Ra’ad (Quiver) is dedicated to Inbar Solomon, who also premiered it. It is inspired by the text of the Aria “Non Piangete, Amati Rai” by 18th century composer, Maria Teresa Agnesi. Just like the text of the Aria, which is situated on the speaker’s deathbed, so are the sounds in the piece – struggling to achieve temporary stability but inherently frail, and constantly oscillating between existence and dying-out, repetition and variability, order and disorder. At first glance, all these look like polarized states of being, but is it so indeed? Is constant repetition a sign of life – like the soothing rhythm of our heartbeats or our breath, or perhaps the repetition is a sign of stagnation and stillness, and the chaos is where life really lies?
De’iyah It’s breathtaking to see a flock of starlings as they move together in perfect synchrony. There it is, a flock, a body with a life of its own. A light grey cloud glides smoothly toward an unknown destiny. And look at it now, as it makes up its mind and turns suddenly in a different direction; its color blackens as thousands of individuals change their angle instantaneously. How can such a harmonious motion be the sum of so many individuals, each possessing their own qualities and idiosyncrasies? And what about the clumsy ones? There are always a few… I once saw a bird that could not glide, just like a mute reciting a poem.
Premiered by Argento New Music Project, Michel Galant (cond.), New York
If the Duck were a Songbird In Tony Kushner’s play, Angels in America, the oboe is described as “…a duck, if the duck were a songbird”. This description captures well the fascinating gap between a musical instrument’s physicality on the one hand – its structure, the substance from which it is made, and the mechanics of its sound production – and the instrument’s “character” on the other hand, which is shaped by all the above, but consists of additional layers, among which is a layer of small mannerisms that can turn one musical sentence to grotesque and the other idiomatic, even though the two are technically demanding to the same extent. Is it possible to isolate and “surgically remove” these mannerisms? And once removed, will they survive – like a lizard’s tail? And what will happen if we “transplant” them in a different body/instrument? In what point does the body from which they were taken stop being itself and start being someone/something else?
All the sounds in Petrol are derived from a live session with the baritone saxophone player Josh Sinton, in which I asked him to use the saxophone in order to imitate a specific recording of the text of Peter and the Wolf (read by David Bowie, rec. 1978). The saxophone recordings were then manipulated in various ways and repositioned to create the representation of one possible decomposition of the experience of listening to the original recording.
Kutra Begulma (joint with Iddo Aharony) revolves around an excerpt of the Zohar describing the mystical creation of God, language, and reality. Rich in poetic contradictions and oxymorons, the text seems to breach the borders of language, in order to describe the indescribable. The piece utilizes the text both as an audio source material (using actual recordings of the text being read, as well as sung in traditional cantillation), and as an abundant source for metaphors for creative processes, as the text deals beautifully and poetically with creation.