LASHON AKHAT: ONE TONGUE
Installation Preview:
https://vimeo.com/852374262/df46719321
https://vimeo.com/852374262/df46719321
Exhibition dates: 12.5.23 – 30.11.23
Location: The Main Bell Cave, Biet Guvrin-Maresha National Park, Israel
Interdisciplinary artist and project initiator: Dor Zlekha-Levy
Composer, conductor, musical director: Tomer Damsky
Singers: Ilana Eliah, Israa Shalabi, Elram Amram, Itamar Shlomo Cohen
A four-voice choral composition of a poem in Proto-Semitic, a hypothesized proto-language Dated approximately to the 4th millennium BCE from which all Semitic languages evolved. Without evidence of its grammar, vocabulary, or sounds, it was reconstructed based on the common characteristics of the existing semitic languages. The composition is at the heart of an audiovisual installation by artist Dor Zlekha-Levy, who invited me to work with scholars and linguistics, learning and reinventing the articulation, and then awakening it with music. The text by Zlekha-Levy was intentionally constructed of words which have great similarity in the existing Semitic languages, a vocabulary which could only consist of primordial, universal components: mother, father, blood, flesh, bread, wine, heart, eye, ear, tongue, womb, water, salt, sweat, peace, rain, death. The music was written for four vocalists, each from a different cultural background and semitic accent: Palestinian (Levantine) Arabic, Kurdish Aramaic, Yemenite Jewish Arabic, and Hebrew.
Location: The Main Bell Cave, Biet Guvrin-Maresha National Park, Israel
Interdisciplinary artist and project initiator: Dor Zlekha-Levy
Composer, conductor, musical director: Tomer Damsky
Singers: Ilana Eliah, Israa Shalabi, Elram Amram, Itamar Shlomo Cohen
A four-voice choral composition of a poem in Proto-Semitic, a hypothesized proto-language Dated approximately to the 4th millennium BCE from which all Semitic languages evolved. Without evidence of its grammar, vocabulary, or sounds, it was reconstructed based on the common characteristics of the existing semitic languages. The composition is at the heart of an audiovisual installation by artist Dor Zlekha-Levy, who invited me to work with scholars and linguistics, learning and reinventing the articulation, and then awakening it with music. The text by Zlekha-Levy was intentionally constructed of words which have great similarity in the existing Semitic languages, a vocabulary which could only consist of primordial, universal components: mother, father, blood, flesh, bread, wine, heart, eye, ear, tongue, womb, water, salt, sweat, peace, rain, death. The music was written for four vocalists, each from a different cultural background and semitic accent: Palestinian (Levantine) Arabic, Kurdish Aramaic, Yemenite Jewish Arabic, and Hebrew.
SOUND SCORE: ACTED AS A GUIDE FOR THE SINGERS, ALL VOICES SUNG BY THE COMPOSER: