The project page for this work can be accessed here: Remembering Steel Skies Raining Tears

“A Dream of Lost Words” is the first part of the multi-movement composition “Remembering Steel Skies Raining Tears” for string quartet. It can also be played very effectively as a stand-alone work. “Remembering Steel Skies Raining Tears” and “A Dream of Lost Words” are based on interviews with child survivors of the Holocaust/Shoah. For more information and an overview of the project, go to the “Remembering Steel Skies Raining Tears” project page here.

“A Dream of Lost Words” begins slowly with music for cello written in the style of a doina; a solo improvisational instrumental form found in Klezmer and Romanian music. The opening cello melody is dominated by a modified version of the expressive krekt ornament, a musical motif found in Cantorial and Klezmer music that traditionally expresses the sobbing or an emotional catch in the throat of intense grief. The performance of this motif is very challenging in the context of classical music performance. The effect or affect can be rendered in two ways using a grace note on the interval of an augmented second. The krekts are created in both the Klezmer Freygish and Misheberak scale (Ukrainian Dorian mode) in F. The cello player has to imagine and render the motif in an effortful and expressive way that transcends the limitations of music notation. This motif is found throughout the composition as a special signifier of the emotions felt by child survivors. While the cello plays its intense musical phrases, the accompanying violins and viola play glassy, high-pitched, artificial harmonics. This section makes characteristic use of shifting meters found in a doina. This effect, along with the sudden, almost violent rapidity of the subsequent cello solo, is intended to express agitation or anxiety in music. 

The next section of “A Dream of Lost Words” brings together all four instruments of the quartet to simultaneously play contrasting melodic/motivic lines, including a subsequently important falling motif in the first violin. These very contrapuntal lines are intended to invoke the sense of a confused, half-conscious dream state full of a kaleidoscopic assortment of memories suggestive of the kinds of disturbing dreams many survivors report having throughout their lives as a consequence of their experiences. After an affirmative conclusion to this section, the music changes abruptly to a rhythmically complex, fast Allegro section in a 3/2 time signature characterized by polyrhythmic and syncopated overlays of triple and duple time. Tension is created through counterpoint and the drive of the repetitive, drum-like ostinato cello line and the multiple polyrhythms between the instruments, while harmony is used as a secondary element. The viola part takes on a heroic, individualistic character, becoming a type of protagonist within the music. 

This fast-moving section of “A Dream of Lost Words” was written as a narrative. It is a story in music of a survivor locked by their memories into reliving a past experience through vivid, repetitive dreams. This dreamer re-experiences an important moment in their life; a short, compressed time period during which they witnessed or became suddenly aware of the murder of a close relative at the hands of the Nazis. Part of the conflict experienced in this dream is an urgent need to recall what was or what could have been said, but was not, during these last moments of a loved one’s life. Expressive cello motifs, played in a variety of ranges of the instrument towards the end of the movement, evoke the emotions experienced as the survivor reacts to the most violent moments recalled from memory. The chords at the end of the work suggest how the dreamer awakes to a disturbing liminal reality where the past and present are intermingled. 

This movement is based on the testimonies of Robbie Waisman, Lillian Boraks-Nemetz, and Peter Gary, each of whom gave accounts of the murder of close relatives by the Nazis.