Dream of the Broken Mirror –
On the composer Tzvi Avni (b. 1927)
A subtle,
somewhat hazy image formed by the cor anglais is reflected in the shards of a
shattered mirror: first in the tuned percussion instruments – xylophone,
glockenspiel and celesta – and subsequently in the strings’ broad, doleful
chords. A wide range of harmonies and subtle tone combinations emerges from the
orchestra. This is Dreams of a Broken Mirror, the second movement of Tzvi
Avni’s Programme Music for symphony orchestra, one of his most
unique and original movements.
In essence,
virtually all of Avni’s works seem like hazy images in shattered mirrors. The
image is of the artist; the shattered mirror is the musical work. The artist is
introverted, sometimes aloof, sometimes near, his mind feverish with thoughts
and ideas. At times he is strongly expressive, prone to momentary outbursts; at
other times he is pensive, bearing a sad countenance. The music is a mosaic of
mysterious harmonies, strident clusters and melodic fragments – alternately
melancholy, lucid or delicate. The music envelops the listener in a poignant yet
subtle veil of sadness.
Tzvi Avni’s
creative path begins in the mid-1950s. Apart from his work at the Jerusalem
Academy of Music and Dance, he devotes most of his time and energy to
composition. He has not taken up conducting or concert appearances, and declined
administrative posts in academic institutions. In this, he represents an
artist’s serious, focused and single-minded commitment to his artistic calling.
His many works are landmarks in the history of Israeli art
music.
Avni was born
in Saarbrücken, Germany, in 1927, immigrated to Israel as a child in 1935, and
spent his childhood and adolescence in Haifa. He reached music on his own,
learning to play various folk instruments (e.g., mandolin, harmonica and
recorders). Through these, he discovered his affinity with musical performance
and, above all, with musical creativity. He began to play and compose at a very
young age, but only at 16 did he begin his formal studies in piano and in music
literature. Among his first teachers were the pianist Frank Pelleg and the
composer Abel Ehrlich. During his military service in the navy, he began
composition studies in Ehrlich’s class at the Tel Aviv Music Academy. Later he
studied with composers Paul Ben-Haim and Mordecai Seter, concluding his studies
in the Academy with the latter. During and after his studies, he worked for
eight years as a music teacher in elementary schools. In 1962-1964 he went to
the United States, studying composition with Aaron Copland and Lukas Foss at
Tanglewood and electronic music with Vladimir Ussachevsky at the
Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center.
Upon his
return from the United States, Avni immersed himself in Israel’s musical life.
He took on several significant posts, among them Director of the Central Music
Library in Tel Aviv, Chairman of the Israel Composers’ League, Chairman of
Israel Jeunesses Musicales’ Board of Director (a position he still holds) and
Editor of Gitit, the Israel Jeunesses Musicales monthly journal. In 1971,
Jochebed Ostrowski and Mendi Rodan invited him to establish a laboratory for
electronic music at the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance. He integrated
quickly into the Academy, was appointed full professor in 1976, and became a
prominent composition teacher, influencing generations of
students.
As a composer,
Avni established himself as one of the foremost creators of the second
generation. His circles of friends are many and varied – in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem,
Haifa and many places in Europe and the United States. The wide acclaim he has
earned is manifest in the many awards he received and in myriad performances of
his works, both in Israel and abroad. His orchestral works are played frequently
by all Israeli orchestras – not least the Israel Philharmonic, which performed
and recorded several of them. His chamber and vocal works stand at the heart of
the Israeli repertoire, and his electronic compositions – especially those that
combine live performance with pre-recorded soundtracks – earned a central place
in the electro-acoustic genre in Israel and abroad. His personal style –
combining tradition and innovation, East and West – frequently made him the
reluctant target of intense criticism; in several cases he responded with witty,
stimulating and thought-provoking articles.
Tzvi Avni is a
modest and genial man, well-educated and broad-minded; he inspires in his
environment a spirit of peace and serenity. At a relatively late age, he became
a family man. Several years after the tragic death of his first wife, Pnina
Grodnai, he re-married. Tragedy struck his family
again two years ago with the premature death of Hana Yaddor, his second wife and
the mother of his children.
Avni’s other,
extended family consists of his generations of students (including myself), who
bask in his rich Hebrew, his vast knowledge of art and literature, and his
intellectual curiosity. As a composition teacher, he is especially noted for his
open-minded approach to his students’ varied styles. Only in retrospect could
we, as his students, fully appreciate his influence; much of it eluded our
conscious grasp as young composers setting out on our creative paths. He was not
a systematic teacher. Instead, he was guided by the proverbial principle: “teach the child in his own way”. He was attentive to our
thoughts and quests, and helped each of us in finding a personal language. The
lessons evolved in a freely associative manner. We ended up covering most of the
aspects relevant to the art of composition – be they technical, emotional and
intellectual; yet he never brought up these topics in an orderly,
carefully-graded fashion. Instead, his teaching was reminiscent of a page of the
Gemara, as thoughts and reflections flowed freely and openly from subject to
subject. Only in retrospect could we appreciate the full range of tools he had
placed at our disposal. He guided his students towards musical creativity based
on love and on inner listening; his lessons were always an intimate encounter, a
genuine dialogue on the work’s essence and content as well as on its technical
aspects. A similar fusion of various ideas and images into a single statement
characterises his own music.
Tzvi Avni is
intensely interested in other arts – literature, poetry, drama, dance and, most of all, the visual arts. Many of his musical
ideas are inspired by paintings, poems and books. His works are often
programmatic, or have titles that evoke programmatic associations. His rich
musical language joins classical formal elements with a variety of materials –
some tonal, others more abstract.
Tzvi Avni’s artistic personality combines continuity with, and loyalty to, the
European compositional tradition with an ability to study and internalise novel
styles, techniques and means of expression. He is well-versed in innovative
notations and in the creative potentials of electronic media. In all the many
paths he followed, his music always retained a sense of melody and intimate
poetic content. In many ways, Avni had been a post-modernist composer long
before the term “post-modernism” entered our discourse.
Three main
periods can be discerned within Avni’s stylistic development. In his first
creative period (from the late 1950s to the mid-1960s), the influence of his
teachers – Mordecai Seter and, primarily, Paul Ben-Haim – is clearly apparent in
his modal writing and in his stylistic commitment to traditional forms and to
the Mediterranean spirit. Among the most notable examples of Avni’s early style,
one could mention the two song cycles for voice and piano written in 1957 –
Three Little Night Songs, setting texts by Leah Golberg, and
Three Songs from “Songs of Songs”; the Woodwind
Quintet (1959); the Piano Sonata No. 1 (1961);
Summer Strings – String Quartet No. 1 (1962); Prayer
for string orchestra (1962); A Day Is Near – variations on a
Jewish folksong for clarinet and string quartet (1964); Psalms for
mixed choir (1965); and De profundis: String Quartet No. 2
(1969).
The second
period, commencing with Avni’s
return from the United States and stretching to the early 1980s, reveals the
profound influence of European and American modernism, and the quest to combine
the styles and techniques which Avni adopted during his studies with the
traditional spirit and his own commitment to melody. The combinations of East
and West, characteristic of his early period, were enhanced by new combinations
– between traditional and innovative notation, between tonal and a-tonal
writing, between electronic recording and live performance, between the melodic
and the abstract.
The second
period is clearly heralded by Meditations on a Drama (1966). This
impressive orchestral work, which gained great success and was performed by most
Israeli orchestras, reveals a combination of modernist techniques (e.g., graphic
notation, aleatoric writing and dense sonorities emerging from the use of
clusters) with a traditional formal conception and neo-romantic pathos.
Five Pantomimes for chamber ensemble (1968) continues the same
stylistic path; it also constitutes a particularly striking example of the
influence of visual arts on Avni’s style, as it takes its inspirations from
several celebrated paintings that each movement purports to describe. A similar
spirit informs Beyond the Curtain for piano quartet (1969), and
Holiday Metaphors (1970) – a large-scale symphonic work in three
programmatic movements.
During the
1970s, Avni’s creative output spanned a wide variety of genres and ensembles. He
composed electronic works, wrote music for solo instruments and unusual chamber
ensembles, created musical displays – usually with a humorous touch – and
continued to compose works for orchestra, choir, piano and string quartet. Among
the major works of the 1970s, one could mention Leda and the Swan
for mezzo-soprano and clarinet (1976), with a quasi-text by the composer, and
Epitaph – Piano Sonata No. 2 (1979). Both works are among his most
powerfully expressive and dramatic. Epitaph, which draws its
inspiration from Hassidic music and from a story by Rabbi Nachman of Bratzlav,
reveals Avni’s renewed interest in his Jewish roots, a preoccupation that
informs many of his later works. Space precludes a detailed account of all the
works that Avni composed in the 1970s – among them the By the Rivers of
Babylon (1971) and On This Cape of Death (1974) for
chamber orchestra; Two Psalms for oboe and strings (1975); and
Torso – two movements for symphony orchestra (1976). Especially
noteworthy are his Lyric Episodes for oboe and magnetic tape
(1972) and the Synchromotrask for female voice and magnetic tape
(1976): both works strikingly demonstrate the imagination, concentration and
vitality of his works during this period.
In the
third period, from the 1980s to the present, Avni gradually consolidated a
neo-romantic style. This style preserves something of the second period’s
modernist spirit – but enriches it with a new, epic and generous expressiveness,
which also incorporates folk materials and ideas drawn from popular music. This
period is inaugurated by Programme Music (1980). Like the earlier
Pantomimes, this orchestral work aims to portray, in music,
paintings that inspired the composer. The writing, however, is more traditional,
devoid of innovative notational techniques, and the musical language is closer
to tonality. Its opening movement, The Machine Game, is wide-ranging in
its orchestration and formal proportions alike, and even reveals certain
influences of American minimalism and of the repetitive rhythmic patterns that
characterise rock music. The move towards neo-romanticism results in the
employment of a wide variety of larger, more colourful ensembles and an
increasing use of large-scale forms, as happens in Mizmor for
santur (or marimba) and orchestra (1982), in the orchestral Metamorphoses
on a Chorale by Bach (1985), and in the psalm cantata Deep Calleth
Unto Deep for soprano, choir and orchestra (1989).
The new
direction indicated by Programme Music is pursued with greater
intensity in a series of large-scale, powerfully expressive works written in the
last two decades. A glance at Avni’s ever-lengthening list of works reveals a
wide variety of genres and ensembles; but all of them reflect Avni’s unique
individual language, his fusion of innovative techniques with a neo-romantic
conception of time. At the turn of the century, Avni’s artistic statements
became more direct. This is particularly evident in his Primo Levy cycle
Se questo è un uomo (1998); in Poems and Melodies
for unaccompanied choir, setting texts by Nathan Zach and dedicated to the
memory of Yitzhak Rabin (1998); and in the major orchestral works of that period
– Desert Scenes (1991), Pray for the Peace of
Jerusalem (1998), and The Ship of Hours for symphony
orchestra (1999), inspired by the paintings of Mordechai Ardon. These works
constitute milestones, not only in the personal story of the boy who fled from
Germany and became an Israeli, but also in the story of the people of this land.
Tzvi Avni’s desire to express the spirit of his time gives his music a
distinctly romantic-national character.
Against the
ever-widening array of works, the fruit of many years of labour, it is difficult
to present a rounded portrait of the composer’s creative persona in one concise
article. However, it is still possible to indicate several key characteristics
of his style and his aesthetic position:
1.
The extended melody: Almost all of Avni’s works feature a single,
continuous melodic line, conveyed alternately by solo instruments and by wide
unisoni. This prolonged melody largely accounts for the communicative character
of Avni’s works. Meditations on a Drama is a fine case in point:
although written in a modernist vein, the work has a prominent melodic line,
present throughout the work. This line, clearly and distinctively based on a
number of repeated motifs, serves as a distinctive anchor for the listener,
supports the work’s formal structure, and facilitates in creating the dramatic
climax towards the end.
2.
Developing variations: Avni
frequently testifies that his works create themselves, that the thematic
materials dictate the form. This working method is manifest in the associative
development of musical materials that crystallise in a sequence of sequential
sections. The resulting compositions can be understood and analysed through the
model of “developing variations”. In this model, as defined by Arnold
Schoenberg, the theme which opens the work undergoes a process of extension,
development and change, which gradually leads it so far from the original as to
make it unrecognizable. This transformative process gives birth to new ideas
which would, in turn, receive similar treatment. This technique appears
frequently in Avni’s oeuvre. Among his orchestra works, it is
particularly evident in the two works that Avni explicitly defined as
metamorphoses: Meditations on a Drama and Metamorphoses on a
Chorale by Bach. Epitaph – Piano Sonata No. 2, one of
Avni’s most important and fascinating works, similarly charts an evolutionary
process in which ideas are emerge from one another; and in Paths of Time
(String Quartet No. 3, 2003), there is a continuous flow
of ideas, all of which can be heard as extended derivations of the work’s
opening bars.
3.
Innovative techniques: Proportional and graphic notation, special
instrumental effects or the free reiteration of repeated patterns – all these
serve merely as framing materials, illustrating the focal points in many of
Avni’s works, wherein he employs traditional notation. These techniques are used
sparingly and judiciously in almost all of his works from mid-1960s onwards. A
particularly prominent display of these techniques can be found in Holiday
Metaphors, in which Avni seeks to exploit the full potential of
innovative notation, sound production and texture. Cluster combinations,
repeated patterns, free notation and passages of heterophonic thickets can be
found in each of the work’s three movements (Dawn, Steps in Time,
Hallel).
4.
Implicit quotations: Veiled, partially-hidden quotations can be
found in several of Avni’s works. Quotations from the national anthem
Hatikva can be found towards the end of Pray for the Peace of
Jerusalem; a quotation from Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony is embedded
into Magritte – A Dilemma?, the third movement of Programme
Music; and the Sephardic liturgical chant, Who could have ever
thought that…, is included in Dance Festivities, the third movement
of Desert Scenes. The quotations usually serve a programmatic or
symbolic function. In Magritte – a Dilemma?, the composer attempts to draw a
picture made up of various parts: each part clearly possesses a logic of its
own, but when they are brought together, they sound utterly absurd and
unresolved – as in Magritte’s paintings. Combining a quotation from Beethoven’s
work with the abstract materials which make up this movement serves to
demonstrate the dilemma. In Dance Festivities, melodies of Eretz-Israeli
folk tunes appear one after another. A single folk-tune quotation immediately
creates a context for all the composer’s original melodies, which follow the
quotes.
5.
Sensitivity to the timbres of different
instruments: This
aspect is clearly apparent in more abstract moments – primarily in introductions
or conclusions – where the composer temporarily abandons melodic distinctiveness
or tonal clarity. Prominent examples include the opening phrases of
Mizmor for santur and orchestra and of The Ship of
Hours, and the orchestral interludes in Se questo è un uomo. Similar abstract moments can also be cited
in the first and third movements of his first string quartet, Summer
Strings.
6.
Programmatic music: Many of Avni’s works are distinguished by
programmatic titles that can influence the listener’s imagination. Many of these
titles evoke Avni’s affinity with the visual arts – as already noted above with
reference to Five Pantomimes, Programme Music and
The Ship of Hours. Other titles allude to various texts,
landscapes, feelings or character that inspired the work – as in Holiday
Metaphors, Beyond the Curtain, Epitaph or
Two Psalms. Untitled works are rare in Avni’s
oeuvre.
7.
Multiplicity of
materials: Avni employs
a variety of styles and techniques, and this variety is notable in each of his
works. In that sense, he is a post-modern artist. That said, each work also
contains a kind of motto: a central motif, with a distinctive character, which
combines all his ideas into a unified sound image. Several of his later works –
e.g., Apropos Klee (2000), Nocturne with Bees and
Fireflies (2002) – provide particularly fine examples of such mosaics,
in their characteristic multiplicity and variety of ideas and
surprises.
8.
Heterophony and variety of
plains: Different
materials can appear one after the other, or simultaneously in a polyphonic
texture. In several of Avni’s works, the harmony is derived from a single
melody, played continuously by a solo instrument – and, at the same time,
divided between other instruments, each of which plays a single note from the
melody and holds it for an extended period. The notes of the melody thus
coalesce into a harmonic structure. The result is a dense heterophonic texture,
in which the melody is nonetheless retained as an anchor for the listener. A
particularly striking case in point is the central section of Meditations
on a Drama; another is the intriguing fourth movement of Programme
Music – a finale which has not yet been performed.
9.
The Composer’s quest to express his Jewish
identity: Space
precludes a detailed account of the growing importance, within Avni’s
oeuvre, of thematic materials and programmatic titles that evoke the
quest for the composer’s Jewish roots. The wide spectrum of influences ranges
from the world of Hassidic melodies and legends – a source of inspiration for
the piano sonata Epitaph – to the poignant and piercing poems of
the Jewish-Italian Holocaust survivor, Primo Levi, which Avni set in his songs
cycle Se questo e un uomo. Myriad titles, allusions and
programmatic contexts emphasise the centrality of the Jewish element in many of
his works.
Tzvi Avni is a
composer who possesses an individual style and a unique voice, whose artistic
path combines tradition and innovation. The use of different,
even contrasted techniques, and the balance between diverse styles and varied
types of expression, constitute central facets in Avni’s personality and
wide-ranging oeuvre. Avni is both a neo-romantic and an innovator, a
subtle and eloquent yet expressive composer. He is a Western intellectual, whose
style is rooted in his deep regard to the traditions of European art music; yet
his artistic language also includes modernistic strands, and he skilfully
maintains his stylistic freshness.
Avni succeeds
in composing communicative music without sacrificing quality and complexity. It
is no surprise, therefore, that his works are frequently performed both in
Israel and abroad, and that he has gained many admirers among performers and
listeners alike. As a representative of the second generation of Israeli
composers, Avni is recognised as one of the most distinctive successors of
his teachers, Mordecai Seter and Paul Ben-Haim. His music constitutes a major
milestone in the history of Israeli art music.
Dr. Michael
Wolpe
January
2005
Translation: Dr. Uri Golomb
© Israel Music Institute, 2007