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Threadsuns (2002)

Instrumentation: SATB chorus
Text: Paul Celan, translation by John Felstiner
Duration: 6'

I. Threadsuns
II. There was earth inside them
III. Psalm

The prevailing question of Paul Celan’s time, posed provocatively in 1955 by Theodor Adorno, was whether or not the German language could survive the atrocities that had been committed under its auspices: “After Auschwitz, to write a poem is barbaric.” Celan resisted the dictum; despite his own concession in 1958 that “a poem today shows a strong inclination toward falling mute,” his poetry often seems to be reaching out in the face of a gathering darkness. There are muted traces of hope in these poems, a hope that with time, we may be able to confront the unspeakable through art: “Perhaps what is past, passing, and vanishing will become more addressable.”

My decision to set these texts for choral forces was informed by the collective sensibility that runs through Celan’s poetry, haunting these works in particular. As translator John Felstiner observes, “‘they’ persist as a third-person plural – a people, evoked again and again throughout Celan’s work…’they’ still pull at Celan’s pen.” The poems are also shot through with strains of mysticism and paradox, informed by what Felstiner deems “the realities conditioning the poetry – loss, death, Jewishness.” (All quotations from Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew, by John Felstiner, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995.)