Commissioned as part of Bravo Niagara!'s Sounds of Hope online festival commemorating the 75th anniversary of the end of the Holocaust, Hatzis' stirring Menorah for violin and piano is a technically demanding work. The first movement, Shabbat Blessing, evokes a devotional Jewish melody, with a flickering, polyrhythmic piano accompaniment, before metric modulations and twelve-tone statements disrupt the work's early tranquility. Second movement Kaddish Yatom's jarring, impersonal extended techniques recall a generational trauma, while quotations of Wagner compete with iterations of twelve-tone rows amid disorienting tempo and register shifts in a symbolic battle of worldviews.
Menorah's two contrasting movements depict two opposite psychic patterns manifesting at times of personal and collective crisis; one of holding on tightly to something old and trusted and another of questioning it and, with it, our shared understanding of humanity and its shuttered assurances. Not being a Jew myself, it is this larger canvas that has allowed me to enter the subject of the Holocaust and document my own psychic reactions to it, particularly at a time in our collective existence when dark clouds are again assembling on the horizon and, if we do not study and learn from history, we will be condemned to repeat it.
The cosmic number seven is present and hidden everywhere within Shabbat Blessing. It is in the rotating three-against-four rhythms in the violin pizzicatos and in the right and left hands of the piano, it is in the hidden "digit sums" of the tempo markings (52, 43), and in the three-to-four metric modulations appearing downstream and disturbing the original peacefulness of the music. Soon, this prayerful calmness of "seven-ness" gives way to impassioned and unsettled music which still looks at melodic and harmonic tradition for answers to the impasse of the moment. The transformation of the principal tonal motifs of the violin, and its incorporation into atonal (twelve-tone) statements represent the suppression of this tradition and a systemic embrace of reductionist logic at the pivotal moment when faith fails. I was thinking here of Arnold Schoenberg, the father of 20th-century musical modernism, who retorted with such rationalist means to the intolerant "classicism" of his time in order to exorcise the rampant and uncontrolled antisemitism and the ascendancy of Nazism in his home country. The soulful four-note "Jewish" motifs of the previous violin melody now become mere tetrachords: a set of non-functional cogs in the mechanical "communism" of the twelve-tone system.
The devastating shuttering inside the low strings of the piano, the growing moans of the violin, and the spasmodic, dehumanized gestures by the two players at the beginning of Kaddish Yatom highlight the disconnectedness and trauma of the victimized psyche. The concluding statement may sound musically more agreeable to the listener, but it is no less tragic. It represents a fictional and anachronistic musical conversation between Richard Wagner - a documented anti-Semite and Hitler's favorite composer - and Arnold Schoenberg, the Jewish musical pioneer who had been demonized by the Nazis as the face of musical decadence. Here, the music of the opening of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde is constantly interrupted by strict iterations of twelve-tone rows in unsettling tempo and register displacements (the longest such iteration is borrowed from Through A Glass Darkly, an earlier composition of mine, with this row serving the same purpose in Menorah.) After a couple of arguments and counterarguments, the two parts rise ever higher in frequency towards the starry sky of the first movement: a D-major chord in which the ratios of the musical intervals and their projection in the realm of rhythm are identical. The composition could have reached a peaceful ending here, but that would have been construed as wishful thinking by a gentile composer. Many years ago, when I was a graduate composition student working on my Ph.D. with American composer Morton Feldman, Feldman had mentioned something to the effect that "...there can be no honest music after the Holocaust." That statement had a profound impact on me; while I don't entirely agree with it, I did pay heed to it in Kaddish Yatom. Suffice to say that Menorah does not end in the starry sky.
