After Everything World Premiere of a new work from Preben Antonsen.
MATTHEW CMIEL & AFTER EVERYTHING INVITE YOU
TO NEW MUSIC FOR FEBRUARY
Preben Antonsen composer, on his new work, Voices from the Nettle-Path.
My new piece, Voices from the Nettle-Path, is an enactment of the astonishing poem by Paul Celan, Stimmen. I’ve loved this poem for a long time, and once considered turning it into a song cycle. But the voices depicted are not quite human, not quite earthly either; they evoke flocks of ghosts, moths, root systems, subatomic vibrations, traces & disturbances — charged with meaning, but past understanding. They are layered in huge, inchoate bundles, where you can hear the resonance and sibilance, but not the syllables. A single human singer didn’t seem right.
By grace, I’ve had the opportunity to write for the unusual ensemble of eight double basses: perfect for the haunted landscape of Celan’s words. I was strongly influenced by the music of Ligeti, another Hungarian Jew from the same generation, whose densely woven sonic spiderwebs are hyper-enlivened by an urgent, narrow proximity to death.
No longer confined to being the unsung hero of the orchestra, you’ll have a chance to hear the bass at its fullest. I’ve embraced extended techniques and extreme use of the instrument — any exicitation of the surface is fair game.
For Paul Celan, poetry was a matter of survival. Like stepping stones over the abyss, his tenuous, yet tendacious existence was sustained by words alone. As he said:“There is nothing in the world for which a poet will give up writing, not even when he is a Jew and the language of his poems is German.”
AFTER EVERYTHING PRESENTS
S T R O N G H O L D A SELECTION OF WORKS BY
ANTON BRUCKNER Mass no 2 in E Minor, Kyrie
ANGELICA NEGRON Dust
PREBEN ANTONSEN Voices from the Nettle-Path
REZA VALI Folk Songs from Set 15
JULIA WOLFE Stronghold
8pm Saturday, February 24, 2018 U N I T Y C H U R C H O F S A N F R A N C I S C O
