The Brooklyn Rail

Immediately following the terrorist attacks of September 11, The New Yorker published a poem that struck a powerful diminished chord with many people. “Try to Praise the Mutilated World,” written by Polish poet Adam Zagajewski and translated by Clare Cavanagh, has a tender and haunted quality, directing the reader to recall sweet, sensual times—“Remember June’s long days / and wild strawberries, drops of wine, the dew.” —amidst an unknown catastrophe. Even while we’re enjoying life’s pageantry, having “watched the stylish yachts and ships,” we are aware of human suffering: “You've seen the refugees heading nowhere, / you've heard the executioners sing joyfully.”

The poem’s narrator continues to direct us toward times of ease and fulfillment (“Remember the moments when we were together / in a white room and the curtain fluttered. / Return in thought to the concert where music flared.”), even while urging us, with ever greater directness, to embrace our condition, moving from “Try to praise the mutilated world,” to “You should praise the mutilated world,” and finally to the command, “Praise the mutilated world.” In this formulation, we know what we’ve lost, what has been irretrievably damaged, but we struggle to accept and embrace it anyway.

Zagajewski wrote the poem much earlier than its publication date, and said it pertained to:

No particular occasion, no single event. For me, it's the way I have always seen the world. When I was growing up I saw a lot of ruins in postwar Poland. This is my landscape. Somehow it stayed with me, this feeling that the world is wounded or mutilated. The poem reflects a philosophical conviction more than an event.

Yet it spoke movingly to that moment of profound loss, when we not only grieved for those killed and wounded, but for our own sense of safety and sanctity.

I thought of that while listening to Music for Broken Violins, a fascinating project by violinist Marija Kovačević. Born in Serbia and now based in New York, she was working as a violin teacher at the Brooklyn Music School when she happened upon a closet that was stuffed with broken violins. The usual options would have been either to begin the difficult work of repairing the instruments, or to discard them. But Kovačević decided to work with them as they were—to seek out whatever beauty might remain in their battered forms.

Instead of sketching out conventional melodies, the composer uses these instruments to intone minimalist repetitions and a sort of organic musique concrète. The sounds range from wispy to ferocious, and demand a kind of attention we may not be used to giving. Kovačević incorporates all aspects of the violins themselves, twisting tuning pegs and dragging cracked bows over often untuned strings. Yet she is able to locate a particular kind of lyricism in the instruments, and sometimes intones a single fractured note—as on the final track of the second volume in the series, called The Chapel—in a way that simultaneously stirs and soothes emotion. The result is a kind of sound mosaic, a gathering of broken parts to create something greater. It calls to mind the observation of director Alfred Hitchcock regarding the process of film editing: “We call it cutting, it isn't exactly that. Cutting implies severing something. It really should be called assembly. Mosaic is assembling something to create a whole.”

The result is a complete reimagining of the lives of these instruments. They no longer serve as the springboards for recognizable sonatas or sprightly fiddle tunes. Their sound at first tends toward the mournful; they seem to be suited to a threnody, jaggedly wailing a cry of pain or despair. But gradually, a new aesthetic seems to emerge along with their sound, one that begins with the acceptance of the instruments’ conditions and proceeds from the possibilities that exist there. That spirit of acceptance permeates all three volumes of the project, which has been released via Bandcamp, with a fourth volume on the way. Kovačević has also toured with this project for the past few years, taking it to Europe and sometimes incorporating movement into these presentations, with performers engaging the broken instruments almost as partners in a dance.

Though, like Zagajewski’s poem, these suites were not created to address any particular situation, their title, Music for Broken Violins, seems to speak to our current condition. The unspecified tragedy to which these works could refer is the state of our political climate, as well as of our natural world. Seeing the cracked and precarious position of our democracy, or of our environment, we struggle to reconcile what is happening, our sense of an ongoing crisis, with our hopes for a livable future. We are trying to make music on broken instruments.

Yet, against the odds, that is what Kovačević does. A spirit of profound openness defines her efforts. In an email exchange, she described her first encounters with the violins: “I remember having them all lined up on the floor and then I began a dialogue with each instrument separately and started recording this sound encounter … It was unlike anything I have heard before. The whole world of sound opened up in unexpected ways.”

A year after making her first set of recordings, she made a second batch at a chapel in Croatia:

I made an exhibit of the broken violins, their broken parts and broken bows, and encouraged people who attended the exhibit to play on/with them. I learned while watching people interact with the broken violins that it also breaks the stigma of playing perfectly on a violin. There is no wrong way of using a broken object and that liberation was beautiful to witness.

Her third recording was made in Utah, at the Sun Tunnels (1973–76) installation created by artist Nancy Holt:

The four concrete tunnels are laid out in the desert in an X configuration and are aligned with the angles of the rising and setting of the sun on summer and winter solstice.… Interacting with the tunnels’ concrete environment with wooden instruments was such a mind-bending experience. There was also considerable echo inside the tunnels, which contributed to that, as well as the wind coming through, often making parallel, additional sounds through the violins.

The fourth set of recordings, about to be released, were made in an empty swimming pool in Portugal.

Kovačević feels the work has changed her as a composer and as a person: “I embrace the unpredictable nature of this process.… By abandoning traditional techniques, I find new paths for making sound. The violins inspire me profoundly, also sparking questions that extend far beyond the realm of sound.” This music makes considerable demands on the listener: to move beyond known parameters, beyond the comparative or critical voice, and toward something new. But it comes in the form of an open invitation; as Rumi described it in his poem “A Great Wagon”: “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, / there is a field. I’ll meet you there.” With these works, Kovačević is asking us to follow her to that field, to lay down in that grass. In the process, she is taking on a world that is not just bent but broken, and making it sing.