PORTRAIT

Notice

When I was asked to take part in a collection of portraits of the sculptor Yehiel Rabinowitz, I felt that it was the model’s voice that contained the essence of his personality, and that I should start from there. So I invited him to tell a story of his own choosing, which I would record and try to extract the musical quintessence from. He told the biblical story of Joseph and his brothers, with great liveliness and humor, and I selected from the recording a few phrases, and also a few onomatopoeia, whose musical potential I found interesting. I divided them into phonetic elements, generally short and devoid of any detectable meaning, with the exception of a few key phrases in the story whose sudden emergence made them even more lively or comical. Their rhythm and melodic contour served as a model for a percussive instrumental treatment based, as is often the case with me, on close synchronization with the recorded elements. More or less radical manipulations almost always render the whole audible as a simple sequence of incomprehensible syllables. But I have ensured that the vocal personality of the model remains perceptible through contours, accents and rhythms.