The premiere of Where flames a word lands in Dave Allen’s Hotbed of Intrigue, amid his list of ten favorite concerts of the year. The Crossing (who performed it) pops up twice, with special mentions also of David Shapiro and Joby Talbot. Delightful company!
It’s thrilling to be included in the year’s Top Ten list—two years running—of the Philadelphia Inquirer’s David Patrick Stearns. His survey of things musical in the area lists events I wished at the time I could have gotten to, now even more so, as I read about them again. But I was fortunate to be a part of the Paul Celan project in The Crossing’s Month of Moderns, and to hear exciting music by David Shapiro and Kirsten Broberg. My offering was Where flames a word, a setting of two poems and one largeish bit of prose by Celan. You can read the text and my notes about the piece here.
What Stearns wrote:
Where do you start with the Crossing’s Month of Moderns Festival? Founder/director Donald Nally culled and commissioned lots of pieces based on the troubled poetry of Paul Celan during May and June at Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill. Besides yielding great pieces by Dane Bo Holten and Philadelphian Kile Smith, new forms of musical expression surfaced, such as the hallucinatory spirituality of Joby Talbot’s Path of Miracles.
After the premiere, they reprised my piece at the opening concert of Chorus America’s annual conference, which happened to be in Philadelphia this year. More about the piece, and excerpts from the premiere:
Where flames a word (Paul Celan)
SATB div. 13′. Program notes. Reviews
1. Before your late face, page 5. View excerpt
2. Conversation in the Mountains, page 13. View excerpt
3. I know you, you are the deeply bowed, page 23. View excerpt
Donald Nally’s choir, The Crossing, occupies a unique niche in the musical ecosystem: Its singers perform new and unfamiliar music for a small chamber choir. I heard them for the first time last season, when they joined Piffaro for a major event: the premiere of Kile Smith’s Vespers for voice and Renaissance instruments. The Crossing’s latest a capella concert in Chestnut Hill was the first pure Crossing concert I’ve attended, and it met most of my expectations. The Crossing presents novel, beautiful, complex music that requires precise coordination and first-class voices.
The program’s main event was another premiere by Kile Smith, the final work in a trilogy Nally has dubbed the Celan Project: three settings for texts by Paul Celan (1920-1970), a Romanian Jewish poet who survived the Nazi death camps.
I’d never heard of Celan, and I found the texts obscure and complex. Celan grew up in the aftermath of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, speaking several languages, including Yiddish. But German was the language used by cultured Central Europeans in his youth, and he continued to write in it after the Holocaust, even though it was the language of his oppressors. Celan’s German is so personal and inventive that Smith referred to him as the “German James Joyce” when I queried him after the concert.
Smith’s piece used English translations, which only increased their opaqueness in my case, and I listened to his piece primarily as pure, wordless music. Smith treated the unaccompanied voices just as unpredictably—and effectively—as he treated Renaissance instruments in the Vespers and modern instruments in the horn concerto he wrote for the Classical Symphony. He’s composed a number of good pieces over the years, but lately he seems to be on a roll.
Dave Allen, Hotbed of Intrigue, 10 Jun 2009
Kile Smith’s Where flames a word, the final world premiere in the Celan Project, and the first to incorporate a prose work by Celan. Gives a sense of immanence and of tremendous, overwhelming size and the struggle to comprehend it. Middle section, the prose setting, has text that reflects a struggle for language, a conflict between “green” and “white” language, and the build-up of clusters suggests language at war, green and white each fighting for their own space… the Smith piece was really impressive: a strong sense of lapping waves, of drawing closer to that nagging, inscrutable secret that seems to haunt Celan. One odd thing: ending on the word “delusion” with a sweet, major chord. Are we to come away thinking of peace and harmony as a delusion? Is this resignation in the face of the struggles Celan evokes? Not sure.
[I commented to Dave’s post:] Hi Dave,
Good question, and thanks for the kind words. Here’s how I see all the Celan texts in the piece. There’s you and me, and then there’s something else. You and I are delusion. The else is real. There’s comfort in that; struggling’s over; major chord.
But it is a deceptive cadence. I set up the final section to sound like it’s in C major, although it’s really C lydian (with the F#). But on “real” I take out the lydian and accentuate C major even more by going to its subdominant of F major. When they settle on the last syllable, “sion” of delusion, the bass even drops to that glorious low C. Sounds like the last chord. Did it sound like that to you? I was hoping so, anyway. But then it jumps up a ninth and the other voices settle to D F# A, and that’s the last chord. So it is major, but odd.
Peace and harmony are not the delusion. In the face of what’s real, we’re the delusion. And that’s fine. That’s my take on the text, and what I tried to convey, anyway. Many thanks again for all your observations,
Kile
The Crossing sings final concert of Month of Moderns festival
David Patrick Stearns, 8 Jun 2009
an important world premiere… Where Flames a Word took on Paul Celan poems that seem to be about soul recognition through sex – in words too fearlessly personal to be uttered in real life and that can perhaps exist only in a poem. The depth of expression easily surpasses his much-discussed Vespers. Some of the word settings are plainspoken as can be; others sail in through alien key signatures, racing in from some side door. Resolutions got sidetracked by bass notes that rise from under cover. Most of it makes little literal sense but, poetically speaking, feels completely right in spellbinding ways I never imagined.
Where Flames a Word will be reprised at the Crossing’s free opening concert of Chorus America’s National Conference, 7:30 p.m. Wednesday at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church, 313 Pine St.
Now it’s me writing: You can look at the words here and see what you think they’re about. The parallel I draw from Celan’s poetry in general is to James Joyce, although everybody notices that. The parallel to these texts in particular is, for me, John Donne, and how the sensual is a portal to the eternal. The so-called metaphysical poets did not shy away from descriptions of physical intimacy in trying to fathom the reality of the spiritual experience. This is nothing new, and goes back, at least, to the Song of Solomon.
(The idea that religious people are prudes is a myth invented, let’s be frank, by irreligious people for whom intimacy has evaporated into mere pleasure. If you have a metaphysical appreciation, you understand perfectly well not only the power of both worlds, but the interleaving. The secular world invented this dichotomy, not religion. That some religious people have bought into it merely demonstrates how tightly they have become entangled in the world. Tsk, tsk.)
Whether this piece is deeper in expression than Vespers is something I can’t calculate. Maybe it is. I’m happy for the wonderful feedback I’ve received about both works. I am moved by the Psalms more than any other literature and think I invested that into the music, but that’s for others to decide. It may be true that I play Vespers close to the vest harmonically (that is, I think it’s very expressive, but within a smaller circle). One reason is that Renaissance instruments do not sit well with extreme harmonic shifts. Another is that Vespers is closely related to liturgical music, which should not be a vehicle for self-expression. (Art shouldn’t be concerned with self-expression anyway, but that’s another discussion.)
For instance, the reading of Scripture in worship should be accomplished simply and clearly, with no room for dramatic recitation. Chant, which is artful declamation, comes directly out of that. Sacred polyphony comes out of chant, and the same principles apply, I believe. But in a concert piece, one can loosen up one’s expression, since the purpose changes.
Come out Wednesday and see what you think. Did I mention the concert’s free?
Joe Barron of the Montgomery News wrote a preview of The Crossing’s Month of Moderns concerts, and passed on a bit of news to me: that Kirsten Broberg and I both chose some of the same Paul Celan text to set. My work, Where flames a word, uses three texts, the last bit being what we both chose:
(I know you, you are the deeply bowed,
I the transpierced, am subject to you.
Where flames a word, would testify for us both?
You—all, all real. I—all delusion.)
I’m looking forward to hearing Kirsten’s piece tonight, on a concert that also includes music by Bo Holten, James MacMillan, and Steven Stucky. On June 5th, I’ll be on the program with Paul Fowler, Jackson Hill, Holten, and Arvo Pärt. All at the Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill. The Month of Moderns started off last weekend with a powerful performance of Joby Talbot’s Path of Miracles that continues to resonate.
