Israel Prize-winning Israeli composer Arie Shapira believes that a composer should be able to write in any genre and should not be the kind of specialist that, say, Frederic Chopin (piano pieces) and Richard Wagner (operas) were.
And so he has composed everything from film music to chamber works for one instrument, from programmatic music about such subjects as the Holocaust and Israeli politics, to completely abstract absolute music. Moreover, he has used both standard orchestral instruments and electronic instruments in his works.
Even so, in some way all his music is about Israel, he told The Chronicle in a recent telephone interview from his home in Haifa. “I try to express the mentality and atmosphere of Israel, which is hectic, nervous, violent and so on,” he said.
And he seeks to do that in a way that “must be Israeli, not European or American…. I believe that every musical piece must be criticizing the past,” he said.
Milwaukee will get a chance to hear what Shapira is talking and composing about on Thursday, Feb. 23.
At noon, Shapira will speak about his music and the role of the composer in Israeli society at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Music Building, Room B40. Admission is free.
Then at 7:30 p.m., Chicago’s MAVerick Ensemble, which specializes in contemporary classical music, will present a concert featuring five Shapira chamber works, most of them for standard acoustic instruments, but one of them for guitar and electronic sounds.
The concert will take place in the recital hall of the Peck School of the Arts, 2400 E. Kenwood Blvd. The program will also include the premier of a new work by UWM professor emeritus Yehuda Yannay, plus music by U.S. avant gardist John Cage and by the ensemble’s director, William Jason Raynovich.
Shapira takes pride in being “considered the most avant-garde composer in Israel” now, as he described himself. This is one reason that Yannay is interested in his work and wanted him to be part of UWM’s Music Now And From Almost Yesterday series.
“So many composers have turned neo-conservative” in Israel, Yannay said in a telephone interview. But Shapira “still does interesting experimental work” that is about “the way he feels as a contemporary person reacting to what’s around him; and I find this very important.”
Shapira is also proud that he was trained completely in Israel, which fact helped him to “develop my own language.”
He is also a politically engaged composer. He freely says that he is opposed to Israeli settlements in the West Bank, and has both signed petitions and composed music about his political beliefs.
In fact, he said that he lost a teaching job at the Rubin Academy of Music in Tel Aviv because of one of his compositions, “Upon Thy Ruins Ofra” (1990), that he wrote to “make fun” of the settler movement. This resulted in his going to Haifa University in 1995, where he has been ever since.
Yet for all his immersion in the present, Shapira has not lost his love for music of the past by Mozart, Schumann, Chopin, Bach. In fact, he teaches a class in Bach’s counterpoint, and he said his students constantly ask him why he does that when his own music is so different.
“I was not born in Eisenach in the 17th century, so I can’t write like Bach,” he said he tells them.
In fact, he was born in Kibbutz Afikim in the Jordan Valley in 1943 to parents who were immigrants from Eastern Europe. His father was a physician, and Shapira was “supposed to be a physician, too.”
But his parents were also music lovers who saw to it that their son had piano lessons; and when he was 16 “it fell on me like a hammer” that “I just wanted to write music,” he said.
He studied at the University of Tel Aviv and the Rubin Academy of Music. In addition to receiving the Israel Prize in 1994, he also received the Prime Minister’s Prize in 1986.
Tickets for the concert are $10 general admission, $7 for students and seniors; and are available from the Peck School of the Arts box office, 414-229-4308.
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