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John Harbison's Composition for the Anniversary of Israel
From: Columbia University
| By:
John Harbison |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
When John Harbison was asked to compose a musical piece to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the State of Israel, 
he found himself faced with a daunting but compelling charge. It was only after studying the music, language, poetry and politics of the country that the idea for "Four Psalms," a large cantata, began to take shape. By incorporating modern issues as well as historical references, the piece celebrates Israel's cultural history at the same time that it offers hope for the country's future. For Harbison (above), one of America's most prominent composers, the challenge of composing for such a specific and special occasion was augmented by the passionate and vocal opinions of numerous people involved with the project. Despite the contentious and oftentimes political obstacles, in April 1999 the Chicago Symphony and Chorus performed Harbison's work to wide critical acclaim. He visited Columbia University to talk about the creative process of researching, developing and writing "Four Psalms" and the various elements that influenced its composition. |
Listen to an excerpt from the prelude to "Four Psalms," performed by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson. |
 nitially I got a phone call from a gentleman in Chicago who said he represented a committee that had been formed by the Israeli Consulate of Chicago to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the State of Israel with a large musical piece. They had been working through a process that had taken a long time and were somewhat behind in terms of getting ready for the date. They offered me a commission of very wide latitude in some ways and very refined specifics in other ways, which was to be ready for the year of the anniversary, then barely a year and a half off. |
At that point I really felt I was too preoccupied. I was working on the opera The Great Gatsby and I didn't feel I had time to do it, so I very respectfully opted out. But for about a week afterward I kept carrying around images of Israel. I'd always wanted to visit Israel, but I'm not sure what the images are based on, because I'd never been there. I think they were sort of Bible movie images as much as anything--deserts, sharp mountains--perhaps conditioned by years of Old Testament films. |
In any case, I began to feel that the occasion was both too challenging and too interesting to not at least see whether the opportunity was still available. I asked my publisher to call and explain that I wasn't Jewish and that I had never been to Israel. The committee said, "Well, that's OK; we kind of suspected that. But what we want here, once our committee functions, is for the shape of this project to be generated independent of us." |
Once I accepted the charge, this did not turn out to be true. The committee was the most active and interested commissioner that I've ever dealt with. I appeared before them three times to outline plans and describe various kinds of parameters of the piece. I circulated various text ideas and got very vigorous responses, not only from the 15 members of the group but also from people in Israel and from other consulates. It became an extraordinarily lively interchange of ideas. |
The more I dug into the project, the more material there was that I wanted to include and the less time there seemed to be to try to do it. I began to develop a long bookshelf of things that I had read: poetry, history, commentary and also films. It was an extraordinarily rich kind of soil I was digging into. |
Initial ideas
My first idea was that I would choose ancient texts that would stand for certain kinds of specific events, but also themes of the modern State of Israel. I began with this assumption, and then I veered away and thought I should represent Israeli poetry. I went to Israel to meet some of the poets whose work I thought I was going to use. |
However, in the course of the trip what they were saying to me--and what people were saying to me about the whole project--started to become interesting in itself. For the first time in my life I was taking notes on conversations I was having, with everyone from the people that were officially on the itinerary, to people who were not, to folks in the United States who had heard about this project, and others. |
Finally I had close to 40 fairly accurate transcriptions of encounters about Israel. That subject matter began in my mind to displace modern poetry, and the ancient texts that I wanted to use began to form in relationship to some of these conversations. |
I began also to deal with the issue of language. I began to think that I should set these ancient texts--in this case, psalms--in Hebrew, but I didn't know any Hebrew. So I collected tapes in various voices, registers and accents of the texts I was interested in. I also got tourist language tapes and started trying to teach myself conversational Hebrew so I could get some sense of accentuation. |
I had a lot of interlocking projects here. At this point I began to circulate the encounters that I wanted to use in the piece. That's when things really got lively. Because every one of the living people that I wanted to put in the piece was objected to by some part of the constituency that I was working for. My consolation was that really everyone was felt to be unacceptable to someone who was interested in the genesis of the piece. So with this distribution I felt that I could really retain everyone that I felt I needed to have. |
So everyone that I felt was important in relation to the psalms did stay in the piece. Some are people that I know quite well, and some have recognized themselves as they appear here, and some are people that I knew much more formally and whom I suppose might or might not notice that those were things that they said. |
Prayer of Amemar
The piece began to assemble--a text with the psalms still at the center, chorally, in Hebrew and remarks from everyone else in English, because all these other remarks had been made to me in English, even those by Israeli citizens. Yet I still felt like something was missing from the text. I sat down to begin and it seemed to me what I couldn't find was a way for the listeners or the receivers to think about the whole thing. It bothered me that there was no kind of umbrella about how we should all approach this. |
At that point I began to page through a prayer book and I came upon the prelude material, which my scholar friends told me is a very modern text. It's from Babylon in 424 CE. At that time there was a group of rabbis in Babylon who believed in the mysterious indicative power of dreams. Rabbi Amemar, the author of this prayer, seemed to state a kind of gateway, or way of receiving, what was to follow in this piece. |
So I invented another soloist; up to this point I only had three. The mezzo-soprano joined the piece to present the prayer of Amemar. I wanted to keep some of the crucial lines in his dream as a thematic center for the piece: "May it be your will ... that all my dreams regarding myself and regarding all of Israel be good ones--those I have dreamed about myself, those I have dreamed about others, and those that others have dreamed about me. If they are good, strengthen them, fortify them, make them endure ... But if they require healing, heal them." That seemed to me important, because it dealt with the great diversity of opinion that was going to be stated and not really reconciled. |
Then the whole question really became whether any of this should resolve. The first audiences for this piece were quite disturbed that neither the prelude nor the whole piece resolves in any sort of straightforward way. Over and over the embassy folks told me this should be a celebration, and I kept saying it is a celebration because all these people are there. But they, I think, meant celebration in a rather different sense. |
In my mind the celebratory quality of the piece is inclusiveness. In a healthy young democracy, vehemence is possible. When I was in Israel I thought it must have been like being in the United States in the Jacksonian era, when people were so incredibly more volatile and more willing to just say things directly at each other. The sense of an absolute volatility is one of the things that struck me as very palpable while I was there. In a way, the various characters that we meet don't talk to each other. They talk in some ways past each other, but they just register their points of view. |
The idea of Amemar's dream, which was an afterthought in the constructing of the text, became a central thematic issue for the piece. Coincidentally, it kept intersecting with parts of what people were saying in these little moments of encounter; it recurs as it goes along. The text is really the genesis of the two languages of the piece. |
Musical qualities of the psalms
I saw the need for two languages in the more ritualistic or hieratical of the psalms to get the Hebrew rhythms to inhabit them naturally. I discovered very naively something about the psalms which I probably shouldn't have been surprised by, which is that they are very metrical, and in some cases rhyme. That shouldn't be a surprise, but many of the English versions also reproduced this. That was a somewhat unexpected influence on their construction, because I hadn't really known what to expect from the actual sound of these Hebrew psalms. |
I also discovered from discussing this with various kinds of people in an advisory capacity that these psalms all had a very current function in the liturgy of today. In fact, they carried with them some musical, at least conventional, settings that would have been known to some of the listeners. I was told, for instance, that the final psalm, "Hiney mah tov umah na'im" ("How good and pleasant it is"), which is actually set by Shütz and Bach as well, is often sung as a round. Rather than using the actual round that is familiar in summer camps and so forth, I just took the idea that it could be a round. |
I also knew that the second psalm that I use, "Shir hama'a lot" ("A song of ascents"), is often expressed as an antiphon. The only one for which I used material from the modern usage settings is the third one, "Al naharot Bavel" ("By the rivers of Babylon"), in which I did take the tune. Rhythmically it's not the same, but the tune is there and it became a very important constructive tissue for the whole piece. |
I never thought that voice was so important. And in the case of this piece the absorption I think came a lot through just my readers seeing melodies. You know, sort of volunteering melodies along with the pronunciation guides. And I began to feel that this was something that ought to be part of the piece. But it also was, I think, in the nature of the rhythm of the language. I was so struck by the unique configuration of Hebrew. |
I wrote this piece for a really large chorus. I don't know how many of you have ever written for, or had the opportunity to write for, a chorus of a couple hundred. This is a different medium or a different kind of choral writing from the typical chamber chorus that most of us would think about, and a different kind of projection and inertia had to be calculated in. The orchestra is rather small, just pairs of winds. |
There is a high level of choral preparation in the performance and an almost compensatory lack of preparation in the orchestra that is part of the lot of contemporary composition. But I realized that one of the hidden bonuses of a piece like this is that a chorus of 200 really has to rehearse to learn their parts. Next time, I think, I might even try 300 or 400, because that much more rehearsal would be needed. The sheer mass is certainly part of the conception of this piece. When they come in they are meant to sound more than congregational, perhaps hypercongregational. |
Modern voices
I wanted the sound of the people of today to reflect the sound of the encounter--that is, either the sound of what I felt they were thinking about or the sound of where they were making these remarks. In the case of the driver or in the case of the guide, it was much more the physical environment in which they spoke. And that, of course, is quite a different world from the actual psalms, which occur in a more timeless environment. |
The three soloists--the soprano, the tenor and the bass--impersonate all of the encounters. The mezzo-soprano is entirely restricted to the Babylonian rabbi. In the piece we seem to be moving toward some sort of less harsh exchange of voices, when all of a sudden this business about the Palestinian and the rather brutish response of the driver shows up. It is a kind of a thorn in the piece, there's no doubt about it. That was another thing that was in a sense related to the last chord. Could not the piece move toward some distillation of clarity? That was one of the more troubling decisions in making the piece. |
All these things were considered, and they were considered very much in terms of the experience of the tourist. This piece doesn't claim more than a really touristic acquaintance with the culture, which was probably my advantage and disadvantage in making the piece. When I talked to Israeli composers about this, they all said, "Well, I'm glad you're doing it," which was a response I really understood, because it did raise a lot of issues for which I didn't have to take complete cultural responsibility. I was an observer, and, as I've said, deeply a tourist. |
I also find as a tourist the sort of attitude that Copland had when he went to Mexico. As long as you don't think you've really "got it," you can do a lot in terms of reference. I think that it helps to have a certain distance. The jump from the touristic to the actual mastery of the material is really large. |
But in the case of this piece I really did feel that it also is absorbable through the sound of the arrangement. In some cases I also felt very fortunate in the way certain things were stated by these people, because I really didn't do anything to the language here. People would talk to me, and I pared it down, but all the phrases are exactly as they were spoken. Actually, a couple of people who are New Yorkers did recognize themselves immediately, and noted the accuracy of the cadence in the piece. |
Some of the speakers in the piece are very distinguished citizens of Israel and have said these sorts of things in public. They are very readily identifiable, if you follow the politics in the recent history of Israel. It's really quite startling, that you can listen to someone you don't know and within just a few minutes you're getting an amazingly quick access to what's on their minds. |
The journalistic aspect of the piece still makes me a little uncomfortable. I'm a little surprised even a year or two away from this how much of it was still as contemporary as it seems to be. If you follow the newspapers as I now do, you do find that a lot of this keeps recurring in slightly varying forms all the time. |
Reactions to "Four Psalms"
I think the reaction to the piece is part of the experience, since there was such a close monitor on the genesis of the piece. My correspondence back and forth with the consul-general, various members of the committee and the various people interested in the shaping of the piece was really, for me, without precedent. |
Some of these people were musicians, some were cultural figures of certain kinds, some were political figures and others were business folks. At one point, when it looked like we were at an impasse, I actually had to ask one member of the committee to intercede with the consul-general to put the whole project back on the rails. It was a very vigorous, rocky process. At certain times I was quite sure we would not get to the other end. |
All of the musical people that I talked to while working on this piece advised against going so far toward the occasional. They told me, "Please don't use these modern texts, because they will date, they will become banal. They will be OK for just that weekend and they will mean that the piece just stays right there in time and never goes anywhere." But I felt the charge of the piece was essentially to do that--to hit the mark of this occasion and not worry about the rest. Because it seemed such a singular kind of proposition, that really seemed the way to do it. |
I had to do it the way I felt that this particular situation required. Because without the witness of these specific 50 years and these people, I felt that the sense of the occasion and the commission itself would not be satisfied. In this case I went against a lot of the best advice that I had and decided to simply focus on the occasion. |
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