The Death of Simone Weil
Darrell Katz, text by Paula Tatarunis
I Gone Now 7:50
II Renault 12:42
III November 1938 12:12
IV Saint Julien 13:58
V X-Ray Dreams 10:34
VI Almost Paradise 7:46
VII Like A Wind 6:51
Darrell Katz; text by Sherwood Anderson (from the novel, Winesburg, Ohio)
All compositions Jazz Composers Alliance Music, BMI
soloists
1 Mike Peipman
2 Matt Steckler/Phil Scarff (duo) Jeremy Udden
3 Taki Masuko, David Harris, Keiichi Hashimoto
4 Art Bailey, Hiro Honshuke, Phil Scarff, Warren Senders
5 Keiichi Hashimoto, Art Bailey, Norm Zocher
6 Bob Pilkington, Hiro Honshuke, Norm Zocher
7 Norm Zocher
Composed, arranged, and conducted by Darrell Katz
Produced by Darrell Katz
Tracks 1-6 recorded at Berklee Performance Center by Berklee Recording Studios, October 6, 2001. Recorded using Studio D.
Recording Engineer: Hun Min Park
Assistant Engineer: Greg Galindo
Front of House Engineer: Brad Berger
Track 7 recorded at Thin Ice productions by Bob Patton June 8, 2002.
Mixing and editing by Bob Patton of Thin Ice Productions.
Innova> Director and Design: Philip Blackburn; Artists and Product: Chris Strouth; Assistant: Chris Campbell.
Innova is supported by an endowment from the McKnight Foundation and by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.
(tracks 1-6)
*The Jazz Composers Alliance Orchestra
Voice: Rebecca Shrimpton
Flute: Hiro Honshuke
Alto Sax: Matt Steckler, Jeremy Udden
Tenor Sax: Phil Scarff; Baritone Sax: Hans Indigo
Trumpets: Keiichi Hashimoto, Mike Peipman
French Horn: Dirk Hillyer
Trombones: David Harris, Bob Pilkington
Tuba: Jim Gray
Piano: Art Bailey
Vibraphone: Rich Greenblatt
Percussion: Taki Masuko
Bass: Rick McLaughlin
Drums: Harvey Wirth
Guitar: Norm Zocher
Guest vocalists:
Warren Senders on “Saint Julien” only
Al Tatarunis on “Renault” only.
track 7
Abby and Norm Group w/Rebecca Shrimpton
Voice: Rebecca Shrimpton
Guitar: Norm Zocher
Quantum Guitarbass: Abby Aronson
This work was funded in part by the
Copying Assistance Program of the American Music Center.
This project was funded in part by the Massachusetts Cultural Council, a state agency, and by a grant from the Boston Cultural Council, a municipal agency supported by the Massachusetts Cultural Council.
Thanks to Joe Smith, and Karen Zorn
Photograph of Rebecca Shrimpton and Darrell Katz by Jeffrey Shrimpton (only of course, if the photo is used).
Photographs of Dresden after fire bombing in World War II, courtesy of The Library of Congress:
Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division,
LC-USZ62-94453 and LC-USZ62-94459.
For further information or booking, or for scores and parts, contact The Jazz Composers Alliance, PO Box #491, Allston, MA, 02134, JCAcomp@aol.com
www.jazzcomposersalliance.org
The Death Of Simone Weil
Setting poetry to music is a comparatively recent development in jazz, and it is still rarely done. Darrell Katz's improvisational cantata, a setting of Paula Tatarunis' The Death of Simone Weil stands out in this relatively small subgenre of the jazz song tradition, in terms of both scale and ambition. It is also among the most successful and moving large-scale works for voice and jazz orchestra.
Katz is no stranger to compositional ambition. He is a founder of Boston's Jazz Composers Alliance and Orchestra, which since1985, has not only presented more than 120 works by resident composers, but also featured works by guest artists such as Julius Hemphill, Sam Rivers, Dave Holland, Henry Threadgill, Maria Schneider, and many others. His work can be heard on previous JCA Orchestra releases-Flux, Dreamland, and In, Thru, and Out.
In his writing, Katz synthesizes a wide range of influences including modern classical, folk traditions, and the entire jazz legacy into a mature and personal compositional style. His writing here is some of his strongest and most lyrical on record. The melodic invention that serves the poem is matched by a broad palette of orchestral colors and timbres, rich harmony, and a subtle underpinning of dance rhythms, all of which bring out nuances of meaning and feeling in the poem. Katz also judiciously deploys improvising soloists-including trombonist Bob Pilkington, guitarist Norm Zocher, and saxophonist Jeremy Udden-in a variety of ways. There are structured collective improvisations, spoken word with improvisation, as well as duets, and individual solos. These spontaneous passages always work within the mood and structure of the piece, adding the immediacy of improvisation to work that is already deeply emotional.
This is not Katz's first setting of the poetry of his wife Tatarunis, who, over the last ten years has published more than 150 poems in small presses such as Ploughshares and The Massachusetts Review. Several of their collaborations are found on I'm Me and You're Not(Brownstone, 1999) with the Jazz Composers Alliance Sax Quartet. In those compositions, the poetry is primarily spoken to musical accompaniment, and Katz originally thought that The Death of Simone Weil would follow a similar course. But as he started work on the piece, he found himself setting the words to melodies, and it took a different direction.
"I was really into the idea of getting the melodies, working with the text, and figuring out what to do with it," Katz says. "I think the best model for what I wanted to do is the Tin Pan Alley composers. I wanted the words to line up with the melodies so it sounded very conversational. I wanted the text to be really clear and easy to understand. As I wrote, I discovered that duration, rhythmic placement on and off the beat, long or short notes, intervals, all these things really affect the meaning of words."
The music's sensitivity to the sound and meaning of words manifests itself in ways both small and large. For instance, the light, bouncy sound of Viana do Castelo inspired the Latin rhythms in the opening moments of "Renault." The blues that concludes that section was suggested by the slavery imagery that links the Renault plant workers and the fishermen in the poem. Other choices are more subtle. The terrifying image of the insatiable German ovens, "round as bellies," gulping down their victims in "Almost Paradise" suggested a round, soft melody to Katz. In its muted resignation and sorrow, the passage is perhaps more powerful than if he had confronted us with stark dissonance.
"November 1938" provides a marvelous example of how the architecture of the composition shadows the structure and meaning of the poem. Tight harmonies, short phrases, and rapid changes in color echo the anguished tension and pain from which Weil longs for release. When the poet envisions surcease from her agony, as "the plain chants plucked me aloft from my suffering/ and I hovered like a feather on the breath of God," the music opens out into some of the most ravishing moments in the entire suite, with echoes of liturgical music reinforcing the spiritual longing of the words. Weil's desire for release remains unfulfilled, but the glimpse of transcendence that the music offers only heightens the poet's sense of tragic irony.
The unity of words and music in the suite and the subtle shadings of thought and feeling it contains are beautifully captured by singer Rebecca Shrimpton. She possesses both the musical skill and artistic sensibility to handle the heavy emotional and musical demands of this piece. Listen to how easy and natural she makes the extended harmonies and tricky metrical changes sound at the beginning of "November 1938" or near the end of "St. Julien" just prior to the dramatic throat singing of Warren Senders. Her singing is more than a matter of chops, however. There are countless examples of her interpretive skills, her unfailingly insightful use color, texture, and inflection to convey the meaning of the words. In "Like a Wind," the more intimate and loosely structured song based on a passage from Sherwood Anderson's Winesberg, Ohio, her articulation and sense of timing make the meaning of the words clear, in fluid, but purposeful and beautifully paced performance.
"The Death of Simone Weil took me close to 3 years to write," Katz says. "I'm the type of person who goes over every note again and again and wrestles with every last thing. A lot of people compare writing music to painting, but I think of it as carving something out of rock-the final composition is already there, I just remove the excess." This process of refinement has produced music whose depth and economy of expression are worthy of the poetry it serves.
Ed Hazel
Ed Hazell is a Boston-area jazz writer who contributes to the Boston
Phoenix, Jazziz, Coda, and other magazines.
Simone Weil
The 20th century French philosopher, Simone Weil, is an enigmatic and disturbing figure. Raised in a non-observant Jewish intellectual household, she developed diverse interests -- classic Greek literature and philosophy, history, mathematics, Communism, pacifism, trade unionism. Despite a reclusive and often abrasive personality, she also had a shy sweetness, and felt a deep compassion for and identification with suffering and oppressed humanity. Her convictions informed her actions and led her to passionately sincere, but sometimes ill-fated engagements in factory work, labor strikes and the Spanish Civil War.
In 1938 Weil had a mystical experience while reading George Herbert’s poem “Love” during a terrible migraine. This, along with her fascination with the image of the crucified incarnation of the ever-absent, impossibly distant God, brought her to the threshold of the Catholic Church. She ultimately refused baptism, offering as explanation the two words, anathema sit, that had been pronounced to signify heresy during the Inquisition. Her last notebooks reveal her growing interest in the concept of emptiness as articulated in Eastern religions.
Other aspects of Weil’s life and thought, darkened by the shadow of her psychopathology, manifested more malign elements of refusal and renunciation. During the Occupation, faced with limitations on her employment because of her Jewishness, she composed letters that savagely mocked the absurdly bureaucratic literalness of the racial statutes, but that also concluded that Jews were a minority whose interests would be best served by their being assimilated into Christian society. Weil’s self-negation culminated in 1941, when, ill with tuberculosis in an English hospital, she refused to eat more than the meager war rations allotted to French citizens. This refusal, the consummation of a lifelong asceticism and denial of the body, led to her death.
Paula Tatarunis
THE DEATH OF SIMONE WEIL
Music: Darrell Katz
Lyrics: Paula Tatarunis
I. GONE NOW
The imagination is continually at work filling up all the fissures through which grace might pass.
-- S. Weil
No, you never once came
walking across the carpet
toward me as I'd wished --
(as if by sheer longing
I could have willed you there
out of your gray space. )
But there's gone, now,
and the self that imagined you
itself defies imagining.
Oh, it would have been
a dream to waken from,
bloodying my nose against the mirror --
Yet, like most desire, it was
the sweetness of the self
melting through the fingers,
quicker than hunger. And so
when they make the movie of your life, Simone,
I'll be ready. For fifteen years I've waited patiently.
The knock will come. They will beg me
to star. And of course I will graciously accept,
having all these years been practicing
your shy, sweet, sidelong smile through my horn rims in the mirror.
For, after all, they’ll only want a reasonable
copy of you, Simone, as for a long time
that's all I wanted, too, reading in you only
my own versions of self-distaste,
like what the coroner wrote:
The deceased did kill and slay herself
by refusing to eat whilst the balance
of her mind was disturbed.
Yet, like most desire,
it was the sweetness of the self melting through the fingers,
quicker than hunger.
And so, when they make the movie of your life, Simone, I'll be ready.
For fifteen years, I've wait-ed patiently.
For fifteen years,
so patiently.
II. RENAULT
...an obviously inexorable and invincible oppression does not engender rebellion as an immediate reaction but rather submission.
S. Weil
Winding down among the rocks
and the bitter grass
outside Viana do Castelo,
come the wives
of the fishermen.
It is evening.
The full moon
casts a net of light
over the cliffs and sea --
it snags and tears
on the masts of the boats
like a rent veil,
on the masts
of the fishing boats
the wives board,
one after the other,
singing very ancient hymns
of a heart rending sadness.
You have chanced upon
the festival
of the patron saint
of this wretched village, Simone.
These wives of fishermen
and their songs move you.
These wives are slaves,
and the wives of slaves,
and you, among them, are a slave, too,
branded forever by your year
in the Renault plant
at Boulogne-Billancourt.
What I went through there
marked me so
that still today when any human being
speaks to me without brutality,
I cannot help but feel
there must be some mistake.
And in another tale
the fisherman kneels
beside the black sea raging
with waves as tall as the towers on the church.
Terror rages in him as he prays
Flounder, flounder in the sea,
Come, I pray thee, here to me...
for Ilsebil, his wife
who was King, Emperor, Pope
and howls to be GOD, now --
even though the mud
from their old pig-sty home
is still caked beneath her nails
Flounder, flounder in the sea,
Come, I pray thee, here to me...
enraciné as the seeds of malheur
that entered you, Simone,
ouvri`ere A96630
at Boulogne-Billancourt -- and would later flower:
extreme affliction, perfect absence and
the distress of the abandoned Christ.
III. NOVEMBER 1938
He whose soul remains ever turned toward God though the nail pierces it finds himself nailed to the very center of the universe.
-- S. Wei
Mal de tête, the ignominious
quotidian of my incarnation!
It drills my forehead like a nail --
like a lidless
third eye transfixed
by its desire.
If only I could flinch from it!
This pain impales me
like an unwilling bride
to my sickbed here
guiltie of dust and sin
and wretched unwillingness.
If only I could enter
the sanctuary of the poem,
naked as a spirit,
my miserable flesh
shed in a heap on the porch --
like at Easter in Solesmes,
when the plain song
plucked me aloft
from my suffering
and I hovered like a feather
on the breath of God,
or dust in his splendour,
far above the malheur, dégoût et
paresse of my unworthy life:
Love bade me welcome, Love
bade me welcome, and the doctor
brought a horrid nux vomica,
for migraine:
like a curate of the flesh,
in his macaronic latin,
he says Mass over me.
Love bade me welcome, yes,
me, with my cyclops eye as raw
as the kiss God planted
on the brow of Cain. O quick-eyed Love,
sweet sorcerer, take my unwillingness
and refine it with your flame until
what remains is the quicksilver
of consent, and the gold of welcome, Love,
like the smile on a beloved face,
that whispers,
as if blessing nuptial vows.
When the plainchants
Plucked me aloft
from my suffering
and I hovered like a feather
on the breath of God,
or dust in his splendour,
far above the malheur, dégoût et
paresse of my unworthy life:
Love bade me welcome,
Love bade me welcome,
Love like a smile on a beloved face,
That whispers,
who made the eyes but I?
IV. Saint Julien
Le travail manuel. Le temps qui entre dans le corps. Par le travail l'homme se fait matiere comme le Christ par l'eucharistie. Le travail est comme une mort...
(Manual labor. Time enters the body. Laboring, man turns himself into matter, as Christ does in the Eucharist. Labor is like a death)
S. Weil
Saint-Julien, September 1941.
Europe's at war. But here,
all summer, under the yellow sun
the grapes have fattened. Their chill
spring green has reddened like cheeks
between the corkscrew tendrils --
At their desks, the children work
their versions of the harvest:
yellow, purple, green, they press so hard
curlicues of wax lie strewn
like leaf fall all over
the drawing paper.
That which one feels
one must do,
a poem
or a harvest,
one must do,
and that's that...
One might choose an exceptional degree
of sacrifice or courage,
but not the cross.
That which one feels
one must do
That which one feels
one must do,
a poem
or a harvest,
one must do,
and that's that
and that's that.
In your vineyard, Simone,
time enters you, like sweetness flowing up
through the woody, wrist-thick vine-trunk;
You ripen. Your small hands crack like grape skins
as you pull bunch after bunch from the wizened vine,
lying on your back on the scorched September ground:
fatigue, hunger, thirst -- these are the fruits
you would taste.
Round and round you're spinning beneath the sun its eye is
piercing but sure as clock-work
hand over hand you pull the purple clusters
hand over hand, as if you were a-ascending on a ladder,
propped a-against a cross placed there for you,
as if you were a vine,
groping toward the bitter light
fatigue, hunger, and thirst
like the blood and water
of the holy fruit,
or the bitter wine
you barely let
touch your parched lips.
Three days' rain.
You sit and write. The vineyard
sags beneath a heavy, gray
sheet of water. The
crayons have been put away.
The Fuhrer's tanks push eastward
toward Moscow --it is the rasputitza,
the season of mud, the prelude
to the grim, Russian winter.
I should not love my suffering
because it is useful.
I should love it
because it is.
3.8.90
V. X-Ray Dreams
For if he does not lose courage, if he goes on walking, it is absolutely certain that he will finally arrive at the center of the labyrinth. And there God is waiting to eat him.
Il n'y a dans le monde que nourriture et mangeur –
(There’s nothing in the world but eater and eaten.)
--S. Weil
On the x-rays TB starred her lungs
like millet strewn across a black tabletop.
Her eyes were embers in a white ash bed.
The doctors sighed. Fervor and consumption
devoured her, and she would not eat.
She dreamed of the girl
who watched her brother’s execution
and, returning home, devoured
a pot of strawberry jam
to tear herself from that death
For the rest of her life
she could not bear the thought or the taste
of strawberry jam
Her world had become that pot of jam
Where death lies implicit as seeds.
walking deeper and deeper into the maze
with darkness her only guide.
She could feel the breath
of the restless beast, the faceless shape at the center,
waiting for her, patient and starved
Waiting so patiently.
VI. ALMOST PARADISE
The gods love sacrifices
they swarm like flies
toward the sweet savor
The world is eater and eaten.
As she slept
U-boats famished in packs off the English coast.
Locust plagues of buzz bombs blackened skies.
German ovens, round as bellies,
gulped boxcars, link by link.
She heard fat sizzle, crisp skins split.
The beast's mouth watered.
He was never full.
He had room for more. He'd wash her down
with Dresden, Pearl Harbor,
Hiroshima, and hunger still.
He was never full.
Dying, she would not eat.
It seemed so little to set against
the beast's Goliath belly.
Quiet as a pearl, she disappeared.
She passed untainted through the body of the world,
onto the charnal floor to lie
with the bones of the afflicted,
almost the paradise she craved.
©Paula Tatarunis
4.13.90 Easter Eve
Acknowledgements: Gravity and Grace, Waiting for God and Notebooks (S. Weil)
Simone Weil, A Life (Simone Pétrement, Pantheon, 1976)
