Que sais-je? is a one-hour composition that explores the life and philosophy of composer Amos Elkana’s father, Yehuda Elkana, through music, archival recordings, and visual media. Performed by the Meitar Ensemble, the piece integrates live instrumental performance with multichannel audio and video projections, surrounding the audience with a tapestry of sound and memory.
| # | Audio | Title/Composer(s) | Performer(s) | Time |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Total Time | 64:26 | |||
Que sais-je? |
||||
| Meitar Ensemble, Topi Lehtipuu, tenor, Pierre-André Valade, conductor | ||||
| 01 | Part 1 | Part 1 | 5:00 | |
| 02 | Part 2 | Part 2 | 3:24 | |
| 03 | Part 3 | Part 3 | 5:22 | |
| 04 | Part 4 | Part 4 | 3:34 | |
| 05 | Part 5 | Part 5 | 2:12 | |
| 06 | Part 6 | Part 6 | 5:29 | |
| 07 | Part 7 | Part 7 | 4:11 | |
| 08 | Part 8 | Part 8 | 4:38 | |
| 09 | Part 9 | Part 9 | 2:38 | |
| 10 | Part 10 | Part 10 | 8:30 | |
| 11 | Part 11 | Part 11 | 9:02 | |
| 12 | Part 12 | Part 12 | 3:05 | |
| 13 | Part 13 | Part 13 | 1:59 | |
| 14 | Part 14 | Part 14 | 5:22 | |
Amos Elkana’s Que sais-je? is a powerful and emotional portrait of his father Yehuda Elkana in music, words, and history. Yehuda Elkana’s life story straddles some of the major fissures of the 20th century, having been born in Hungary, survived deportation in 1944 and subsequent internment at Auschwitz with his parents, migrated to the new state of Israel, and built a life in the nascent country as a public intellectual. Amos Elkana’s composition incorporates recordings of his father recounting his personal journey alongside readings of poetry by Hungarian poet Péter Nádas and Gertrude Stein, with a musical score performed by the Tel Aviv based Meitar Ensemble conducted by Pierre-André Valade and augmented by Elkana’s own live electronic processing. In performance, video projections also accompany the work to enhance the context and provide more points of historical memory.
The work is divided into fourteen sections that are separated by the elder Elkana’s spoken recordings. In the first, at the very opening of the piece, he quotes Gertrude Stein (whose voice is heard later in the piece), “let me recite to you what history teaches,” succinctly summarizing one of the core goals of the piece itself. The opening musical material begins with three gentle solo flute phrases before the other winds join with intertwined contrapuntal lines. The ensemble settles into a hypnotic, cyclical texture evocative of Messiaen before the piano adds fluid connective passagework and separated articulations. Péter Nádas’ voice is heard here for the first time, reading the first lines of his poem in Hungarian, a Kantian meditation on meaning.
Read MoreThe elder Elkana’s second segment, accompanied by percolating live electronics, tells of his birth in Yugoslavia in 1934 and Hungarian occupation of his region which led to the arrest of his father. The music that follows at the opening of Part 2 is angular and reflective of emergency vigilance, with jagged, stabbing ensemble accents and an ascending rocket motive, contrasted by poignant, mournful melodic material in the violin, bassoon, and cello, and later in the winds.
A solo bassoon and then haunting, disembodied ensemble chords accompany the retelling of an episode on the Auschwitz transport train when his mother learned that his grandmother and aunts had committed suicide on his birthday because they thought they would never see him again. A low rumbling bass line in the piano spurs on these unsettling chords. The piano initiates a series of canonic entrances in Part 4, a powerful musical expression of sorrow and confusion after a story of young Yehuda’s father forbidding him to take a collection of glass churches with him as they were ordered towards the infamous final Nazi death march.
Amos Elkana’s live electronics provide motion to several of his father’s spoken segments, such as the subtle bubbling sounds towards the end of Part 5 that accompany the details of how Yehuda and a 15 year old girl scoured for food in garbage cans while they were hiding from the Nazis. The subsequent ensemble music is dense and chaotic, with swooping lines in the flute, accented passages in the piano, highlights from woodblock, and furioso figures in violin and clarinet, eventually leading into the first recording of Gertrude Stein reading her iconic absurdist poetry. The ensemble swirls behind Stein’s voice with dizzying high register elliptical phrases, an encapsulation of a surreal state, the abject suspension of order and sanity that must have greeted all who found themselves surviving the last days of the catastrophic war.
The second half of the piece focuses on Yehuda’s journey building a new life in Israel, circling around to subject matters that are less bleak. At 1:20 in Part 8, Elkana’s pointillistic electronics are briefly joined by textural writing in the ensemble, col legno articulations in the strings that accompany a humorous moment when his father recounts a cow famous in Israel for providing the maximum quantity of milk. What follows is a section of tactile timbres, mechanical, separated lines in the piano, and brusque interjections in strings and bassoon. The texture coalesces into off-kilter phrases of repeated notes, a ballet of misfit puppets.
At the 2:00 mark in Part 10, oscillating figures in strings and piano provide regularity of pulse but not metric division, as Elkana spins out a harmonic progression like a slowly exhaling accordion. An ominous pedal point interrupts midway through Part 10, and the oscillating figures return at a slower rate before they cohere into an anticipatory unison between violin and flute, giving way to more irregular arpeggiated groupings, first in the solo piano and then in a solo passage for live electronics. The music Elkana writes in Part 11 that follows his father’s recounting of the day he met and proposed to a woman he had just met is a reprise of the music chronicling his grandfather’s arrest in Yugoslavia in Part 2, recast slightly, but suggesting how disparate life events can be connected in terms of their significance.
The closing section of the work is signaled first by an unaccompanied reading in Hebrew of a eulogy Yehuda Elkana gave at a funeral in 1983 calling for civilized debate within Israel and then by the final recording of Yehuda Elkana referencing the ambivalent Michel de Montaigne inspired title of the piece, Que sais-je? (“what do I know, anyhow?). The younger Elkana follows this dismissive final word with playful ensemble music that has echoes of Franco Donatoni’s nervous modularity. Finally, with two minutes remaining in the work, we hear overdubbed layers of tenor Topi Lehtipuu’s voice in a poignant presentation of the final stanza of Nádas’ powerful poem.
One of the striking things about hearing Yehuda Elkana’s story in his own voice is the clear, dispassionate way in which he narrates traumatic episodes from the Holocaust, what Amos Elkana describes as “eloquent, precise, yet emotionally distant.” To the composer son, this is where music can act as the connective tissue between the pain and emotion embedded in the stories and the distance that Yehuda seems to have cultivated, one assumes out of necessity for his own survival and ability to function. Perhaps this filling in the gaps is also a reflection of Amos Elkana’s own hunger to understand his father’s experience. And yet, the younger Elkana does not give us an overwrought score — powerful, yes; emotional, most definitely. But Amos Elkana’s Que sais-je? also reflects some his father’s restraint, an acknowledgment that with certain subject matter, it is not possible to eclipse the drama and import of the events themselves with music. Combined with the score, the poetry excerpts of Nádas and Stein provide a different kind of reflective distance, Nádas engaging with a lineage of searching for meaning through philosophy, and Stein reflecting a tattered mid-century reality. The sum total that is Que sais-je? straddles the weight of the historical subject matter and Yehuda Elkana’s dispositional humility elegantly, sharing a potent account of one man’s journey through a traumatic 20th century history without forcing our emotional reaction to it.
– Dan Lippel
Recorded at Auditorium of the Israeli Conservatory of Music, Tel Aviv, November 5, 2024
Recording, mixing & mastering: Yaron Aldema
Video: Amos Elkana
Premiered April 13, 2023 – Meitar Ensemble, Studio Annette, Tel Aviv
Liner notes: Amos Elkana
Cover Art: Alexander Polzin: “Sisyphus”, alexanderpolzin.com (photo by Klaus Michalek)
Design, layout & typography: Marc Wolf, marcjwolf.com
Photo of Amos Elkana, p. 9: Natalie Schor
Meitar Photo: Michael Pavia
Photo p. 5: “Sunrise over the desert” – a frame from the video screened during the performance, by Amos Elkana
Supported by Open Society Foundations
The Yehoshua Rabinovich Foundation for the Arts
Amos Elkana (born August 20, 1967, in Boston) is a composer, guitarist, and sound artist whose work spans orchestral, chamber, electroacoustic, and multimedia compositions. Raised in Jerusalem, he studied jazz guitar at Berklee College of Music before pursuing composition at the New England Conservatory under William Thomas McKinley. He later earned an MFA in electronic music and sound from Bard College, studying with Pauline Oliveros and George Lewis.
Elkana has composed nearly 80 published works, performed at major international festivals and venues such as Carnegie Hall, the Berlin Konzerthaus, and Heichal Hatarbut in Tel Aviv. His discography includes albums such as Casino Umbro (2012) and Tripp (2018), reflecting his diverse musical language. He has received numerous awards, including the ACUM Golden Feather Award (2002), the Prime Minister’s Prize for Music Composition (2011), and the Rosenblum Prize for Excellence in the Arts (2021).
Beyond composing, Elkana is an active performer, engaging in concerts as an electric guitarist and live electronics musician. He has collaborated extensively in dance, theater, and film projects, integrating his expertise in electronic music and sound design. Identifying as a cosmopolitan, his artistic philosophy is influenced by the ideas of Kwame Anthony Appiah, embracing a global artistic perspective that defies categorization.
Founded in 2004 by artistic director Amit Dolberg, the Meitar Ensemble has established itself as one of the world’s leading contemporary music groups. Based in Tel Aviv, they have been praised by The New York Times for their “excellence, poise, and precision” and have performed at prestigious venues and festivals such as Ultraschall Festival (Berlin), ManiFeste (Paris), the Venice Biennale, and 92Y (New York). The ensemble has held residencies at Royaumont Festival, Cervantino Festival Academy (Mexico), and MATA Festival (NYC).
Meitar has received major awards for its contribution to Israeli culture and contemporary music, including the Binyaminy Award (2006), Partosh Award (2008), and Landau Award (2010). Their 2018 album Ailes, conducted by Pierre-André Valade, won the Coups de Cœur prize from the Académie Charles Cros. They were also awarded the Dwight and Ursula Mamlok Foundation Award in 2024.
The ensemble has premiered over 400 works and collaborates with leading composers such as Helmut Lachenmann, Georg Friedrich Haas, Philippe Leroux, and Chaya Czernowin. They have released recordings on labels such as Souphir, NEOS, and VERSO. Meitar also directs Tedarim, a Master’s track in contemporary music performance at the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance, and organizes CEME, an international new music festival. Additionally, they run the prestigious Matan Givol International Composers Competition, solidifying their impact on contemporary music worldwide.
Pierre-André Valade (born 1959, France) is a conductor specializing in contemporary music. He co-founded the Paris-based Ensemble Court-Circuit in 1991 and served as its Music Director for 16 years. He later held the position of Music Director of the Athelas Sinfonietta Copenhagen from 2009 to 2014. Since 2014, he has been Conductor in Residence of the Meitar Ensemble in Tel Aviv, a partnership he considers one of the most creative of his career.
Valade is widely recognized for his interpretations of 20th- and 21st-century repertoire, particularly works by the French Spectralist school, including Gérard Grisey and Tristan Murail. His recording of Les Espaces Acoustiques won the Diapason d’or de l’année (1999) and the Grand Prix de l’Académie Charles Cros. He received the latter distinction again in 2008 for his contributions to contemporary music. In 2018, he appeared in a 14-disc box set celebrating the history of the Tonhalle Orchester Zürich, released by Sony Classics.
He has conducted major orchestras worldwide, including the BBC Symphony, Philharmonia Orchestra, Luxembourg Philharmonic, Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio-France, Montreal Symphony, Seoul Philharmonic, Tokyo Philharmonic, and Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia. Valade has also been a guest at leading festivals such as the BBC Proms, Aldeburgh Festival, Donaueschingen Musiktage, Darmstadt Ferienkurse, Milano Musica, and Warsaw Autumn. In 2001, he was named Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture.
The daring Yugoslav-Israeli intellectual and Holocaust survivor Yehuda Elkana may be best known for his insistence that a people must leave the traumas of the past behind in order to thrive. With Que sais-je?, electric guitarist and composer Amos Elkana, Yehuda’s son, has created a portrait in music of his father.
The work’s 14 movements, performed by prominent Israeli new-music group Meitar Ensemble conducted by Pierre-André Valade, with electronic sounds by the composer, also include archival recordings of Yehuda Elkana calmly relating stories of his and his parents’ experiences. These include the Nazi death and labor camps and a death march, seemingly miraculous survival, and his subsequent life in Israel.
Part 1 is somber and thoughtful, hand-in-glove with the elder Elkana’s plainspoken, matter-of-fact testimony. Part 2 intersperses calm string music with pointed wind and piano accents. Rueful themes emerge in the third movement following Elkana’s account of his parents’ opportunity, ultimately not taken, to immigrate to Palestine in 1935 when Yehuda was a baby.
The family’s deportation to the camps in 1944 and the news that Yehuda’s grandmother and aunts had committed suicide is only one of the harshest parts of the chronicle. The composer illustrates it with slow-moving woodwind harmonies over a muted walking bass line on the piano. The winds float adrift as the family embarks on a death march.
The punchy, hyperactive music in Part 6 seems to reflect the family’s post-traumatic sense of displacement after their harrowing survival. The movement ends with Yehuda and his parents immigrating to a kibbutz in the land that would shortly become Israel, accompanied in this telling by a text by Gertrude Stein, read by Stein in English. “Miracles play,” the writer tells us.
In one of the archival recordings Yehuda Elkana quotes another line from the same Stein opus, no doubt his son’s inspiration for including the Stein recording: “Let me recite what history teaches.”
Over the course of the work we also hear verses from a poem by Peter Nadas, read by the poet in Hungarian. It includes these lines, in English translation: “A thing that is more / than its sum, will be shaken by its destiny / to no avail, / it still cannot speak.” This could be the Jewish people. Yehuda Elkana insisted on the need for educated, “elite” individuals to speak on behalf of their people and of humanity.
A pulled-apart beat that drives Part 7 resolves into electronic dots that seem to go off in all directions as Elkana sets off from the kibbutz to receive a serious education. But it’s whimsy that drives Part 8. Everything seems possible. Elkana raises rabbits to sell for food as he learns Hebrew and English.
Broken rhythms return to underscore the more nervous-sounding Part 9. The sequence then sees Yehuda through becoming an educator and reporting for army service from which he is ultimately excused because of asthma.
Shimmering traditional harmonies give sections of Part 10 an ambient quality, hints of minimalist flow alternating with haunting tension as the tonal range rises. A sudden bass blast thrusts us into a rock-and-roll world that quickly lapses into a low hum from the woodwinds. (There are few hints of folk music in this opus, but it’s hard not to think of klezmer when the clarinet sounds.)
Amos Elkana studied with George Lewis and Pauline Oliveros, and their influence inflects his work. To my ear what’s distinct about his music is its smooth combination of harmonic intricacy with studied clarity and its fusion of descriptive vigor with emotional restraint.
Perhaps surprisingly, the archival narration, far from creating a feeling of insular self-absorption, has a mind-opening effect. The work succeeds in its aim, as the composer writes, of “giv[ing] give voice to the emotional undercurrents that were often left unspoken, expressing through music what words alone cannot convey.”
Yes, that’s a subset of the special and unique power of music generally – communicating recognizable meaning and feeling that words somehow cannot. But here one feels the very specific goal the composer has set himself, and it’s gratifying to hear him meeting it.
Jazzy fanfares open Part 11, which follows Yehuda’s account of meeting his future wife. It’s the longest movement, at over nine minutes. After a snappy beginning it develops into a dissonant parable of sliding rhythms and unanswered questions. But it ends on peacefully swaying strains.
“What do I know anyway?” (in French, “Que sais-je?”) asks the elder Elkana rhetorically at the end of his narration. But the music ends with tenor Topi Lehtipuu singing the Nadas poem’s final verse in a patchwork of multiple audio tracks. It’s an image of a young boy standing in front of “our house” during “one of the long years / of the first industrial size / burning of humans.” Quite a contrast with the reflective attitude embodied in the life’s work of Yehuda Elkana. The composer quotes in Hebrew a eulogy his father wrote for a colleague, in which he repeatedly urges Israelis to “manage the debate.” What a humble yet encompassing phrase with which to appeal to a world gone mad with hostility.
Que sais-je? is a profound tribute to the composer’s father, teachers – and audience. It asks us to listen closely with our hearts and minds alike. Amos Elkana finds a near-magical formula for composing music that is ear-twistingly challenging and ear-catchingly accessible; intellectually inspiring as well as semi-programmatic; and enjoyable in the abstract.
— Jon Sobel, 7.22.2025
New Focus Recordings is an artist-led collective label featuring releases in contemporary creative music of many stripes, as well as new approaches to older repertoire. The label was founded by guitarist Dan Lippel, composer Peter Gilbert in 2004, and composer/engineer Ryan Streber in 2004, formed …Read More …
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