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Breath Piece: On Paul Celan and John Coltrane
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 February 2026
Abstract
The long 1960s saw a broad awakening of interest in the breath. Paying attention to this pneumatic turn reveals new channels of inspiration; this essay considers one such. It listens for a resonance between two artists in separate fields and cultures who knew little if anything of each other: the poet Paul Celan and the musician John Coltrane. Despite their differences, a radical pneumaticism connects them, and it begins around the year 1960. In a series of influential performances, Coltrane and Celan expressed an exhaustion with and of musicality. This exhaustion enabled the development of a new kind of expression, an expression of tightly compacted sound and meaning without conventional development. The aspiration of this expression was toward the other, even the wholly other, and its representation and performance was the breath.
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