KJ Karapetkov and The Buried Giant

EN 101 (“Encounters: Reading across Time and Space”) pairs older literary texts with modern works that respond to them with appreciation, ambivalence, and resistance. Along with traditional critical assignments, the course includes a creative project that allows students to stage their own encounters by responding to readings in the form and media of their choice. The course envisions literary history as an ongoing conversation in which students participate.

For his creative project, KJ Karapetkov was inspired by the novel The Buried Giant,  which led him to compose and perform an original duet for trumpet.

KJ says, “The story of The Buried Giant resonated with me on an emotional level that I wanted to express through music. I felt a duet was the best choice for the piece, as there are a lot of themes of duality in the novel, and my focus was specifically on the elderly couple who are the novel’s main protagonists. Each movement of the piece follows a key scene in their character arcs and is constructed to convey the tone and feeling as they rediscover their past.”

Professor Maruice Lee, one of the instructors of EN101 comments on KJ’s composition and the source material saying, “The Buried Giant is a strange and beautiful book by Nobel Prize laureate Kazuo Ishiguro. It’s set in medieval England and weaves together myth and history, magic and novelistic realism, political events and intimate relationships. I think KJ’s duet captures the haunting weirdness of Ishiguro’s world, which sets dualisms in opposition to each other but remains delicately modulated.”

We thank KJ for allowing us to share his wonderful work and hope that it encourages others to find inspiration in interdisciplinary endeavors of their own.