LJOVA (Lev Zhurbin) - film composer, arranger, violist

I know a drummer who must bite his tongue
To keep the beat. And trumpets seem to make
Their players blind. Guitarists' arms are slung
In an embrace. And saxophonists quake.

But when I hear Ljova I'm agape
Not only at the music he extracts
From strings, like precious liquor from a grape,
But at the drama with his bow he acts.

Is ecstasy what makes him seem to smile?
Or is he grinning through some private hell?
He's slicing at an angle all the while.
A killer or a lover? I can't tell.

But if music issues from the soul, it's clear
Ljova's soul is vast, and rich, and dear.


Sonnet by Rob Weinert-Kendt, presented on my 30th birthday. :)

Thank you, Rob!

"we didn't rehearse... but music is actually about people.. and talking is actually about shutting up"


-Thus Spake Ljova as part of his "opening remarks" on his 30th birthday.

My wife thinks that I would've made a darn good lawyer -- but, with due respect, I have to disagree.
First of all, my "attention to detail" is excruciatingly good. Unfortunately, my observance of the aforementioned attended details is generally at war with my sense of spontaneity. In my world, details should rarely be paramount - what's important is the idea, hopefully the "big" idea. Details should be for lawyers, assistants, and interns. I'm supposed to be left to dream up new ideas.

Right - sure. When I released "Vjola", I somehow imagined that having recorded these semi-improvised pieces was good enough, and that someday, if someone wanted to perform this music, I'd hire an arranger -- but when that day came, there was no budget, and so I diligently wrote out the music myself, even though that was not at all my intention. Why can't people learn my music by ear, like these guys?

Over the last decade, I've had to write out tons of pieces of music by ear - folk pieces, contemporary pieces, ragas, many things. Some of it is really enjoyable, and some of it is awful. Sometimes I feel that until I've written out all of the cheesiest tunes in the human consciousness, I'm bound not to see the pearly Gates.. While all of it is an interesting learning experience in terms of texture and melody, a bell consistently rings in my ear as I churn out the meatpies -- "WHY?" "Why must I write this stuff out -- whatever it is -- note for note? Why would you want to repeat anything exactly the same way? What about interpretive freedom?" And yet, as that bell tolls it quandary, I diligently type out the stuff 100% as it is on the record. As they say in Russia "the eyes do wander, but the hands act". When it comes to making sheet-music, I'm extremely detail oriented, having learned the hard way how much time a badly created set of music can waste in rehearsal. As much as I'd like to break the chain and free myself of details in performance, it's impossible -- they descend on me like vultures and begin their gleeful rape. "Sharp!" "Flat!" "Louder, we can't hear you in the back!" "Softer, you're burying the accordion!" or, in more classical settings, "Down bow, Down!". Argh.

I used to be a rebel. I still am. But increasingly, knowing "the right thing" and ignoring it comes with greater guilt. It's not like getting kicked out of "chamber music" class in high school for improvising on Brahms -- it's like risking your livelyhood and health insurance.

I suspect I know how things work -- as we grow older, we realize that we're setting an example for our kids, and we don't want them to have the same shortcomings that we've been trying to hide. We try to do the right thing, make a good face -- meanwhile, kids try to break everything in their sight, then put it back together again.

To an extent, we follow their example -- we regularly break our toys, destroy our buildings and redraw borders. We never do things the same way, and even when we try our best, we miss. Generally, that's progress.

What am I really saying? Clearly -- details, like rules, were meant to be broken.
And, I need sleep.

In January 2008, Ljova acquired a new 6-string acoustic instrument, built by Eric Aceto. It has the sounding range of the violin, the viola, and most of the cello, all in a package slightly larger than a violin.

Between January 26 and May 31, Ljova's friends and fans contributed names on his blog; now you get to vote on your favorites! Author of the best submission will win autographed CDs, as well as Ljova's gratitude.

Voting ends on August 31st.
==> Vote Here -- thanks! (For sound samples, see here.)

I don't know how ACB does it, but I barely if ever have time to blog, read other's blogs, or even reply to email. It seems sinful, somehow non-deductible. I used to spend 30-40 minutes a day surfing for new music on MySpace -- now? barely 20 minutes a week, if that. I barely have time to write my own music, see friends, find new material, work out -- and you want to sit at home and watch me spill my artistic guts? well, maybe just this once.

Actually, the last few months have been nothing short of incredible. Aside from sporadically writing new tunes for Ljova and the Kontraband, I've written music for two short films -- Sean McPhillips's Cupcake (which premiered at Tribeca FF in April) and Lev Polyakov's new animation, Only Love, which is just starting to get sent out to festivals. The soundtrack for Cupcake was actually written for and performed by the Kontraband, with special guests Alon Yavnai (on piano) and Marcus Rojas (on tuba); while Only Love was scored for a chamber orchestra, which I recorded one player at a time in our living room. While the subjects of the films are similar at the germ, the outcomes and approach -- on the soundtrack and out -- are anything but. And yet, I still feel somehow proud of my work, that it still sounds personal and ambitious.

But aside from film scores and preparing the Kontraband album for release in September, I'm trying to hunt down my next big project -- what could it be? My wife is pining for more songs - songs, songs that she can sing. Naturally.

We spent the 5th of July harvesting poetry, first at home and then at Barnes & Noble. Trying to find a poem suitable for a song is somewhat like finding a good car, pair of jeans, diamond ring -- except sometimes it makes you feel ingloriously dumb.

In the course of an hour, I flipped through a bilingual volume of poems by Anna Akhmatova, as translated by Stanley Kunitz. The Russian side drove me to goosebumps and near tears, while the English translation made me admire the Kunitz's artful re-stringing of her verse. Still, nothing seemed like a song -- some poems were too short, and all were too depressing. Who'd pay to hear Russian angst nowadays? Only I.

I next looked at the The Collected Poems of Stanley Kunitz, the man who translated Akhmatova, but found nothing that grabbed me immediately. It felt dated, somehow, even if there was no "thou art antiquated" element.

I looked at a collection of Japanese Death Poems. (Too short. No. Thank you.)

..and more and more. There was a huge anthology, a litany.. But with every poem I rejected, a growing feeling of moronic stupidity arose, the kind I feel when I skip real vegetables for Veggie Booty. How could I not be inspired by any of these poems to write a song? Am I numb? Am I a froid droid? Why wouldn't they speak to me?

Inna found for me some contemporary Yiddish poetry. It was very sentimental, though witty and graceful. Graceful poems make for good songs. And so I wrote something equally sentimental, something that could work, while dreaming of writing something colder, more detached.. but not something that would make Yiddish as angry-sounding as German.


Mostly, it was all about magnitude. Not the poems, but the size of the shelves. I felt the bookstore closing in on me, I wanted to write a poem to shut them up "you all talk too much yet say so little", but I knew it wasn't true. I knew my ears were clogged, but wouldn't admit it. I saw the writing on the wall -- some day, a kid named Mozart 3.0 will find my music and say "wow, this stuff is so 2005". Ah yes, nothing like turning 30 - one foot in childhood, the other..?

It's getting late.

As some of you know, one of my rare original treasures is a song I wrote on the lyrics of the poet Trumbull Stickney, called Mnemosyne. I had found Stickney's poem while browsing an Anthology of contemporary American poetry at a book store in San Francisco in spring 2007, and was immediately captured by its visceral intensity. The song composed itself almost at once, though I didn't write it down until I was riding aboard a train from Paris to Karlsruhe several months later. (If you haven't heard us performing it live, then you surely will hear it on our debut album, coming this Fall.)

Stickney lived just 30 years, and not much has been written about him. This morning, however, I found a fantastic article by Edmund Wilson, published in 1940 in the pages of the New Republic, calling Stickney "a remarkable American poet whom too few people have read", and quoting the poem Mnemosyne in its entirety. Read the whole article here.

Brief primer: "Temp Music" is the practice of putting temporary music into a film's soundtrack during the editing process before any original music is finished, or even earlier - before a composer is approached. It's useful to the editor and director in getting a feeling for the pacing of a film, and can occasionally be used to show preview audiences, to see if they like the vibe of the soundtrack. The downside, though, is that often a film production will approach a composer, saying that "we made a film, we've edited it down, we have a temp track that we think works really well, and the preview audiences love it -- but we can't afford to license any of the tracks we've put in, so would you mind writing something very similar, but not so similar so that we don't get sued?" Generally, then comes the budget, and the composer pouts / chuckles / smiles and nods.

I mention this briefly because, while writing music for my collaboration with the Freefall Dance Company, I made a little temp music of my own.

For quite a few weeks, I had the dancers make movements to a looped version of the harmonium intro from Jeff Buckley's Lover, You Should've Come Over, which you can hear below.




I tried many times to sit down to write something, but nothing came -- until the night before the music rehearsal.

Here, then, is my piece "Buckley Loops", live recording from the dance show itself, featuring Shoko Nagai on accordion, myself on 6-string, and Ron Caswell on tuba.

Enjoy!