Enthousiasm for ‘A Prayer and a Dance’ in the Meistersängerhalle, Nürnberg, Germany
The German audience greatly appreciated my composition A Prayer and A Dance, performed by the Nürnberger Symphoniker the 27th of October 2012 in the Meistersängerhalle. I got called up to the podium twice.
Rilke in Nürnberg
The soprano Judith Mok sang the première of Zey… in 1994 in the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam. She was friends with the famous Dutch writer Leon de Winter. Leon was starting production of the filming of one of his books, called Hoffmans Hunger. He was doing some casting work, and it was at that time that…
Rehearsal of ‘A Prayer and a Dance’ by the Nürnberger Symphoniker
Yesterday I went to a rehearsal of my piece ‘A Prayer and a Dance’ which is being performed tonight in the Meistersingerhalle, Nürnberg, by the Nürnberger Symphoniker. The rehearsal was in an amazing building: the Reichsparteitagsgelände. One could see the building from kilometres away, a huge complex which apparently is one million square metres big.…
‘Tears can open gates, but a melody can cause walls to fall’
In 1999, Bert Hof from the Folkertsma Foundation called to ask me if I would write a composition as a 75th birthday gift for Yehuda Aschkenasy. At that time, I knew Yehuda only from reputation and had never actually met him. Many friends were always telling me about his lectures and others even celebrated Passover…
Zey…
Performed by Nienke Oostenrijk-soprano and the North-Holland Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by David Porcelijn I composed Zey… , for soprano and chamber orchestra, in 1994 for Nieuw Sinfoniëtta Amsterdam. The three Yiddish poems used in this piece allude to three important moments in recent Jewish history: the flourishing and the subsequent banishment of the Jewish community…
Everything is illuminated
What is coincidence? A few days before I left for the Ukraine, I was at the bookshop at the Jewish Historical Museum. I was chatting with the woman behind the counter about my upcoming trip to the Ukraine, where a documentary was going to be made about my search for traces of my family in…
The Bible Tapes
A hundred years ago, when radio first became popular, radioplays were the hit of the day. The art of the radioplay seems to have been lost in the commotion of television, and now, of internet. A Dutch director, Peter te Nuyl, has always been fascinated by the Bible, and wanted to find a form to…
Information theory, randomness, redundancy, coding, noise, chaos
Chomsky tried to apply information theory to linguistics. As far as I know, few have talked about artistic aesthetics in terms of information theory. Recently I’ve been reading about Alan Turing, and the development of information theory during the Second World War and up until the seventies, during the development of the computer. It made…
My High School Years
Our high school, Cherry Hill High School East, had a wonderful music teacher, Max Culpepper. Many of my friends took trombone lessons with him. I had French Horn lessons from his wife, Ginger. The atmosphere that they created at the high school together with the other music teachers brought a deep love for music to…
Jeff Hamburg 