This piece was written during a time of a time of extreme burnout. I had this music theory professor I was close with tell me that if I went to graduate school, I would see all of my friends, not in grad school, make money, have relationships, go on vacation, buy houses, get married, and be happy while I sat in a basement grading papers. Her comment has stuck with me in these years, while I graded piles and piles of papers, wrote hundreds of pages of music, watched friend after friend after friend go on vacation and buy houses. When it came time for me to apply for an endless stream of jobs, I listened to older, more accomplished men tell me I needed to learn how to take advantage of people in the music industry to become successful: “You know what I mean,” they said.

I don’t regret going to grad school, and it is perhaps fitting that I think of my old professor in combination with the first piece of music history I properly learned, The Epitaph of Seikilos. It is somewhat poignant to know that the translation on the tomb (below), is about fleeting life and the passage of time as it has sustained and lived for thousands of years. The Epitaph of Seikilos is the oldest known artifact of a complete musical work dating back to the 1st or 2nd century C.E. in the era of Greek Antiquity. I was also inspired by the Greek myth of Cassandra, a woman given the curse of unbelieved prophecy because she didn’t have sex with Apollo, the god of the sun. The title of my piece, inspired by Gwen E. Kirby’s set of short stories, Shit Cassandra Saw, sits on just this. Because if given the knowledge of foresight, Cassandra saw so much more than the Trojan war – she saw everything. She saw piles and piles of future and past, layered on top of itself like a cake, all at once, or slowly like a dried-out stream, or occasionally when she is never thinking. And it was wonderful, and it made no sense and was weird and fun and she probably didn’t care or cared too much, and it didn’t matter because nobody believed her. And it makes me think of what survives, what is remembered. So, because of this myth, because of a melody that has outlasted generations, but for me has only outlasted my own exhaustion, here is a piece about epitaphs, about elegies, about the Shit Cassandra Saw, about a love of modal harmony, fiddles and triplets, something simple because it makes you happy, and everything and nothing at all.