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inmind.Forthemostpart,thisisasalutary development, particularly when a record is asinterestingasForceofLightis.Butitalso puts added pressure on artists, since they aremorelikelytobeheldtotheirownstatements about what they were trying to do andwhy. In the case of Force of Light, for example ,someonelisteningcarefullyfortheway in which it provides musical accompaniment for Celan’s words might wonder why Kaufman opted to pair them with a style that might be described as “cabaret rock.” While that particular aesthetic, most famously implemented by Tom Waits and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, works wonderfully for over-the-top storytelling that channelsthedarkhedonismoftheWeimar Republic, it’s an odd fit with the emptiness of Celan’s work. Leaving aside the fact that Celan, who was raised in Romania, was bothtooyoungandtoofarfromcosmopolitan life to have experienced the fragile decadence of that world directly, there is also the problem that many of his poems playoffliteraryinfluencesantitheticaltothe messy Modernism of the Expressionists or theirpoliticallyengagedsuccessors. In Celan’s German, the words in songs like “Aspen Tree” or “Count the Almonds” resonatebecausetheyturnthebeautyofthe classic poetry of German Romanticism, with its belief in the purity of nature, inside out. From this perspective, the most obviouswaytosethisworktomusicwouldbeto expand on what composers like Schönberg undertookwiththeir“NewMusic,”reexamining the Lieder tradition of Beethoven, SchubertandBrahmsthroughthetint-free glasses of the avant-garde. In a rock idiom, this might mean composing spare, dissonantmusicinthesinger -songwritervein. ForceofLighttakesaverydifferentpath, onewhichthreatenstoconcealthefactthat Celan was first and foremost a lyric poet, one who repeatedly demonstrated that Theodor Adorno’s oft-cited injunction against writing poetry “after Auschwitz” is bestinterpreted,notasabanontheliterary form itself, but an insistence that poets always feel the presence of the Holocaust insteadofconsigningittothepast .Butitisfor preciselythisreasonthattherecordmaydo a better job of provoking listeners to ruminate on Celan’s oeuvre than an overtly “appropriate ” treatment would have. In a sense, the fact that Force of Light does not seem to fit his poetry makes it a fitting tribute to the themes of failure and loss that coursethroughit.I CharlieBertsch(cbertsch@gmail.com)currently teachesAmericanliterature,culturaltheoryand newmediaattheUniversityofArizona. [BOOK ] ACTIVISTSEDER AMYSTICALHAGGADAH:PASSOVER MEDITATIONS,TEACHINGSANDTALES CommentaryandTranslationbyRabbiEliahuJ. Klein,NorthAtlanticBooks,2008 Review by Kennard Lipman Note for our non-Jewish readers: The word Haggadah (“telling” in Hebrew) comes from the scriptural commandment to tell our children about the Jewish liberation from slavery in Egypt, as described in the book of Exodus in the Torah. This story is told every year at the Pesach Seder (the family ritual meal for Passover). Eds. D o we need another Haggadah ? Doweevenneedanother ‘mystical haggadah’? After all, we can find Haggadot with titles such as The Chassidic Haggadah and The Secrets of the Haggadah. The answer is definitely ‘yes,’ for Rabbi Klein brings us deeper into the ways of tikkun according to Kabbalah and Hasidism , than any other Haggadah in English. CULTURE [MUSIC ] ROCKAFTER AUSCHWITZ FORCEOFLIGHTbyDanKaufman/Barbez TzadikRecords,2007 Review by Charlie Bertsch I f you listened to ForceofLight without reading anything about it, you might think it a somber update of the sort of psychedelic experiments that proliferated in the late 1960s, with its coupling of spare yet trippy sounds, and spoken-word passages that call to mind the pretense of that era’s alternative poetry scene. Or you might think it a blurred-edge take on the sort of music made by acts like Tortoise in the 1990s, a subgenre labeled “post-rock.” Oryoumightjustbestrugglingtofigureout a proper response to the record, which manages to be simultaneously airy and grave, pretentious and earnest. None of these possibilities are meant as a criticism, either, for Dan Kaufman and his bandmatesinBarbezhavecraftedanalbumthat has the potential to appeal to a wide range ofpeopleonitssubstantialmusicalmerits. The thing is, the kind of listening that formulationsupposes—hearingsomething onitsownterms,withouttheframeprovided by both professional and amateur commentary —has become as antiquated as poweringatrainwithasteamengine.These days, it’s second nature for even casual music fans to turn to the Internet for context whenever they come upon something new. If artists use the accessibility of informationtotheiradvantage ,theycanfindan eager audience for even the most difficult, obscurework.Andtheycancountonagood percentage of those listeners to comprehenditscomplexity . That’s why records like Force of Light seembothmorefrequentandmorepopular than ever before. The capacity to discover, in a few seconds at the keyboard, that an album is “a three-year long labor of love” that pays “searing homage to Holocaust survivorandpoetPaulCelan,”redefinesour senseofthemusicitcontains.Itputsusina position, not...

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