long Exposure
Instrumentation:
Flute, Clarinet, Saxophone, Trumpet, Trombone, Percussion, Piano, Violin, Violin, Viola, Cello, Contrabass
Year of composition: 2025
Duration: 15 minutes
Commission: Dan Yuhas
Funding: Startstipendium by the Austrian Ministry of Culture
Premiere:
Israel Contemporary Players & Christian Karlsen @ Zuker Hall, TLV 06.12.2025
Unfortunately, a few years ago, a tormenting awareness of the historical influences on my writing began to stir within me. I don’t pretend to truly identify the source of every hum that rises in my head, but generally speaking, every two-note combination reminds me of a Bartók piece I played as a child. Every structural design of my movements feels like a theft from my orchestration professor in second-year Budapest, and every musical theory that helps me stack a tower of notes into a chord feels like a selfie with Schoenberg, Barry Harris, or Lisa Streich.
And if I’ve already taken such a selfie, then it is only right and moral that I print it, paste it onto the score, and admit in good faith: "Here is the source!" In this case, he who cites his sources brings redemption, at least to his own tormented soul. I tried to suppress it, I cursed the great composers, and I tried to find new genres I was unfamiliar with just so I wouldn't notice that the ideas weren't mine. I even tried reverse psychology, to steal brazenly and claim I didn't care, that everyone steals! But the awareness only grew heavier, and my private humanism, my small subjective voice, began to fade away.
On one snowy Saturday afternoon, my beautiful wife asked me to play some Chopin for her. I sat down at the piano with joy and opened the old book, but I simply couldn't stop myself from pushing myself into his music. I added a counter-line, decorated, expanded the cadence, shifted registers, and looked for a juicier chord at the moment of climax. During that nefarious act, I discovered that even my silly improvisations could not escape the petrifying gaze of source-awareness. Right there, mid-improv, I recognized how I was tossing into Chopin’s pot a large bundle of Shai Maestro, coarsely chopped cubes of Morton Feldman, and curly spices in the style of the Chief Cantor of the Great and stunning Synagogue in Vienna.
My beloved wife soon regretted her innocent invitation, which had turned into a display of pretension, wild laughter, and heavy dissonance. But in those moments, I discovered something that changed my life. I discovered that I could serve as a junction between worlds, a one-of-a-kind junction, a humanistic junction.
From that day on, all my works deal with such junctions, with translations, Exegesis, and remixes. As time goes by, I find myself moving from working with one or two specific sources to creating works that contain a multitude of them, large wide intersections where a variety of influences can meet. Sometimes it seems to me that I am trying to arrange a marriage between distant voices that live within me, to bridge them, to love them together, to choose them with open eyes, and to work with them in my way, my own way.