About the creation

The Israeli-born, Australian-based composer and pianist Yitzhak Yedid is winner of the 2020 Azrieli Prize for Jewish Music, the prize awarded “to a composer who has written the best new work of Jewish music.” In unanimously selecting Yedid for this year’s prize, the jury described his music as “brilliant, creative, dramatic, slyly humorous and unquestionably Jewish.” ​Other awards include the top two prizes in Israel for classical performers and composers: the Prime Minister’s Prize for Composers (2007) and the Landau Prize for Performing Arts (2009).                      The composer of over fifty works, Yedid melds the music of his ancestral Syrian and Iraqi Jewish background with Western art music. His musical style is eclectic, multicultural and highly personal, blending jazz and Jewish cantorial music with classical European and avant-garde techniques. His skill at improvising as a pianist adds a further dimension to his eclectic, multi-cultural, alluring music. “Yedid’s music is generally not for the faint-hearted,” writes critic Barry Davis The Jerusalem Post. “The intensity of his writing is palpable.”                                                 Yedid undertook his musical training at the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance, then at the New England Conservatory in Boston and at Monash University in Melbourne, where he earned his Ph.D. in 2013. He currently lectures in composition and piano at the Queensland Conservatorium Griffith University in Brisbane.                                                                                   The composer writes that “Kadosh Kadosh and Cursed was inspired by the Temple Mount in Jerusalem – the holy yet explosive place, sacred to Muslims and Jews alike – and that my work is a documentary of sorts, about a blessed place (Kadosh Kadosh), which is also a locus of curses, of intra-religious violence. Kadosh Kadosh and Cursed is therefore a conflicting homage to my hometown, Jerusalem. The work, in two parts, consists of twenty-four connected tableaux, or musical scenes, that bridge the variegated compositional approaches originating from two remote, opposing musical traditions: on the one hand from Arabic art music and Mizrahi (Arabic-influenced, Jewish) Piyyutim (liturgical and paraliturgical ornate songs), and on the other from European traditions, avant-garde music, and improvisation.                                      “Kadosh Kadosh and Cursed begins with an uproar followed by a quiet, unnerving, and asymmetrical rhythmic section growing towards a slow-building climax. This climax reflects the key attributes of the work as a whole: energetic, passionate, and unyielding. The few pauses in the score are full of tension, catapulting continuous forward motion through coherent transition from chordal to heterophonic, multi-voiced sections. The section entitled “Arabic-music like” is naturally woven through a chromatic transition from the first one. The texture travels naturally from ‘the east’ to ‘the west,’ reflecting the sounds one hears in Jerusalem, the ‘loaded and explosive place’ that inspired the work.”                                                                                                     The composer further describes Kadosh Kadosh and Cursed as “a meeting point between the ancient and the new, and between historic and current events, in both musical and philosophical, human terms. My interest in textures, derived from micro-intonations of Jewish tunes, led me to compose a multi-layered texture and to embed a Baqashot-Piyyut of Sephardic music into the sound of textural harmony in order to create a strange, surreal atmosphere.”