Musician Builds An Ark

“Build Yourself an Ark,” written by David Sasso, eases into its waltz time with a easy swing, a flourish from a mandolin. But Sasso’s voice carries instructions: ​“Gather some gopherwood and build yourself an ark.” It’s an immediate reference to the story of Noah’s flood, but it’s brought into the present via a form of traditional music that Sasso gives a modern twist. ​“Take along your loved ones; they may not all want to go / Don’t worry about your husband; he already knows,” he sings.

It’s then that, if you’re listening closely, you understand that Sasso is turning the original story inside out. If the narrator is God, then God isn’t talking to Noah, but to his wife Naamah — who doesn’t appear in the story in Torah, but does appear in Midrash, rabbinical discourses on the original story. Or is the narrator really God?

“Build Yourself an Ark” and ​“Flight of the Raven” are two songs — one in American traditional and one in classical mode — that Sasso, a New Haven-based composer and musician who is also a practicing psychiatrist, wrote for a program called called Religion, Spirituality, and the Arts (RSA), asking artists of diverse media and backgrounds ​“to study a particular Biblical passage from multiple perspectives and come up with a response that would be presented in a live gallery,” Sasso said.

The story chosen for 2020 was Noah’s flood.

“They chose it before the pandemic,” Sasso said, but it turned out to be ​“perfect for a lot of things this year.” For Sasso, it also allowed him to continue examining questions of family, faith, and music that have been with him for his entire life.

Sasso grew up in Indianapolis, the son of two rabbis, Dennis Sasso and Sandy Eisenberg Sasso. ​“They’re the first married rabbinical couple in history,” he said, ​“which makes me, in fact, the first child born to a woman rabbi.” His parents shared a congregation, Beth-El Zedeck, for many years; his father still practices on the pulpit while his mother is a teacher and author.

Sasso grew up playing ​“various instruments” in the classical tradition starting at the age of three. He started composing in middle school. In high school he went to Interlochen Center for the Arts and wrote a piece that the student orchestra then performed. Then, ​“one of the composers there said, ​‘do you want to write a piece for a program I’m putting together with the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra?’” Sasso was 16 and said yes, and the piece was performed. Three years later, when he was in college at Indiana University, he won a commission to write another piece for that orchestra. He studied music and biochemistry in college ​“and wrote a lot of music.”

He then went to medical school; ​“I decided it would be easier to be a doctor and a musician on the side than the other way around.” Nevertheless, while getting his medical training, he wrote a full-length opera, The Trio of Minuet, that the Indianapolis Children’s Choir premiered in 2003; it ​“ended up on a few PBS stations,” he said. He completed his psychiatry training and is now an assistant clinical professor in the Child Study Center at the Yale School of Medicine, medical director of the Child Guidance Center of Mid-Fairfield County, and a private practitioner. He’s also firmly embedded in the greater New Haven music scene as a mandolin player for Five and Change, in his duo with Kat Wallace, and as a session musician.

The RSA is run by Sasso’s mother through a collaboration between Indiana University and Purdue University. ​“It had always sounded very cool to me,” Sasso said, ​“but I could never participate” because the live events took place in Indiana, and Sasso, as a practicing psychiatrist, is based here. When the Covid-19 pandemic meant the program had to be run remotely in 2020 – 21, however ​“I put in an application,” Sasso said, and was accepted by its panel of 10 faculty members.

Sasso began by revisiting the story of Noah, then turning to Jewish interpretations of the story. ​“What I love about the program is that it honors the text while also questioning it, and that feels like a very Jewish notion,” he said. ​“In Jewish tradition, the biggest honor you can give an idea is not just to engage with it seriously, but also critically and creatively.” That meant steering away from a literal interpretation of the story, which would suggest figuring out what’s ​“right” and ​“wrong” about it. Instead, Sasso said, ​“let’s just sit with all the ambiguity and nuance. Let’s explore all the spaces in between.” He also felt the ways his approach drew from his experience as a psychiatrist. ​“When something uncomfortable happens, you don’t just make a decision…. as soon as you pick a side,” it’s possible that ​“you’ve foreclosed a lot of creative possibilities and healing opportunities,” to ​“find wisdom in the contradictions.”

He drew on flood stories from other cultures, like Gilgamesh. He also moved forward in time to find connections to the devastation wrought on New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina, the isolation of the pandemic, and in the human elements of the story — wherein only a handful of people survive while the vast majority of humanity perishes — the United States’ ongoing reckoning with racism.

“The conversation about the Noah story at the superficial level is: why would God have done something so horrible as to destroy everyone but whoever was in that ark?” That led to a second, immediate question: ​“How is it that Noah in the story speaks not a word to God?” In the story he follows orders; he doesn’t argue, he doesn’t plead for clemency for his friends and neighbors. This led Sasso to think of the people (and deity) in the story as characters — to interrogate feeling the kind of anger that makes someone want to destroy everything, and to ask the question ​“what can you preserve? So instead of being a story about destruction, it becomes a story about preservation.” And from Noah’s perspective, ​“if you see that everything around you is about to be destroyed, what do you do?”

“For me, it’s a story about what human beings do in response to a catastrophe … because catastrophe happens without our wanting it to all the time.” Based on a reading that conceived of Noah’s ark as an archive, Sasso thought about what was being preserved there. There are the humans and the animals. In Midrash, Noah’s wife Naamah preserves seeds and plants everything after the floodwaters recede and the land reemerges.

So in writing the lyrics for ​“Build Yourself an Ark,” Sasso thought of it as ​“instructions for a modern-day ark.” He wrote it in October, when ​“we were all hunkered down and had been hunkered down for months.” When he sat down to write the piece, he at first envisioned something classical. But ​“I sat there with my guitar and sang ​‘gather some gopherwood and build yourself an ark,’ and that was it.” It ended up as a country waltz instead.

He began by thinking about what he thought was worth preserving ​“when society goes through upheaval,” he said. He thought of art, music, stories, ​“wisdom, kind words.” He thought of caring for the community around him. He also found himself musing on preserving ​“the truth” — ​“a slippery concept, but an important one, and that’s something American society has really been struggling with,” he said. He returned then to what he considered part of his Jewish perspective, that the truth wasn’t something that one arrived at as much as constantly tried to move toward, without ever really getting there. ​“The whole premise of science is that we never get to the truth. It’s just ​‘what’s the question that gets us a little closer?’”

He and musical partner Kat Wallace recorded the song in December with a band made up of Mike Robinson on pedal steel guitar, Brittany Karlson on vocals and bass, and Ariel Bernstein on drums, amid ​“all kinds of testing and quarantining, and people backing out at the last minute and finding replacements. We got a group together and we got an AirBnB, and we did the masks, and we went in and recorded.” Other parts were added later.

“Stellar band,” Sasso said. ​“I just had the cameras running the whole time and picked out all the bits that were the right takes.” He appreciated how the video made it appear ​“like we’re all in either our own arks, or we’re all in a cruise-ship ark, and you’re looking through the portholes.”

The choral piece ​“Flight of the Raven,” meanwhile, was an opportunity for Sasso to ​“dip my toes back into” classical composition, he said. He spent a week over the New Year’s holiday setting to music a poem his mother had written about the raven that Noah sends out from the boat first to find land; the raven doesn’t return. The poem ​“humanizes the raven,” dealing with its feelings of resentment at being sent out on a suicide mission. ​“I will feed prophets and not be silent,” the poem reads.

Employing a frame of mind many composers have used, Sasso imbued his composition with words; the chords in the piece — F, A, C, E — ​“spell ​‘face,’” whereas the ​“two main notes in the melody, if you break it down, spell ​‘ed,’ which means ​‘witness’ in Hebrew, so the raven is a witness on the face of the earth that is covered with water. The backing vocals sing the word ​“tevah,” which means ​“ark.” At one point, the chords change to spell the word ​“cage.” The English horn in the piece plays the Torah and Haftorah tropes from Jewish services.

He enlisted singers Moira Smiley, Karla Mundy, and Robert Eisentrout, with Anna Lampidis playing English horn, to help him record the piece remotely. Smiley is a ​“vocal shape-shifter” who writes and performs, Sasso said; she and Sasso knew each other from college. Smiley found the other singers to round out the group. Sasso found the English horn player through a mutual acquaintance. He put the video together and ​“added some footage for a beach in Curacao” to give the effect of a raven ​“floating on never-ending sea.”

“It’s a real throwback to composing like I did in college,” Sasso said. Though his experience of writing it has given him thoughts of returning to the classical world and writing an opera or a symphony.

“Something grand,” he said.