Matti Kovler’s Cokboy is a highly personal setting of a highly personal, and also political, poem by the New York-born poet Jerome Rothenberg (b.1931). Rothenberg, who has also been an anthologist, translator, and anthropologist, included Cokboy in his collection Poland/1931. The premise is that of a Jew, narrating in the first person, finding himself among the American Indians (Rothenberg lived on a Seneca reservation for a time), a displaced Jew among a people whose culture has become displaced from around them. Between them mistrust and sympathy go hand in hand, the narrator blending the elements of his culture with that of the Indians: “silk of his prayershawl-bag beneath/cover of beaverskin above/savor of esrog fruit within/horn of mountaingoat between/feather of dove….” His “vot am i doink here,” the deliberately assumed Yiddish accent, is both comic put-on and expression of his insecurity. Kovler in his setting carries it a step further, incorporating very naturally an ancient Hassidic chant that adds texture to the stream-of-consciousness, multi-layered meaning and perspectives of the poem.

Musically the piece works with similar blending of materials and shifts of focus. The opening passages are aleatoric, asking the players to play almost randomly, creating an unsettled, fuzzy surface before the entry of the narrator and suggesting his unsettled state. Identifiable figures gradually coalesce, becoming melody and counterpoint. Following a return to aleatoric music a culmination, a strongly diatonic and sustained section linked to the words “the old man watches from the cliffs a city/overcome with light”—a great G major chord, marking a kind of false epiphany for the narrator. A gradual recapturing of the complexity of the opposing cultures of the poem, with the interpolated Hassidic melody, demands a less straightforward, but more satisfyingly realistic, musical conclusion.

Written by Robert Kirzinger