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"Reckoning" is an older piece which I started and completed sometime in 2010. In January 2010, a good childhood friend of mine took his own life a few months before my first deployment while I was serving in the United States Marine Corps as a Rifleman. Prior to his suicide, the lifestyle of an Active Duty Infantryman for the USMC was needlessly hell.
My mind wasn't in a very good place while writing this. I was drinking heavily, which is essentially a right of passage for a Grunt; and I was beginning to understand the misery of the more senior enlisted peers who would spout phrases like "you can't spell 'Disgruntled' without 'Grunt'" - Morale was lower than it had ever been in my life. I can't recall if I began writing this as a response to all the unnecessary "hazing" and behind-the-scene violence that took place in the barracks every week on Thursday during our mandatory "Field Day" cleaning emphasis.
Every Friday morning, prior to our Company formation, every room in the barracks would be "White-Glove" inspected for cleanliness. And the task really wouldn't be so hard if the more senior-enlisted Marines, who were the same rank as you but had a year or a deployment ahead of you, hadn't interfered with our lives while being the new kid on the block. In the movies, they call the new guy "FNGs" (Fucking New Guy), but in the Marines we were called "BOOTs" (Barely Out of Training).
During the deployment, in the Summer of 2010, I finished what I could of this piece prior to my laptop dying. And since I had no way of fixing it while overseas, I had mailed it to my dad and asked him to send it in for repairs. I spent the next 5 months without a laptop and did not get it back until the late Winter of 2010 when I returned home from deployment.
The song was never completed to my satisfaction, back in 2010; however, after revisiting it over a decade later, I feel that the song is complete. Could I possibly improve on some things later on? Sure. I have never seen anything wrong in revisiting a piece and adjusting dynamics or even adding something new that came to mind later. In this case though, I feel "Reckoning" is unique due to the raw emotional state I was in while composing it. So, you may hear how some instruments start to all cut off towards the end, leading to just a piano.
Nowadays, I feel that's a fitting end to the story. When does the reckoning end? When will I be allowed to do what I was trained to do. When can I be ordered on mission to “kill” someone? When will I lose grasp of my own sanity, which each day grew more fragile by the second, and decide to take my own life, due to the boredom or the needless "hazing" rituals. Let’s call hazing what it really is.
Torture.
This song is for those who survived and to those absent. All of you know who you are, whether you see this or not. Was it all necessary to make us a more efficient killer? I wonder if that was the point of it all. And it took me a long time to fully understand that the vicious cycle of violence inflicted upon us was done upon those who did it to us. It really wasn’t until around the time I completed “Amidst Chaos & the Nature of Humanity” where a single film reminded me of what I, or rather we, endured in order to survive the next "Reckoning." That film was none other than the great & disturbing “Salo: or the 120 Days of Sodom.”
“Reckoning” was written in E Minor in Adante (approximately 70 BPM). It consists of: a Piano, Synthesizer, Strings (Violin, Viola, Cello, Bass), and a Sitar (my personal favorite exotic instrument).
Happy Memorial Day
and Thank You for your service.
Ma-An-Go
May 30, 2022
- Genre
- Classical