Maim

Here is a thought:

The words we say are only a part of our communication. We transmit meaning through inflection, pacing, vocal tone, intensity, energy, expressions of face and body, etc.

Capturing this thought:

Maim zarim, maim gnuvim is a piece which listens to all but the words.
A world of minute, concealed, transparent, and fluid energies is revealed through a tiny window.
While these energies are minute, the time scale of the piece is huge. This allows a long close focused and magnified view on the minute, concealed energies.
In fact, the window itself as a perceptual reality begins to disintegrate with such a microscopic viewing.
Furthermore as all the smallest intentions and tendencies are magnified and become exaggeratedly explicit. Every time there is a slight hesitation in the movement of the minute energies, the entire existence of the piece, as a concrete audible reality seems to be put into question.

While composing this piece, day in and day out, the current reality of the Middle East was forcing its presence on me, closing in, causing the minute fluid energies to congeal into a lopsided blind and stuttering march.

A long personal account regarding the name of the piece

As I started to write the piece, immersing myself in the sound world of the beginning became a kind of passion. The sounds were like water, so transparent and evasive, yet so basic and essential that they were healing a thirst. Having to turn away from my desk to the other activities of the day was increasingly difficult.

This was around September October 01, and it coincided with the events of September 11th, where thousands of people got killed, the American reaction which killed many in Afghanistan, and the strong wave of patriotism which swept America making itself felt everywhere on the street.
During that time, people were killed, killing, and exploding daily in the Middle East, death fueled by anger and injustice.

The news would come every day, relentless. The thin fluctuating walls of my invisible "Water Island" were slowly melting away. I found myself turning the watery intimate pulsations of my piece into the magnified beating of a collective drum, of the whole orchestra, and the small privet utterances became melodic outbursts of a twisted march, like the march of the blinds in Breugel's painting, approaches relentlessly, with no aim, no control.
The urgency of the political reality awakes in me voices, which call into question ones right to work on ones art in pressing times when action and public political activism seems to be needed. Being an Israeli, I was educated to believe that building a country (and being an active part of a collective) is more Nobel and important then creating art (being an individual). Internally, I still have to fight for, and protect my right to engage in art, which for me is in its base an individuated subjective matter.
This is not only an internal conflict.

Consider our blind and mechanical reactions to loaded political situations:
Our readiness to infuse the individual identity with a collective one; our need to belong and establish an "US" positioned against the "THEM". Our hardening into RIGHT group, pointing a blaming finger at the WRONG group; and the desperate pull of the whole herd as it presses all individual doubts to reach a place of false collective security in the sea of fear. A place where hesitations and self questioning are erased by the group certainties.

Maim zarim maim gnuvim is the experience of these conflicts as the internal water is being stolen away to become infused with foreign, strange water.

Music can be a voice of the collective, a voice pushing towards the collective, but I wish for music which enables us to experience a doubt, an uncertainty, to question one self and most importantly connects us to our individuality. It is only from this self-questioning that an opening and change can begin.

The composer would like to thank the soloists, Rico Gubler, John Mark Harris,
Seth Josel, Mary Oliver and Peter Veale, for their double presence in the piece, as a source of inspiration, and as a resource of knowledge and experience with extended techniques of their instruments.
Many thanks also to the Experimental Studio, especially to André Richard and Michael Acker for a long-term and very fruitful collaboration.
Maim zarim, maim gnuvim is a first movement of a triptych, of which the second movement will be for the soloists only and the last movement for the soloists and the orchestra.
Maim gnuvim main zarim is dedicated to Francisca Clamer.

- Chaya Czernowin