Music of the Sefiras

Music of the Sefiras (2023) is my attempt to create Borges-like fiction in music and to discover the in-between space of language and abstract sound.

The piece asks quite a lot of the listener. It is an hour of very dense music, and asks for several kinds of attention at once: to listen to the music, to follow the meaning and content of the text and the network of details of this esoteric historical fiction, and at the same time to give in to the strange space that opens between the meaning of language, the physical sound of the voice, and abstract musical sound - between mysticism and irony.

This challenge is not accidental. It is connected to the central questions of the piece: What does it mean to compose the music of someone else? And what happens when the boundaries between lecture and concert, history and invention, meaning and sound, rationality and mysticism begin to dissolve?

The piece is built from two interwoven layers: music attributed to Moshe Najara, a fictional composer I invented, and a lecture delivered by a fictionalized version of Gershom Scholem. The lecture begins as an account of Najara’s history, music, and ideas, but gradually melts into the music itself and into a mystical space in which language and sound become difficult to distinguish.

Moshe Najara is imagined as a composer who lived in the Ottoman Empire in the seventeenth century. His music and speculative musical theory draw on several sources:

• European Renaissance polyphony, which he never heard, but only read about and tried to imagine;
• the Ottoman music of his surroundings and the music of his real great-grandfather, the poet and composer Israel Najara;
• Kabbalistic mysticism, with its ideas about numbers, letters, words, and intervals, filtered through the radically subversive messianic ideas associated with Sabbatai Zevi.

Through the attempt to compose “his” music, I had the chance to compose music that is not my own, but rather the music of an imagined, marginalized composer whose biography, theory, and repertoire are fictional, while whose historical world is drawn from real materials. The historical background is strongly influenced by Olga Tokarczuk’s novel The Books of Jacob and by the messianic movement surrounding Sabbatai Zevi, who eventually converted to Islam.

In the fictional narrative, Najara absorbs ideas associated with this movement: the dissolution of boundaries between the permitted and the forbidden, between male and female, between noise and pitch, and between religious and cultural identities. These ideas are transformed into a musical theory in which identities and distinctions gradually begin to dissolve.

The lecture is delivered by a fictionalized version of Gershom Scholem (1897–1982), the historian of Jewish mysticism. His voice is recreated using generative AI; it is part of the fiction of the piece, not an archival recording.

The lecture begins as a scholarly presentation on the fictional composer Najara. Gradually, however, Scholem is drawn into the music and into the metaphysical ideas of his object of study. His text shifts from historical and musicological exposition to commentary on the music being heard in the present moment. As his voice gradually loses its stable semantic function, it begins to function musically. The lecturer becomes a protagonist, eventually drawn into an invented Kabbalistic ritual based on the rolling of letters.

Throughout the piece, boundaries gradually dissolve: between lecture and concert, history and invention, explanation and experience, word and sound, rationality and mysticism, and composer and character.

Fiction here is not a story placed on top of the music. It is a way of generating a musical world and testing what it means for that world to sound as though it belongs to someone else.

It was a way for me to live in an alternative possible existence - one in which the Middle East is imagined as a space of mystical and intellectual exchange, violence is displaced by spiritual endeavor, and religion remains a fluid field of exploration rather than an instrument of aggression.

Chapters

00:00 I. The Infinity Contracts into the Central Point
07:40 II. Light Is Emitted from the Friction of the Heavenly Air
13:56 III. The Light Contracts into the Central Point and Leaves Free Hollow Space
21:55 IV. Redemption through Sin
27:15 V. Shattering of the Vessels
35:52 VI. One Straight Line Prolongs the Light of Infinity
40:39 VII. Some Sparks Come Out of the Shells
44:14 VIII. Annulation of the Sin
48:39 IX. The Last Spark Goes Back to Its Origin
53:24 X. Thoughtless Light

Full transcript

Performed by: Ensemble Recherche
Audio recording: Johannes Philipp Müller