Longy Faculty

Osnat Netzer's Works

PERFORMED BY:

Brendan Nguyen, piano

ABOUT:

Through Glimpses of Unknowing was commissioned by Brendan Nguyen — a pianist I admire for his almost inaudible articulation — and is influenced by the work of artist Chiharu Shiota.

The music begins from a simple question:

What if, like other instruments, the piano's sound could begin from silence? Can sounds hide within their own resonance? How might the sudden attack of  hammer be obscured and swallowed into the long drone of its strings? When does a thing become its own shadow?

Perhaps the answer can be found in the delicate dance of fingers on blocks of ivory; a dance that is all-at-once violent, delicately playful, and beguiling. This is a music whose true harmonies are only revealed during its own echoes. A music that recedes into the dark as soon as it comes into focus. A music which glows off in the distance somewhere, hidden by our own perception of it. Waiting. Always waiting. Fervently. To be heard.

Through glimpses of unknowing

This track is from the album Electronic Masters, Vol. 3 and is available for purchase on CD Baby here: http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/electronicmastersvol3

Alloy (Metal Etude No. 2) by Jeremy Van Buskirk

Luce Cantabile: Concerto for Alto Saxophone and Shadow, First Movement

מילים: לאה גולדברג
לחן: אסנת נצר
הפקה: עמית פוזננסקי
עיבוד: עמית פוזננסקי ואסנת נצר
שירה ופסנתר: אסנת נצר
Poem by Lea Goldberg, Music by Osnat Netzer
Produced by and co-arranged with Amit Poznansky

Lyrics by Leah Goldberg

אני הלכתי אז Ani halachti az

Duo Patchwork
Noa Even; tenor saxophone
Stephen Klunk; drumset

Zwang Und Zweifel (2017)

Text by Margaret Atwood
Radcliffe Choral Society
Conducted by Margaret Weckworth
Harvard University Paine Hall
March 3rd, 2018

Disturbed Earth, Excerpt (2018)

New Directions Ensemble / Christopher Lees
Amy Beth Kirsten, composer

Drink Me

Peggy Pearson, oboe
Rane Moore, bass clarinet
Gabriela Díaz, violin
Rafael Popper-Keizer, cello

They bury their dead with great ululations

Performed by:
Alice Teyssier, soprano
Palimpsest Ensemble
Nicholas Deyoe, conductor

A setting of Greek poet Sappho's lyric fragments in an English translation by Canadian poet Anne Carson. Translation used with permission.

Can we listen to the past? Perhaps when we have some record. But, when all traces of sound are absent, what can we hear of another time? What, when faced with the ultimate silence of an epoch that has passed, can we look to? We reach into the dark…

And then we find these words.  These words that once were sung.   But even they have been silenced…by the decay of parchment, of stone, of a language, of memory.  Still, in the few that remain we hear a voice.  A voice that reaches toward and speaks through us.  As we project ourselves into the past through our own remembering and imagining of these words, so do they project themselves into the future.  By singing the song of another, the past is made present.  The now that was becomes the now that is.  We hear now again.

Notes on a page (of Sappho)

https://www.innova.mu/albums/john-howell-morrison/hard-weather-makes-good-wood