Reverberations

Chen Halevi - clarinet, Menachem Wienberg - piano (2015)

My piece "Reverberations" for Piano and Clarinet is dedicated to the wonderful clarinet player Chen Halevi who commissioned it. The title refers to the physical phenomenon of reverberations especially of the piano. These reverberations are produced either by playing the piano itself or by the clarinet playing into the piano sounding board thus awaking the piano strings to react in echoing the clarinet lines. In a way the piano plays itself in this case without the pianist intervention. For me though, this acoustical phenomenon has a deeper and more symbolic meaning as our memory and our emotional reactions are based on reverberations of our life experiences. So I've tried to express these layers of echoing within my psyche, using my own musical material combined with an old Jewish Yom Kippur Prayer which I love.

In Conversation with Clarinetist Chen Halevi, on "Reverberations":