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Programme Note

Composer Note:

Music for the play The Mirror was written for the Yale Repertory Theater production in 1972-1973. The play, typically set in a ghetto or shtetl of Poland or Russia, concerns itself with sexual fantasies born of sexual denial, neglect and repression. These are hardly the usual subject matter for folk material about Jewish life! For the ensemble I chose instruments that would make up a Klezmer band: Violin, Clarinet, String Bass, and Drum. The music itself is permeated with the tunes, tonalities, and dances of the Jews of Eastern Europe, heard through a contemporary sensibility, however, just as Singer was reexamining the folk material he inherited from his background.

-- Yehudi Wyner