Darmok & Jalad (2022) 12'
For clarinet, bassoon, trumpet, trombone, percussion, violin, and double bass.
Premiered through Curtis on Tour’s L’Histoire du Soldat tour, Spring 2023. Self-published (Morningside Press, ASCAP).
Darmok & Jalad is an unabashedly nerdy piece of music. Fellow nerds may recognize that the title refers to an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. In that episode (one of my favorites), Patrick Stewart’s Captain Picard encounters a spacefaring civilization called the Tamarians. We quickly learn that it isn’t possible for humanity to communicate with these intelligent aliens – a strange and concerning fact, since the “universal translator” in the ship’s computer magically solves this problem most of the time. The first words the Enterprise crew hear from the Tamarians are: “Rai and Jiri at Lungha. Rai of Lowani. Lowani under two moons. Jiri of Umbaya. Umbaya of crossed roads. At Lungha. Lungha, her sky gray.” These phrases are as meaningless to the crew as they are to you and I, though I’ll admit that I very much enjoyed the feeling of near-comprehensibility I experienced when first listening to this strange, partially translated speech.
After some spacefaring adventure, the problem with translating Tamarian becomes clear: the Tamarians speak almost exclusively with proper nouns. Without knowing the stories that surround the names and places of the Tamarian language, it isn’t possible to understand its meaning. For example, saying “Romeo and Juliet” might mean something like “star-crossed love” for you and I, but that’s only true if we’ve both read Shakespeare. Ian Bogost writes a compelling article in The Atlantic in which he argues that to think like a Tamarian, “we would have to meditate on the logics in everything, to see the world as one built of weird, rusty machines whose gears squeal as they grind against one another.”[1] In other words, the Tamarian way of thinking doesn’t reference the characters in mythological narratives. Instead, it uses those referents to convey the actual process by which a story unfolds, the same way a line of computer code might stand in for a complete underlying procedural algorithm.
Darmok & Jalad is music that obsesses over some of the “weird, rusty machines” underlying the vocabulary of tonal composers. This piece atomizes and twists standard grammar from Mozart and Beethoven, revealing once- familiar patterns as slightly strange, only partially translated bits of musical material. A delightful squealing of gears, even – music that is made of a mashing up of familiar moves. I hope the slinking, slithering result brings you some of the same suspenseful enjoyment the Tamarian language first brought me.
You might also like to know that “Darmok and Jalad” is a phrase from Tamarian. The full thought is “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra,” or “Darmok and Jalad on the ocean.” These phrases convey something like “cooperation,” or “new friendship.” As Captain Picard translates it, “Darmok and Jalad” means “that a danger shared might sometimes bring two people together.”[2]
—Nick DiBerardino
[1] Bogost, Ian. “Shaka, When the Walls Fell.” The Atlantic. Atlantic Media Company, June 18, 2014. https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/06/star-trek-tng-and-the-limits-of-language-shaka-when-the- walls-fell/372107/.
[2] Menosky, Joe, and Phillip LaZebnik. “Darmok.” Episode. Star Trek: The Next Generation 5, no. 2. Broadcast syndication, September 30, 1991.
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