On the Floodis of Babiloyne

Duration: 10:00
Completed: 2006
Instrumentation: Alto Saxophone and Computer (Max/MSP; 2 channel)
Dedication: For Nathan Mandel

Program Notes

The psalm that begins “By the waters of Babylon…” is a shared holy text for practitioners of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The Israelite writer speaks with a stunning ruthless fury, apparently from the midst of the so-called Babylonian Captivity, after the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem and the Temple, and took the Israelites as captives and servants. Many have found the writer’s call to brutally kill the Babylonian children problematic, for a variety of reasons. Therefore, this psalm raises the question of how holy texts should be read. Those who accept a text as God-given truth must ask themselves ‘what kind of truth’? After all, statements can be true in various ways. Must we always agree with the narrator in a particular text? Is the narrator of a holy text God? Or is a holy text an account of God’s relations with people, which may be narrated by people?

Of course, one way of reading holy texts leads to violent fundamentalism. People of faith who find this text relevant need to ask if they are, or could be, the one crushing the child’s skull. However, if people of faith instead read it as an account that does not require us to assent with the narrator, it changes the meaning considerably. Rather than a justification of violence, it is the picture of the problem of nationalism and brutality, a complex portrait of the transformation of an individual, who casts aside every instrument of imagination to become a ruthless killer through the looking-glass of humiliation and alienation.

If that is the case, then this is about how we justify ourselves to ourselves. Could the Babylonians have done what they did without the idea of Babylonians, or of Israelites? Could the narrator do what it would do without those ideas? There is a tragic loss of imagination in this text. In leaving behind our instruments, in leaving what is not, and leaving what could be, we are left only with what is; a prelude to murder.

“On the Floodis Babilyone” was composed in 2006 for Nathan Mandel, to whom it is also dedicated.