Missing Words IV

Missing Words IV, Eric Nathan (2018) 18'for flute, clarinet/bass clarinet, percussion, piano, violin, violoncello “Missing Words IV” (2018) is the fourth 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 the contemporary world. The German language has the capability to create new words through the combination of shorter ones 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.In my work, I take three of Schott’s words, and their various conceptual associations, as points of creative departure. The first movement responds to the word, “Erkenntnisspaziergang,” which