Rising – Smith, Conversation in the Mountains
Kile Smith – Conversation in the Mountains
Sunrise, Monday March 30
We're back. More signs of Spring. Let's go the mountains... singing.
With Kile Smith. And Paul Celan.
When we reprise a work written for us, we usually discover in it a moment particularly well-suited to us - something that feels like we breathed it, in which we all connect. The second movement of Kile Smith's Where flames a Word has not one, but two of these.
The poems of Paul Celan dominated our 2008-2009 season and commissions. When we asked Kile to write a work for it, we first suggested Celan's unusual prose narrative, "Conversation in the Mountains," a kind of meditation on our desire to connect with nature, and with each other. But it is so much more than that, with Celan's disarming use of language:
and in the middle there is water, and the water is green, and the green is white,
and the white comes from even farther up, from the glaciers, and one could say,
but one shouldn't, that this is the language that counts here,
the green with the white in it
The first "moment for us" is one of unfolding; Kile gradually gathers all our voices into explosive tension. And yet, it feels not so much like the dam breaks, but that we all decide to go flowing over it in a giant sonic wave.
earth folded up here, folded once and twice and three times, and opened up in the middle
The second "moment for us" is the inverse. (How does music do this?) A moment of near silence we all wait for when we're singing it. There is listening everywhere and it has all the rests, pauses, and breaths of....well, of a conversation in the mountains.
because, I ask you, for whom is it meant,
the earth, not for you, I say, is it meant, and not for me
a language, well, without I and without You nothing but He,
nothing but It, you understand, and She, nothing but that.
The new week is here. We're singing our way to April, coffee in hand.
- The Whole Team @ The Crossing
Where flames a word
Mvt. 2 "Conversation in the Mountains"
music by Kile Smith
words by Paul Celan
recorded February 14, 2016 at the Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill
audio by Paul Vazquez of Digital Mission Audio Services
video art by Dan Cole
* * *
[The stones, too, were silent.]
And it was quiet in the mountains where they walked, one and the other.
"You've come a long way, have come all the way here..."
"I have. I've come, like you."
"I know."
"You know. You know and see: The earth folded up here, folded once and twice and three times, and opened up in the middle, and in the middle there is water, and the water is green, and the green is white, and the white comes from even farther up, from the glaciers, and one could say, but one shouldn't, that this is the language that counts here, the green with the white in it, a language not for you and not for me-because, I ask you, for whom is it meant, the earth, not for you, I say, is it meant, and not for me-a language, well, without I and without You nothing but He, nothing but It, you understand, and She, nothing but that."
"I understand, I do. After all, I've come a long way, I've come like you."
"I know."
–Paul Celan, bracketed text omitted by the composer.