Sextet for 2 Bass viols (Viola da gamba), Harpsichord, Violin, Flute and Piano

Casino Umbro

Es Gibt

For flute (doubling piccolo and alto flute), Bb clarinet (doubling bass-cl.), violin, cello and piano
[Year: 2016]     [Duration: 15']

Tripp

Eight Flowers are set of eight very short pieces for piano. Each piece was inspired by and named after a certain flower and together they form a bouquet. The order and number of times in which each of these pieces are played are left to the performer's discretion. In this way it is as if he/she is arranging the bouquet of flowers to suit his/her own taste.
Premiered by Gabor Csalog on June 11, 2006 in Neuhardenberg, Germany, in a festival honoring György Kurtág on his 80th birthday.

Eight Flowers - Amit Dolberg (piano)

Yael Barolsky (violin), Israel Contemporary Players, Ilan Volkov (conductor).

The next witness was the Duchess’s cook. She carried the pepper-box in her hand, and Alice guessed who it was, even before she got into the court, by the way the people near the door began sneezing all at once. (Lewis Carroll / Alice in Wonderland)

Before She Got Into The Court - Live - Mishkenot - 7jan2018

Composed in 2017. Recorded by Gilad Harel.
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According to Don Juan (Carlos Castaneda), A man of knowledge is one who has followed truthfully the hardships of learning, a man who has, without rushing or without faltering, gone as far as he can in unraveling the secrets of power and knowledge. To become a man of knowledge one must challenge and defeat his four natural enemies. The four natural enemies are: Fear, Clarity, Power and Old age. Each of the 4 movements of this piece is inspired by an enemy in the order that Don Juan talks about. However, this is not program music. One can listen without knowing what inspired me in my writing and still, hopefully, enjoy the music and take something out of it.
The piece is an homage to Carlos Castaneda. It was written for and dedicated to Gilad Harel.

The Four Enemies - Gilad Harel (clarinet)

This is the cadenza from the piano concerto "with purity and light". Performed by Amit Dolberg

Cadenza (from piano concerto) / piano fractal no.5

Composed in 2018. Recorded in 2020 by Oded Geizhals. Published by Donemus.
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Opus Focus - for percussion and computer (1 to 12 loops).
More info: www.amoselkana.com

Opus Focus

Composed in 2010. Recorded in 2018 by the Tel Aviv Saxophone Quartet. Published by IMC
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I composed this work for young saxophone players so the task was to make it short and not too difficult. Eventually I came up with something fun and groovy to play which although short makes a complete statement.
In March 2018 I had an inspiring recording session of this quartet with the fantastic Tel Aviv Saxophone Quartet courtesy of the Israel Composers' League. After the session was over we still had half an hour to spare in the recording studio so I suggested they improvise freely on the first theme (I called it "between Coltrane and Lachenmann") and I asked Yaron Aldema to continue recording. The result was so good that I added this ad lib. section as an integral part of the work. Here is the result.

Laconic Pentatonic - TLV Sax Quartet

Composed in 2004. Recorded in 2005 by the Israel Contemporary String Quartet. Published by IMI
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From the liner Notes to the CD "Casino Umbro" (Ravello):
By Prof. Ruth HaCohen
String quartets have been always an arena for compositional experiments as they were a venue of intimate if not arcane discourse. String Quartet no. 2 strongly belongs to this tradition, as to its rich vocabulary of articulation, thematics, and textural modes. Elkana, searching for “rigorous predefined form that will grant him liberty of ‘pouring’ music into them”, elaborated a “method of composition with ‘fractal’ configurations”, which he intensively and extensively uses in this work. The mathematical idea of fractals is that similar patterns recur at progressively smaller (or larger) scale. Fractals are everywhere around us, we perceive them in snowflakes and leaf veins, and they make up blood vessels and coast lines, enabling us to experience the whole in the detail. Inspired by this basic idea, in some of his works Elkana embarks by shaping predetermined tone matrix, which could contain any number of tones, in any order some even repeated within the original set from which he then draw certain numerical orders that will recur in various structural levels in the work he conceives. Thus differentiating his system from the 12-tone Schoenbergain method, Elkana still adheres, in the procedure he developed, to the latter’s basic permutational modes, to which he applies rules of selection to avoid arbitrary choice. Rhythm is likewise manipulated. The cohesive effect, though not easy to detect, is intuitively experienced due to the thick recursive connections between micro- and macro-levels including that of the entire work. This, of course, does not exempt the composer from an imaginative, creative process and from giving each movement its own unique character and modes of unfolding. Thus in the first movement the highly profiled, soft and almost solemn opening theme, fugued through the four parts, will not be able to hold an immediate outburst of an abrupt homophonic gesture, and the alternation and conflation of these two basic utterances will furnish the basic dramatic infrastructure of the entire movement. Despite calculation (or maybe due to its constrains) the movement can be experienced as an essay on the rise and fall of tonal energy, in its basic, visceral undulations. The second movement is born from sustained sounds, which are ever there to collect all that transpires, into their serene duration, even the most capricious, frantic figuration which abound here as well. Tonal sustainability is embodied here in variety of being and becoming modes, and its presence is so strong throughout that even when it does not outwardly there we feel its presence. The brief scherzo-like third movement, a sort of peak in terms of the structure of the entire work, accentuates its edgy, almost ghost -like character through the sul ponticello (on the bridge) and other strings and bow effects, but no less by shaping temporal irregularities as a natural, inevitable flow. Ideas and sonorities from previous movements are recollected in the fourth, elegiac one, which searches, in different ways, for expression of unbeknownst yearn. Beethoven’s Convalescent's Holy Song of Thanksgiving to the Divinity, in the Lydian Mode” (String Quartet op. 132, 3rd movement) comes to mind. The fifth, a grand finale movement combines rondo-like construction with a playful recapitulation of moments and modes of being experienced throughout the work.

String Quartet no.2

Composed in 2014. Performed by Yael Barolsky. Published by Donemus
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"Reflections" is a work for violin and computer. In this work, the computer functions like a mirror by continuously recording the violin and then playing it back at different times throughout the duration of the piece. These recordings are not random, they happen in specific places and played back elsewhere. Sometimes this creates a multitude of voices where one can not distinguish between live violin playing and the recording (the sound is rarely processed). In fact, in certain sections the music sounds as if it is an ensemble of violins playing together. In order for this effect to be successful, maximum accuracy and concentration are required on the part of the violinist.
The piece was written for Yael Barolsky and dedicated to her. It was premiered at the Teiva in Jaffa on May 1st 2014.

Meandering Forests (Yael Barolsky)

Reflections

I composed and recorded this work/installation in San Francisco in 2006.

This music was created to accompany an exhibition by my artist friend Alexander Polzin who created a series of 99 paintings about this poem:
https://www.alexanderpolzin.com/age-of-anxiety

The sound source for this installation is largely based on a recording of five actors (four characters and one narrator) reciting Auden's poem in a bar in San Francisco. During this process the actors were encouraged to drink as much as they wanted so as to recreate the mood of the original poem. The bartender was generous enough to turn off the background music during the recording and so the only background sounds are bar noises made by people drinking, conversing, laughing, playing pool, etc. Different layers of sound are created by transforming the bar recording electronically. These layers become alternately 'visible' and 'invisible' by fading them in and out. One of the electronic sound layers is created by analyzing 12 peaks from the recorded voice and connecting these peaks to 12 oscillators. The result is a sort of a modified reproduction of the actual voice recording. Another layer that is present is the sound of a quartet of wind instruments - tuba, trombone, trumpet and clarinet. Each instrument corresponds to a different character in the poem.

The Age Of Anxiety

Amos Elkana was born in Boston but grew up in Jerusalem. At the age of 15, he picked up the electric guitar and began to study music which soon became his primary occupation in life. In 1987, aged 20, he returned to Boston to study jazz guitar at the Berklee College of Music and composition at the The New England Conservatory of Music. In 1990, he moved to Paris to study composition with Michele Reverdy. He also took composition classes with Erik Norby in Copenhagen, and with Paul-Heinz Dittrich and Edison Denisov in Berlin. In 2007 Elkana received his MFA in music/sound from Bard College, New York. While at Bard, he focused on electronic music and took lessons with Pauline Oliveros, David Behrman, Richard Teitelbaum, George Lewis, Maryanne Amacher and Larry Polansky among others.

Amos Elkana composes concert music for orchestras, ensembles and individual performers as well as music for dance, theatre and films. His works have been performed and recorded by ensembles and musicians from all over the world, such as the Berlin Symphony Orchestra, the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra, the clarinetist Richard Stoltzman, Musica Nova Consort, the Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra, the pianist Gábor Csalog, the Berlin Saxophone Quartet, Stockholm Saxophone Quartet, the flautist Yossi Arnheim, the New Israeli Woodwind Quintet, the Carmel String Quartet, Ensemble Meitar, the ICSQ (Israel Contemporary String Quartet) and many more.

Many of Elkana's compositions are written for traditional orchestral instruments, but without the traditional boundaries. They are his attempt to carry the listener's imagination and senses into new territory. One of Elkana's best known works is "Arabic Lessons", a multilingual song cycle for three sopranos and chamber ensemble that sets to music 13 poems by the German writer and poet Michael Roes. Commissioned jointly by the Berlin Festival and The Tel Aviv municipality, the work won the 2003 Golden Feather of ACUM, Israel's Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers. In its review of Arabic Lessons, the English daily Jerusalem Post called it "a perplexing, beguiling 40-minute opus in which the composer challenges the so-called 'acceptable' form of the lieder, shattering it and building it anew, as if constructing a new world from its ashes. ... Arabic Lessons is one of the most significant works composed in Israel for quite a while."

Elkana is also an active performer. He regularly participates in concerts and performances of improvised music where he plays electric guitar and does computer processing. In 2010 he opened the International Litrature Festival in Berlin giving a concert of his music for Recorded voices of poets, Electric guitar and electronics. Elkana is also a part of the duo Concoct Sonance with Yaaki Levy. The duo performes improvisd music and tours on a regular basis.

Amos Elkana

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