Claire Meghnagi – Soprano
Irena Friedland – Piano

Cat. No.: IMI-CD-52
Release year: 2015

Questions of identity have been central to Israeli Music from its inception. However, in previous generations, the search for identity was often embodied in a quest for a distinct, representative national style whose sources and characteristics have been determined and re-determined over the years. Zehavi’s Lonely Bird introduces an alternative, present-day approach to the same lasting question. In this collection, Israeli identity is constructed not through unity, but rather through a variety of voices combining and complementing each other. Joined together, the various songs reveal a picture of plurality in which different influences, traditions, languages, and musical idioms can be heard. Yet the many voices speaking out in these songs are all part of an Israeli culture that is in a continual process of forming and evolving.
In several of the poems selected by Zehavi, the image of a bird appears. Nomadic, borderless, and fragile, it surfaces time and again, representing the diversity of Israeli voices. It emerges as a little song bird, chirping by grandfather’s old house in the lost Jewish shtetl (in Itzik Manger’s “The Windmill”); as a ״captive bird ״, a symbol of the Jewish community praying for rain (in the old medieval hymn El Khai “The good Lord will open the gates of heaven and will bless us with rain”); it surfaces as the painfully fluttering “bird of my heart” (in the Gypsy Cante song ״Sad Bird ״); and in the same vein, the bird is a metaphor for the poet’s heart (in Lea Goldberg’s “Lonely Bird”). It reappears as a symbol of voice and identity (in Yona Wallach’s poem, “Identity Problems”); and as a mysterious dream (in the Yiddish poem “The Bird of Paradise”).
The migratory bird is often a symbol for Jewish diaspora existence, bringing to mind the wandering Jew (or Gypsy) who comes across and absorbs different musical traditions and influences. Similarly, in Zehavi’s collection the bird becomes a vehicle for the compilation of an assortment of images, ranging from distant reminiscences of the Diaspora to the present-day diverse population of south Tel Aviv. Such influences find their expression musically. While Zehavi’s songs are clearly composed and situated within the general framework of the art song, they reveal the shades and influences of the distinctive worlds from which they have arisen. Such echoes can be found, for example, in medieval hymns (El Khai and “My Lover Stepped into His Garden”) in which the sounds of the kanun, a traditional stringed instrument, can be heard. On the other hand, the song “Thou Art Beautiful My Love”, using a text from the Song of Songs, is characterized by modal tonality and distinctive intervals of perfect fourths and fifths that are usually associated with Hebraic cantillation.
Alongside these influences, and in spite of the traditional and folk sources whose sounds are clearly heard among the many voices of the Lonely Bird, the collection as a whole refers to and stems from the art song, the German lied, and in particular the works of Franz Schubert. This becomes obvious, not only through direct quotation from Schubert’s songs, but in a more general way, in Zehavi’s approach to the poetic text and his paying homage to the musical conventions of the genre. According to Zehavi, his reliance on nineteenth century art song is in itself a statement regarding the place of so-called High Art, or Art Music in his musical and creative world. Composing from his stylistically remote standpoint, references to Schubert result in a multilayered intertextuality; for example, in “Identity Problems” which uses Schubert’s “Der Leiermann” (from Winterreise) as a subtext. The clash between the merry music and the half frozen, dying musician in Schubert’s song becomes the background for Wallach’s line: “Bird, Bird, another speaks from your throat.” Throughout the song the increasing chill, expressed musically by broken lines over the Schubertian street-organ motif, extends its reach and eventually paralyzes.
Another musical reference can be found in “It is Too Late,” in which Zehavi quotes from Maurice Ravel’s Kaddish, which itself incorporates the traditional melody of the Jewish prayer for the dead. The poem by Dan Pagis describes a late return to the poet’s hometown, now a strange city to him. Zehavi’s reference to Ravel’s Kaddish is an expression of mourning for the bygone, pre-Holocaust city that no longer exists.
Zehavi’s settings of three poems by Yair Horwitz give an additional dimension to the texts: the first one, “Vanishing Melody”, portrays a mood of loneliness and alienation in which the motion and inner process of the poem are accentuated by the musical development. “A Prayer” is distinguished by its a cappella opening and recitative style, as well as by the simplicity of the piano accompaniment and the momentarily revealed chromaticism. Finally, in the setting of “When My Love Wakes Up”, where frozen clusters in the opening bars become motion towards the end, the non-verbal voice of the piano brings a sense of hope.
In the Yiddish song “The Windmill” the allusion to Schubert’s windmill in Die schoene Muellerin is obvious, yet in Zehavi’s version the motion of the windmill’s sails, recreated in the piano part has an unreal quality. It is but a memory, an echo of a lost world, rendering this Yiddish version of the German lied particularly poignant. Another Yiddish song, “The Bird of Paradise”, is set as a folksong with repeated versions. The apparent simplicity of the setting is misleading, for the harmonic structure of the song stresses the absence of the bird that has flown away.
In the four Gypsy songs Zehavi draws from the Gypsy-Andalusian Flamenco style, which combines many different influences, including Sephardic- Jewish ones. The songs are characterized by short, concise texts of high emotional intensity, expressing deep sorrow and pain. The vocal melismas opening the songs stem from the time-honored Cante practice of using long embellishments both as a vocal preparation, and as an improvised cry of lament that expresses the singer’s pain. Especially in the first song, “Sad Bird”, this cry of pain brings to mind its Jewish equivalent, the plangent sound of the Shofar.
“A Protest Song”, a setting of a poem by Zehavi himself, is a musical and textual deconstruction of a well-known Israeli children’s song, “Pizmon l’yakinton”. Maintaining the pentatonic tonality of the original song as well as the simple piano introduction and accompaniment typical of Israeli children’s songs, the content of the poem, which depicts the “Other” – children of the African refugees in Tel Aviv – becomes ever more disturbing. The harsh reality of their lives is momentarily reflected through the appearance of the tritone interval (which is the interval missing from the pentatonic scale), particularly after the second verse. Zehavi’s appropriation of this famous song, which has become a symbol of both childhood and of Israeli folk song is a definite statement regarding the hollowness of any identity that is not allowed to flow and change, to evolve and be open to new content and new voices.

Irit Youngerman