FANTASIA ON “AVINU MALKEINU” (2022) for Pierrot ensemble and percussion

Instrumentation: flute/piccolo, clarinet in Bb/bass clarinet in Bb, violin, cello, piano, percussion (tubular bells, crotales, bass drum, whip, tom-toms, triangle)

Duration: ~13 minutes

Performance/Recording History:

  • Premiered by Chris Boyadjiev, flute/piccolo, Anju Aoto, clarinet/bass clarinet, Simon Hagopian-Rogers, violin, Alice Lee, cello, Ryan Zhu, piano, and Seongwon Hwang, percussion on April 3, 2023 at the Juilliard Composition Concert in Morse Hall at The Juilliard School in New York City, NY

Awards:

Program Notes:

The Avinu Malkeinu (“Our Father, Our King”) is a Jewish prayer recited during the Ten Days of Repentance - the period from Rosh Hashanah through Yom Kippur. The prayer pleads for forgiveness for sins committed in the past year and asks for renewal for the upcoming year.

Every fall, I hear the recitation of the melancholic Avinu Malkeinu melody at High Holy Day services, and every fall, I find myself humming the tune long past the holiday season. There is something so profound and powerful about not just the melody and the prayer, but also the context in which the prayer is recited during the services at my Temple. As the ark (the ornate cabinet which contains the Torah scrolls) is opened in preparation for the reading from the Torah, the cantor stands and chants the hauntingly beautiful prayer with their back to the congregation. It is a strikingly memorable and vulnerable moment and occurs at the crux of the service and the High Holy Days as a whole.

FANTASIA ON “AVINU MALKEINU” is a sonic rumination on the traditional Avinu Malkeinu melody that my Temple (and many others) uses each and every year for its High Holy Day services. The melody is divided into two parts; the piece begins with the parts kept wholly separate and distant from the original form of the melody. As the piece progresses, alternating between large-scale variations of each of the parts, it draws closer and closer to the melody. The music increases in intensity, and the parts of the melody gradually lose their independence from each other until they are sonically entangled. Finally, we reach the coda, where we hear the two parts of the melody in their more-or-less original form, but they are mere echoes in the chapel which elusively float into the ether.