Morbid Curiosities

In one of the posters that Edward Gorey designed for the Cape and Islands Chamber Music Festival, a trio of musicians plays on a sandbar.

The lady cellist, in faux-Edwardian dress, plays with an endpin sharp enough to stab a man. The harpsichordist’s instrument is painted with lonely lighthouses. The flutist huffs and puffs from underneath his ample moustache.

In another poster, which I actually have hanging in my Brooklyn apartment, the same trio plays barefoot and in giant clamshells, having traded their instruments for violin, clarinet, and some sort of double-manual keyboard.

Gorey, the macabre illustrator who adored opera and ballet, designed posters for the festival from 1984 to 1986. At the time, Gorey was living on the Cape in Yarmouth, where he remained until the end of his life. His house became a museum after his death in 2000.

I grew up going to the Gorey House up-Cape and reading the Gashlycrumb Tinies, once scaring off a babysitter by requesting it as a bedtime story. (If you’ve read the Tinies, you know it’s not really a children’s book).

I like to think if “Ted” were still alive, he would be into the same kind of “alternative” classical music that I am, considering our shared “queerness” in all senses of the word. (For example, he’d probably enjoy the Maria Callas look-alike contest happening at Green-Wood Cemetery later this month.)

And so, it feels right that, timed with the centennial of Gorey’s birth, that violinist/vocalist/composer Carla Kihlstedt, also a Cape Codder with “a weakness for old wooden boxes with strings pulled across them,” would release a Tinies-inspired song cycle on Cantaloupe Records.

26 Little Deaths — performed with Present Music, conducted by David Bloom — is best to listen to while reading the book. In that way, it is like a supplement to the original.

When adapting a book about children dying in horrible ways, it might be difficult to get the tone right. Kihlstedt’s Little Deaths manage to be creepy, playful, and darkly funny, yet still melancholy.

For example, in “Childhood Friends” — based on “Basil assaulted by bears” — the way that Kihlstedt whisper-sings the line “so soft your fur” is genuinely haunting. With low growls and churning violin, the song has a Tim Burtonesque feel.

Later on, “The Problem of the Tower and the Clouds” — honoring “Yorick whose head was knocked in” — is oddly heartbreaking, with the existential line “I feel so small” intoned ethereally.

However, some of my favorites are completely, or at least mostly, instrumental. The cycle opens with the cacophonous “Girl Descending a Staircase.” The song “One-Horse Open Sleigh” — a tribute to “Desmond,” thrown out of one — is predominantly sleigh bells.

Even the songs with lyrics use all sorts of Foley sounds — from popping tacks, to ticking bombs, to crackling ice. At times, I was reminded of Philip Miller’s collaborations with William Kentridge.

Kihlstedt’s musical style is eclectic. “Death by Peach,” about the hedonistic stone-fruit-eater “Ernest,” mixes Klezmer and Celtic folk.

The last of the cycle, “Love Song for Dolly” — based on “Zillah who drank too much gin” — channels Kurt Weill. By expanding on a detail in Gorey’s drawing, Kihlstedt crafts a ballad around a real “doozy” of a day.

It’s all pretty perverse. In an artist statement, Kihlstedt writes that “the irony is not lost on me” that, as a “mother of two” in a “country that normalizes violence,” especially gun violence, she’s written a song cycle “in which 26 imagined children meet their doom.” She continues, “And we are to think it’s funny. Cute, even.”

Kihlstedt insists that the Gashlycrumb Tinies isn’t about death but rather “the banality of life and the inexhaustible oddness of the human imagination.” I’m not sure if it’s that deep.

But I will say that maybe Kihlstedt is able to get into the Gashlycrumb children’s heads precisely because she’s a parent herself. (The lyrics to “Stupid Fort” — for “Susan who perished in fits” — are based on a real-life tantrum.)

And anyone who’s been around children knows that they, just like artists, are fascinated by mortality.

Photo by Mark Andrew