Chamber Music Violin SKU: PR.114418750 Composed by Michael Hersch. Sws. P...(+)
Chamber Music Violin
SKU: PR.114418750
Composed by Michael
Hersch. Sws. Performance
Score. 8 pages. Duration
11 minutes. Theodore
Presser Company
#114-41875. Published by
Theodore Presser Company
(PR.114418750).
ISBN
9781491129524. UPC:
680160655489. 9 x 12
inches.
The
seven-movement in the
snowy margins might be
considered a sort of
atomic suite, as each
movement is succinct, yet
a microcosmic powerhouse
inspired by “The
Comet,” by Polish
writer and Holocaust
victim Bruno Schulz.
Hersch’s intensity is
expressed through
dramatically captivating
violin gestures, pushing
the boundaries of
texture, technique, and
emotion. Michael
Hersch’s in the snowy
margins was written in
2010. Like much of his
work, it is grounded in
literature and art. The
title is drawn from a
short story, The Comet by
Polish writer, poet, and
artist, Bruno Schulz
(1892-1942). This forms
the last of his
collection The Street of
Crocodiles, published in
1934. Schulz was shot by
a Nazi officer in
1942.Both the title of
Hersch’s work, and the
‘motto’ found on the
composer’s manuscript
(‘Thus far and no
further. But what has
become of the end of the
world…’) are to be
found in The Comet.
It’s interesting that
in in the snowy margins,
unlike his earlier
Fourteen Pieces which
were inspired by the
poetry of Primo Levi,
Hersch chose to not title
each individual movement
with a quote. However his
choices of text are
applied, there is a clear
quality of distillation.
In every case, the texts
which the composer has
chosen to eschew lie
beneath the music, akin
to the greater mass of an
iceberg, submerged, but
imminent.Hersch also has
very particular taste in
visual art, and there
seems to be common ground
between the intensely
expressionist drawing of
Schulz, and those of
Michael Mazur, which
inspired his string
quartet Images from a
Closed Ward. The
parallels between these
artists reflect common
traits shared between
these two pieces, which
provide a window on how
the music should be
approached, expressively
and technically. I would
argue, that from a
violinist’s point of
view, this pertains
directly to how bow and
left hand should approach
the string: the febrile
vibrancy of both Mazur
and Schulz’s pencil and
charcoal strokes, perhaps
what T.S. Eliot called
the ‘circulation of the
lymph’, in every
gesture, speaks to the
intense experience,
physically and
emotionally, of playing
(and hearing) this music.
There is an intense sense
of ‘truth to
materials’ at every
moment, the sense that
every note sings on the
edge of, or even beyond,
total collapse.— Peter
Sheppard-Skaerved.