Missing Words II

Missing Words II, Eric Nathan (2016) 10'for brass quintet “Missing Words II” (2016) is the second in an ongoing series of compositions composed in homage to Ben Schott’s book Schottenfreude (Blue Rider Press/Penguin Group), 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 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 own vocabulary. My piece is a series of short, playful musical responses to the definitions of three of Schott’s new words. The first movement responds to Schott’s word “Leertretung,” which he directly translates as “Void-Stepping” and defines as “stepping down heavi