Tresar is a musical poem I composed early during my undergraduate degree. It is one of the earliest pieces I wrote focused on brevity, being part of a set of four miniatures, each only one line long, which kicked off a project of several years of slowly accumulating one-page musical poems into a collection I hope to soon publish. The score for this poem is available here:
The text of the poem is in Hebrew, and translates roughly to: “A dozen syllables to the end, and on my lips only her name.” In the Hebrew version the text fits into twelve syllables, with the last word, pronounced “shma”, written and spelled as the word meaning “her name” while also sounding like the first word of the Jewish prayer “Shma Yisrael…” which is traditionally said before death.
A few months ago I was able to coordinate a distanced recording of the work, which you can listen to below, with the Dior String Quartet and soprano Nofar Yacobi (who also sang this piece’s earliest version in the premier performance during our studies at Tel-Aviv.)
I hope to be able to share a version recorded live and in-person in the future. I will update with that here when I can.
