| The Book
of Quartets
When I wrote the first piece in the Book of Quartets in 1995, I had no
idea what path I had started down. In the following weeks I wrote a few
more pieces of the same texture and about the same length, and found it
so interesting that I resolved to create a cycle of around 20 pieces (the
origin of the title). The pieces were done, my friends in Tel Aviv played
them, but I had the feeling that something still remained to be said through
this means of expression – that here, perhaps, something like a
new aesthetic could arise. I had the idea of writing a yearlong cycle
of 365 pieces. That took about three years, and I was so preoccupied with
the work that I didn’t actually notice when piece 365 came and went,
- and I still continue to write them almost every day.
Despite my love of theorizing, analyzing, philosophizing, and so on, there’s
not much I can say about the Book of Quartets. The work makes demands
on my entire being – intuition as well as reason. There’s
still no way I can assess them “from outside.” I once defined
them as “practical (experimental) metaphysics.” I could also
put forth the claim that, for me, writing and playing the quartets means
roughly the same thing as being alive.
The pieces are perceived quite differently by different listeners; for me, they are poems, a literary event no less than a musical one –
poems neither in Russian, Hebrew, nor German, but in the language of music,
able to express everything that moves me. As with a volume of poetry,
the pieces are linked to one another, so that one can open the book at
any page and read any number of poems at one time.
- poem (2012)
-Two poems (2008)
- 6 poems (2010)
- Two poems for string quartet (2004)
-Wort
-Stein
4 poems for string quartett (2006)
- 1.
- 2.
- 3.
- 4.
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