Estro Poetico-Armonico II (2014) by Yotam Haber
for flute, clarinet, violin, cello, and piano

Estro Poetico-Armonico II takes as its launching point the fifty psalm settings, Estro Poetico-Armonico (1724), by Benedetto Marcello, a contemporary of Bach, who paraphrased or elaborated on the liturgical music of the Venetian Jewish tradition. I came across his music when I was living in Rome, working on Death will come and she shall have your eyes (2008) for string orchestra, mezzo-soprano, and archival recordings of Italian cantors from the 1940s-1960s. I was inspired by the Jewish communities of Rome and Venice that were segregated for many generations since their initial arrival in Italy after the destruction of the second temple in Jerusalem. Without any real musicological substantiation, not really requiring one, I imagined that one generation passed on to another these ancient musical traditions, and through a kind of telephone-game-evolution, the music lost or gained its essence on each transference. When I came across the first edition of Marcello's psalms, I read his introduction with great astonishment and pleasure: he too, spoke of an imagined musical filament connecting the music sung in the Venetian synagogue of his day with "an ancient music passed down from Mount Sinai". The theory, of course, can't be proven, nor should it be, in order to appreciate the beauty and brilliant inventiveness of his cantatas. EPA2 is my re-imagining/re-hearing/re-creating, as the telephone game continues, generation after generation.

This work was commissioned by the Fromm Music Foundation.