Te’ena [2022] תאנה
for ensemble and electronics

About the piece:
Men of song
Spend all their hours looking for
More red
Ever more red,
Black miners
And sometimes a thousand black miners
Even in a fig.

The never-ending quest for the “ever more red” depicted in the above poem is the seed from which Te’ena stemmed. The poem, by Omri Livnat (b. 1992), is originally in Hebrew and is a part of the longer poem Malachi.
Te’ena, meaning “fig” in Hebrew, also draws on the way in which some species of wild fig trees pollinate: they are bound in a symbiotic relationship to the fig wasp, which in order to fertilize the fig tree has to penetrate the figs, lose its wings, and die inside. This process I found very touching and poetic, and also metaphorically related to (a rather romanticised idea of) the creative process: similarly to the wasp sacrificing its wings and itself for the prosperity of the fig, so might the artist make sacrifices for the benefit of their creation. The artist’s so called “penetration” into their work’s creative space might as well be painful and intense.
By electronically processing and spatialising the ensemble’s sounds, I explore in Te’ena different spaces and types of movements, lying on the boundary between the metaphorical and the directly descriptive. Sonic images of “Outer Shell”, “Penetration” and “Inside” take shape, interpolate with one another and dissolve, using materials that range from concrete field recordings to rather abstract sounds, and movement that takes place both in the metaphorical and actual listening spaces. The Bassoon takes the figurative role of the fig wasp, and at some point during the piece the bassoonist is asked to dissemble their instrument and playing only on a small part of it — embodying the wingless wasp after having entered the fig.

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