The Physics of Sorrow
An original composition by guitarist Georgi Petrov
Words by George Wilde. Photography by Taylor Cohen.
“The word sorrow in different languages can mean different things depending on where you’re from…the Bulgarian word ‘tuga’ [tuh-GAH] has a different meaning from what it means in English…usually people experience some kind of melancholy about something that has happened: days past, when they were young, people that have passed. But in Bulgaria most of the sadness is about things people never got a chance to do and never really had the opportunity to do. It’s a sadness about wasted time and wasted life on mundane things. That has a lot to do with the regime. That is tied to the theme of untold stories between people. That can lead to other untold stories.”
— Georgi Petrov, composer and guitarist
On a European tour in summer of 2016, New Orleans based musician and bandleader Georgi Petrov read The Physics of Sorrow by Georgi Gospodinov. Inspired by the text, he embarked upon a personal journey similar to his physical journey of playing music across the continent. “[The book] explains a lot of things about how I was raised, the way my parents were raised by their parents, how Bulgarian reality is reflected in our character…it’s got a very overarching humane point.” He was inspired to compose an hour-long piece, conceived and rehearsed over the course of the next year.
The 2010 novel was met with major acclaim in Bulgaria, selling out within the first day of its release and considered for a host of international awards. Gospodinov’s main character is both a real person and a metaphysical child who, oft-abandoned in the basement or behind locked doors is instantiated as the Minotaur, the keeper of the Labyrinth, a timeless tangle of corridors and dark places. It is a wide-ranging novel, labyrinthine in its form and literal content. It is rooted in reality and self-reference (the main character shares the author’s name) yet employs magical realism with ruminations on time, the past, and the untold stories of countless unnamed.
Over the course of ten musical vignettes, Petrov presents the book’s major themes: Abandonment, Sorrow, Pathological Empathy, Boredom, Poverty, Redemption. Leading his quintet on guitar, he was accompanied by instrumentalists Brad Webb on drums, Trey Boudreaux on upright bass, Tomas Majcherski on alto saxophone and vocalist Hilary Johnson providing vocal melodies and narration with quotes from the text. These musicians are often found in the jazz context in New Orleans where they play extended improvised solos drawing from the American jazz idiom. In Physics of Sorrow they exhibit a different and lesser heard side of their musicality as they expertly present through-composed chamber music. Improvisation is employed but is limited in duration and scope. While most of the music is composed and performed from the page, there are sections where Petrov provided only sketches, lead sheets (sheet music with the melody and harmonic content but not specific performance instructions), or just suggestions for a groove. Petrov wrote the music with this group in mind so that trust plays an important role: knowing the musicians’ background and interests, Petrov allows them to express their personal interpretation of his composition.
Including text from the book at the behest of the author — with whom Petrov had the opportunity to discuss his project at a café in Sofia, Bulgaria — Georgi has crafted a unique expression not unlike a soundtrack to the novel. Indeed, the work sounds cinematic. A four-note opening theme appears throughout the piece, played on different instruments ranging from a simple vocal feature to hidden in the top line of a rubato guitar chord melody. Also presented in varying rhythms, the theme moves through these textures so as to become indistinguishable from its original form. Melodies fly together, shifting and diverging but finally joining in unison. The unison texture is important to the piece, with most prominent melodies played identically on at least two of the instruments. While human voice and saxophone have flexible intonation, guitar is mostly limited to tempered tones. This creates slight tuning discrepancies that add to the tension, haunting the listener with discomfort and melancholy.
This quality is no accident: Petrov seeks to elicit emotional or energetic response from the audience. Heaviness or sadness is a universal human experience, felt acutely in the Bulgarian reality. Imagination and creativity are maligned in Bulgarian culture of the 20th century, not because of the people’s nature, but by their engagement in the mundane at the hands of a repressive socialist regime.
“Growing up in Bulgaria, there are limitations on what is perceived to be possible, or even real,” Petrov says. “The idea of starting a business is met with doubt like ‘you’re wasting your time, wasting your money.’ Being creative and trying new things seems truly impossible. To this day my friends and family cannot believe that I am a musician for a living.
“Under the regime, life is so stringent. You are not permitted to pursue imagination. You’re assigned work. For my parents’ generation, say we were just hanging out at the coffee shop in the afternoon: the police would come and ask for our papers. If we weren’t working they would just take you away to dig a ditch for the day or something.”
In the U.S. we take for granted the ethos: ‘you can do anything you set your mind to.’ But during this regime, defining yourself on your own was not an option. Lacking opportunities for creativity leads to “tragic boredom,” a life of the mundane. Georgi illustrates this tragedy; the delay effect on the guitar evokes a sense of space and longing, complicated and confused warbling executed altering the delay speed — this sound is sympathetic to the Labyrinth as if the listener is hopelessly lost in the dark corridors. Yet sorrow is not absolute. Petrov brings the novel’s humor to light as well.
In “Socrates on the Train”, the narrator considers what will become of identity in revering the fleeting and transitory instead of the concrete and enduring. A period of collective free-improvisation follows, exploring sonic space with atonal saxophone wails, dissonant guitar arpeggios, arco bass and highly-intense and dense drum work.
A piece about the jokester character Gaustine reflects the time in the 90s in Bulgaria when Georgi grew up as a young child. There was democracy but also crushing poverty, people doing anything they could to make money and survive. The playful Gaustine comes up with ideas to make a little money: Tamagotchi for the poor (a cockroach in a matchbox), movies for the poor (fabricated summaries imagined from the posters outside the theaters), even projecting blue skies on a dark and cloudy sky. The duality of freedom and poverty is reflected in a simple motif shifting every two bars from major to minor: something tragic yet funny that makes you want to laugh and cry at the same time.
Through-composed form is often ignored in New Orleans music, even subtly discouraged by experimental music gatekeepers who may have a narrow view of what is acceptable in what they curate. However, the tides may be turning as new venues, like The Building in Central City, offer their support for and offering concerts featuring the latest in inventive New Orleans intellectual music. Georgi Petrov has crafted a compelling, deeply personal performance, distinctive in style and substance.
You can see the Georgi Petrov Quartet featuring Hillary Johnson perform these works tonight at 8:00pm at The New Orleans Jazz Museum inside The Old U.S. Mint in the French Quarter.
