Zan Huang

The initial idea for this piece came to me when I was standing in the Detroit Institute of Art atrium containing the Diego Rivera Mural. The endless depth of workers layered like a renaissance painting, the birds juxtaposed next to planes, the hands growing from mountainous rock, the human child cradling in the earth whose roots grew into the industrial instilled this profound spiritual experience where technology and nature were, to me, finally unveiled as one being. Rivera says that we are natural, and thus the instruments of our own hand are natural processes. I was entirely awestruck by this work and I couldn't help but stand in the room for 45 minutes taking it in as much as I could.

I feel that the story of creation, of crucifixion and redemption and the second coming are not linear events, but rather events that happen outside of time. It is at once the origin before time, the end of time, and also always present and happening. Every moment in time has its second coming that is always in the process of coming. If we, humans and the material reality around us, are necessarily vectors carrying out the divine will and the word (logos), then so is the second coming is wrought out of our own technology. In our technological process, we bring about both armageddon, salvation, and renewal simultaneously.

What lies in our relationship to technology is something as ancient as our mythology. What we create and claim domain over have in fact already made a permanent claim on us beforehand. What we build is set in stone in the partitions and symbolic order of our souls and psyches. That also gives theology an axiomatic truth.

And knowing this, what must have God felt when confronting the ordination that he must be sacrificed? What is on the mind of God when he enters Jerusalem? He must have sensed the past, future, and present at the same time. He must have seen Rivera's factory in the proto-original splendour. When Ecce Homo begins, the music must be both glimmering with beauty and terrifying.

I. The Mechanical Heart · II. Blind · III. Nightscapes I · IV. Interlude · V. Ecce Homo · VI. The Second Coming

Walter Benjamin was born on the 15th of July, 1892 in Berlin, then the capital of the German Empire. He dies on the 26th of September 1940 at the age of 48 by suicide after swallowing morphine tablets at a hotel in Portbou, Spain bordering France. His death represented one in over six million Jewish people who had perished during the Holocaust.

During the 48 years he was alive, his work as a literary critic and philosopher forever changed the course of European thinking. He worked within a strange syncretic intersection of ideas and disciplines still unmatched in its originality. He was a Marxist theoretician in the Frankfurt school, a Jewish mystic, a translator of French poetry, an Encyclopedist, a German literary scholar, a psychedelic writer, an experimental art radio broadcaster, and a socialite in various intelligentsia. His many friends included renowned yet disparate figures of the 20th century, from Georges Bataille, Hannah Arendt, Theodore Adorno, Bertolt Brecht, Kurt Weill, Gershon Scholem, to Kurt Godel.

This piece follows the last 7 years of Walter Benjamin's life.

I. Prologue (0:00) Pre-Death · II. Berlin 1933 (1:25) A musical collage · III. Exodus (6:05) On memory and symbols · IV. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (10:57) · V. Angelus Novus (16:56) · VI. Postlude (27:03) Post-Death · VII. Post-Life [Manhattan 1967] (28:28) Resurrection of a ghost

Flute — Jordan Smith; clarinets — Oliver Bishop; violin — Javier Fernando; cello — Terence Lo; piano — Muse Ye; mezzo-soprano — Alexia Benson; baritone — Joshua Thomas.