Amos Elkana: Que sais-je?

The 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