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Following Daniel Fawcett (3rd Prize winner), and Chris Fisher-Lochhead (2nd Prize winner), this week, we spotlight Omer Barash, the first-prize winner of the 2024 Martirano Award. His winning work, Te’ena, is scored for flute/bass flute, clarinet/contrabass clarinet, bassoon/contraforte, trumpet, trombone, percussion, piano, strings, and live 8-channel electronics. This is the final conversation in the series featuring the 2024 Martirano Award winners, led by Victor Zheng, Coordinator of the Martirano Award and an alum of the School of Music (DMA ’23).
Omer Barash is the first prize winner of the 2024 Martirano Award. His winning work Te’ena, is scored for flute/bass flute, clarinet/contrabass clarinet, bassoon/contraforte, trumpet, trombone, percussion, piano, strings, and live 8-channel electronics.
Victor Zheng is Coordinator of the Martirano Award and an alum of the School of Music (DMA ’23).
Victor: First of all, can you tell me about the title of your work, Te’ena?
Omer: It’s taken from a poem in Hebrew, on which the piece is based. It’s a poem by the poet Omri Livnat. I had already composed a song cycle based on his work, so Te’ena was, in a way, the continuation of that project. “Te’ena” means fig in Hebrew. A free translation of the poem into English would be something like:
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.
I was really interested in this metaphor of an artist, a “man of song,” being on an incessant quest for something, which is always more something – there is this aspiration to the unachievable which I was interested in. When preparing myself to compose the piece, I also researched about wild figs and learnt that the way they pollinate is through a symbiotic relationship with a tiny wasp, the fig wasp. The wasp would go into the fig, and then it would lose its wings when it enters the fig – which is very poetic. It would lay eggs inside the fig, and then die. When the eggs hatch, the new wasps go out covered with pollen and then go into another fig and do the same thing. And that’s how the wild fig pollinates.
Victor: You reference the poem that talks about the “men of song” – as in music? Did you feel any personal inspiration behind that being one of the aforementioned “men of song?”
Omer: Yeah, I felt this was relatable to the way I work. There is always something that I try to achieve which is unachievable. It’s kind of a romantic idea, right? An aspiration towards something transcendent.
Victor: I guess that kind of just bleeds into my next question, about the inspiration for the piece. I want to circle back – you said you already composed a song cycle about this. Did it relate to this resulting work at all?
Omer: In a way, yes. There is one technical aspect that binds the two pieces. The song cycle, titled Malachi (which was my master’s thesis piece when I went to McGill University) was structurally based on the idea of a slow, large-scale interpolation between a chord that symbolizes Heaven and a chord that symbolizes Earth. I conceived of these chords by analyzing the poet’s voice reciting these words in Hebrew: shamayim, which is heaven, and aretz, which is Earth. I extracted different partials from his voice, and each song in the cycle was harmonically based on a chord that was kind of a snapshot throughout an interpolation between these two chords, like one point along this very long transformation. In that song cycle, the central song – meaning song no. 6, since there are eleven of them – is based on a chord which is at the exact center of this long process between Heaven and Earth. And this is a very important chord also in Te’ena.
There is a moment in the piece where I try to emulate the feeling of getting into a fig, like the wasp. There is huge friction, the strings playing scratch tones and a lot of noise, which is supposed to evoke the penetration into the fig. After that, we enter this space which is very static – the harmony of that space in which you are is just one chord, which is the central chord from the song cycle. So, I used the central chord in order to symbolize the state of being “at the core” of something — in this case, of a fig. Sounds are moving around in the electronics, so there is some kind of movement, but in terms of harmony it’s completely still.
Victor: I think I remember that moment in the work. It was really distinctive, where I kind of like – I felt that whole thing spinning around me, as if like of the moment of immersion.
Omer: Yes, exactly.
Victor: I did want to ask you about how you treat electronics. First of all, the instrumental parts of this work, you integrate everything so well into this uniform texture. It’s very difficult – I mean this in the best way possible – to pick out individual instruments sometimes, because everything is just so unified, playing with timbre really well, and sometimes the electronics very subtly blends into it. And to me, that moment we were referring to is the first time I heard the electronics really pop out and it was a really effective moment. I guess I want to ask more about electronics and how you approach them, what your philosophy is. What kind of role do you want them to play within the rest of the ensemble?
Omer: It’s a good question. This was my first piece that I wrote for more than one instrument and electronics. I was ambitious – in some cases in the piece, maybe unnecessarily complicated. But it was a great lesson. I would say the electronics play two main roles. There are a lot of field recordings in the electronics that I took back in my village, my hometown in Israel. There are a lot of fig trees where I grew up, and I just took a recording device and went to an open area in the countryside where there were a couple of fig trees, and recorded what was happening around. So, you hear a lot of birds and some leaves rustling. One role of the electronics is to create a space – both concrete spaces, like the actual surrounding of the fig trees, but also “space” in a more abstract sense, like in that moment when the electronics are surrounding you and you’re being engulfed by sound. The second role is to process the instrumental sounds in real time, in kind of basic ways – some ring modulations and microtonal inflections of pitches. And I think you are right when you identify this as an enrichment of the timbre of the orchestration; so, in these places, the electronics is more of an orchestrational device, I would say, but then you have also these more compositionally important roles of the electronics, like being the space in which you are placed.
Victor: It’s always that age old question, right? It’s how you take something as distinctive as electronics and how do you integrate that with the rest of an ensemble. And the role you took seems to be is to integrate it as one of the members, have it synergized as much as you can with the rest of the ensemble. Is that accurate?
Omer: Yes, I think so. It’s true even when I treat the electronics as the provider of space. For example, when you hear the birds in the electronics, the instruments are also participating; they’re mimicking these birds. So there is this idea of blending, which I also find to be quite romantic, actually.
Victor: I also noticed throughout the work, you have some spoken word – is it mainly in the flute?
Omer: The flute has some spoken passages, you’re right. In this piece, I gave some instruments an almost dramaturgical role. For example, the bassoon is serving as the wasp.
Victor: You even tell [the bassoonist] to dismantle the bassoon at some point, right?
Omer: Exactly, that was my way to retell the process of the wasp losing its wings. It loses some part of its body, and so does the bassoon. And when [the bassoon] is still fully connected, I ask the bassoonist to cover the instrument’s bore with some aluminum foil, so it buzzes, like the wings of an insect. In a similar manner, the flute, too, has a dramaturgical role, of alluring the wasp into the fig, being this voice that calls the wasp; or, by analogy, a muse calling the artist into the space of their creation.
The way the flute does it is by whispering into the flute while playing. The flutist whispers a text that I wrote, but it’s not really meant to be very intelligible. I was mostly interested in how this kind of speech-like sound, amplified by the electronics, could create this alluring sensation, even if it’s not really intelligible.
Victor: Yeah, you’re right – it is subtle. If you’re not listening for it, it might just pass you by and I think that was also really effective. It plays into your theme about electronics and just the general integration of everything. On a personal note, I will say I think that was one of the most well-done parts of the work. Being able to integrate this kind of spoken text and a theme to it without it somehow taking over to be the main character, because you really don’t want it to be, right? It’s not a vocal work – you have it somehow serve a timbral function while being text, and that was actually quite remarkable in my opinion. Was that your intention?
Omer: I would say so, yes. I think it’s true, when you have a text, when you have the human voice in music, to me [it] always draws the attention and becomes the focal point. Some pieces aim to integrate the voice of a singer within the texture of the ensemble, but to me, this never works unfortunately. I’m always drawn too much to the voice to perceive it as something equal to the other things. So, my solution for this problem in Te’ena was to turn one of the of the musicians from the ensemble into a part-vocalist, so the voice is a bit more subdued.
Victor: Balancing the roles with their instrumental duties. I also noticed in the strings – not words, but are those phonemes?
Omer: Oh yes, that’s true, I ask the string players to growl. And when I was rehearsing this piece with Ensemble Modern, we had to work on this quite a bit, because you know, well, growling is difficult. It can also harm your vocal cords if done excessively and incorrectly. Some of the Ensemble Modern members did it amazingly well, especially considering that they had to overcome with their growl the instrumental sound, which is amplified. Both the singing and the growling in Te’ena is always used as an augmentation of the timbre of the instrument, so whenever a musician growls, it’s always while also playing similar sounds on the instruments, like grainy crash-tones played with extreme overpressure of the bow.
Victor: It’s so subtle that I didn’t realize it until I looked at the score! Like, “wait a minute, did I just hear that or was it something outside? Is someone telling me to ‘come in?’” In the context of the piece, everything seems just well balanced and nothing like overblown or out of place, and if that really was your aim, then bravo. I really think it was impressive.
Last question. Do you think you can talk about your experience working with the IME?
Omer: Yes, it was a wonderful experience. And I must admit I was very anxious before coming. I knew the IME was a student ensemble, and assumed that for some of the students it would be the first time playing this kind of music. For some of them, it was even the first time playing the instruments that the score calls for. For example, there is an important contrabass clarinet part in the piece, and the clarinetist [Chandler Cleric] was amazingly open and willing to delve into it. It’s a difficult part with some very virtuosic passages, and he did it wonderfully. And you know, so many of the musicians were so open and eager. The bassoon player [Michael Deresz] was also incredible. He understood the music right away and put his heart and soul into the role of the wasp. It was a wonderful experience – all of my concerns completely disappeared when I met the people. Of course, Steve [Taylor] was so engaged and so professional. And also, lastly, I have to acknowledge the help of Graham [Duncan] and Karen [Blackall]. They were amazing, you know, because the piece calls for a ridiculously heavy setup of electronics – each of the 12 instruments should be amplified separately, and there are eight speakers around the audience that have to be perfectly calibrated, so you hear all of the movement of electronic sounds around the audience. The setting up of all of this took the entire day of the concert; Graham and Karen were there, very patiently helping me, and I couldn’t have asked for a better support for this. It was really wonderful. And of course, meeting Chris [Fisher-Lochhead] and Daniel [Fawcett], the other two prize winners, was very lovely and enriching and I learned a lot from them, too. It was a very enjoyable couple of days.
Te’ena and Omer’s other works can be found on his personal website.
Photo credit to Laura Mykolaitytė.