About the creation

Verbal explanation of a musical composition is greatly handicapped by the lack of congenial notions in daily language. Over a long period of time, traditional music has been translated into a technical jargon which helps the listener to recognize certain crystallized musical idioms in melodic, harmonic, rhythmic or other expressions. With those terms he can operate a more conscious perception of the musical occurrences in composition, till he reaches the stage of a happy co-operation between his emotional and intellectual evocations.

Contemporary music has not yet found equivalents in lay language, which can explain different behavior of musical thinking, and which can lead to a different syntax and to different laws of musical architecture.

I ask the listener of my work kindly to release me from pseudo-philosophical speculations, highly technical remarks, biographical hints, ideological points of view and more, all of which make easy, readable and somehow interesting programme notes, but will never reach the honest truth in the musical event.

I do believe in the listener’s capacity to free himself from irrelevant comparisons with music well known to him. Instead, he might follow with his inherent ability of curiosity, new patterns, new textures, new relationships and new sound materials. In short, letting a different world of music sink in, undisturbed by preconditioned evaluations.

While listening to this symphony of mine, the listener will quickly realize that the term ‘symphony’ in this case is not identical with the classical symphony. Here, that word symbolizes all that takes place in the discussions between single instruments, groups of instruments, cross relations between different sayings and different opinions; all dealing with a basic ideas which are split into various patterns and ever again reunited at points of culmination, till the final fade-out of the music closes the work.

Josef Tal