Work of the Week – Chaya Czernowin: The Divine Thawing of the Core

By Christopher Peter
27 Jul 2025

Composer Chaya Czernowin sits at a table with sheet music, looking calmly into the camera. Plants and dark furniture in the background.

On 1 August 2025, a highly anticipated world premiere will take place at the Darmstadt Summer Course: The Divine Thawing of the Core for bass flute and ensemble by Chaya Czernowin. This piece carries immense personal, political and musical weight – a sonic response to a world in deep disarray.

Ustvolskaya, Claire Chase and the power of form

The piece is closely inspired by Galina Ustvolskaya’s Second Symphony, whose uncompromising language profoundly shaped Czernowin’s musical thinking. Rather than referencing it directly, the new work emerges from an inner kinship in instrumentation and spirit.

Dedicated to Claire Chase, who initiated the commission, the piece features her on contrabass flute – an instrument of primeval depth – accompanied by a stripped-down orchestra: six flutes, six oboes, six trumpets, trombone, tuba, percussion, piano and three cellos. Together they sculpt a sonic landscape of stark contrasts, from fragility to raw intensity.

A rupture at the core: sound as a mirror of societal unrest

Czernowin’s composition goes beyond musical dialogue: it was written in response to growing political upheaval, particularly in her home country Israel. The “divine thawing of the core” refers to a painful, uneven process of emotional and moral disintegration – mirrored in the music through distortion, irony, and a nightmarish waltz that melts into something ritualistic, primitive and strangely coherent.

Architecture as a musical principle

Composed in Barcelona, the work draws structural inspiration from the Sagrada Familia. Czernowin describes its form as “non-periodic and cyclic”, where recurrences act like cavernous corridors, creating illusions of time and space. The result is a musical architecture full of ambiguity and inner tension.

An invitation to listen – not to judge

The Divine Thawing of the Core is no political manifesto. It is an attempt to express the inexpressible, to process pain through sound, and to remain sane amidst despair. The work offers no easy answers – but it asks urgent questions.

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