Three Pieces from the Emigration

Three Pieces from Exile consist of three fragments drawn from extended chains of association, remnants of past emotions that continue to resonate within the music. The cycle does not unfold as a linear narrative but as a sequence of images: musicians gathering for an open air concert in front of a dilapidated camp barrack. What has long been stored in bodies and memories has disintegrated, recombines, reappears in splinters, and briefly takes shape once more.

The conceptual core of the work touches on an experience that feels unsettlingly close. It is said that a person need only move a few kilometres away from their familiar surroundings to become a stranger, a foreigner, an emigrant. This shift in perspective generates the tension of the piece: proximity and distance, belonging and displacement, memory and the present moment.

Formally, the work consists of reworkings of pieces from the fragment collection of the Emigrant Trios, op. 51. The material was developed in the aftermath of television compositions for an SWR film about the Jewish cemetery in Mannheim. While the core remains identical, its realisation changes according to the instrumentation. Accordingly, Three Pieces from Exile have no “home” in the sense of a fixed ensemble; they are conceived as open forms, music that can be embodied anew each time.

Three Pieces from Exile are available on the CD EMIGRATION OF STRINGS, catalogue no. PREISER PR 90761. The Wiener KammerOrchester is conducted by Philippe Entremont.