22AGENDAMAY/JUN 2002

SHOSTAKOVICH 3 [summer 1946] rtet No.3 in F op.7 Qua STRING Shostakovich String QUARTETS
selected poetic responses
by arwulf arwulf
[allegretto] ure, remember? and talk about the fut rds we used to drink tea ch without using wo and say so mu much nadzia would laugh joscha and arkable how ember? isnt it rem just their eyes, rem time rots on... stays with us as nder. i thought i heard thu thunder the chickens hated remember how artillery as much as we hated sic this is chambered mu placed in a drawer each score is upon completion i wont even bother ff trying to have this stu ed or even published perform not now ion what a peculiar posit to be in [adagio]

everything we create is subject to official interpretation and id rather have no interpretation at all into the drawer ! with this entire cycle

[allegro non troppo] mmence to dance i can see them all co say so when the directors cant you? every so often itched on the current gets sw commence to dancing and they all on their knees

ves or even in their gra [moderato con moto] field is honest: at least a game on the saying? the ball either whats that theyre one kicks en a good boy? christ! havent i be this way or that . y its called they have no idea.. disagree with the wa and if we er in protest mince around we can holler togeth now my fiddles will mincing steps in secretive tip-toe cause a ruckus as if not to with both hands im rubbing my head t alone i just want to be lef anything wrong i havent done adows of the trees once in the night sh breathe deeply i began to relax and in my bones the vodka was still le to handle myself but i felt better ab i heard an owl

[moderato] al much more irration ms to be yes, moderation. tements but the rest of life see most ridiculous sta ration sign my name to the everything in mode ive begun to to let me be elf simply to get them ially moderation its espec ich ch to drink lit a cigarette at wh i had a bit too mu there comes a point rk sat down e consists the square to the pa walked through the natural respons and rubbed my eyes ation, it was very dark of resign d urned the moon had wane to all appearances slowly the dance ret thing up there to nearly no my head g: in you know the sayin comrade stalin give em the finger thing out nd myself smiling i fou has measured every vated: but with your hand including insomnia ange smile ive culti but its surely that str deep down in e down. ve my share i ha one corner up, on your pants pocket

Shostakovich String Quartet No. 8 in C Minor Op 110 [July 1960]

[largo] [allegro molto] and now at long last coerced to join the communist party here in russia party of stalin to this very day nothing like what it should be nothing like what they struggle we thought it could so long ago to create in chile, in guatemala instead of democratic socialism tangled up in cubas militarism we had bolshevism, party of none of this succeeding the way shoot them in the stem of the brain, party of torture vsevolod meyerhold tortured for six months before allowed to expire and his wife stabbed to death dozens of punctures stabbed in her eyeballs this is the party of stalin

Shostakovich String Quartet No. 7 in F Sharp Minor Op.108 [1960]

my name is dmitri shostakovich i am a citizen of the union of soviet socialist republics. i have been asked to write something for the victims of fascism and war i am also writing for myself, as this could be my last will and testament if i do myself in

[allegretto] my first wife, nina was a nuclear phys icist she died of the canc er radiation poisoning do you really expect for me to join the party? thi s is still the bolshevik party im still not seeing socialism havent seen it yet, have you? has anyone hereabo uts? has anybody here se en socialism? ive been waiting [lento] look at the way im floating over the surface of the street nothing makes me hover in this disconcerting wa y, not touching the groun d in spite of enormous gravit ational pull, nothing does me this way the way your pa rty does and always has. can you see why i never joined? fuck.

which is precisely what i want to do at this point. yes i saw the ruins of dresden but i saw petrograd become leningrad and the siege wherein they ate the dogs and cats; i saw the world through eyes of typhoid, eyes of typhus staring out

[allegretto] to this very day and i am vomiting alone again my head is spinning i am uterly despondant i cannot separate any of it theres nothing dividing whats happened from whats happening right at this moment theres nothing no division

[largo] it is only a continuum a series of variations on the same theme as slew all the mensheviks and old bolsheviks and so many of my good friends i feel it in my heart and lungs this is the real essence of largo right here in my suicide the suicide i so badly want from myself its the mass mind and heart brought in to me and sent back out in this way out

[largo] punching my fist into my palm crying good to cry hardly ever cry its good to cry hardly ever let myself cry its good to cry this way can you hear it yet can you? do i have to write it on the moon for you to see?

if i put myself out of this body this shall be my last word how much can a person bear? how much do you expect me to? i lay myself down by the river i lay myself down by the river i lay myself down until the breath is gone and no one will know

[allegro] here i will scribble my name and exactly how i fee l today if anyone has to ask what this means, i am ve ry sorry. everything means so mething. [didnt mayakovsky say so?] i cannot put it more clearly. this one takes not ve ry long. if you wish to unde rstand i want you to look for the diminutive figure wh ose feet cannot touch the earth.

wearing a raincoat and puffing a cigarette, reading pravda and wincing in the broad daylight, here i am. stalin is seven years dead yet i am subject to his centrifugal antigrav itation and try as i may i cannot reach the gr ound

MAY/JUN 2002AGENDA23

Shostakovich String Quartet No. 12 in D Flat Major Opus 133 [1968]

all twelve notes of the octave says the cello the four of us will discuss do you have any idea what were under? without hesitation without too much hesitation let me just enough allow me we will discuss as we see fit permit me the face of the day for twenty minutes and know that we see to establish the power play in your minds ears clearly spelled out and the lungs of your heart unmistakable exactly what either shoot them im still living through or have them simply vanish lets get it right lets be explicit judge me not by what here in the drawer you think i do for why lets speak plainly you think i do it judge me not spat spat spat spat on the pavement but cannot expel the life my mouth is full of this kind of a life cannot spit it out it has bonded with the orbitals of my jaws my palette is painted with the life ive led the lives weve lived my teeth are ringing with it its still torture like meyerhold was tortured or the sustained, more gradual torture i was raised in this manner out here like me in the street not by my family but by the torture is torture benevolent state i was raised to be even in your own home town like this even if you dont shoot me like this behind the ear my ears still ring and this with the essence of shooting and this like this and anyone with conscience like this has the same auditory problem torture is terrible even in your own language whether they torture you in german or in russian or english for that matter torture in french someone is laughing under the concrete someone called my name im leaving the square hands in my pockets i bit my cigarette in two my eyeballs crawl out from behind my spectacles my eyeballs end up perched up by my cowlick i am watching those who are watching they are watching but i saw them first mine eyes never close i am watching too i have become a sphinx i can perch here longer than lenin, even longer than lenin i am perched here long as you like like it or not here i am

I AM STILL AFRAID A A A M M M S S S T T T I AM STILL AFRAID L L L L L L A A A F F F R R R A A A I AM STILL AFRAID D D D

time in our bodies should be precious i wanted to savor every evening but instead i swallowed each night, whole my teeth could not penetrate the surface of the night, and my throat needs must dilate to allow the night to slip down

see how the string vibrates to mimic my gizzard listen to my gizzard i have the guts of a rooster i wasnt born this way the government performed a transplant whereby the cocks gut was planted inside of me i have a soviet gizzard when stalin planted chicken guts inside his citizenry it was to enable us to peck the ground and live on scratch

have you seen the rooster i crow like a crow up all night staring i hide very much like a beetle both ways at once the rain collects did you know that in my pockets and nothing insomnia is from can be resolved reptilian ancestors of birds? there are no solutions i become a dragon breathing smoke at 2 AM i sit perfectly still except for ashes falling and at dawn hear me cry out! but when they come to see whos generating all these noises i am silent and immobile youd never know it was i who had crowed i sit unblinking a weary little reptile a wary little bird never do i blink i have swallowed my own voice i let it out through the drawer where chamber music waits out the siege the siege of khrennikov the siege of brezhnev

Shostakovich String
[elegy (adagio)] fifteen is the devil card in the tarot this in translation means: coercion the curtailment of ones expression by another who maintains controls thusly im leaving fifteen symphonies and fifteen quartets often nowadays i feel as though ive got fifteen fingers on each hand, all numb and growing cold

Quartet No. 15 in
there is a sense of projection my voicings will move out from here to far beyond my present reading sometimes im thinking four dimensionally its disconcerting

my tongue is silent into my stomach behind my lips, silent where every honest effort with witness and mute is made to digest with having left itself the night, each hour immobile during each every fucking minute segment of my time here wedged in my guts

E Flat Minor Op.

anatoli kuznetsov for instance

144 [1974]

far in the future from where i sit tod ay an american is writi ng poetic responses to my work he tells me, twenty seven years between us, tha t kuznetsovs book babi yar had a powerful effec t but also wonderful upon him when he was a boy of ten years and im leaving the echoes of all whov it is gratifying to he e ar this worked with me [serenade (adagio) either directly ] or in solidarity and i think of ukran ian collusion and anti-sem itism

i think of officialdom and all the varieties of dissent not everyone may ac t openly or, honestly now, fla mboyantly we all must do what we can that is the fabric of principle [how often it is fraye d and torn]

khrennikov, like zh danov hated to have his tee th on edge that is, if music need led them [intermezzo (adagio) ] but look at what fai led, in life to rile them! no tee th on edge in the face of all the madness what was it my mu sic called to mind for the m?

[epilogue (adagio) ] fifteen agio molto)] but how did this blood is the number stay in my veins of curtailment what is silence? [nocturne (adagio) all of these years? and coercion ] particularly in my co untry? under such circumstances? i will not be i mustnt allow the se ideas taken down these questions and i am silent while so many others contradictions into invisibility yet certainly not known to me intim to cause me any mo ately re pain and oblivion and absolutely anon i will never be silen ymous witho t and yet i have a tru ut that sure to my understandin e conscience g and unco surely you understan a russian conscienc mpromised d all of them taken e have i continuum such a condition is and bledslowly this much you may impossible hear plainly we cannot know my or all too suddenly especially looking exactly now, but strings i am silent ahead how odd is fate it is certain will as i write i will never ever be silent to have shuffled ou i will live sound r deck but i am perhaps i should fee in this way. i cannot tomorrow tom l orrow never fully pretend to begin to satisfaction thereof goodbye for now understand silent [funeral march (ad