Description

ALBUM PREVIEW 

Total Playing Time of the Album:  47:34

Photo by © Noah Shaye

BODHICITTA
Poem for Piano – Song of Brotherhood

Writing about Music is a rather ungrateful task, because it is very difficult to put into words, even with poetic tones, in a way that defines an experience, and even less to translate an inspiration that has emerged from deep within. It is a mistake to suppose that an aesthetic emotion can be transferred to words, which undeniably confirms that our knowledge is full of words and phrases which we lean on, but which are distant from and the opposite of wisdom.
There would be no musical sounds if it were possible to explain them with verbs and adverbs. Any attempt to translate a single series of notes from a Beethoven sonata or a symphony by Bruckner into literary phrases is guaranteed to fail, thanks to the non-verbal language that represents the essence of musical sound.
My attempt will therefore be to simply express and share what I could feel and hear within while composing Bodhichitta. It was, and is, a sincere longing, a hope and somehow a vow (sonic vow) exclaimed through the voices of the piano, to accompany those who listen to that pure aspiration of the deepest feeling of compassion towards all beings, that arises from the heart and is spread to the hearts. If the heart is touched, this is no mistake.
May this be a voice, like a drop in the ocean, that Bodhicitta cries out, and my longing will have been fulfilled and been of benefit to anyone who has listened.

Daniel Levy

Structure and sense of the composition.

The work is made up of 5 sections, a continuously unfolding melody and without pauses that mark the movements. These sections are cyclical, based on a chord and scale like a Raga (E flat – G flat – A flat – B flat – D flat) in an introductory form of Alap, which delves into – in each varied repetition – the predominant intention of the theme of the Song. As if the sonorous nucleus wanted to primarily underline, in that constantly developing cell, the multiple gardens of Brotherhood. This is the direction that leads us, in a certain and definite way, to gradually discover the essence of Bodhicitta, which is explicit and firmly rooted in mysterious and contemplative passages. Here, the poetics that unfold in the piano reach areas of great metaphysical intensity.

The writing becomes natural and simple, very effective in harmonic processes, with chords that incite melodies in the form of a spiral in terms of tones, and unexpected modulations and timbres that come from the use of the instrument as if it were a synthesis of very arcane sounds.

The rhythms are added to the phrases that are recited and shaped into a filigree. In a game of harmonics fused in a form of meditation, with intervals and sounds that must be perceived from far away, the crystalline clink of the Drilbu, the Tibetan ritual bell which is made of the fusion of 7 metals, companion of the Dorje in the hands of the monks, appears unexpectedly.

And if the Dorje symbolises the manifestation of the universe, the long tones of the Drilbu that unite cohesively with the piano, undoubtedly convey Bodhicitta’s transcendent sign in a clear way to the the listener’s intuition.

It is an internalised ‘climax’ and an ‘understatement’ without the need to use pompous language. Here Levy’s technical compositional flow, of extreme sensitivity and purity, is shown with the full amalgamated force of the colours of the piano’s palette. It gradually reaches orchestral sounds in its advance towards the ‘coda’ of this singular and inspired composition, where the first theme of Brotherhood is totally imbued with the essence of Compassion that gives life to the meaning of Bodhicitta. The Epilogue is therefore prepared, with a display of arpeggiated octaves that resemble eloquent and subtle ‘explanations’ at a sensitive level on the harmonic plane of such a complex subject. As the sequences descend from very high frequencies, a landscape is produced in the sound, like arches in the low register and with percussions that seem to reach the very bottom of the earth, reverberating and accelerating rhythms that offer a vision of the vast possibilities of the piano, to seal, at last, the beginning of an awareness of the path crossed or about to be crossed, in order to achieve the incorporation of the universal gift of Bodhicitta, made in Music.

Markus Lerner

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