Media Spotlight

Butter-lider (2022)

0:00 – 1. ergets vayt (H. Leivick)
2:15 – 2. tirtl-toybn (Yankev Glatshteyn)
3:30 – 3. nakht (Kadya Molodovsky)
6:35 – 4. a lonke tsvishn berg (Rokhl H. Korn)
8:05 – 5. the meadow with the butter-flowers

An absolutely golden performance of Butter-lider (2022), commissioned and premiered in full by No Exit New Music Ensemble, Dec. 3, 2022, SPACES Gallery, Cleveland, OH. Special thanks to No Exit directors Timothy Beyer and James Praznik; the brilliant musicians of No Exit; and my advisors, Yu-Hui Chang and Ellen Kellman.

Sean Gabriel, flute
Gunnar Owen Hirthe, clarinet
Cara Tweed, violin
Nicholas Diodore, cello
Nicholas Underhill, piano
Luke Rinderknecht, percussion
James Praznik, media and recording

--------

Butter-lider is a setting of poems by H. Leivick, Yankev Glatshteyn, Kadia Molodovsky, and Rokhl H. Korn, four of my favorite Yiddish writers of the 20th century. However, instead of setting these texts for voice, my music accompanies recordings (graciously archived and provided by the Yiddish book Center) of the poets themselves reciting their writing. The final movement features my own text assembled from translated fragments of each of the four poems.

Through this piece, I hope to facilitate a dialogue, across artistic media, across time and space, between these writers’ unique perspectives, and my own, on what it means to make Yiddish art. I refuse to fall into the elitist and insulting narrative of “elevating” a folk tradition by bringing it into classical music spaces. Rather, I hope to participate in this living culture so that it may reach new audiences and new generations, and to offer another medium, another language, through which to tell Yiddish narratives.