QUADERNO KOSOVEL is inspired by the Slovenian poet Srečko Kosovel who wrote during his short life, 22 years, an enormous number of poems of the greatest value (which is not fully appreciated yet).

He lived across the First World War of which his work experiments the ‘extreme sense of  life’ and bears all the mortal wounds of it: like one of the pines in the Carso often described in his poems with the roots sticked into the hard land while its foliage is shaken by the wind, Kosovel lingers to his roots but is agitated by the explosive changes coming from outside the borders and, as a catalyst, assimilates and transfigures them through his being a poet.
The composition is articulated in four moments, everyone related to a text, four ‘voiceless madrigals’ in which the word is implied, four ‘soul landscapes’ where the relation between the written sign and that one which is heard is investigated in a space of Listening inbetween two polarities (Music/Word), where the sense should and has to be assembled swaying from one to the other.
Thus the listener free of movement in this space will choose her/his own interpretation path, overlapping the two poles which go on parallel tracks by their nature to come to the ‘Reading’ of the poetic ‘Text’ where word and music can be blended and transfigured to a higher level.

TEXTS

I. MOJA PESEM

Moja pesem je eksplozija,
divja raztrganost. Disharmonija. Moja pesem noče do vas,
ki ste po božji previdnosti, volji mrtvi esteti, muzejski molji, moja pesem je moj obraz.

II. SKICA NA CONCERTU

Ves poln sanj je črni klavir, ko da globina mrakov
v njem se zrcali.
Za njo je sprostrl

bele roke pianist.

Tiho,
ko da na črnem mramornem jezeru odplavala laboda bela sta neskončnosti iskat …

Full of dreams is the black piano, as if an abyss of darkness
was reflecting in it.
Beyond it the pianist has stuck out

the white hands.

Quietly,
as on a lake
of black marble
white swans moving away searching the infinite…

III. USPAVALNA PESEM

Moja pesem je bela, bela kakor mrliška mesečina, kadar vztrepeče na oceanu. V mojem srcu tišina, tišina.

O in žene ni in ni,
ni je žene, ki bi me ljubila,
in vsa kozmična noč stoji
in jaz stojim sredi nje brez cilja.

Sredi ceste sem se ustavil: kam bi tako sam in kako? – Med kostanji mesečina, okoli mene vse svetlo.

III. LULLABY

My song is white, white as deathly moonlight, trembling on the ocean. In my heart silence, silence.

Oh, there is no woman, there is not
a woman who loves me
and in the midst of the stillness of the cosmic night
I remain without purpose.

I stopped in the middle of the street: where could I go so alone, and how? Between chestnut trees, the moonlight,
around me everything shines.

IV. V SOMRAK ZVONI

V somrak zvoni, na gozdove pala je tema;
tiha pesem, ko da hoče
od sveta.

Proč… in tam bi onemela, tam bi ugasnila
in to sivo, težko žalost
v večnost potopila…

IV. TWILIGHT TOLLS

Twilight tolls, on the wood
darkness has descended;
a silent chant, longing to detach itself from the world.

Far… over there becoming silent, there become extinct,
and this grey, obscure desolation

in the eternity sink…

Find the score here