Four Songs at Night (for high voice and sinfonietta)
Music by Lila Meretzky, text by Anna Margolin, translation by Shirley Kumove

I. We went through the days
II. This is the night
III. Night came into my house
IV. Die Goldene Pave (The Golden Peacock)

I. We went through the days as through storm- tossed gardens.
Blossoming, maturing; mastering the game of life and death.
Clouds, vastness and dreams were in our words.
Among stubborn trees in a rustling summer garden we fused into a single tree.

Evenings spread their deeply darkened blue, With the aching desire of winds and falling stars,
With shifting, caressing glow of fluttering leaves and grasses,
We wove ourselves into the wind, merged with the blueness
Like happy creatures and clever, playful gods.

II. This is the night, the sadness, the non- existence,
The treacherous glow of dreams.
Unhappy one, what will be?
Be cold, be clever, turn away from the stars, From child’s play with shadows, dew and fragrance,
Be still, be still,
And with all your congealing blood you will hear,
How the earth opens And the worm beckons.

III. Night came into my house
With the roar of stars, flood, wings,
With the glow of swamps, dirt roads, and mists.
I lay tense and miserable.
Trees came into my house,
Looming gigantic with roots and trunks And ancient deep glances from the leaves. 
And huge bizzare clouds
Came with thunder and laughter,
Like the dark heads of pagan gods.
And all of them swirled, hard and wild and bleak,
Clamoring: “you are, you are, you are”.

I lay tense and miserable.

IV. The golden peacock flew off and away, 
And night opened its golden eye.
My radiant one, sleep on.

Night opened its golden eye,
I became the fiddle and you the bow. 
My restless one, sleep on.

I became the fiddle and you the bow, 
Happiness arced fondly above us. 
My gentle one, sleep on.

Happiness arced fondly above us, 
Left us alone, flew off and away. 
My mournful one, sleep on.

Recorded Nov. 4 2021 at Sprague Hall, New Haven, CT.

Performed by C Han and Molly McGuire, voices, Danielle Maeng, flute, Marty Tung, bassoon, Kyle Thompson, horn, Yukiko Nakamura, percussion, Seho Young, piano, Gregory Lewis and Ilana Zaks, violins, Emily Rekrut-Pressey, viola, Sandra Haga, cello, Nicholas Hernandez, bass, Maura Tuffy, conductor.

Artwork by the composer.

Four Songs At Night

Performed by YXUS Ensemble:
Olga Voronova, violin 1
Mari Targo, violin 2
Laur Eensalu, viola
Leho Karin, cello

Since I moved to Tallinn in August, the landscapes of Estonia have become an enduring source of inspiration for my music. In September, I made a particularly memorable visit to the peninsula of Paljassaare at sunset. As the evening chill set in, a thin layer of mist formed near the shore, almost appearing to join with the surrounding water. "Where Mist Meets Water" seeks to recreate the conditions of that magical evening, continuing a series of recent works focused on the sound and texture of water.

Where Mist Meets Water for string quartet

0:00 – 1. ergets vayt (H. Leivick)
2:15 – 2. tirtl-toybn (Yankev Glatshteyn)
3:30 – 3. nakht (Kadya Molodovsky)
6:35 – 4. a lonke tsvishn berg (Rokhl H. Korn)
8:05 – 5. the meadow with the butter-flowers

An absolutely golden performance of Butter-lider (2022), commissioned and premiered in full by No Exit New Music Ensemble, Dec. 3, 2022, SPACES Gallery, Cleveland, OH. Special thanks to No Exit directors Timothy Beyer and James Praznik; the brilliant musicians of No Exit; and my advisors, Yu-Hui Chang and Ellen Kellman.

Sean Gabriel, flute
Gunnar Owen Hirthe, clarinet
Cara Tweed, violin
Nicholas Diodore, cello
Nicholas Underhill, piano
Luke Rinderknecht, percussion
James Praznik, media and recording

-

Butter-lider is a setting of poems by H. Leivick, Yankev Glatshteyn, Kadia Molodovsky, and Rokhl H. Korn, four of my favorite Yiddish writers of the 20th century. However, instead of setting these texts for voice, my music accompanies recordings (graciously archived and provided by the Yiddish book Center) of the poets themselves reciting their writing. The final movement features my own text assembled from translated fragments of each of the four poems.

Through this piece, I hope to facilitate a dialogue, across artistic media, across time and space, between these writers’ unique perspectives, and my own, on what it means to make Yiddish art. I refuse to fall into the elitist and insulting narrative of “elevating” a folk tradition by bringing it into classical music spaces. Rather, I hope to participate in this living culture so that it may reach new audiences and new generations, and to offer another medium, another language, through which to tell Yiddish narratives.

Butter-lider (2022) פּוטער־לידער

Marieke Keser, violin; Elisabeth Smalt, viola; Damien Harron, percussion

The Hanged Fiddler

Bailie.AbletonElectronicComposition1

Composer of acoustic and electronic Music
lilameretzky.com for more music, video, visual art, scores, and teaching and collaboration inquiries

Four Songs At Night

Lila Meretzky

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