NESHIMA
Neshima is Hebrew for breath.
Our breath is our constant friend, it accompanies us through every moment of our lives, in our wake as well as in our sleep, through joyful times and in sorrow. Most of the time we might not give it any heed, but it is always there. While breath is universal in that it is what connects us with life, it is also extremely personal, my breath is my life. As children, we often cry when we are overcome by emotions, and as we gasp for air, our breath regulates us, bringing us back to ourselves. I have been trying to learn to pay closer attention to my breath, to hear what it is telling me about my state of being, about my feelings, my emotions and where I am, to allow it to occur freely in times of distress, and observe how it brings me back to myself.
I have often been told that when I play, I breathe heavily and audibly. It is not intentional, it just happens. The more I find myself in the music, the more intense my breath.
This is perhaps the most personal project I have ever undertaken. It has been a wonderful challenge to allow myself to create this body of work and to present it, as if saying, “I am allowed to be”. Such a statement is surprisingly difficult to say, though it is as simple and as basic as breathing.
As a young musician, one thing that drew me to the lute and to the world of early music was that it seemed that there were so many rocks left unturned, so much to explore, so many pieces that have not been read and played in centuries. As a moderately arrogant young musician, I was tired of listening to the same Beethoven Sonatas in a hundred different versions, or another Haydn symphony. And in this regard, the world of early music offered me a universe of unexplored treasures.
Another thing that drew me to this world was the freedom left to the imagination of the player by the sparseness of information given on the written page. There were no signs of dynamics, no articulation bows, no tempo indications, sometimes not even a specification of what part should be played by which instrument.
The possibilities seemed to be endless. The line between interpreter and creator grew smaller and smaller while the space for creativity grew ever larger. To perform a piece was not merely to be a vessel for the composer’s material, but an opportunity to use that material and to mold it according to my own playfulness and creativity, to find in the music that element which resonates with me and to enhance it and give it a voice.
Of course, over time I have come to see that things were not so black and white as I had once come to believe.
On the one hand, creativity cannot be measured by how much information about the “shoulds” of the performance is given by the composer, for the space for creativity is so grand and so subtle at the same time, that it doesn’t lend itself to be measured at all. And on the other hand, the freedom that I have found in the compositional text was confined to the musical language of what we generically call early music. While I learned to speak that language with great pleasure and as much as I have attempted to articulate myself with it, it is still, and will always be a foreign language to me.
This is how my fascination with intabulation or arrangement grew. In the sixteenth century, it was common for lute players to arrange such vocal polyphonic pieces as madrigals and motets for the lute while adding diminutions and other idiomatic embellishments for the instrument. Drawing from the arrangements by lute composers such as Luis de Narváez, Jean Paul Paladin, and others, I began arranging my own versions of madrigals by great renaissance masters such as Cipriano de Rore and Thomas Tallis, and realised that never before had I felt so connected to any piece of repertoire as when writing my own arrangements. It wasn’t repertoire anymore, it was simply my music.
Going down the rabbit hole of intabulation, I have come to explore variation pieces such as La Monica - a melody that was extremely popular at the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the Passacaglia - the four-bar pattern that serves as the basis for so many popular songs from Monteverdi’s Lamento della Ninfa to Ray Charles’ Hit the road, Jack, and others. Much like the abundance of arrangements of vocal pieces, one can find endless examples of variation pieces by wonderful lute and theorbo composers such as Giovanni Girolamo Kapsberger, Alessandro Piccinini, and John Dowland. However, I noticed time and time again, that rather than interpreting their fully written-out compositions, it proved far more rewarding to me to draw from their examples, while creating my own set of variations.
With all this, alongside my years of working with singers, getting the polyphonic works of the great masters of the renaissance slowly and gradually in my fingers, I turned to explore the freest of instrumental forms of the sixteenth century, the Ricercar, or the Fancy, its English counterpart. These purely instrumental pieces are not based on any given patterns or any specific vocal pieces. As the name Ricercar suggests, it is a form of ‘search’. These are free improvisation-like pieces that explore the polyphonic possibilities the lute has to offer while giving way to somewhat more extravagant virtuosic passages that are purely instrumental in character.
One person who has long struck me as a musician who seems to be multilingual when it comes to music is my dear friend Simon MacHale. He is a composer, singer-songwriter, music theorist, and someone that I view as a well-rounded musician. Apart from his support and inspiration for me in this project, he has also written me a piece for this album, and while I created for myself the boundaries of writing within the confines of the language of early music, I have invited Simon to tear down these boundaries. His piece for theorbo featured in this album is a premiere, and for a musician mostly dealing with compositions by long decomposing composers, this offered a unique opportunity to experience a dialogue with the composer and to figure out in tandem how this piece can be approached and performed.
Samuel Beckett once said that writing in a foreign language offered him greater clarity, forced him to think more fundamentally, and to write with greater economy. I think I can relate to that in a way. While I don’t consider myself a composer, I can see the benefits of creating within a self-imposed set of boundaries. Even while writing these words in English, my second language, I am not faced with the same challenges that I had in preparing the music for this album. Of course, the language of music is abstract. And the meaning to be drawn is ultimately at the hands, or rather ears, and hearts of the listener. And so, I leave this to you.
Orí Harmelin