A new hotel was built nearby,
bright rooms, breakfasts doubtless comme il faut,
juices, coffee, toast, glass, concrete,
amnesia—and suddenly, I don’t know why,
a moment of penetrating joy.

“Citizen/Subject” is a contemplation of identity and nationalism. Drawing inspiration from both Polish and American composers such as Penderecki, Lutoslawski, Chopin, and Charles Ives, “Citizen/Subject” celebrates the 100th anniversary of modern Poland’s independence by engaging deeply with the relationship between the individual, the nation-state, and cultural identity.

Part of my familial heritage is Polish. My maternal grandfather’s parents emigrated from Poland around 1900, a few decades before Poland regained its sovereignty. For my generation, little remained of my Polish ancestry aside from the surname “Porada” that most of my mother’s siblings held. My grandfather had even switched from the Polish Catholic Church in his Pennsylvania mill town to a Protestant church. The occasional making of pierogis was about all that was left.

Yet when I became a serious pianist, my grandfather was always delighted when I played Chopin. It connected to something deep within him that I myself did not feel. I knew, for this project, I would want to reconnect with Poland and Polish culture. To my dismay, I soon learned that Poland is, like the United States, in the throes of a resurgent right-wing political fight over national identity and exclusion. I knew my piece would grapple with these crucial issues.

The pull between belonging to a nation and being one’s authentic self is one that most of us feel at some point in our lives. How, for instance, do I reconcile my desire to feel that I belong as an American while Donald Trump, with whom I share absolutely no values, is our executive leader?

I turned to contemporary Polish poetry to begin to get a sense of what the sublimated soul of the Polish people were truly feeling and suffering from. I read Wislawa Szymborska and Adam Zagajewski and browsed several more poets. I saw a common theme of alienation of the poet from their surroundings, like every building, tree, and friend was a facsimile of itself, a faded copy. There was a sense of isolation, of loneliness that resonated strongly within me. From Zagajeswski’s “Family Home”:

You come here like a stranger,
but this is your family home.
The currants, the apple and cherry trees don’t know you.
One noble tree readies
a new brood of walnuts in peace,
while the sun, like a worried first-grader,
diligently colors in the shadows.
The dining room pretends it is a crypt,
and doesn’t give out one familiar echo—
the old conversations haven’t lingered.

So, in composing “Citizen/Subject,” I asked myself: what is the abyss between what the nation-state promises us and what it actually delivers? The nation promises safety, and yet can never guarantee it. The nation promises connection with those like us, yet all of us still feel alone, Polish, American, or anything else. The nation promises to provide us with meaning, and yet we all know that only we ourselves can create meaning in our lives. The nation promises material security, and yet many of us are homeless and many more are discontented with what we already have. The nation tries to fill the function of a god in our lives, but it can perform no miracles with which to inspire; its only power is based in violence and suppression.

Musically, I depict this tension with the interval of a tritone. Equally dividing the octave (the musical interval symbolizing identity), the tritone’s dissonance and irreconcilability shows the gap between what a nation promises and what we get from it. Other sections and gestures, including a mazurka and invocations of the national anthems of Poland and America, further explore this tension. In the fifth, climactic section, I include a lengthy quotation from “God Bless the USA”, the jingoistic post-9/11 country hit. This is not in any way an endorsement of its message, but to challenge those of us who think that “this is not who we are” to acknowledge that, as a nation, it does in part define us and we need to do more to embody our own values.