"disparu" (2024)
Premiered by The Rhythm Method Quartet at the Lake George Music Festival Composers' Concert, August 22nd, 2024.
Special thanks to The Rhythm Method for an amazing performance!
Marina Kifferstein - violin I
Leah Asher - violin II
Martine Thomas - viola
Iva Casian-Lakos - cello
Program Notes:
Georges Perec, (1936-1982), was a French novelist known for his experimental writing. His novel entitled, W ou le souvenir d’enfance, (W or the memory of childhood), published in 1975, is two stories wrapped in one. This semi-autobiographical, semi-fictional work navigates Perec’s memories of childhood during the Second World War, and of his parents who were killed.
« Je n’ai pas de souvenirs d’enfance » : je posais cette affirmation avec assurance, avec presque une sorte de défi. L’on n’avait pas à m’interroger sur cette question. Elle n’était pas à mon programme. J’en étais dispensé : une autre histoire, la Grande, l’Histoire avec sa grande hache, avait déjà répondu à ma place : la guerre, les camps.
-Georges Perec, W ou le souvenir d’enfance
« I do not have memories of childhood »: I posed this affirmation with assurance, with almost a sort of defiance. One did not need to interrogate me on this question. It wasn’t on my schedule. I was exempted: another history, the great one, the history with its big axe (the History with its capital H), had already responded in my place: the war, the camps.
-Translation by Samuel Mutter
Unfortunately, Perec’s words have remained relevant, as the Second World War was shamefully not the last time that peoples’ childhoods were ruined by oppression and war.
Today Perec’s words ring in my head with alarming persistence as I think of all the people, the memories, the lives being destroyed by the war and the Israeli atrocities currently happening in Gaza.
Georges Perec was a child of Polish Jews who had immigrated to France. Both of Perec’s parents lost their lives during the Nazi invasion and occupation. Now in Gaza, children are losing their childhoods, their parents, and in many cases, their very lives to the State that was founded for the people who survived the Holocaust.
As a person descended from European Jewry, I feel I must respond to the obvious hypocrisy of the situation. The war in Gaza has gone on for far too long. It must end.
-Samuel Mutter