In B-flat by Rachel Stone

IN B-FLAT

By Rachel Stone ‘17

d “Incarcerated in the German prisoner-of-war camp Stalag VIII-A in 1940, the French composer Olivier Messiaen set down what he called “Quatuor Pour la Fin du Temps,” the “Quartet for the End of Time.”

It was first performed in January 1941 before a freezing audience of prisoners and German guards.”

-The New York Times This reflection is segmented into eight parts, mirroring the structure of the Quartet for the End of Time, the last movement of which was played by violinist Stefan Jackiw and pianist Anna Polonsky on February 5, 2015

I. the piano player with glass fingers grows a bird from her palm it presses the keys and the sostenuto pedals which are too hard for the glass fingered pianist to push without help. the first piece she learned came out of her like fire and roiled around inside her lumbar and her chest and her knees until she fused with the soft brass edge of the lyre post and every time she pulled away only the music would follow her so the bird who does not sing plucks out an old folk song, hopping down the scales until, sated, he crawls back inside the palm that keeps him listening.

II. the bird, a mute.

III. on the table sit two shabbos candles with steel vines for necks lifted straight from a mapless old country of blown laurel and washed wool. the violin sings the prayers while the violin stays silent in the lamplight. light the candle with a quiet kiddush, familiar wick jumping to stem. light fills their mouths and the hollows of their irises, staring into the wild flame. she wears a lace headcovering, small dahlias bending in the jumping light. the moon flits behind the eaves of the sharp trees, fractal branches bending into themselves like a woman cradling her own lungs.

IV. birds wing from fire with glass beaks.

V. the violinist and the pianist in a skeleton room and soft light remind me of how at synagogue as a child I asked god sometimes for flight, to float above the cantor and her bimah and above the firefly light of the neir tamid, above the tops of the heads of the widows in the front rows of the congregation and to float above the souls of their loved ones reclining above them, arms outstretched and listening, listening, to drift up to the stained glass rafters and sleep against the red glass light of the sun fire drowning itself within the baltic sea.

VI. that there should be time no longer.

VII. the bird, through light.

VIII. the pianist with glass fingers walks around the kitchen table of her house and thinks about the bird she once kept as a conduit. she rubs the wrinkles in her hands and she feels them slowly bend and recede, sparking like a silent thing coming slowly back to life.

d Rachel Stone is an English major. She doesn’t play an instrument but she was a pre-professional ballerina before she came to Princeton. Music and the interpretation of it has been something that has preoccupied her poetry. Her entire family on her mother’s side is extremely musical. She feels that what she inherited of this legacy is the ability to interact with music (through dance, through writing). In her inability to create the music itself, she is drawn toward the closest approximation she can find. She has never been to a concert at Princeton, and this contest gave her a good excuse. This was the first time she had heard Messiaen’s “Quartet for the End of Time” and found it incredibly powerful without quite knowing the reason for its resonance. After the concert she decided to do some research. After learning its history, she found that it brought a different sort of urgency into the music, and wanted to try and write something that could work towards capturing it. During the concert she knew she wanted to write a poem that addressed music as a tactile thing, as something that could be created through movement, but she didn’t want to force this connection. She decided to use the structure of the Quartet to inform the poem.