Menorah (Preview)

Programme Notes
Commissioned by Bravo Niagara! for the pre-eminent Israeli violinist Shlomo
Mintz with the financial support of the Ontario Arts Council, “Menorah”
is a technically demanding composition for violin and piano. The premiere
took place on December 13, 2020 as a music video with violinist Marc Djokic
and pianist Christina Quilico. It was presented as part of the Voices of Hope
online festival commemorating the 75th anniversary of the end of the
תכרב)‏ Holocaust. It is cast in two contrasting movements, Shabbat Blessing
depicting two opposite psychic patterns ‏”(םותי שידק)‏ and Kaddish Yatom ‏(תבש
manifesting at times of personal and collective crisis, one of tightly holding
on to something old and trusted and another of questioning it and, with
it, our shared understanding of humanity and its shuttered assurances. Not
being a Jew myself, it is this larger canvas that has allowed me to enter
the subject of the Holocaust and document my own psychic reactions to it,
particularly at a time in our collective existence when dark clouds are again
assembling in the horizon and, if we do not study and learn from history, we
will be condemned to repeat it.
Shabbat Blessing begins with superimposed right- and left-hand pizzicatos
on the violin giving way to a devotional Jewish-sounding melody. For a
while, the piano accompaniment sounds like flickering stars: a cycle of
‘threes’ and ‘fours’ in the high register of the instrument undisturbed by
the earthbound violin melody. The cosmic number ‘seven’ is present and
hidden everywhere: in the audibly rotating ‘threes’ against ‘fours’ present
in the violin pizzicatos and in the right and left hands of the piano, in the
hidden “digit sums” of the tempo markings (52, 43) and in the ‘three-tofour’
metric modulations appearing downstream and disturbing the original
peacefulness of the music. Soon, this prayerful calmness of “sevenness”
gives way to impassioned and unsettled music which still looks at melodic
and harmonic tradition for answers to the impasse of the moment. Finally,
tradition is suppressed, and the principal tonal motifs of the violin become
transformed and incorporated into atonal (twelve-tone) statements which,
to me at least, represent a systemic embrace of reductionist logic at the
pivotal moment when faith fails. I was thinking here of Arnold Schoenberg,
the father of 20th Century musical modernism, who retorted with such
rationalist means to the intolerant “classicism” of his time in order to
exorcise the rampant and uncontrolled antisemitism and the ascendancy
of Nazism in his home country. The soulful four-note “Jewish” motifs of
the previous violin melody now become mere tetrachords: a set of nonfunctional
cogs in the mechanical “communism” of the twelve-tone system.
Kaddish Yatom begins with a sudden and devastating shuddering inside
the low strings of the piano. From within this shuddering, the growing
moans of the violin become increasingly audible. After a brief silence,
spasmodic and dehumanized gestures by the two instruments break out
unexpectedly, separated by silences or quiet moments. Even these quiet
moments, however, (distorted tonal memories, often in tatters) serve only