Songs  of  a Redeeming  Trumpet

Text by Hugo Claus

for Tango Ensemble and  Medium Voice

Commissioned by Transparant, Antwerp

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a redeeming trumpet

We are making music.

behind bars

Saturday Sunday Monday slow week and weak days

A still life a landscape a portrait

A woman's eyebrows

They close as I come near

The landscape with blond cattle wading

With the season of pity

Burnt into the Prussian blue of the fields

So I painted another still life

With unrecognizable eyebrows and a mouth like a moon

With a spiral like a redeeming trumpet

In the Jerusalem of my room.

parkmusic (Ensemble)

the signs

Did you too, my love, learn the signs

of this grave, the waves?

The swimmer reads,

forgets, drowns,

They've put up fearsome warnings in the sand,

they've divided nature into terms,

into danger zones.

The child skates,

forgets, freezes to death.

Were you too, my love, overwhelmed

by all this admonishing foam,

do you also swim in the high sea

as in a trap?

Or shall I find you in the sand,

in the fragrance of the moment?

in those days

In those days, in the beginning, language escaped

from the midriff.

Rut, need, hunger. And you.

A source, a counterform.

From among countless warnings

gone sour between tongue and teeth

I learned:

Hunger   hate   malice

Murder   revenge   loss

in Flanders fields

The earth here is the richest.

Even after all those years without manure

you could cultivate a dead man's leek here

to beat any market.

The English veterans have dwindled.

Every year they point out to their dwindling friends

Hill Sixty, Hill Sixty One, Poelkapelle.

The combine harvesters in Flanders Fields describe

ever closer circles around the winding corridors

of hardened sandbags, the bowls of death.

The butter of this region

has a taste of poppies.

breathing-watching

Breathing - watching - no desire.

I see the road and the wasteland,

and the light across both.

Corn, young weeds and where the asphalt begins:

midday with its contracted shadows.

Though I am toothless

with misery after all those years, yet

I remain, 1 believe, the reason for my growth;

I signify myself, a foreshortened shadow,

an accident in the earth's light.

the apple tree (a prayer)

How each morning the apple-tree

has forked: changed!

It is not the tree of knowledge,

curling in its rind,

ripening in its husk.

With vulnerable twigs

the apple-tree reaches for its leaves

until the night

when the wordless Ram nibbles its bark.

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Ensemble:

Clarinet in Bb, Alto saxophone, Accordion (Buttons),

Percussion (one player): Drumset: Bass Drum (Foot), 3 Tom (high, middle, low), Side drum, Wood Block, Hi-Hat, Cymbal (middle, hanging)

Standard: Triangle (high), Xylophone (f – c’’’’), Glockenspiel (g - c’’), Crotales (b’), Tam Tam (low), Bass drum (low, standard)

Medium Voice, Violin, Double Bass

Duration: ca. 40 Minutes