You Don't Have an Axe in Your Neck (2025)

Program Notes

Imagine a rusty, jagged-edged axe buried deep in the back of your neck. It’s stuck in the bend where your spine meets your skull. You can’t get it out, no matter what you do. You can’t sleep with the pain, and the lack of sleep fractures your emotional fortitude to cope with it. You try everything to make the pain stop. Nothing works. It gets worse. Eventually, all you can do is lie still on your floor with ice pressed to your neck, having taken more painkillers than is perhaps wise, just to ease the agony only slightly.

Imagine enduring this for years without an end in sight.

You don’t have an axe in your neck. If you did, it might be easier. Acquaintances wouldn’t alienate you for not smiling through pleasantries. Professors wouldn’t chastise you for participating in class less than usual. Your employer wouldn’t punish you for taking leave for doctor’s appointments to try to get the axe out of your neck. If they could see your festering wound, they’d be ashamed of their insensitivity. But instead, you must go through the motions of normalcy every day, meeting the eyes of hundreds of people who have no idea how unjustly lucky they are to have never faced the degree of physical torture you’ve suffered every day and night for years.

This piece is based on that experience and dedicated to suffers of chronic pain and other invisible disabilities that make daily life unlivable. It begins unassuming, introducing just one note at a time. The music builds to a climax of two tonalities grinding painfully against each other, unrelenting. Then it ends exhausted and unresolved.