Much of Michael Hersch’s recent music is situated around the frailty and destruction of the human body, whether it is terminal cancer in the opera On the Threshold of Winter, sketches of dying patients in End Stages for chamber orchestra, or confinement to a psychiatric hospital in the string quartet Images from a Closed Ward. And yet, in these bleak settings, Hersch somehow finds and communicates “a strange excitement,” to echo a phrase from Christopher Middleton, the poet featured in cortex and ankle. To journey into the darkness with Hersch—and the fearless interpreters who perform his music—is an invitation to experience the world in all its unfiltered, visceral intensity.

“a cascade of rough bark tearing your fingertips off
in a collapse of earth …” — Christopher Middleton

Hersch’s approach in the two pieces recorded here can be traced back to works he composed at the beginning of the new century, such as the wreckage of flowers for violin and piano (2003) and the ten-hour chamber cycle, sew me into a shroud of leaves (2001- 2016). A key presence in Hersch’s developing aesthetic was the British poet Christopher Middleton (1926-2015), whom Hersch met in 2001 during a residency in Germany. To shape the 50-movement, 145-minute arc of the first part (of three) of sew me into a shroud of leaves, Hersch included fragments of Middleton’s poems as written preludes to many of the movements. He intended no literal correspondence or “word painting” to link the music and text, but the lines of poetry provided points of anchoring and reflection for his own creative process, and also for the listener, who could follow along with the written text in the concert program or liner notes.

Hersch refined the process of pairing condensed movements with poetic fragments in A Forest of Attics (2009), of ages manifest (2011), and other instrumental works. He also extended the idea to the visual realm, linking movements to black-and-white etchings and photography in Images from a Closed Ward (2010) and in the twenty-two movements of his program-length work for violin and piano, Zwischen Leben und Tod (2012). The thread of music paired with art reached a new phase with Black Untitled, from 2013, commissioned by Ensemble Klang for a premiere in Amsterdam, and based on a painting of the same name by the Dutch-American artist Willem de Kooning (1904-1997). Breaking away from the pattern of short and interrelated movements, Black Untitled took only one image as a point of departure for a stark and single-minded meditation.

As deeply engaged as he was with poetry, Hersch was reticent about setting words to music for a vocalist to sing. (A song cycle composed in 2010 for baritone Thomas Hampson was a rare exception.) “For most of my musical life,” the ever modest Hersch explained in an interview with the writer Marius Kociejowski, “I was convinced that the texts I responded to didn’t require anything other than their presence on the page, and that even if I wanted to engage it was highly unlikely I could have truly added anything to them.”

He broke his embargo in a most ambitious and impractical manner by writing On the Threshold of Winter (2012), a chamber opera sung by a lone soprano who contemplates death from terminal illness for two gripping, uncompromising hours. The work is rooted in the loss of a close friend from cancer, and Hersch’s own diagnosis and subsequent treatment for the disease. The opera’s premiere production at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2014 added another key figure to Hersch’s musical circle: the soprano Ah Young Hong - the muse behind all of Hersch’s recent vocal writing. In 2015, she was joined by clarinet, horn and viola to introduce the song cycle a breath upwards (texts by Dante Alighieri and Ezra Pound); then in 2016, she appeared with Ensemble Klang for their second Hersch debut, cortex and ankle.

Bringing this entire creative chapter full circle, cortex and ankle marked Hersch’s first vocal setting of texts by Middleton, a year after the poet’s death at the age of 89, and fifteen years after their first inspiring encounter in Berlin in the fall of 2001. “It was a surreal juxtaposition,” Hersch recalled, “being in the midst of what was for much of the world, broadly speaking, a time of violence and disquieting uncertainty, and of beginning to see a way forward as a composer. The scaffolding for that increasing clarity was Christopher’s poetry. I don’t know if it would have happened without him, but it happened in that moment and in many ways everything I have written since stems more from Christopher’s influence than from any other artist.”

Hersch’s works for Ensemble Klang certainly align with his tendencies over the last fifteen years, and yet there are important new elements at play, most obviously brought on by the ensemble’s unique configuration. “He writes for us in a way that nobody else has,” noted Ensemble Klang’s Pete Harden. “The tremendous enjoyment for the group in performing these works has come from that sense of freshness ... These works go beyond personal expression, or attempting to provide collective catharsis. They’re deeply physical works, fleshy and corporeal, and while being expressionistic they still create all this room for the listener.” Harden singled out Hersch’s “unflinching outlook, one that even when the music is so sparingly written can leave the listener gasping for breath.”

As a preface to the songs of cortex and ankle, a short instrumental prelude begins with adamant counterpoint that fades to hovering stasis, as if a premonition is foreknown and then lost. The arrival of the first song and its pale, chant-like utterances establishes the fundamental bearing of this work: direct, unsentimental, sparing in its use of vibrato and ornament, more a ritual of sound and space than a progression of pitches and rhythms.

Hersch’s manner of approaching poetry is to isolate the word fragments that speak to him, rarely setting an entire poem. For the interrelated songs of cortex and ankle, the texts establish an overall trajectory of descent. The early songs are upright and expectant, with several undefined figures that “walk forward beneath the living branches” in the first song, and a hesitant sense of waiting in the next song in which “the souls might one by one set sail.”

The fourth movement is an important musical juncture, its new clarity matched by a tighter visual focus on the fine-grained details of “needles of juniper,” “a sunlit white stone wall,” and a “tress of ivy” that “clings to the roof.” An oscillating pattern in the piano provides momentary grounding for the harmony and pulse. Key words repeat, their meanings altered by the increased urgency and jumpiness of the musical material. We are, without a doubt, “near oblivion.”

All the foreboding and downward motion coalesces in the fifth movement. The music begins with quiet objectivity, belying the gory imagery of “a cascade of rough bark tearing your fingertips off / in a collapse of earth.” The juxtapositions of light and dark are strident and extreme: “hurting, flayed, the light’s body a human sees with love, / opening a mouth in horror at the moon.” The music mirrors this quality of brutal proximity, often placing the singer a half-step or a minor ninth away from adjacent voices. The friction of these unstable intervals—not quite unison, or just overshooting an octave—aches with tangible, vibrating tension. (The ability of soprano Ah Young Hong to hold her ground amid such fierce sonic entanglement makes it clear why Hersch has entrusted her with so much of his recent music.)

The sixth movement makes a momentary retreat: “Distance perhaps / is all for the best,” the text begins. The percussionist’s clanging metal pipes and the vocalist’s microtonal adjustments enhance the sense of disorientation.

The seventh movement returns to a mode of chant-like incantation centered upon several shocking images of “so much blood in the wind,” and the woman, “whose nose they cut off.” By the end, the musical texture reduces to nothing but a strong, rhythmic whisper. This leads to a flashback of sorts, when snippets of text and the piano’s oscillating pattern return from the fourth movement. At that earlier point we were “near oblivion” but still unaware of the form it would take; having now descended further, there is a nostalgic innocence in those earlier touchstones.

The next two songs migrate to the core of cortex and ankle. The ninth movement brings the only appearance of the self-revealing pronoun “I” in the text, within an image of a stairway rattled by one harrowing outburst. Then we go even deeper into a devastating view of mass graves, the vocalist reduced to a semi-spoken monotone punctuated with silences.

The final movement acts as a merciful epilogue, pulling us gently back toward centeredness with music that evokes pre-tonal liturgy. Incorporating text from Middleton’s translation of Charles Mauron’s Poem on Van Gogh, the closing image is one where the “heavens wheel and wheel,” witnessed from the “center point where all is at an end.”

I place my forehead on the plate glass-front
And peered in at the darkness...
And there was nothing there for me to look for.
... see some corpses floating down ...
Be frightened, brother. I am.
— Fawzi Karim

Over the past several years I have worked closely with the words of Fawzi Karim, having set them in a cycle for voice and orchestra. Karim’s world is a remarkable and disquieting place; a landscape of empathy, beauty and often unspeakable horror.

During the recent past, this extraordinary figure had become an ever-more important part of my life. He was both a friend and a tremendous inspiration. His best work has a concision which goes to the heart of any matter, often uncomfortable to many. The work is without excess or a heavy hand, without surface-level regret or sentimentality. Karim was clear-eyed about the world in which he lived, and he did not shy away from its challenges and troubles. But precisely as a result of that clarity, he yearned for and held onto the good in others, when and wherever he found it. When I think of Karim, the words of the American sculptor Christopher Cairns come to mind. Cairns once said while discussing his own work that, amongst other motivations, he attempts to convey ‘love … the love of humankind, even in its catastrophic relationship to where it is going.’ Or, in Karim’s case, where humankind had been as well.

I met Karim for the first time at the home of poet and writer Marius Kociejowski. In the months before, I had read Kociejowski’s book, God’s Zoo, and had relayed to him how deeply taken I was by the chapter entitled Swimming in the Tigris, Greenford. In the weeks afterward, I found myself thinking a lot about Karim, the figure at the center of that chapter. Karim’s words to Kociejowski encapsulated many issues confronting artists. For example:

“When I was a child we had two trees in the courtyard of our house. There was the mulberry which was full of light, beneath whose spreading branches my aunt who was blind took shelter from the sun. I used to climb up between the leaves, and there the light flooded in from all directions. The other was the oleander which was the mulberry’s extreme opposite, a dim and closed tree, which never accepted our human presence. Its sap was bitter to the taste, sticky, and attracted flies. I like both these trees, but to which do I belong, the mulberry or the oleander? One is bright and open and extroverted, while the other absorbs the light and keeps it there … I think I prefer the first one, but it’s the second which pulls me more.”

Karim speaks later of events which took place while growing up in the midst of a bloody, terrifying conflict. He describes the 1958 coup he witnessed in Iraq as a boy:

“It is very hard to speak of this because I did not fully understand what was going on. I was very young. They took Nuri’s (the then Prime Minister) corpse, burnt it, dismembered it, dragged the pieces all over the streets of Baghdad for three days, and after that they hung them from the bridge. The burning thigh I saw with my own eyes, close to my house. All of us ran after it and started shouting revolutionary slogans but I returned home quickly because of the smell of the burning flesh. You can’t imagine from where such hatred comes.”

In Karim’s later poetry, he would invoke these brutal events:

The eye turns black...

I was born in a mellower year,
A year when people still paused at the smell of corpses.
Now I smell the roasting of a thigh ...
He pours on more kerosene
And the fire glows and the smell of flesh gets stronger.

... my father said, ‘Whoever goes sniffing out corpses would want to be rid of their stench.

But it was a mellower year;
A year when people still paused.
A year that saw the barrier go down between me and that smell.

Karim’s work often includes particular and unexpected juxtapositions of quiet introversion and graphic brutality. I had engaged musically with the work of other poets and writers in which I had found similar characteristics (e.g. Christopher Middleton, Czesław Miłosz, Peter Weiss, Ezra Pound, Bruno Schulz, among others). Even amongst these celebrated figures Karim was unique— the particular quality and coloration of Karim’s toggling struck me rather powerfully—and I jumped at the chance to meet him when Kociejowski so kindly arranged for it.

Upon meeting Karim for the first time— even during those first few minutes of awkwardness which can occur when strangers meet—I was struck by his eyes. They conveyed their own particular juxtaposition; he had an expression that I can only describe as both anguished and at ease. I often wondered if others saw it too. What I mean to say is that his every glance conveyed unmistakable urgency and immediacy, but those qualities run through with restraint. This expression was not one which necessarily was the result of an earlier trauma, though likely in large part it was. I came to understand that he recognized threat and trauma in the current state of things, and certainly the promise of more to come. This sense of impending loss became more pronounced, it seemed, when he was enthusiastic about something or someone. It was something I was all too familiar with. Over time, especially as Karim’s health worsened, his ‘oleander’ asserted itself, and particular fragments of his work seemed to take on more significance.

Time marching briefly with swift steps reaping his human crops.
I imagine me without a mouth, without even a lung.
Useless as a witness …

But even in the midst of adversity, his great capacity for serenity and gratitude came to the fore. When he met my daughter for the first time, he couldn’t have been more kind and patient. Though she was only a child, he spoke with her at length and with tremendous respect. He treated her as an equal. Among the many things she recalls from their time together, she remembers marveling at seeing someone write in Arabic for the first time. Karim gave her a note (in Arabic and English) for her to remember from their first meeting, something she treasures to this day. Karim loved having visitors, and what surprised and delighted me was how much he loved to discuss music and particular performers. He came alive listening to and talking about music of all kinds.

Later, when re-reading that same chapter of God’s Zoo, I was reminded of Karim’s love of music, even a desire to be a composer:

“Often I tell people if I could be anything else it would be a composer…Words alone just won’t do it for me.”

As it turns out, Karim did not compose music, but was a gifted painter. Like his poetry, the paintings have a presence strongly and constantly felt, not unlike the sensation one gets in the pit of one’s stomach when there is large, active machinery nearby. In one of his larger paintings, Apocalypse, we perceive from a distance what could be a scene inspired by the work of Bruegel (Pieter the Elder) or Hieronymus Bosch. But while the viewer may seek to characterize Karim’s painting style by comparing his work to those of prior artists, in fact many of his paintings were quite unique, many distinctly born out of his experiences in Iraq.

Earlier this year, we were fortunate to have the great Austrian composer Georg Friedrich Haas lecture on music at the institution where I teach. Interestingly, Haas quickly turned his attention to painting, and he spoke of impulses and techniques shared among various art forms. Thus when discussing Bruegel the Elder’s The Procession to Calvary (also sometimes referred to as Christ Carrying the Cross), Haas talked about why this this painting was special to him, and why it was important for young composers to examine it. While he directed the assembled to the high level of technical detail, he continued, ‘there is something more … There is the dramatic situation of the motion, the flow …. where the eye is directed. The desperate atmosphere is supported by these decisions.’ Haas also noted something else about the Bruegel work which seemed directly connected to so much of Karim’s work: Karim, like Bruegel, often and fearlessly invoked what perhaps amounts to the oft discussed concept of the universality of suffering. Haas continued, ‘We see the wheel, the instrument where people were tortured to death during the time of Bruegel. This is what Bruegel saw. And this is one of the important things which happens … in that it is not always the distance between the artist and a piece of work … it’s also those elements which are most shocking for him and they are indicated … making conscious today, that which was Bruegel’s today.’

Kociejowski’s interview further explored Karim’s approach to creating. Karim illustrates here the importance of being precise, that quality I so much admire in his work:

“As a consequence of being here, I have become very close to the idea of the simple sentence, one in which there is no exaggerated feeling or idea or belief. It is better to leave things just as they are. Once you add these other things you misjudge, you become unjust.”

Fawzi Karim was an artist whose work naturally engaged with elements of the human experience that so many others may seek to resist, hide from, ignore, or obscure. He did so honestly and beautifully. While I mourn his passing and his works unwritten and unpainted, I am profoundly grateful for what he left us. In the coming years, I hope others will have the opportunity to discover and engage with this unflinching, affecting and unique body of work.

And peered in at the darkness ...
And there was nothing there for me to look for ...

The silence is sour, and remote as some fountain of wool;
My feet are so light they hardly make a sound.
How do I answer the call of the current ...

I will drink out the bottle until the scent bleeds out of me and the soul can be seen through my body ...

... for a friend they burnt in a pool of acid,
Or for someone left like a scarecrow standing guard over a minefield.
Skulls and fragments of bone,
Wreckage ...
given thicker presence by the mud.

You can’t get away from the sight of those mouths where
the breath is stilled.
Is there to be some revivification of their torn bodies?
Is the dawn to be?