Amarmos (Andrew Thomas Kuster) is a writer and musician. My creative work includes Lessons With Hypatia and The Soulless for music theater, a series of cross-genre music recording projects, music production, and experience-based writing. I also publish scholarly work.
In my creative work, I seek to reveal how real people become aware of human urges—life and love—through which each individual comes to comprehend their unique experience of being alive. I try to express powerful emotions (especially the many shades of love) that color a person’s interactions with others and flavor a person’s understanding of his or her self. I try to depict how a person experiences resisting or succumbing to instinctual behaviors, how that person learns to use memory, reflection, and sacrifice to construct meaning, and—by the emergent awareness of behaviors that bring satisfaction at different stages of life—how a person realizes who he or she is as an individual. Although my work explores philosophy, mysticism, eroticism, power, gender, family, and religion, really what I’m trying to tell are love stories.
I take the substance of my work from my own life experiences and my education. I also draw inspiration from the delightful writings of Daumal (A Night of Serious Drinking) and Calvino (Invisible Cities), particularly how their light and engaging style so simply opens up to immediate and profound poignancy. My thinking about perception, psychology, metaphor, and memory is deeply indebted to Jung’s scholarly writings on the alchemical process of individuation and his Red Book, the clarity and honesty of Jaspers' Philosophy of Existence, and Crowley’s The Vision and the Voice, an attempt to tear open how mind, metaphor, and archetype function. And I’m humbled by those composers who have so earnestly tried to express their individual understanding of love, humanity, and divinity, especially Messiaen and Mahler in his Eighth Symphony.
I compose love songs. I try to enhance the listener’s experience of the viewpoint of a character by using musical elements appropriate to the meaning of the words and drama. I seek to compose beautiful and singable melodies that utilize modality, vocal range, and articulation effectively and appropriately. Likewise, in my orchestration I attempt to heighten the lyrics and drama by using appropriate instrumentation (from classical orchestra to rock) and large-scale formal construction that incorporates dance-forms and over-arching areas of harmonic suspension and arrival.
Of those writers and composers who address archetypal human behavior, I most highly regard the plays of Ibsen, Molière, and Wedekind and the collaborations of Brecht and Weill, especially in Seven Deadly Sins. I too attempt to depict instinct, but I focus on how an individual internally struggles with conflicting instincts. My poetry represents enraptured speech, or rather: emotion at the level of becoming words. I try to avoid metaphors and poetic forms that might distract from the expressivity of a character or the unfolding of the dramatic whole. Instead, I try to enhance the emotional density the character is experiencing using real, impassioned language. Thereby, I hope to depict through words, music, and drama the externalization of a person’s essential humanity (or, how that individual comprehends life, love, and divinity).