Feb 11, 2005

In tune with himself
By Dalia Karpel
Photos by Reli Avrahami

Although he says it's all been done before, composer Erel Paz still believes he has something new to say in his music. Judging by the prizes and scholarships he's won, he's right. He just can't make a living at it.

Right after he gets out of bed and before his morning coffee, Erel Paz sits down at the piano in his study and plays a Bach prelude or fugue. No, he's not a very talented pianist, and he's happy that none of the neighbors is a professional musician "who would surely be cringing at my interpretations."

Paz, 30, is a composer of contemporary music. Despite his age, he lives in his parents' apartment in Kfar Sava, mostly because he doesn't have much money. His piano is "awfully beat-up; any bar piano is better." But he has to start the day by playing because music has to be consumed, he says, not only via the ears. "It has to come through the fingers, too."

Until recently, Paz worked at the Milky Shop Cafe in the London Ministore shopping center in Tel Aviv, but he quit his job about two weeks ago - not for the first time. He has been working there on and off for about 10 years, but whenever he wins some sort of prize, he devotes himself solely to composing. On January 13, this year's ACUM Prizes for classical music, literature and poetry were handed out at the Givatayim Theater, and Paz came home with a check for NIS 10,000 for a composition he had submitted anonymously. The judges felt that the work, entitled "A Fish with No Name," was an example of "superb instrumental composition that combines humor, originality and an appropriate and convincing structure." (The other two winners in this category were the young composers Avner Dorman and Binyamin Yosifov).

Paz is tall and thin and something of a redhead. He chain-smoked throughout our interview, but at the end, he casually commented that he doesn't actually smoke - only sometimes, when he has to participate in social events. Paz is a funny guy and his humor is laced with sharp irony. The conversation began with a discussion of his and his family's virtuosity - at matkot (the paddle-ball game popular on Israeli beaches).

"I'm the scion of a family of matkot players," he affirms. His mother, Rachel, is "a certified player." His father, Eli Paz, works as a professional guide. Since he was a child, Paz has spent practically every weekend with his family at Herzliya's Zevulun Beach. Matkot is his sport, the way he clears his head. Now he's the only child at home. His older sister Sarit, an archaeologist and hiking guide, has moved out, and his younger sister, Nitzan, is off traveling the world.

Since graduating from the Thelma Yellin High School of the Arts, Paz has written 10 musical compositions; most are chamber works, one is for orchestra. It doesn't come easily to him. "On the contrary," he says, "I pound each and every note hard until it's sitting well and can't move." Asked if 10 pieces is a lot or a little, Paz replies that orchestral works take much more time to write and have little chance of being performed.

"The previous work for symphony orchestra that I wrote in 2000, called `Water,' actually received one wonderful performance and one terrible one. Denmark's Odense Symphony Orchestra performed it about two years ago in Denmark. The conductor, Guy Feder, who was from the same class as me in Thelma Yellin, made sure that the performance was well done. I didn't have money then, so I didn't travel to the concert, but in Denmark they record live in the concert hall. They sent me the disc and the performance was terrific."

The second performance was in Israel, and Paz says it was a traumatic experience. He anonymously submitted "Water" to ACUM's Liebersohn Competition in 2000, where it made the final and also won a prize of NIS 12,000 (the other winner was composer Nurit Jugend, for her symphonic work, `Kol Hashetika' - `The Voice of Silence'). "The Haifa Symphony was going through a bad period then. They had budget problems and discipline grew lax and the performance of `Water' turned out to be awful. Yes, I received a monetary prize, but the really significant thing is the performance of your work and instead of a prize I got a slap in the face. To top it all off, the performance also happened to be on September 28, 2000, on the eve of Sharon's trip to the Temple Mount and the start of all the `festivities,' and since that day I haven't seen my friend Nasser who used to work with me at the cafe."

Working at home

Paz spends most of the day at home, working at writing music every spare moment, on paper and on the computer (with a musical note-processing program). "I write because it answers my need to express myself in a personal and original way," he says. "Even though it's all been done already, there is still wealth to be mined. It's a little like the work of a scientist. I'm curious to keep going and see what's ahead. I don't think linearly and progress from note to note. I'm more like a sculptor who takes material and starts to shape it. What happens many times is that I toss out a little idea and then keep working all the time on expanding it. I guess I was born with a certain potential and I also received a lot of encouragement from those around me. Even when I was at the conservatory in Haifa, when I played the violin, I insisted on playing something I'd written myself at the end-of-year concert."

What do you do in your music?

"I don't think in terms of the development of a clear melodic line, but more in terms of textures. Simple and traditional harmonic shifts are at the basis of the work's structure, but then it's as if they're buried and imperceptible. In other words, I try to hide them. What matters most to me is to be original in my music. I can't point to any specific influences of techniques of other composers. I would hope that it's impossible to say that a work of mine sounds like a work of Gyorgy Ligeti or Luciano Berio. Even though everything has already been done in music, I'm trying to create something else. All of the definitions - modern, not modern, post-romantic, neo-romantic - just kill me."

But if you nevertheless had to define your music?

"Almost all good music is a filter of other music with the addition of an original, personal statement. Usually, I find the trigger for my writing in personal experiences and memories, and sometimes I use it to `settle accounts' with my environment and with myself. Which is also the reason apparently that I haven't yet written an `Elegy for the Victims of Terror' or a work in honor of the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.

"In my work, `Live Games with Bach in the Dark,' for clarinet, viola and electronic soundtrack, I broke down Bach's music into tiny melodic structures that last for very long periods of time. The idea came from a memory of mine from high school days of how at the end of some party, when everyone was sleepy and worn-out, one person sat down and played a Bach suite on the cello. Just like that, at four in the morning. In the `Bruckner's Force' piano quartet, I tried to convey the experience I had when I played for the first time in the symphony youth orchestra."

Music critic Noam Ben Ze'ev says about Paz: "In his works, I find a striving for beauty. They are always beautiful, attractive to the ear, not off-putting. Musical beauty is very important to him, and is there in each phrase. In the musical tradition, `beauty' is a concept that belongs primarily to the romantic genre, and therefore I wouldn't define Paz as an `avant-gardist.' The avant-garde aims to defy and challenge the senses with innovative sounds, which is why in the various avant-garde styles you find grating sounds, aggression, `mess' - so to speak, and not calm or pleasantness.

"That said, Paz is also not a romanticist. The intuition that guides his music is impressionistic - in other words, tied to the orchestral shades, the shades of sound, to a kind of melodic and harmonic blurring. His attitude toward non-musical content is clearly impressionistic - and is expressed in the titles of works like `Water,' which is divided into movements called `Sea,' `River' and `Rain.' It's impossible to miss the tribute to the impressionistic composer Debussy and his three-part work, `La Mer.'"

A tremendous revelation

In 2000, Erel Paz completed his bachelor degree studies at the Rubin Academy of Music in Jerusalem, where he studied composition with Dr. Ari Ben-Shabetai, to whom he offered special thanks when accepting the ACUM Prize in January. The studies were interesting, but he felt like academia was stifling his intuition, and so he decided not to pursue a master's degree or a doctorate.

He has received more than a few scholarships, including one from the America-Israel Cultural Foundation, and numerous prizes, including the audience prize at an international competition held in Seoul, South Korea in 2001 for his work, "In the Neighborhood." His work, "Bruckner's Force," won the Irino Prize at the 2004 ACL (Asian Composers League) festival - "I got a thousand dollars and I went to the dentist."

His works have also been performed at the MATA festival in New York in 2003, under the sponsorship of composer Philip Glass, though Paz was unable to attend the concert. "At the American consulate in Tel Aviv, they gave me a hard time and refused to give me a visa even though the festival had invited me to the performance of `In the Neighborhood' at their opening concert. They said that I hadn't proven any socioeconomic ties to Israel, which means children and a pay slip."

Paz, who has played the violin since he was a child and insists he used to practice of his own free will without having to be nagged about it, began studying composition while still in high school. He studied with Prof. Sergio Natra and in his matriculation exams was given special permission to compose five pieces for the final recital instead of just playing five pieces.

From a young age, he says, "It was obvious to me that I didn't want to perform, or to be a soloist. I didn't like standing on stage and being blinded by the lights. And I also felt that it wasn't such an original expression of yourself, because when you're a performer, you first of all have to express the composer's work - and to negate yourself somewhat in the process. When I discovered that I could write music and then wait for others to play it, it was a tremendous revelation."

His discovery of composing owes a lot to a teacher named Eyal El-Dor. "At Thelma Yellin, there was an excellent teacher named Eyal El-Dor who taught solfege and harmony. He did things that went beyond the curriculum, like leading afternoon workshops for kids who wanted to write music. He was about 30, and was a composer who was just at the start of his career. He was the student of the well-known composer Abel Erlich. El-Dor really encouraged me when it came to composing. And then one day he shot himself. I was in tenth grade then and I went into total shock.

"I had just written my first work, with El-Dor's encouragement, and I was still in the youth orchestra, playing violin. A quartet was supposed to perform my work and we were in rehearsals in Haifa before the concert, which was supposed to be on a Sunday evening. That was the weekend he chose to commit suicide. I remember that a girl from my class told me that he'd killed himself and the whole way back to Kfar Sava on the bus I was crying, and Eitan Steinberg held my hand.

"A week before, I'd gone with El-Dor to a festive concert in honor of Abel Erlich's 70th birthday. And I told him about the concert in Haifa and he said he was very proud of me and that of course he would come. His committing suicide on the eve of the concert wasn't totally coincidental. It hurt very much, but I'm not angry at him. He was a very impressive figure and he was really the one who encouraged me to compose. After it happened, I had a crisis and couldn't concentrate very well on writing. Some time passed, and then I started studying with Sergio Natra and there was a terrific chemistry between us. For three years, I went to him for a composition lesson every week. He was very liberal and gave me a lot of freedom."

Is that the reason why you prefer to do occasional jobs and not to teach?

"Teaching is a great responsibility, because you have the power to change people's lives. Eyal El-Dor was a missionary of the profession; he came to students who didn't know it was possible for them to become composers and he opened that window for them. All the teachers I had after him told me that it's a hard profession and that it's not easy to make a living and that there's no money in it and that I wouldn't be happy. El-Dor never said anything like that. He only talked about the positive aspects of composing, and in the end he took it harder than anyone and killed himself. I learned that he also destroyed all his works before he killed himself. Not long ago, the library of the Music Academy in Jerusalem put some books and booklets up for sale and among them was one with notes for violin sonatas that belonged to him. A friend bought it for me and I'm keeping it as a memento.

"Right now I'm in a good period and things look optimistic, but the choice of composing as a profession is not the sanest or most promising."

Making a living

Paz says he lives with his parents because he doesn't make a good enough living. Two years ago, he accepted a part-time position with ACUM, where his job mostly consisted of registering the broadcasts that were aired on the Voice of Music classical music station. "I earned enough to leave my parents' home, but I knew that I wouldn't last there and I did end up leaving and going back to the cafe," he says. "My parents are very nice and not nosy, and since I'm the only child who hasn't left home, I have a study and a bedroom. In the past year, there has been a significant rise in my income. For the first time, the America-Israel Cultural Foundation commissioned a work from me for its 2005 competition. The piece is 21 minutes long and they paid me $2,500. For three months, I could afford to focus solely on writing. I've never been a money or a label freak, and I'm not a clothing freak, either."

When you finish composing a piece, what do you do - start knocking on the doors of conductors or editors at the Voice of Music?

"I look for opportunities. On the Internet, for example. If I send the piece to a musical ensemble in Taiwan, I have better chances than I would in Israel. Here they only commission works without wanting to pay. `We'll be happy to play it,' they say, and that in itself encourages me to write. Obviously, the real goal is to get to a situation in which they commission a work and pay for it. This year, Limor Livnat, the Minister of Education and Culture, promised increased budgets for musical performance and that new works would be commissioned from Israeli composers. Maybe I'm an idiot to hope that something like that would come my way, but I'm hoping."

You wouldn't make phone calls?

"I don't know that many people and it's not always comfortable for me to promote my own work. Sometimes I just put a disc in an envelope and send it. A week ago, I sent an envelope to Mendi Rodan [director of the Rishon Letzion orchestra] with a section of an orchestral work, and I added a disc of `Water' from the Denmark performance. I haven't had any personal discussion with him and I won't call him. It's his decision. Often, I send copies of my work abroad. I send it anonymously and they don't even know what country I come from. I function like a small publishing house. Every once in a while I put together a few packages and send them and hope to receive a reply. Every once in a while, they tell you to get on a plane."

And for the radio?

"I told you I'm a one-man operation. I'm the scut worker and the boss and the publicist and the graphic designer, and I also make myself coffee. Once, I sent a package of discs to all the editors of the radio programs. I added a little note and sent them out. On Thursdays at eleven at night, Zamira Lutzky from the Voice of Music plays the music of Israeli composers and she invited me to the studio. She does holy work in playing Israeli composers. The visit to the studio was a real experience. I didn't get to hear any music that I wrote, but for about an hour I heard a summary of all the things I'd done so far and I was absolutely thrilled. Usually I have the feeling that I haven't done anything so I was surprised to see that I'd actually done quite a lot. Every piece of mine has either gotten a performance or won some prize."

The option of remaining alone

Paz hasn't had a girlfriend for a long time and says that women have a hard time understanding him and his way of life, and soon end up cutting off the relationship with him. But this doesn't bother him. He doesn't have any dream that involves home-family-kids-money. "I'm used to being alone. I'm fine alone. In some ways, it's the ideal state for me. Of course I have a need for a bond with someone else and for love, but in relationships I felt misunderstood. Even as a kid I liked being alone. My parents used to go on lots of little trips and they'd take me with them. At age 8 I told them, `Go by yourselves. I'm staying home.' And it was wonderful to have the whole house to myself."

What do your parents say?

"My parents respect what I'm doing, though they don't really understand it. They're not in the profession and they don't know how to appreciate what I've done, so their faith in me is really a blind faith. They trust that I know what I'm doing. I think that I know. So there's the option that I'll remain alone, without a wife and kids, and that doesn't seem like such a radical scenario to me. In fact, it looks quite reasonable."

Are you interested in being an innovator and a provocateur?

"Innovation is an important thing, but because it's all been done before, I believe that my mission as a composer is to try to find and develop my personal language amid all this chaos, and in certain ways, that's a lot harder than being innovative. Apparently, I'm also not the biggest provocateur around. Especially in the imagination. There's actually a lot of sarcasm in my music, when I use familiar materials like the first theme from Bruckner's Fourth Symphony and put it in a totally different context from the original. Creating a provocation via the music itself is not an easy thing, and even then only a very few, who take a really in-depth look at the music and search out the contexts will even notice it. There's this one composer who always greets me by saying, `So how's the avant-gardist?' Considering what's happening these days on the music scene, I guess he's not that far off when he calls me that. I think that today it's fine and ethical to write music in any language, as long as it's the composer's truth, the truth he was searching for and that he found."

What kind of music do you listen to when you're not writing?

"I have a deep and abiding affection for Prince. I listen to music mostly when I'm driving. The Mahler symphonies, early Elvis Presley. Led Zeppelin and the Beatles and Israelis like Eran Zur, Corinne Allal and Etti Ankri. I love and admire Bjork, that incredible Icelandic alien, and also the Red Hot Chili Peppers. At home I listen to the radio. Sometimes the Voice of Music and sometimes the current events' programs, and I can write music when the radio is on, as shocking as that might sound. I'm used to working with all the noises around me. Oh, and for a few months now, I've constantly been singing to my dog, Moshon - `Who loves you more than me?'"