Yair Klartag
For many years Israeli composer Yair Klartag wanted his music to be “completely universal.” But in recent years, he discovered something unexpected: that the type of universality he was looking for relates not only to his Jewish heritage, but to parts of that heritage he wasn’t even fully aware of.
Case in point: “The Parable of the Palace” for choir and four double basses, the winner of the Azrieli Foundation’s Commission for Jewish Music for 2024. The work draws on Jewish philosopher Maimonides’ titular parable to investigate the limits of logic and reason in explaining reality and the metaphysical. Along with the other winners of the 2024 Azrieli Music Prizes it will debut October 28 at a gala concert in Montréal.
Yair Klartag’s other honors include the Kompositionspreis der Landeshauptstadt Stuttgart and the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation Composers’ Prize. He spoke with us recently about his new piece and its inspiration.
Maimonides and the King
Maimonides’ “Parable of the Palace” is an allegory for degrees of religious faith. Klartag explains that the parable is found in the philosopher’s Guide for the Perplexed, “an amazing book in which he tries to reconcile Aristotelian logic and reason [with] Jewish beliefs. [The parable] tells the story of a palace in which a mysterious king lives. There are different groups of people in different circles around the palace in different proximity to the king,” groups representing different levels of religious faith.
One inspiration for the composer was simply the geometric organization. “In the core, there is the irrational – what goes beyond reason – and around it are different circles with different distances from the irrational. The inner circles are the circles of logic and science (that’s how Maimonides himself interprets parts of this parable). This image of circles surrounding an irrational core inspired the structure of the piece – the music spirals and circles around a very abstract musical material built from [the sounds of] low double basses and different vocal material from the choir.”
Another crucial aspect was the text. Maimonides’ original is in Jewish Arabic, a language now extinct but widely used in the Middle Ages by Jews in Arabic countries, like Maimonides, who resided in Egypt at the time. “It uses mostly Arabic words but [is] written using the Hebrew alphabet,” Klartag says. “It was important for me to discuss such universal ideas (reason and irrationality) through the writings of a Jewish thinker who learned about Greek philosophy through Arabic translations. In the face of the horrors of the present, it was helpful to connect to a common humanistic historical universalism like that.”
Klartag credits Prof. Meir Bar-Asher, “who generously recorded the text in the original pronunciation. He is one of very few living people who can read and pronounce this language – and so this piece [also involves] a revival of a lost language – one that connected Jews and Arabs.”
Bass Instincts
The instrumentation theme for the 2024 competition was choral works for a cappella choir and up to four additional instruments and/or vocal soloist(s). “The Parable of the Palace” is scored for the unusual combination of choir and four double basses. This instrumentation, Klartag says, was related to the geometrical concept of the piece.
“The double basses create a sort of an irrational swamp in the depth of the piece,” he says. “This special instrumentation allowed creating different situations – some where the double basses give deep fundamentals, and the voices harmonize them as their partials. In other cases, the double basses become very lyrical as if singing with the choir.
“The expression I was trying to achieve is of a mystical landscape, where certain elements appear to have a clear inner logic, but always melt into the irrational core.”
Diaspora of Ideas
Klartag’s Jewish inspirations go beyond the writings of one philosopher. The “unbelievably rich corpus of ideas” that came out of the Jewish diaspora, he discovered, were “extremely relevant to my upbringing…I was enchanted with diasporic ideas of replacing territory with books and writings as a way of existence and longevity, [and] especially [ideas] around the metaphysical and the way Middle Ages thinkers like Maimonides or Saadia Gaon understood rationality.”
This background informed two other recent compositions, Klartag says. A Maimonides text about rational and irrational numbers drives “Rationale,” for soprano and ensemble. And for “Music of the Sefiras” he imagined “a composer who was part of the Sabbatean movement and tried to compose…a music influenced by mystical kabbalistic ideas and by the imagination of European polyphony – polyphony that this invented composer has never heard, but had read about and tried to imagine what it would sound like.”
Listeners can experience the newest fruits of this highly original composer’s imagination when “Parable of the Palace” debuts, along with the other Azrieli Prize-winning works, at the October 28 gala concert in Montréal.
The Azrieli Foundation awarded four Music Prizes for 2024: a Commission for Jewish Music, a Prize for Jewish Music (for work already written), a Commission for Canadian Music, and a Commission for International Music. Read about all the 2024 Azrieli Music Prize laureates at the Azrieli Foundation website.
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