About this Piece

I composed God, the Brand to explore the mutable nature of truth. I failed.

In the ”Baby Boom” panel (which inspired this work) of The Great Wall of Los Angeles mural, I noticed three things upon my first viewing. First, the giant baby at the center, hungry to consume. It’s hard to miss; I love it. Next, I noticed the white couple in the middle ground, enjoying a coffee in reasonably accommodating, inoffensive digs. If you look closely, various details reveal their comfort and insulation. Finally, outside the glass patio doors, I noticed the ghosts of non-white soldiers peering in. It was this observation that turned me on to inspecting selective truth. I read this scene as a reminder that it was these soldiers’ sacrifice, exploited, that bought the couple’s comfort. In this tableau, the inequity of truth is stark. The couple’s truth is not reality in its fullness; it is a selective construction, a story devoted more to myth than to fact. Here, truth masquerading as gospel became a tool of repression through obfuscation, denying the couple any sense of lucidity—a dynamic I have recognized in our time. One I wish to escape. In God, the Brand, I sought to explore this selective mutability through melody.

That encounter with the mural birthed the framework for how I approached sound itself. Virtually every bit of the work traces its lineage to the opening viola solo, though perverted by means of harmonic manipulation and motivic transfiguration complicating the context. Just as the mural dismantles “truth” through perspective and juxtaposition, I aimed to do the same with melody as my medium. In three vignettes, which similarly begin with solo or chamber-esque textures (viola, bass clarinet, bassoon, plucked bass), the melodies of that viola solo are twisted and contorted, producing distinct musical statements. I challenge the listener to follow, say, the opening motive of that viola melody—bum bummm, dee dum (quickly repeated notes followed by a minor-third rise and a major-third fall)—through the work and find the many ways it manifests. Through this approach, I aimed to illustrate how shared ideas, facts, and opinions can be manipulated to support divergent truths. Yet as I finished composing, the piece revealed something quite unexpected. I realized that while truth may be malleable for the individual, at the collective level it behaves quite differently. Truth is a kaleidoscopic amalgamation of people and stories, a messy, shifting narrative that resists control.

Each vignette, though approached from different perspectives, ended up not so dissimilar. They became their own beasts, sure, but they retained similar qualities that bind them. They have a certain driving momentum. They hide melodic figures behind dizzying accompaniment. The chordal structure is dense and unsettled. And through all that, all three vignettes display brief instances of clarity. Together, they hint at a larger, unbounded narrative, one that can be grasped only in memory, and even then, not entirely.

This realization led me to consider The Great Wall as a whole. The mural reveals how individual stories and people create a larger truth that no single propagandist machine can fully contain. Through the collective effort of Judith F. Baca and all who contributed (artists, historians, administrators), they captured the beautiful, haunting, and bizarre messiness that is the story of everyone. Likewise, in God, the Brand, I composed a narrative of disparately familial gestures, revealing a truth that is beautiful, haunting, and bizarre: bum bummm, dee dum. Interestingly, the failure here became the point. I set out to control truth through melody and instead discovered that I have no such power.

—Xavier Muzik