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commissioned by: Muzik 3 Foundation for the Flux Quartet
premiere: Flux Quartet at the La Jolla Music Society Summerfest, August 9, 2018
length: 12 minutes
date: June 2018
instrumentation: spatial string quartet (performers located in the four corners of the room, around the audience)
audio (premiere performance by the Flux Quartet)
program note: For centuries, Jewish congregations throughout the world have read the text of the Hebrew Bible aloud in synagogue with a kind of ritual chanting referred to as cantillation. A set of small symbols, or tropes, that appear above and below the text provide guidance for the structure and melismatic patterns of this chanting. Yet within different communities, the tropes have been interpreted in a wide variety of ways that reflect the assimilation of local musical practices. While the text and tropes look exactly the same, the resulting sound is quite different in each community, thereby giving voice to the Jewish diaspora.
Drawing on the text of the first four sentences of B'reisheet, the opening section of Genesis, I have created my own interpretation of the tropes using a single pitch with rhythmic and timbral variations, which appears after a brief introduction. As it is repeated, it is complemented by transcriptions of traditional cantillation patterns, including Sephardic (Syrian and Moroccan) and Ashkenazic (Hungarian and British) versions. By gradually combining these versions and presenting them simultaneously, while positioning the members of the quartet around the audience, I hope to give voice to this remarkable phenomenon – to the way in which the tropes and text have historically traveled with Jewish communities throughout the world, both connecting them and also marking their differences of place through sound.
Tropes was commissioned by the Muzik 3 Foundation for the Flux Quartet. It is dedicated to my grandfather, Samuel Steiger, who emigrated in the late nineteenth century and worked tirelessly in the 1930s and 40s to help family members escape Europe and begin new lives here in the United States.