Music

G.N.Z. takes its title from the Hebrew root meaning “to store or hide,” referring to the Cairo Genizah, where thousands of discarded Jewish texts were preserved — ranging from sacred writings to everyday notes. The piece draws on two anonymous and undated Genizah poems: one fragmentary and mysterious, the other openly homoerotic. By bringing these incomplete, centuries-old voices into a contemporary setting, including imagery inspired by today’s queer culture, the work reimagines the identities of the fragments’ authors, and treats the music itself as a modern Genizah — a shared space where hidden, forgotten, and diverse Jewish experiences can coexist.

The original seed from which Mit Groys Khesek (“with great passion/desire” in Yiddish) stemmed, was the relationship between a teacher and their pupils. Hence, the piece’s title, which is taken from a song depicting a rabbi teaching young children the Hebrew alphabet. Drawing on this model, the cello takes the role of the teacher, constantly trying to “cultivate” the electronics with different means. The electronics part, in turn, goes through large-scale processes of convergence and crystallization of the materials, triggered and shaped by the cello.

Stone, n. 

[…] as a type of motionlessness 

[…] of hardness, and hence as an emblem of insensibility, stupidity, deadness 

[…] a block, slab, or pillar of stone set up as a memorial.

Stone, v. 

[…] to put to death by pelting with stones.

(From the Oxford English Dictionary)

In Djamila Boupacha’s testimony documented by Gisele Halimi and Simone de Beauvoir, she depicts the series of torments she had gone through by French troops during the Algerian War. These torments were referred to by her torturers as “the third degree treatment”. Scholar Dr. Heidi Brown argues in an article about Boupacha that each of the afflictions forced on Boupacha was meant to destroy a different part of her identity: as the daughter of her father, as a muslim, as a woman, as a human being. 

The text of this piece is taken from Boupacha’s testimony, in which she wonders if she is still the young woman she used to be before being tortured and raped. The vocal part reflects the attempt to efface Boupacha’s identity, which I consider to be “the fourth degree” of the torture. Thus, the words lose their semantic meaning at times, the vocal timbre is deformed beyond recognition, and the vocal line is at times submerged within the sound of the piano and violin, to the extent that they are not distinguishable anymore. The voice identity of the soprano part is obscured and distorted, metaphorically conveying the same procedures afflicted on the identity of Boupacha.

Being on the verge of leaving — this time, far away and for good — the path that stretches from my home village straight to the Jordan River feels like a runway. As I stroll along this path, the landscape takes on its own rhythm: at various intervals, I pass two pecan plantations; a lady and her dog; several flocks of cranes; finally, the river; and in the background, as ever, the Golan Heights, changing color from burning orange to dark purple.

During one of my daily walks along this path, I experienced a moment of incredible clarity: the path in length, the heights and the river in width; and the realization that everything that will happen, can, possibly, happen right now.

In Hebrew, Alakhson can mean “diagonal” or “oblique.” With this piece I aim to cast an oblique glance over some milestones in the lineage of Israeli concert music, from my own standpoint as a link in this chain, so to speak. In this regard, Alakhson pays homage to Yinam Leef, with whom I studied at the Jerusalem Academy and whose Violin Concerto and Intermezzo No. 1 are woven into the present piece. By utilizing heterophonic textures, the piece also refers to one generation older, to Mark Kopytman — Leef’s own teacher, who iconified this particular texture (to which he refers as music’s diagonal dimension) and established it within the soundscape of Israeli concert music.

The never-ending search for the “ever more red” depicted in the fifteenth stanza of Omri Livnat’s poem Malachi, was the seed from which Te’ena stemmed.

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 touching and poetic process serves here as a metaphor to 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 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 different spaces and types of movements 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.

Malachi’s text uses excerpts from the poem Malachi by Omri Livnat. It revolves around an enigmatic entity of the same name — “Malachi” also means “my angel” in Hebrew. At times, he is a lover; at others, a prophet or a god. The ambiguity, or betweenness regarding Malachi’s identity in Livnat’s poem is also a main theme of the musical piece, which explores betweenness in terms of form, timbre, and instrumental gesture.

An important source of musical material in Malachi is the poet’s own voice. While not actually heard in the piece, Livnat’s voice was recorded and then analysed. The recorded voice’s spectral signature was translated into pitches, which finally serve as the entire piece’s harmonic infrastructure. Thus, a relationship is maintained between the poet’s voice — both literally and metaphorically speaking — and the composer’s interpretation of the poet’s work.