About the creation

The piece Ma'im Rabim ("Many Waters") is a revised version of a piece for soprano and orchestra which I composed in 2000. The piece is inspired by texts from the Jewish prayer «Hosha’anot». In the current version, the orchestral part was reedited ,expanded and served as raw material for a sonorous electro-acoustic intervention. The addition of the electronic music to the piece was conceived as a kind of metaphorical resonance, as voices conversing and reflecting, as imaginary mirrors, the music played by the orchestra. "Hosha’anot" are prayers for the Succoth Festival. The repeated "Hoshana" in these ancient prayers are a response after each rhyme or part of the prayer that pleads for the elements of the world, such as water and fire, for the blessing of the crops and for help against pests or natural disasters. These appear together with songs of praise to the beauty of the temple. The Hoshanot hymns are built primarily from the combination of words and phrases, almost completely devoid of compound phrases (without verbs or adjectives). I read these phrases like a code, a collection of "encoded messages." This is indeed poetry that encodes various layers of meaning from the biblical and Talmudic literature. The text is concise and charged, yet not open, however, conceals associations and radiates complexity. Each group of phrases is dominated by a consonant or syllable and the resulting rhyming, at times, is a-symmetric. Reading the verses, without scholarly knowledge or awareness of the direct quotation and various interpretations, provides a unique and independent musical experience. When I read the Hoshanot, with the intention of setting them to music, I thought it necessary to enable the consonants and rhythms to be heard. I therefore preferred, in the first stages of composition, to be assisted by the Latin transcript of the text, in order to detach myself from the literary-textual meaning, thus exposing myself to the pure musical message. I felt that from the music of the text's consonants and rhythms, as well as its conciseness, stems an immense inner force. I understood that such a text could not be sung in the customary form. The music that resounds from these verses, as a result of the various recurring consonants and syllables that create a-symmetric rhymes and rhythms led me to write for a "speaking" or "reading" voice, rather than a "singing" one, in the traditional sense of the word. I therefore decided to limit and reduce the melodic lines and harmonic progressions and structure the entire work (not only the vocal part) in light of the musical-recitative image, like the voice of a ballad singer who has but a few secretive words, charged with layers of meaning and memories. Betty Olivero