Pork Roll, Egg and Cheese on a Kaiser Bun
Composed by Ken Ueno

About this work:

For quarter-tone electric guitar and quarter-tone vibraphone.

I am a foodie. When I had a meal at Momofuku Ko, in New York, many years ago, one course changed my life: a spoonful of shaved, frozen foie gras. It was amazing. On one hand, it was nothing like I had ever had, stunning. As my body temperature melted the frozen fat in my mouth, it occurred to me that a wildly inventive, new, avant-garde sensation, need not be mutually exclusive from “comfort food.” Something of the lushness of microtones delivers to me a similar embodied feeling, like a warm blanket.  And, having grown-up playing electric guitar, the sound of the electric guitar always feels familiar and comforting too. These aspects are central to the experience of my conception of this piece. 

Pork Roll was composed for my friends, the electric guitar and percussion duo, the Living Earth Show (Travis Andrews and Andrew Meyerson). Their virtuosity and committment inspire me.  Hearing that one group in Norway had a quarter-tone electric guitar and a quarter-tone vibraphone built for them and had commissioned Brian Ferneyhough for a piece, The Living Earth Show guys acquired those instruments and learned that piece. They not only learned the Ferneyhough, they memorized it (Ferneyhough is the patriarch of the New Complexities – a fiendishly difficult subgenre of new music, requiring an unholy amount of dedication and virtuosity to perform). When I was composing this piece (which they have since also memorized), I researched the provenance of their name. “Living Earth Show,” was gleaned from a line in a Ween song wherein “Pork roll, egg, and cheese on a Kaiser bun” is repeated as a non-sequitur refrain. It speaks of the Freudian dimension that food can accrue and project – a space between an object of our desire and guilt and a space of refuge.

Presently, as I am rewriting these notes, it is 2021. Pork Roll was written in 2012. We recorded it in the storied facilities of Fantasy Studios in 2014, and I had been waiting to release it as part of a portrait CD with other, even older, works. The recording project, aside, I had also intended Pork Roll to be part of an evening-long work for the Living Earth Show guys, a still as-of-yet apocryphal desire. This imbues Pork Roll with a character in my mind as a lingering open parenthesis, a closure bracket still in the future. Perhaps because of this, the nine years since the 2012 premiere has gone by surprisingly fast. Some markers of time in the intervening years are occasions the LES and I performed together; one of the most memorable being our concert in 2014 at Chapman University, when my friend from graduate school, Dominique Schafer, hosted us for a residency. Dominique passed away two years ago, and now, when I think of Pork Roll, a tincture of loss is also part of the history of the piece – Fantasy Studios closed in 2018, Dominique…as short as nine years feels after a year of teaching on Zoom, the preponderance of living in virtual space dissolving boundaries of the physical, distorting even my sense of pre-Covid times, the reality was that there was much that had happened. 

I have yet to eat a proper pork roll sandwich, but when I heard Ween, I understood it to represent a symbolic idea of “comfort food.” But now, MY Pork Roll has become what Robert Hass says of a word, that “a word is elegy to what it signifies.”