Drzewo życia
Every spring Hashtag Lab proposes an evening during which we make a small gesture of remembrance for Polish Jews. On the 81st anniversary of the destruction of the Great Synagogue on Tłomackie Street, we invite you to listen to Artur Zagajewski’s Drzewo Życia, set to poetry by Chava Rosenfarb.
Drzewo Życia is a work commissioned by the Marek Edelman Dialogue Centre in Łódź, written to poems by the Yiddish poet Chava Rosenfarb. Chava survived the ghetto and eventually emigrated to Canada, where she died. The great work of her life is the sweeping autobiographical novel Drzewo życia, which was recently translated into Polish. Although the title of Artur Zagajewski’s composition derives from the novel’s title, the canvas of the work is not prose at all, but selected poems written by Chava shortly after leaving the ghetto — poems about her experience of extreme abandonment and isolation.
Artur Zagajewski is one of the most interesting Polish composers. He readily draws on pop-culture aesthetics, skillfully dosing influences from punk rock and the new wave of the 1980s, while maintaining his own individual and recognisable musical language. How can Zagajewski’s declarative, sometimes sharp and abrasive style meet the intimate, feminine and poetic record of life’s most difficult experiences?
“When I work with a text, I feel a little like a contemporary theatre director who builds new and sometimes very distant contexts around classical texts. Much as, for example, Paweł Mykietyn does in his Pasja, where he assigns the part of Jesus to a woman and has Pilate shout to the crowd through a megaphone accompanied by loud, rock music. That kind of reinterpretive approach is very close to me, although compared to my earlier works, in Drzewo Życia I decided to soften my musical language somewhat.
From the outset I wanted to collide this poetry with the contemporary world in some way — to run it through a filter of today. In certain sections of the work I therefore reach for the means employed by contemporary musical culture, both the highbrow ‘avant-garde’ kind and the popular kind. In the vocal part there are techniques such as screaming and quasi-chanting, which on one hand call up punk-rock expression, and on the other evoke the social protests we experienced so recently in everyday life. A similar role is played by the repetitions of selected lines from Chava Rosenfarb’s poetry, which, through manifold, almost mechanical repetition, detach themselves from their original context and thereby acquire a new, contemporary dimension of meaning.”
Programme
Artur Zagajewski Drzewo Życia
Performers
Patrycja Krzeszowska-Kubit voiceArtur Zagajewski electric guitarJulian Paprocki contrabass clarinet
and Hashtag Ensemble:
Krzysztof Kozłowski synthesizer Dominik Płociński celloAlbert Woelke accordion (Akademia PRO Hashtag Ensemble)
Production:
programme concept and text: Ania Karpowiczvisual identity: Karol Tomoki Yamazaki
sound engineering: Kosma Standera
production: Aleksandra Demowska-Madejska
The Contemporary Music Space Hashtag Lab is co-financed by the Capital City of Warsaw. The patron of the concert is the Museum of the History of Polish Jews POLIN.
Co-financed from funds of the Minister of Culture and National Heritage drawn from the Culture Promotion Fund — a state designated fund — under the “Composers’ Commissions” programme, implemented by the National Institute of Music and Dance.
