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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.
Que sais-je?: Musical Tribute, Historical Reflection
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.”
‘Still Cannot Speak’
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.)
Celebrated Antecedents
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?’
“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.
Que sais-je? is out now on New Focus Recordings.
