Visions, Fantasies and Dances music for string quartet
Visions, Fantasies and Dances is a seven part work for string quartet. I composed it in Australia in 2008; its premiere was at the Jerusalem Theater’s Henry Crown Symphony Hall on March 1st, 2010 by the Sapphire String Quartet.
 
My spiritual experience as a child chanting the Baqashot at the well-known Ades Synagogue in Jerusalem inspired this composition. Baqashot are collections of supplications, songs and prayers that have been sung by the Sephardic Syrian Jewish communities for centuries. Every Shabbat during winter months my father woke me up a few hours after midnight to walk to Ades Synagogue to participate in the singing until dawn. Later in my life I was able to distinguish between different Maqamat. This attracted me to explore classical Arabic music and heterophonic textures, and, just as has occurred in Baqashot, to compose works that merge Maqamat with Jewish themes. Since I trained in Western classical music and practice improvisation (as a pianist) it seemed appropriate to merge these different influences.
 
And so, Visions, Fantasies and Dances is an authentic expression of new music which incorporates a wide spectrum of contemporary and ancient styles. It creates a confluence between the heterophonic textures of Arabic genres (classical Arabic music and Arabic- influenced Jewish music) and the compositional approaches of contemporary Western classical music. Amongst the Western composers of special importance to me are Béla Bartók (1881-1945), György Kurtág (b. 1926), György Ligeti (1923-2006), Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992), Alfred Schnittke (1934-1998), Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951), Stefan Wolpe (1902- 1972) and John Zorn (b. 1953).
 
The quartet consists of seven major sections in Part One (tracks 1-7), six major sections in Part Two (tracks 8-13), five major sections in Part Three (tracks 14-18), six major sections in Part Four (tracks 19-24), four major sections in Part five (tracks 25-28), four major sections in Part six (tracks 29-32) and two major sections in Part Seven (tracks 33-34).
The titles of the sections evoke various musical and visual images and transfer the ideas and thoughts that inspired my work. The sections have been created with a range of different approaches and the musical elements have been developed in diverse ways. The thirty two sections utilise approaches and musical modes that contrast with each other. These sections range between up-tempi to slow, between Arabic melody and a Piyyut to a melancholic mood, between choral Baroque style to Serialism, between slow harmonic progression to the heterophonic texture of Jewish prayers and between microtonality to improvisation.