Talea Ensemble, Claire Chase

Program Notes

Chaya Czernowin
the divine thawing of the core (2025)

During the time of writing the piece I was in Barcelona and saw the Basilica de la Sagrada Familia. Seeing this strange and gnarly structure clarified for me the structure of this piece. It is unperiodically cyclical, the repetitions creating cavernous corridors and strange temporal illusions in its unfolding.

Pairing orchestration with Claire Chase playing the contrabass flute was a strong guide for the piece. The beginning—elemental, naked, and (maybe) intimate—is forced to melt away in an uneven process through irony into an elemental brutality, including a demonic waltz in a gradual thawing of its features into a wholly different way of expression—more coherent, ceremonial, and brutally primitive.

The title comes from observing the political process of the last difficult years, and especially the change that Israel, my native country, is going through. It is hard to believe and devastating to follow the past two years, seeing how various long-term underground processes and the fifty-seven-year-long state of occupation are erupting, forcibly melting the last remaining vestiges of a culture (which had some hope for peace and some ability for empathy) into the darkness of ferocity and brutality to the degree of ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. . . . This forced thawing of a democratic society into a theocracy under the guise of the Jewish divinity (and supremacy) is deeply painful to any person who believes in humanity. However, this is not a political piece. It comes from pain; it attempts to find a way to digest the ongoing incomprehensible in order to maintain some sanity.