Reflection
One of my biggest difficulties in this assignment was having to view disaster from a scholarly view. Disaster is inherently tragic, sad, and difficult to approach rationally. Therefore, I was glad to have the opportunity to make a more personal reflection on this disaster.
The way I deal with stress, pain, or wrongdoings in my life is through music. Music is a cathartic experience where you really can just let everything that’s resting on your heart out. While contemplating these disasters, I wrote two songs on the piano, which will be on the next two pages. I hoped to be able to capture even a minuscule amount of the emotion that the victims and their families felt during this disaster.
I chose to open my website with a video containing images from Chernobyl’s aftermath. Many of these images may not even seem like they’re from Chernobyl, but they all share a sense of isolation and loss that accompanies a disaster like this. The images are set to me playing “Rêverie” by Claude Debussy. The piece is very meditative, allowing the viewer to simply take in the images, while also somewhat surreal. While I was playing, I chose not to let go of the sustain pedal very often (something I used as well in my two later pieces), which gave the piece a more flowing sound that blended together, sometimes resulting in dissonances. By letting the images play for a longer period time, I hoped to give the viewer more chance to really think and reflect on what they’re seeing.
Then, I included background on the Chernobyl disaster in order to put my website in context. That was followed by a description of my research and my inspiration for research — the true motivation that I wasn’t able to write in my essay. After this reflection, my website will close with the two songs I composed, along with two poems that inspired them and some images.
The first song, on the next page, was inspired by Liubov Sirota’s “BURDEN”.1I will let the poem speak for itself — it is very moving — but what inspired me for this song was the following portion:
The soul, it seems–
is a difficult memory.
Nothing can be erased,
nothing subtracted,
nothing canceled,
nothing corrected! . . .
What really amazes me above nuclear disasters is the invisibility of radiation, and how that invisibility can change our perception of the disaster. These lines by Liubov Sirota drew a parallel for me between the pervasiveness of radiation and that of memory. In this music, I represented this by a single repeated note that lasted almost the entire song (an idea inspired by Chopin’s Raindrop Prelude). Above this repeated note, I include a melody that “stumbles,” as Sirota alludes to near the beginning of the poem.
The next song, on the last page, was inspired by a stanza of another Liubov Sirota’s poems, “To Pripyat.” One will notice the number of images from the Chernobyl disaster of an amusement park; well, this is the Pripyat amusement park. Pripyat is an abandoned city near Chernobyl.2 I was just shocked by these images with their juxtaposition of an amusement park (especially an iconic ferris wheel) and the isolation and devastation of this disaster. Therefore, I decided to write another song with this poem and those images in mind. After the poem is shown, I begin to play images by Gerd Ludwig, ending the website in the same way that I began it.3
This last song again uses the idea of repetition. I have one melody that is repeated so much that it can be almost nagging or annoying. To me, this represents both the toxicity of the persistent radiation, but also the weight of memories and loss that the victims and their families will always have on their hearts. In addition, another part of the song uses strong dissonances. Once the listener starts to hear these, I begin to play images of people for the first time in my website. This was the most emotional part of the experience for me, so I set it to the most emotional music that I had. To me, these dissonances “tug at the heartstrings.”
One might wonder why many of my images do not seem like they’re from a nuclear disaster zone. Rather than showing gruesome images of the disaster, I believe it was more meaningful to show images that represent the loss of the disaster through isolation and “what once was.”