creation : 30.09.2001, Festival Musica (Strasbourg, France)
composition and conception : Henry Fourès
musicians: 6 percussionists et un soliste
duration : 16′
Like Gegenlicht (Backlight), Vom Blau (Au bleu), Kristall, pieces for bass clarinet, double bass and alto saxophone premiered at Musica 1999,Sommerbericht is one of Paul Celan’s poems where language most expresses the conquest of an endangered stability. Stability of the poet as well as of the poem. Der nicht mehr beschrittene, der / ungangene Thymianteppich. / Eine Leezeile, quer / durch die Glockenheide gelegt. / Nichts in den Windbuch getragen. /Wieder Begegnungen mit / wereinzelten Worten wie: Steinschlag, Hargräser, Zeit. Emptiness of step / circumnavigated, the carpet of thyme. / Line of white, laid / across the heather moor. / Nothing carried in the windfall. / Encounters again with / isolated words such as: scree, gorse, time. It seems – as Armand Robin has found in other poets driven by the same desire to purify language – that sometimes the poem starts out from an emotional chaos and ends up in a language where only the finest molecules of the original tohu-bohu remain. It is also a path that music often takes in its dual relationship of form and meaning: a path that the use of percussion, the “original instrument”, makes even more sensitive. These poems, read more than twenty years ago and reread over and over again, appear to be unsurpassable texts, devoid of any aestheticism, essential, in a light strangely close to those of Attila Joszef discovered at the same time. It has taken all these years for these texts that accompany me to become “pre-texts” for the writing of a music that does not illustrate, does not comment on the poem but has simply been awakened by it.