Yair Klartag (composer)

Musikwissenschaftler Markus Zwenzner im Gespräch mit Yair Klartag.

MZ: Okay, so it’s quite a mind blowing task to look at your score somehow. It’s very interesting, very fascinating. But before we turn to the music, I would like to ask you some general questions–also on behalf of the wishes of Christine. And maybe it’s even a standard question that I will ask all composers that are involved with the festival next year, which I’m going to interview. So we are living in dark times at the moment, really. And I would like to ask you how you deal with this as a composer? What is your personal »crisis mode« as a composer, so to say?

 

YK: With this specific piece and this specific situation, I feel like this piece takes this question really to an extreme. Finishing this piece during this time is really a very, very, very strange experience. I could answer that more generally: for me, it’s always something about this activity, the creation of this abstract world, living in these fantasy universes and play there… that is, in a way, always kind of a statement. It’s always like this. This is what it is for me. It’s in a way a statement saying: I’m not engaging with the real world. I’m not engaging with what the big forces wanted me to be. And I make a choice to be in this world of abstract relationships between sounds. And for me, it always feels a bit like a political statement in a way. So just the act of composition in general.

 

MZ: Maybe, to pose the question in another way: to what extent can what you do in your profession serve as an enrichment and perhaps an encouragement for the audience? It’s maybe the same question in another »facon«. What is your relationship with the audience in this respect?

 

YK: Well, I guess, it’s always the wish of an artist… I think the act of expression is in a way to want to bring people into your inner world. You express something so you can share it with other people. And again, in the way I described it before, there is this sense of creating a space where we can take really, really seriously a relationship between sounds, which are these ephemeral things that you cannot touch and that don’t matter for anything. And just the idea of: we can all together concentrate on this and attribute really a lot of importance to it–saying it’s really, really important whether this sound goes this way or this way–in a community, is of course, the dream. So for me, it’s an extension of what I said before. Of course I want to create the spaces, but if I can share that with more people…–this can be the musicians and the audience, this can be people who are interested afterwards, they are sometimes journalists or musicologists–[it will be what I dream about]. So it’s all sort of creating a community within this space. For me, just the existence of this community is a bit like a political statement and a resistance against the things outside. So of course I think this is the wish of every artists, right? That they will share the space with the audience, they will share the space with me, and they will follow, they will share the sort of sonic and philosophical ideas with me.

 

MZ: Okay, Thank you. Let’s now come to your piece, Music of the Sefiras. The subtitle declares that this full length composition is to be a kind of musical lecture on recently discovered musical and theoretical manuscripts by a person named Moshe Najara. What can you tell me about the ideological background to your composition? How how did this idea come about, how did it come to your mind and why this turn to an historiographical »extreme« in your words, that »is absorbed in irrational mysticism«? How did you come to do that?

 

YK: I feel like there are several different trajectories in my work that brought me to this specific idea. Some of them are more abstract. One is: I’m always super interested in text and how texts and meanings work and how they work in music. What’s the relation between sound and text, between language and sound. And so part of my interest comes from this idea of just using text in music not as a musical material, but as an actual sound. It has meaning, it says something, but it’s all within the world of sound. I was always a little bit jealous of visual artists that feel very comfortable to use text in their individual art. And I feel like in music we tend to use text either completely structurally or take it really as musical material. And I’ve always found it interesting to find these spaces in between. So I think this was one side of it, this use of text. And here for me, that is really something kind of, I don’t know, on the border because it is an abstract sound. So I’m using a spoken text that I produced. I used generative A.I. I took the voice of Gershom Scholem, the famous Kabbalah researcher. And there were enough recordings of him, so I could actually replicate his voice and recreate it. So it is sound that I created using generative A.I. So it is music in a sense. It’s not a recording of anyone. It’s a completely abstract music. So this is the technical side of it. And then the other side, the more conceptual side comes from something, which really surprised me. I was always very reluctant to be interested in these sort of things. And I would say I think of myself as a universal composer and I don’t care about my background and things like that. But then I was recently more and more exposed to very specific and very esoteric parts of Jewish history that I felt reminded me of my parents a little bit or things like that, and felt connected to some things that are very relevant for me. And I wondered and it was quite bizarre and it’s a lot about how rationalism and mysticism are being treated in Judaism. So these two sides of it, these extremes, in a sense both are really important in the history. So the Kabbalah is like a form of Jewish mysticism, people like Madonna are practicing it and it’s very popular. And actually the rationalist side of Judaism is very influenced by neo-platonic philosophy. They were really more like logicians. It’s completely kind of forgotten, not completely forgotten, but it’s pretty forgotten. And when I discovered all these texts, I was super surprised. And the mysticism side of it was something that was always very distant for me. It was very, very religious. I’m completely non-religious. And it’s about all these very metaphysical things. But with the time I somehow randomly started reading about the Kabbalah and its inventions. And it’s actually like: this is our Shakespeare, this is our da Vinci. I mean, these are the Jews. That’s what they were doing. And it’s actually super creative. The texts I use, they’re from the Kabbalah and in them it says things like »the world is created with a line and a circle and the light goes…«. It means completely crazy things and is very beautiful, very creative. So I was discovering this side. And then there also was something about the story of this false messiah (Sabbatai Zvi) that came, which in a sense is super relevant today in many ways. If you see the history of these people during this time, it’s an unbelievable suffering, like complete communities that are massacred everywhere. is all the background for people like Sabbatai Zvi at the end of the 17th century. There came these people who claimed to be the messiah. And there was something really interesting about this guy, Sabbatai Zvi, who showed up at the end of the 17th century. There was this very interesting theology there: Ok, now the messiah has come, so everything is turned around. Everything what was forbidden is allowed, what was allowed, forbidden. There is no men and women and completely crazy things that surprised me immensely. This is very different than the way I normally perceive the history of Judaism and there are quite crazy things. So his story is very crazy. After three years, after he declared himself Messiah, he was invited to the Turkish Sultan. And because [Gaza] was part of the Ottoman Empire, he was forced to convert to Islam, and then his followers also converted with him and stayed in Islam. And they exist until today actually in Turkey. There is a small cult called the Dönme and they still have very bizarre things, for example, if I understand correctly, they have one day a week where they have to do swinging, when they exchange partners. And it’s all part of this idea of: everything is allowed. You know, you don’t need to stay married. You don’t need to. Everything is allowed. So for me there was something very attractive and interesting about this being part of my history, with all these extreme rationalists on the other hand. And furthermore I was very influenced by a book by Olga Tokarczuk that won the Nobel Prize in 2018, I think, and her book is called The Books of Jacob. That basically tells the story of the next messiah. So I talk about that too. This idea of him continued for a few generations. And then after like 100 years came this crazier guy called Jacob Frank who was even crazier and did really, really extreme things. And this book of Olga Tokarczuk is about him. And I read this book and I was very surprised how she was looking at it from her perspective. For her it’s a little bit like the history of the Polish people and all these kinds of things. So these were all things that were just floating around. And then I had this idea of creating a composer. So I wanted to invent a composer that didn’t exist but could have existed. I thought with all this craziness, what would a musician do? What kind of music would come out of it? Because there is no music there. No one that was writing music in general. Like there was barely any Jewish music in this period at all, and definitely not in this area of Egypt. And then I became a bit like a nerd and found all this historical context. And I don’t know how, but somehow this story came up, and it really made a lot of sense to me because everything there is real. So it’s like there is a whole story where everything is historical fact, basically, except for this guy. But so this guy that I invented, Moshe Najara, his father was actually living in Gaza in the 17th century and he was very close to Nathan of Gaza, who was a prophet. And when Sabbatai Zvi, the false messiah, came, he was hosted at his home. So this is a completely real person. And his grandfather is actually quite a famous person, a poet. And they even say he’s like the father of Jewish music, a little bit influenced by Ottoman music. And he actually really had this also very bizarre fight with the other people that were engaging this mystical Kabbalah. So all these stories are all real. And I just added one person. So for me, something drew me to this idea of: I invent this person and then I can write his music. That also freed me a little bit. Like this piece in the end is a little bit his music. It’s not my music. And then I invented a little bit of music theory. He has this mystical interval and he had this book of Kepler that he found randomly and it became also part of his mysticism. So there is this side of inventing this person and inventing his music and his ideas. And something that was really important: It is music being foreign to him, so he not, you know, he didn’t listen to Monteverdi etc. He doesn’t know anything. He lives in this nowhere in a community that is completely secluded from society. No one wants to talk to him because he was a follower of this bizarre, mystical thing and he didn’t really hear much music. So he kind of needs to invent for himself what music is. So this was really interesting for me musically, how he would imagine polyphony. But then he heard some Turkish music and he has this mystical ideas about numbers. So all of this goes together.

 

MZ: This is kind of a Forest Gump in the musical Sense, but it’s fantastic because it’s kind of a hyper-Forest Gump, as it has so many aspects and interesting facets.

 

YK: Maybe I should expand on another layer that for me is super interesting and important, which is the layer of the speaker. So there is this other character, that’s based on Gershom Sholem, who for me really represents this side of rationalism, he’s a scientist, and the piece starts by him giving a lecture. So the piece actually is kind of a lecture and it starts by just him giving a lecture that’s about this history and it’s very accurate. And he works with this other professor to reconstruct the music. And so it starts like this. But then this voice, this character–that is, again, artificial intelligence, it doesn’t exist–gradually, while the piece grows, becomes part of the music. But he also somehow becomes less and less rational. So at first he is kind of distant like an anthropologist. He’s just looking at these things. But by the end he is actually completely inside this very mystical world and is completely taken by these mystical ideas. And it’s something that I found for real with Gershom Sholem, who was also, if you read his writings, very scientific. He was friends with Walter Benjamin and all these big figures, very, very cultured, very learned. But by the end of his life, in his diary, he said: Yeah, well, one time I tried this type of kabbalistic meditation as part of the research. He had to try it a little bit. For me, it was a little bit like brain scientists who have to try LSD just once, just for the research. So there is something about him with this extreme rationalism that’s like: you are actually hiding that, which is behind it, the irrational.

 

MZ: What are your strategies in combining those many different modes of expression, music and text? Maybe you can tell me some things about the composing strategies you have chosen there?

 

YK: It’s a bit like I said before, I saw this as a process. The piece has ten movements and this relationship is really different in each movement. The piece starts with just music. And then enters the lecture, saying, okay, what you just heard are examples of what we tried to reconstruct. And then it starts to be like a lecture but with some weird sounds. So there were parts in which I thought about mixing the speaking with extensions of white noise, because the voice recording sounds like an historical recording, the generative AI replicated also the noise and it sounds really like something from the 1960s. So it’s about this, and then there are different relationships. Sometimes the music really reacts to something in the text. Sometimes it’s completely separated, there is the music and there he speaks, which is the beginning. But gradually as the piece goes on, there are different parts where the speaking actually becomes music. So for example, there is a movement where he is kind of singing, he always says »Well«, he always starts sentences with »Well«, but then his »wells« become something more like, »weeeeeell«… And this becomes suddenly a musical element. It’s like really in counterpoint with the instruments, there is a part where the voice speaks backwards. I mean, there are different things that happen to his voice that become musical, but then sometimes it’s distanced again, where it goes back to a more standard relationship of lecture and music in the background.

 

YK: By the end, it’s like he just decides to go into it, he is completely drawn to this sort of mystical meditation process. And this is completely real. This is similar to what Madonna, I think, is doing, they have these ideas in the Kabbalah that are actually really beautiful. It’s all about the letters. And it kind of reminds me a little bit sometimes of postmodernists like Jacques Derrida, you know, you kind of take the text out of the meaning. And they do a lot of things of like taking letters and their combinations that are mystical and you read them and breathe. And so he starts to do this and he gets into like a more regular way of doing this. And then the music completely becomes one, and becomes very like, what word would I use? Very surreal.

 

MZ: So for me, if I look at the score and I imagine the music somehow, basically it’s a great enigma, somehow a fascinating sphinx to be deciphered somehow, riddles, to be deciphered, given by a sphinx somehow. So you’re dealing with the mystical tradition of Judaism, the Kabbalah and things, all what you’ve talked to me about now. And, well, it’s a cosmos. It’s very, very strange, especially to secular persons like myself. And the question is…

 

YK: It’s also very strange for me!

 

MZ: Yes, that’s what you said. That’s interesting. But is it in a sense like trying to activate people listening by giving them riddles to solve somehow?

 

YK: I think the piece has one layer, that is very: there is everything there, in a way, so you can just listen to it. [But] I definitely want to invite people to look further. It’s a little bit like: I have the feeling that I divide composers into those who are jealous of visual artists and the ones who are jealous of authors or writers. So I’m from the side that is jealous of authors, and I feel like there is something about novelists for example: They have such big expectations of the readers, what they have to understand, to fill the gaps, to look beyond. It’s so common and it’s so normal. And I feel like we never have this. We are afraid, we always give everything so that it’s clear, so that it’s easy to digest. And I like this idea of: there are all these quotations, and they’re all real, but they come from really strange places, with really weird connections. And I think I wanted to have this under-layer. So there is the layer to which you can just listen and it works, but you can always look for more connections that are textual and will hopefully, like you said, activate. This idea of the same intertextuality, the same complex reference also exists in the music, so I hope that by thinking about what happens in the text, people will also think about: Okay, what is going on in the music? What’s the music referring to? There are a lot of things in the music, the piece has a lot… it’s long for me, it’s very long, it’s an hour. And it has a lot of cross-references within itself. So even though it is a little bit like ten miniatures, they are always referencing each other and things come back and were always there before. There is an element of this Turkish rhythm that sometimes appears in a few places but it’s never really explained. The way I always saw text in music is that I have this wish that if people treat text seriously and try to understand, it will be reflected in the way they listen to the music, and that they would take it as seriously and they would say: Okay, if in the text there is all this complexity, we need to give the same attention to the sound. The same happens there too.

 

MZ: Very nice. You don’t consider yourself as a very religious person, as you said. So it’s primarily a cultural interest also in what religions have brought about for humankind somehow making the best out of it, maybe even the cultural aspect of religions, besides the disruptive aspects of religion we also have plenty of in the world, unfortunately. So thank you very much. That’s fantastic. What is your relationship–maybe a very technical question, very prosaic question–with ensemble recherche? Have you worked with them before? Is it like you have also adjusted somehow to what they bring with them, the ways of interpreting and playing? Has there been a longer relationship, or will it be a premiere for you?

 

YK: I do have some relationship. I mean, actually this project, it went through a lot. The idea of my piece really changed completely in the middle. They were pretty angry at me because, you know, it was COVID, and, you know, it has been rolling in different directions. And I do have a relationship with them. I worked with them before once. I’m teaching now and I did also just do a course with my students with them. For me, what I really like about them, which was the idea why I wanted to work with them, which was my initiative, is that I feel like it’s an ensemble that has a history. It’s not like… it’s not the »young and hip« kind, they did for example these big pieces, they played Grisey’s Vortex Temporum for the first time. And also I really like that I have the feeling that each one of them is like a personality. They are very well formed musical personalities that have a lot of presence. For me, that’s how I feel.

 

MZ: So there is the historical dimension to your music and also the historical dimension to the ensemble somehow, and this fits very well, I would say.

 

YK: Yeah, I feel like it’s not a piece for… I don’t know. I think it could work otherwise. But I liked this idea also. There is something about them that they play on the verge of chamber music, so they play without conductor usually, and they are able to do quite complex things. So that is something interesting there, that it’s chamber music, but it’s a relatively big group for chamber music, but they still have this culture of playing chamber music, they’re involved. It’s not like playing in an orchestra. So I think these are things important for me too.

 

MZ: My final question is about something, we have touched already: Today I just heard a radio feature about the rich culture of the Gaza region with the oldest Christian church being located there and all this history in this region. And I know it’s a difficult question, but how do you feel about this coincidence now, having written a music about a fictitious person from Gaza and now relating this to those really harrowing events today? Do you try not to think about it or what’s your position there?

 

YK: So there is a side of me that is a little bit afraid, that it will be taken to this side, I mean, I can’t imagine the interpretation. That would be very tragic for me. And it was a coincidence. I mean, when I found this story and I found this thing that happens in Gaza, it was interesting for me because it’s a place that’s always been such a complex place. I mean, we have a bunch of pieces of land like this in Israel. I mean, Jerusalem also is a very, very, very complicated place. But there is something about Gaza and especially in the last century, it’s just such a strange place. And it is always like all the bad things in the world happen there, so at least in the last decades. It was interesting for me, to be honest, that I didn’t even know that there were Jews there in the seventeenth century. I was surprised that there was someone there. And also, when I tell the story to people here, no one thinks about that. There were people there. I must admit that I almost thought at some point to remove this part because with this situation there is a danger that it becomes the main thing. And it’s just a detail in the story, in the real story. And I just hope that it will come back to be this multicultural place. I think for me, one of the things that was really fun for me was to arrange these quotes, I put a quote of something in every movement. And there was something there that makes you see, how international the world was there. There is this one British guy that came and wrote a story about it, and this Calvinist priest from the Netherlands who came and wrote about it and they were all moving around. And I definitely gathered that it was part of the Ottoman Empire, and at some point was part of greater Syria, and there were these few tiny Jewish communities there, that were struggling within themselves because they were a little bit banned. So, I mean, it definitely gives you hope that it will come back to be this like place of like people from different places that can somehow coexist.

 

MZ: This is interesting, because what after you told me about this Sabbatianism, one gets the impression that it’s kind of a utopia in terms of having fluidity, just breaking, breaching the borders somehow. Maybe it’s a positive vision also for this region that you are formulating with your music in the end.

 

YK: I definitely have a sense like I spent so much time of my life on this conflict. I mean, this Israeli-Arab conflict is such a big presence in my life. I feel like I was… I went to demonstrations, I think, when I was 14. So it’s 25 years of fighting the occupation from every direction. And it’s just such a heavy load. And in a sense, there is something in your mind like: Okay, we are all basically from the Middle East. It’s basically the same people. I mean, my mother was coming from Tunisia and spoke Arabic. These divisions are so crazy, it’s crazy to go to such extremes where it’s all like… I don’t know.

 

MZ: Well, the better I can understand that you are doing what you are doing by composing this piece somehow. What you said in the beginning of our conversation: it’s just trying to pushan alternative thinking towards what we have in reality at the moment. And I really like that idea so much, I must say so. Well, this is really wonderful. Thank you. Thank you very much.