ETHICS: Songs in Search of a Moral Compass / Andrew Munn, bass & Jacob Greenberg, piano / A Circle at Kühlhaus

The world demands our engagement.
Our restless search for what is good and just.
This is not new.

ETHICS is a program of music, film, and performance in which the composers, poets, performers, and listeners grapple with the unending search for the good and just in a complex world. 

Bertolt Brecht's tripartite poem, An die Nachgeborenen, speaks of the dual struggle to overcome capitalism and resist fascism in an address to future generations. To us. Hanns Eisler and Brecht survived fascism as refugees in Los Angeles during World War II. There, Eisler set Brecht's poems of resistance and survival. The music and poem spare no one as it vacillates between condemnation of the powerful to confessions of powerlessness to turn the flood-tide of history.

The centerpiece of the ETHICS is Berlin Verses, English adaptations of Eisler and Brecht's Hollywooder Liederbuch. In its original form, the Hollywooder Liederbuch, is a musical diary of two political artists, driven from their homeland by fascism, yet alienated by the hyper-capitalist society of Los Angeles in which they found refuge. Inspired by Brecht and Eisler’s own practice of adapting historical material to contemporary ends, I have adapted theirs, writing new poems to Eisler’s music. My poems, written with the support of NeustartKultur Fund in 2020, are neither pure translations nor are they entirely original. They use the ideas and images of Brecht’s poems as points of departure, and following the scaffolding of Eisler’s kaleidoscopic music, they delve into on contemporary questions of ecology, migration, war, and inequality.

The Los Angeles based film maker Jordan Freeman has provided a visual meditation on the late capitalist landscape of contemporary Los Angeles, formed and reformed by migration, economic polarization, and a changing climate.