What is it in English. I am bad with languages, ollie. I like to know what is it. I am going to look in New Music room.
I wander if it is a solo clarinet work?

I'm interested in some of the ideas that lie behind this piece. I could understand if it had been written in the mid-60s by a young German composer - but that's not the case, and so I'm wondering what inspired it to be written when it was, and what makes it relevant to today? I really would be interested in your views on this - good luck with the performance. (I know Basel very well, having worked there, but won't be there at the time of your performances, unfortunately).

I wasn't questioning the relevance of setting Paul Celan's poetry to music - Pulse Shadows is a remarkably powerful piece, to take one example of several.

My question actually arose from the quote from Peter McCallum in your own explanatory note linked to above:

"Theodore Adorno said that poetry after Auschwitz was impossible--that any art in the face of such abomination was simply hypocrisy, simply avoiding truth and hiding in mannerism. This work aimed to reopen the poetic mouth."

I've always seen Adorno's comment (which he later retracted) as peculiarly rooted in its time and 'mitteleuropäische' place, which is why I asked the question above. If you're going to employ references like that, I don't think it is then sufficient to say that 'your question could be amply answered by the music itself'.

I'm not trying to be argumentative - I'm just trying to understand more about what sounds like an interesting work in the context of the references that you have used.

Not strictly relevant to Opening of the Mouth, but this may be of some interest in the context of this discussion - some citations to do with the relationship between Adorno and Celan which I compiled for r.m.c.r. about a year ago:

Some of you might be interested in the troubled relationship between Celan and Theodor Adorno. In his essay 'Cultural Criticism and Society' ('Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft' - I quote from the English translation by Samuel and Shierry Weber (which received Adorno's endorsement), in 'Prisms' (Cambridge, MA, 1967), pp 17-34), Adorno ended with the following now notorious words:

'The materialistic transparency of culture has not made it more honest, only more vulgar. By relinquishing its own particularity, culture has also
relinquished the salt of truth, which once consisted in its opposition to other particularities. To call it to account before a responsibility which it denies is only to confirm cultural pomposity. Neutralized and ready-made, traditional culture has become worthless today. Through an irrevocable process its heritage, hypocritically reclaimed by the Russians, has become expendable to the highest degree, superfluous, trash. And the hucksters of mass culture can point to it with a grin, for they treat it as such. The more total society becomes, the greater the reification of the mind and the more paradoxical its effort to escape reification on its own. Even the most extreme consciousness of doom threatens to degenerate into idle chatter. Cultural criticism finds itself faced with the final stage of the dialectic of culture and barbarism. To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. And this corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write poetry today. Absolute reification, which presupposed intellectual progress as one of its elements, is now preparing to absorb the mind entirely. Critical intelligence cannot be equal to this challenge as long as it confines itself to self-satisfied contemplation.' (ibid, p. 34).


These sentiments became quite emblematic of a certain post-war mentality amongst artists, especially in Germany. Gunther Grass was sympathetic at
first, as I believe was Heinrich Böll. Certainly such thoughts haunted many avant-garde composers; with or without explicit reference, one can see signs
of this mentality in the work of Helmut Lachenmann, Mathias Spahlinger, Dieter Schnebel, Gerhard Stabler, Heinz Holliger and others.

Celan encountered Adorno's 'Notes on Literature' in 1959 and attempted to meet him later that year (a failed meeting he described in his story
'Conversation in the Mountains'. a remarkable bit of prose which I'll quote from briefly:

'Poor lily, poor corn-salad. There they stand, the cousins, on a road in the mountains, the stick silent, the stones silent, and the silence no silence at all. No word has come to an end and no phrase, it is nothing but a pause, an empty space between the words, a blank - you see all the syllables stand around, waiting. They are tongue and mouth as before, these two, and in their eyes there hangs a veil, and you, poor flowers, are not even there, are not blooming, you do not exist, and July is not July' (from the translation by Rosmarie Waldrop, in Paul Celan - 'Collected Prose' (Manchester, 1986), p.19).


He speaks of the two of them as 'Jew and son of a Jew' (ibid, p.17)  and describes Jew 'Gross' and Jew 'Klein' (ibid, p.18) meeting in the mountains (it's generally assumed that 'Gross' is Adorno and 'Klein' is Celan - Adorno responded to this story by pointing out to Celan that the real 'Gross' he should have met was Gershom Scholem). Here is some of their imaginary conversation:


'You know and you want to ask: And even so you've come all the way, come here even so - why, and what for?' 'Why, and what for ... Because I had to talk, maybe, to myself or to you, talk with my mouth and tongue, not just with my stick. Because to whom does it talk, my stick? It talks to the stones, and the stones - to whom do they talk?' 'To whom should they talk, cousin? They do not talk, they speak, and who speaks does not talk to anyone, cousin, he speaks because nobody hears him, nobody and Nobody, and then he says, himself, not his mouth or his tongue, he, and only he, says: Do you hear me?' 'Do you hear me, he says - I know, cousin, I know.... Do you hear me, he says. I'm here. I am here, I've come. I've come with my stick, me and no other, me and not him, me with my hour, my undeserved hour, me who have been hit, who have not been hit, me with my memory, with my lack of memory, me, me, me...' (ibid, p. 20)


When the poet Hans Magnus Enzensberger challenged Adorno's thesis (in Enzensburger, "Die Steine der Freiheit," in 'Nelly Sachs zu Ehren' ed W.
Berendsohn et al. (Frankfurt, 1961), p. 47, cited in John Felstiner - 'Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew' (New Haven, 1995, p. 188), claiming that the
work of Nelly Sachs had proved the falsity of Adorno's dictum, Adorno replied in 1961:


'I do not want to soften my statement that it is barbaric to continue to write poetry after Auschwitz; it expresses, negatively, the impulse that animates committed literature. The question one of the characters in Sartre's 'Morts sans sepulture' [The Dead Without Tombs] asks, "Does living have any meaning when men exist who beat you until your bones break?" is also the question whether art as such should still exist at all; whether spiritual regression in the concept of committed literature is not enjoined by the regression of society itself. But Hans Magnus Enzensberg's rejoinder also remains true, namely that literature must resist precisely this verdict, that is, be such that it does not surrender to cynicism merely by existing after Auschwitz. It is the situation of literature itself and not simply one's relation to it that is paradoxical.'


(Theodor Adorno - 'Committment', in 'Notes On Literature' Vol. 2, translated Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York, 1992), pp. 87-88)


Celan could not accept Adorno's sentiments, writing 'No poem after Auschwitz (Adorno): what sort of an idea of a "Poem" is being implied here? The
arrogance of the man who hypothetically and speculatively has the audacity to observe or report on Auschwitz from the perspective of nightingales and
song thrushes.' (publishd in Joachim Seng, 'Die waher Flaschenpost: Zur Beziehung zwischen Theodor W. Adorno und Paul Celan', Frankfurter Adorno
Blaetter, viii (1999), p. 151, cited in Lorenz Jaeger - 'Adorno: An Intellectual Biography', translated Stewart Spencer (New Haven, 2004), p.
187).


Relations between Celan and Adorno remained strained until the latter's death in 1969, though Celan confided in Adorno when feeling that allegations
of plagiarism against him (Celan) were part of a Dreyfus-like anti-semitic campaign (see Jager, op cit, p. 187, and Felstiner, op. cit, p. 189). Adorno
did return to these issues in his two epic late works, Negative Dialectics (1966) and Aesthetic Theory (1970, published posthumously):


'Genocide is the absolute integration. It is on its way wherever men are leveled off - "polished off," as the German military called it - until one
exterminates them literally, as deviations from the concept of their total nullity. Auschwitz confirmed the philosopheme of pure identity as death. The
most far out dictum from Beckett's End Game, that there really is not so much to be feared any more, reacts to a practice whose first sample was
given in the concentration camps, and in whose concept - venerable once upon a time - the destruction of nonidentity is ideologically lurking. Absolute
negativity is in plain sight and has ceased to surprise anyone. Fear used to be tied to the principium individuationis of self-preservation, and that
principle, by its own consistency, abolishes itself. What the sadists in the camps foretold their victims, "Tomorrow you'll be wiggling skyward as smoke
from this chimney" bespeaks the indifference of each individual life that is the direction of history. Even in his formal freedom, the individual is as
fungible and replaceable as he will be under the liquidators' boots.


'But since, in a world whose law is universal individual profit, the individual has nothing but this self that has become indifferent, the performance of the old, familiar tendency is at the same time the most dreadful of things. There is no getting out of this, no more than out of the electrified barbed wire around the camps. Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream; hence it may have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems. But it is not wrong to raise the less cultural question whether after Auschwitz you can go on living - especially whether one who escaped by accident, one who by rights should have been killed, may go on living [this comment of Adorno's is chillingly prescient of Celan's eventual fate - IP]. His mere survival calls for the coldness, the basic principle of bourgeois subjectivity, without which there could have been no Auschwitz; this is the drastic guilt of him who was spared. By way of atonement he will be plagued by dreams such as that he is no longer living at all, that he was sent to the ovens in 1944 and his whole existence since has been imaginary, an emanation of the insane wish of a man killed twenty years earlier.'

(Theodor Adorno - 'Negative Dialectics', translated E.B. Ashton (New York, 1973), pp. 362-363)


Adorno referred to Celan at a few points in 'Aesthetic Theory'.


'Nature poetry is anachronistic not only as a subject: Its truth content has vanished. This may help clarify the anorganic aspect of Beckett's as well as
of Celan's poetry. It yearns neither for nature nor for industry; it is precisely the integration of the latter that leads to poetization, which was already a dimension of impressionism, and contributes its part to making peace with an unpeaceful world. Art, as an anticipatory form of reaction, is no longer able - if it ever was - to embody pristine nature or the industry that has scorched it; the impossibility of both is probably the hidden law of aesthetic nonrepresentationalism. The images of the postindustrial world are those of a corpse; they want to avert atomic war by banning it, just as forty years ago surrealism sought to save Paris through the image of cows grazing in the streets, the same cows after which the people of bombed-out Berlin rebaptized Kurfuerstendamm as Kudamm [A punning abbreviation of 'Avenue of the Elector' to 'Avenue of the Cows' - translator's note]'


(Theodor Adorno - 'Aesthetic Theory', translated Robert Hullot-Kentor (London, 1997), p. 219)


'Sealing art off from empirical reality became an explicit program in hermetic poetry. In the face of all of its important works - those of Celan, for instance - it is justified to ask to what extent they are indeed hermetic; as Peter Szondi points out, that they are self-contained does not mean that they are unintelligible. On the contrary, hermetic poetry and social elements have a common nexus that must be acknowledged. Reified consciousness, which through the integration of highly industrialized society becomes integral to its members, fails to perceive what is essential to the poems, emphasizing instead their thematic content and putative informational value.'

(ibid., p. 321)


'In the work of the most important contemporary representative of German hermetic poetry, Paul Celan, the experiential content of the hermetic was
inverted. His poetry is permeated by the shame of art in the face of suffering that escapes both experience and sublimation. Celan's poems want to speak of the most extreme horror through silence. Their truth content itself becomes negative. They imitate a language beneath the helpless language of human beings, indeed beneath all organic language: It is that of the dead speaking of stones and stars. The last rudiments of the organic are liquidated; what Benjamin noted in Baudelaire, that his poetry is without aura, comes into its own in Celan's work. The infinite discretion with which his radicalism proceeds compounds his force. The language of the lifeless becomes the last possible comfort for a death that is deprived of all meaning. The passage into the inorganic is to be followed not only in thematic motifs; rather, the trajectory from horror to silence is to be reconstructed in the hermetic works. Distantly analogous to Kafka's treatment of expressionist painting, Celan transposes into linguistic processes the increasing abstracton of landscape, progressively approximating it to the inorganic.'


(ibid, p. 322)

Well, I'm prepared to do so if you are. My original response about the music answering the question was motivated by the fact that, on stylistic grounds alone (not to mention technological ones, or indeed advances in instrumental practice), I don't think the music could have been written in the 1960s by anyone, young or old, and over and above that I'm not sure that there's that much mileage in discussing the relevance of a particular piece of music without being able to refer to the aural experience of it. But maybe I'm misinterpreting your usage of "relevance".

That's practically impossible to say, and not just in this case: some experience, like reading a poem, might set off a train of musical associations which might end up so far from the source that it would be impossible to retrace one's steps. I suppose one thing that motivated the composition in question is a contemplation of that very issue. But a compositional motivation isn't necessarily what ends up communicating itself to a listener (or, for example, to the reader of Celan's poetry), nor should it be.

Any accompanying text, to address your other point, is intended to indicate to the first-time listener where he/she might begin their own journey of discovery/interpretation during and after the performance of the music, but not where that journey might end.

Jeesh.  Get 4 stars by your name and you think you run the place.

 

Hope rehearsals are going well.