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Programme Note

Composer Note:

Tanz and Máissele for Violin, Cello, Clarinet and Piano was written in the early fall of 1981 for the Aeolian Chamber Players. The leader of the Aeolians, violinist Lewis Kaplan, asked me to write a piece with a distinct Jewish profile and I was happy to undertake the assignment. In past years I had written a number of compositions which sought to synthesize contemporary aesthetic and technical thought with musical elements of clearly identifiable Jewish character. Turns of melody, dance rhythms, cadential figures, typical sonorities of an instrumental or ensemble nature, emerging from a body of various musics historically connected with Jewish life, were important elements in those pieces I intended to be characteristically Jewish. That much of the material was close at hand and second nature to me will come as no surprise to those who know that my father, Lazar Weiner, was an eminent composer of Jewish music, particularly
eloquent in the realm of Art Song and the Liturgy.

Tanz and Máissele uses as its basic material musical fragments of Jewish character; dances, melodic and harmonic turns, phrase structures and gestural inflections. If these elements are conceived as being "realistic" - (as a recognizable object in a painting is considered "realistic") then the compositional process first presents, then transforms those objects into surreal or abstract shapes, some of which remain substantial, others of which evaporate in a haze of mysticism or of nostalgic speculation.

In the Yiddish language Tanz means "Dance". Máissele means "Little Story". The titles are taken from a pair of piano pieces my father dedicated to me when I was two years old.

Tanz and Máissele, in turn, is dedicated to him. It was the last new composition of mine he
heard before his death early in 1982.

-- Yehudi Wyner