Welcome to the Launch page for Glitter, Doom, Shards, Memory

Check back here for new content throughout the month!

Our first release:

Project overview:

Loop38 is pairing our most recent recording of Shulamit Ran’s Third String Quartet, “Glitter, Doom, Shards, Memory”, with additional information and context to encourage personal reflection of the history and significance of the Holocaust on the modern world. We will release content throughout the month and hope that you will come back to check out the new content as it is released.

Work overview:

Ran’s string quartet was commission by the Pacifica Quartet and was premiered in 2014. Each movement of the work examines an aspect of humanity in the face of life’s most devastating trauma, and the power of art during those times. We are thankful to have the opportunity to record and share this piece as a way to continue these conversations in our communities, and to inform those conversations with reflection and history.

About this piece, Ran said:

Notes from the composer:

“The individual titles of the quartet’s four movements give an indication of some of the emotional strands this work explores.

1) “That which happened” (das was geschah) – is how the poet Paul Celan referred to the Shoah – the Holocaust. These simple words served for me, in the first movement, as a metaphor for the way in which an “ordinary” life, with its daily flow and its sense of sweet normalcy, was shockingly, inhumanely, inexplicably shattered.

2) “Menace” is a shorter movement, mimicking a Scherzo. It is also machine-like, incessant, with an occasional, recurring, waltz-like little tune – perhaps the chilling grimace we recognize from the executioner’s guillotine mask. Like the death machine it alludes to, it gathers momentum as it goes, and is unstoppable.

3) “If I must perish - do not let my paintings die”; these words are by Felix Nussbaum who, knowing what was ahead, nonetheless continued painting till his death in Auschwitz in 1944. If the heart of the first movement is the shuddering interruption of life as we know it, the third movement tries to capture something of what I can only imagine to be the conflicting states of mind that would have made it possible, and essential, to continue to live and practice one’s art – bearing witness to the events. Creating must have been, for Nussbaum and for so many others, a way of maintaining sanity, both a struggle and a catharsis – an act of defiance and salvation all at the same time.

4) “Shards, Memory” is a direct reference to my quartet’s title. Only shards are left. And memory. The memory is of things large and small, of unspeakable tragedy, but also of the song and the dance, the smile, the hopes. All things human. As we remember, in the face of death’s silence, we restore dignity to those who are gone.

—Shulamit Ran