Missing Words

Missing Words, Eric Nathan (2016) 8'for clarinet, bassoon, horn, 2 violins, viola, cello, double bass “Missing Words” (2014) is an homage to Ben Schott’s book Schottenfreude (2013), a collection of newly created German words for contemporary life. The German language has the capability to create new words through the combination of shorter words and can thus express complex concepts in a single word for which there is no direct translation in other languages. Such words include Schadenfreude, Doppelgänger and Wanderlust, and these have been adopted into use in English. With his new book, Ben Schott proposes new words missing from the English language that we can choose to adopt into our daily lives.  My piece is a series of short musical responses to the definitions of three of Schott’s new words. The first movement responds to Schott’s word “Eisenbahnscheinbewegung,” which he directly translates as “Railway-Illusion-Motion” and defines as “the false sensation of movement when, looking