NOWHERE TO GO

For String Quartet

Duration: 12'
Instrumentation: string quartet
Written for: Carmel Quartet
Commission: Mif’al HaPais grant
Premiere: Annette Studio, Tel-Aviv, December 2024

PROGRAM NOTE

I first encountered the poem Nowhere To Go about twenty years ago(!), when I wrote a series of miniatures, each inspired by a very short poem by American poet Archie Randolph Ammons. The poems were abstract, even somewhat obscure; some were philosophical, some dealt with nature. There was a lot of freedom in their abstraction, which suited the work I was writing at the time.

I had not thought about this poem since then, and the way it suddenly resurfaced in my mind while working on the quartet felt almost mystical to me. It came up out of nowhere, almost on its own. It took me a while to understand where the words were coming from and trace their source.

I have nowhere to go
and nowhere to go
when I get back from there.

The words immediately connected me with the national loss of direction and the uncertainty we, the people of Israel, experience in our personal lives, as everything around us has been falling apart over the past year.

On another level, the words of the poem also echoed a much more concrete experience that came strongly through testimonies of survivors from October 7th. The incomprehensible distress, and the claustrophobic feeling, nowhere to escape, nothing to hold onto, and no one coming to help.

The piece is dedicated to Yam Glass, but it does not aspire to describe her, her family’s experience, or come close to capturing the magnitude of the tragic event of her loss. May her memory be a blessing.