PROGRAM NOTE “Hatzvi Israel” Eulogy for female voice, flute, string quartet and harp was written in 1968 on commission by New York Philharmonic violinist Stanley Hoffman. I wrote it at a pivotal time in my life when I was departing for the first time from the safe and familiar world of tonality, having found myself…
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PROGRAM NOTE Love’s Call (2016) is a setting for voice and piano of an English adaptation of a fragment from the Song of Songs. I extracted it from the libretto by Charles Kondek of my opera Between Two Worlds (The Dybbuk). The subtle adaptation/rearranging by Kondek of this deeply passionate, iconic Old Testament text creates…
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PROGRAM NOTE Tzadik KaTamar for Cantor and Piano is a celebratory piece intended to be performed as part of synagogue services, as well as on other ceremonial occasions. Commissioned by Beth Emet—The Free Synagogue in Evanston, Illinois, to honor Rabbi Peter and Elaine Knobel in commemoration of the Rabbi’s 30 years of service to the…
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PROGRAM NOTE When Bruce Weinberger, tenor saxophonist with the Rascher Saxophone Quartet, first approached me in the spring of 2009 with an invitation to compose a work for the Rascher together with Paul Hillier’s Ars Nova Copenhagen, I was thrilled at the prospect of writing for a group of such stellar musicians — some of…
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PROGRAM NOTE The invitation from flute virtuoso Mimi Stillman to compose a work for her Dolce Suono Ensemble’s Mahler/Schoenberg 2012 concert series that could serve as an homage as well as a companion piece to Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, one of the 20th-century’s seminal compositions, was as challenging as it was intriguing. It would seem almost…
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PROGRAM NOTE O The Chimneys is a setting of five poems by Nelly Sachs, the great German-Jewish 1966 Nobel Prize co-winner in literature, whose writing concerned itself almost entirely with the subject of the holocaust. Composed in 1969, the work was my personal way of saying, through my own art, ‘do not forget’. I selected…
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PROGRAM NOTE The title Fault Line is a metaphor for the volatility of human existence. Underneath even the most seemingly orderly of lives, fault lines lie, at times totally invisible on the surface, yet capable of erupting with the power to shutter and change all. Fault Line may be heard as a journey of a…
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PROGRAM NOTE In the spring of 1984, two happy moments in my life converged together to bring about the creation of Amichai Songs. First, I was commissioned by the Eastman School of Music to write a work for the great mezzo-soprano Jan DeGaetani (1933–1989). Ms. DeGaetani, as it turned out, had just formed an ensemble…
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PROGRAM NOTE Apprehensions was one of nine works commissioned by WFMT, Chicago’s Fine Arts Radio Station, as part of a series examining the 20th century art song. It was my initial intention to group together a number of poems, when I came across Apprehensions by Sylvia Plath. Written in the last year of her life,…
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ADONAI MALACH (Psalm 93) was commissioned by Congregation Emanu-El B’ne Jeshurun in Milwaukee, as part of a 1985 conference of composers and cantors, where each composer was paired with a cantor and assigned a text from the Jewish liturgy. The challenge I set for myself was to make this short piece melodically appropriate for Cantor Abraham Lubin’s beautiful cantorial style while, at the same time, at least hinting at a harmonic language more inclusive than what is generally heard in a Shabbat Service setting.