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CLASSICAL
AN AWAKENING
- MEIRA WARSHAUER CALLS US TO ATTENTION
By Robert Workman
On a beautiful spring night in 2007,
Meira Warshauer felt the heady rush of success at the debut of her
Symphony No. 1: Living, Breathing Earth. The premiere had caught the
attention of National Public Radio and, on that night, the music
seemed to affirm a collective love and connection to the Earth in
all attending the concert.
But Warshauer woke up the next day faced with the
question “What’s changed? How can we do what we need to do to
continue to be able to live on this planet?”
For someone who thinks of music and the arts in general
as transformative, it was a sobering moment that coincided with the
birth of what would become her next major work, Tekeeyah (a call), a
work co-commissioned by the Wilmington Symphony Orchestra and
sponsored by Wilmington’s Thursday Morning Music Club, a group of
citizens dedicated to the promotion of classical music.
Tekeeyah is the first ever work written for a shofar-trombone
soloist, and composed specifically for Haim Avitsur, who will
perform on the ancient shofar as well as trombone. He is a noted
trombone virtuoso who has premiered some 60 new works written
especially for him. It was a happy accident, perhaps, that Avitsur
and Warshauer met the weekend of her symphony’s premiere, beginning
the two-year collaboration that produced Tekeeyah.
The shofar is a hollowed-out ram’s horn used in the
Jewish tradition to call the faithful to attention, particularly at
Rosh Hashanah, the start of the Jewish New Year. And it’s a
difficult instrument to play.
Musically, Tekeeyah uses the shofar’s limitations as
strengths, building the solo and orchestral parts from its two
strongest pitches and a rhythm based in threes. Warshauer was in no
doubt about Avitsur’s trombone playing, but how was he on the shofar.
“I play in the synagogue in Manhattan,” he said to
Warshauer when she introduced the notion. “And I have this amazing
shofar I’ve been playing!” Warshauer said that when blown well, the
sound of the shofar can be felt at one’s core. “All we are commanded
to do is to hear the shofar, to be fully present.”
“This piece is about what’s underlying us,” Warshauer
said. “What’s our bedrock? And the shofar is what’s supposed to get
to our bedrock. It calls us to wake up to a deeper reality, to pull
away the veil of busyness, pull away the distractions. I feel like
that’s how we’re going to get to the next place.”
Warshauer’s music
is high, wide and deep, inspired by life’s big questions and a
passionate desire to bring her meditations on nature, humanity and
transcendence into musical expression. And Tekeeyah is the latest
that she hopes “will go from my soul to your soul.” |
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