NOWHERE TO GO

For String Quartet / String Orchestra

Duration: 12'
Instrumentation: string quartet / string orchestra
Written for: Carmel Quartet
Dedication: dedicated to First Sergeant Yam Glass and to her fellow observation soldiers who fell at Nachal-Oz base on October 7th 2023.
Commission: Mif’al HaPais grant
Premiere: Carmel Quartet, Annette Studio, Tel-Aviv, December 2024
(recording engineer, Yossi Arenheim)
Video shooting: Tel-Aviv Soloists Ensemble, Jaffa Music Center, January 2025
(recording engineer, David Louria; videography, Alon Harel)

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.