The Unlearning

In 2009, I turned to the haunting images of Francisco Goya’s etchings The Disasters of War and began composing The Unlearning to contemplate the violence in Iraq and Afghanistan and to question how the kernels of thought, beliefs and attitudes that lie in each of us could have the potential to grow into societies, cultures and countries at war. Composed as a duo performed with the extraordinary violinist and singer Carla Kihlstedt, these songs were released to critical acclaim on Tzadik in 2011. In 2013, I commissioned visual projections by filmmakers Daria Martin and Mao Mollona which combine Goya's etchings with ancient Goddess imagery from the research of Lithuanian-American archaeologist Marija Gimbutas. Through extensive excavations in central Europe, Gimbutas proposed that there were matrilineal societies existing for thousands of years without any evidence of warfare. Through imagery and song, this piece calls into question whether war is a cycle that repeats itself or whether it can be broken through deeper fundamental change of individual and collective unlearning and learning. This work has been performed at The Stone in NYC (2012), Roulette Intermedium in Brooklyn (2013), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco (2016), and the Berkeley Art Museum (2026).