Love and Distress Songs

The song cycle Songs of Love and Distress was written originally in 2002 for voice and piano, and later arranged for voice and string quartet. As the title suggests, these are songs about love and the distress it tends to cause us; when they were written they reflected fairly precisely my own experience of love at the time. I chose a range of texts — including one in Russian and one I wrote myself — each illuminating a different side of that experience. What they share is a female point of view on love (even David Avidan's poem is written in the feminine).

The songs are sung, most of the time, in a non-operatic voice — not always guttural, but I tried to avoid the vibrato so common in classical singing, both to suit the Hebrew language and because the songs draw on many musical languages and vocal techniques, including shouts, speech, whispers and moans. For me these are only means — tools that help carry from me to the listener a range of strong emotions that can change in the blink of an eye. For this performance I expanded one of the songs, which I had felt was unfinished. From a distance of a few years, I feel that in these songs I managed to convey something very personal and direct — that the music carries the feeling it was meant to express. Total love, the suffering it causes, the bond between love and creation, and the self-reflection it stirs in us: these, to me, are universal feelings, and there is nothing like music to convey them — no matter that this is only a small part of me, or that today I am in a different place.

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