PROGRAM NOTE
When Bruce Weinberger, tenor saxophonist with the Rascher Saxophone Quartet, first approached me in the spring of 2009 with an invitation to compose a work for the Rascher together with Paul Hillier’s Ars Nova Copenhagen, I was thrilled at the prospect of writing for a group of such stellar musicians — some of Europe’s very best – and was also intrigued by the sound possibilities of a saxophone quartet combined with voices.
My preliminary ruminations about possible texts took a decisive turn when I found out that the commissioning organization, and venue for the work’s premiere, would be the Internationale Orgelwoche Nürnberg, Musica Sacra. For me, as a Jew and an Israeli, there is no way to think of Nuremberg without confronting its dark history during the spread of Nazism, although at the same time recalling that this is also where the post-war Nuremberg Trials took place.
As the daughter of a Berliner, who left his comfortable home in the early 1930’s and who later lost two brothers and many family members who had stayed behind (a story similar to that of my mother, whose family called Odessa and Lithuania their home), I am poignantly aware of the fact that what was once his ‘Vaterland’ is also my fatherland, by which I mean, at the simplest and most basic level, the land of my father. Germany as such continues to be a difficult place for me — it is where das was geschah (that which happened), the phrase used by Paul Celan when referring to the Shoah (Holocaust), was allowed to unfold. Yet for all the emotions that accompany this recognition, I am also acutely aware that the people I meet on streets and in shops of German towns forever remind me of my father, his sister, and the many close people that made up this side of my family. The metaphor of Cain and Abel, two brothers of the same mother, captures this paradox.
The central poetic impetus for the work that came to be is “written in pencil in the sealed boxcar,” a brief poem (19 words in all in the original Hebrew text) by the late Israeli poet Dan Pagis (1930–1986), himself a Holocaust survivor. Eve, mother of Cain and Abel, is on her way to the gas chambers (“here in this transport”) together with Abel, and is looking (longing?) for her older son, Cain, son of Adam (= ben adam in Hebrew, meaning also Mensch). The poem is constructed in a manner that spins the end back to the beginning, ad infinitum… I preceded this poem by the biblical account from Genesis of the Cain and Abel story — the first murder. The emphasis in my music is not on the slaying per se. That is such an unspeakably horrific act perpetrated by one brother against another, that I could only describe it, musically, in a manner that is almost matter of fact in its tone: that which happened. Rather, it is Cain’s response “Am I my brother’s keeper?” countered by God’s wrath, and leading up to Cain being branded with the Cain mark for the rest of times, that is at the crux of this movement.
These two central movements, grounded in biblical myth and in recent history, are surrounded by two shorter statements. The work opens with a nine-word fragment by Paul Celan “sprich auch du,” set in Hebrew and in German. I read this fragment as a command to take on the role of the witness, speaking out, keeping alive the memory. These words return at the end of the third movement, as Eve’s plea to “tell him [Cain] that” reaches its peak. And for the concluding movement I selected a phrase from Job, set in the original Hebrew and its English translation, ending with “tell if thou hast understanding”. We are left with little, yet, even in the face of despair, we must go on. Perhaps lessons have been learned. Amen.
—Shulamit Ran
Texts, translations, and pronunciation guide
INFORMATION
Commissioned by the Internationale Orgelwoche Nürnberg—Musica Sacra
For the Rascher Saxophone Quartet and Ars Nova Copenhagen,
Paul Hillier, Director
Premiere: June 6, 2010
Musica Sacra Festival, Sebalduskirche,
Nuremberg, Germany
Rascher Saxophone Quartet
Ars Nova Copenhagen,
Paul Hillier, director
Duration: c. 23’