“There was nowhere to go but everywhere, so just keep rolling under the stars.”
That’s some of the road wisdom in Jack Kerouac’s 1957 novel On the Road, a paean to the American road trip as a metaphor for journeying through life and meeting fellow travelers along the way.
The Carpe Diem String Quartet—Columbus’ resident professional string quartet—recently journeyed to WOSU’s Performance Studio to play a selection from Mosey by composer and quartet founding violist Korine Fujiwara.
Inspired by—of all things—an airport layover, Mosey embodies musically the many ways we move through time and space on the road trip of life.
Not quite sure how to mosey? You have a couple of options. Two seemingly contradictory meanings for “mosey” appear in the Oxford English Dictionary—to go away quickly, and to walk at a leisurely pace, to amble, to wander. The work meanders and hustles by turns in the Carpe Diem String Quartet’s performance.
Fujiwara says Mosey was inspired by people-watching during a long layover at an airport at the height of holiday travel season.
“I was struck by the different ways everyone moved through the chaos of the holiday season, everyone in their own emotional microclimate suffering their individual degree of transit stress, and how they each managed it,” Fujiwara said. “People running to their gates with smiles on their faces, people running to gates in desperation and exasperation. People striding purposefully from point A to point B without making a fuss. Passengers strolling by various merchants, sampling the offerings, window-shopping as they passed the time. People nonchalantly moving through the crowds, unbothered as they made their way to their gates.”
Fujiwara had been tasked with composing a new work for her quartet, and up to the time of her travels, the writing had not gone smoothly.
“Each time I sat down and started working, nothing gained traction in my mind,” Fujiwara said. “Instead, it became an ever-darkening vicious circle of non-inspiration.”
Seeing people from all corners of the world moseying—in one sense or another—through the airport gave Fujiwara the inspiration she needed.
“I began sketching new music as I watched my fellow travelers, capturing how we all move through the airport, paralleled by how we move through life,” Fujiwara said.
Eventually the ideas found voice in the music that is Mosey. The piece is a reminder that, however we mosey, finding our own way is what matters.
Or as Jack Kerouac put it, “We had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.”
