Josef Tal - Musical Style

Musical Style

"...There is no linear creative process. By its very nature it moves adventurously in many directions. There is the big danger that this may mislead one to superficiality. But just the same it is the great privilege of the creative man that all the roads are open before him. It is up to him, whether he loses his way in that universe or whether he explores it." —From: Self portrait of the composer Josef Tal – notes for a radio transmission (date unknown)

The characteristic features of Tal's music are broad dramatic gestures and driving bursts of energy generated, by various types of ostinato or sustained textural accumulations. Complex rhythmic patterning is typical of the widely performed Second Symphony and of a number of notable dance scores. But Tal's marked dramatic and philosophical propensities find total expression only in opera, particularly in the large-scale, 12-note opera Ashmedai...

Tal's early compositional style was a point of some controversy, due to his departure from – and criticism of – the so-called 'Mediterranean school' favoured by many Israeli composers at the time. This was an approach pioneered by Paul Ben-Haim and other composers, who set traditional Middle Eastern Jewish melodies within a European, often Impressionist, harmonic vocabulary. He was the most distinctive among the first generation of composers who principally opposed the use of folklorism and orientalism.

"...From the moment of my arrival in Palestine, in 1934, I was considered to be an enfant terrible. I thought that it was a mistake to harmonize a Yemenite melody according to European songs." —Josef Tal

On the one hand, like other members of the pioneer generation of composers who emigrated to Palestine in the 1930s, Tal sought to create a new national style distinct from European (and particularly German) modernism. On the other hand, to distance himself from Ben-Haim's "Mediterranean" school he adopted a distinctly modernist style. Tal's music is not monolithic. Despite its dominant atonality, Tal's music has undergone changes and modifications over the years. These changes reflect what occurred over time in Israeli music. Most of the works which Tal wrote around 1950 are characterized by traditional components and frameworks, written in traditional techniques such as variations, and atonal musical language. In the late 'forties and early 'fifties, when the Mediterranean style was at its peak, Tal was a frequent borrower of Oriental-Jewish source material as the basis for his compositions. If we take Ben-Zion Orgad's definition as the most pertinent it would surely follow that Tal's Piano Sonata, 1st symphony, 2nd Piano Concerto and other works based on Oriental-Jewish melodies are definitely not Mediterranean.

Reflections (1950) is neither tonal nor serial, and inhabits a world not unlike Bartok of the third and fourth string quartets, tempered somewhat by a decidedly Stravinskian acidity, along with a Hindemithian contrapuntal propensity. This, however, should not be taken literally. Cast in three movements, and having a performance time of approximately fifteen minutes, its procedures relate it more to the general neo-classic aesthetic of the late 1930s and 1940s. The use of solo strings played off against the ripieni of the string body points to the Baroque concerto grosso. As if to trump its neo-classical models, the final movement is a "fugue" in which Tal obliquely pays his respects to Hindemith without reverting explicitly to Hindemith's vocabulary.

"...After the War, again, I had to learn a new musical language, the serial technique, which became dominant in the 1950s in Europe. Other styles followed that one. Every fifteen years I learned, and composed in, a new musical style, and all of them interested me. This variety is the 20th century, and it could have happened only to one who lived through the whole century, someone stubborn like me." —Josef Tal

Tal's numerous works for traditional media defy classification as part of any "school". No doubt Schoenberg had an early influence on the Berlin composition student. But neither his widely played First Symphony (1952) nor his exceedingly well-wrought String Quartet in one movement, nor, for that matter, his subsequent Cello Concerto is in any structural sense dodecaphonically conceived. While row materials are freely used, the method of composing with twelve tones is nowhere strictly applied, not even in as recent and completely atonal a piece as the Structure for solo harp. Similarly, oriental materials are employed sparingly and with the greatest caution. Whereas the Symphony is actually based on a Persian-Jewish lament as notated by A. Z. Idelsohn, the Quartet no longer goes beyond the use of a few characteristic motifs. And if the Symphony still features a dance section in accordance with the then prevailing tenets of the Mediterranean School, such sacrifices to popular taste, however subtle, have been conspicuously missing in recent years.

A comprehensive examination of Tal's work suggests the following analysis:

(A) First period (works written up to 1959): These have a three-part structure; the micro-structural idea is based on the relationship between notes; the beat and the melodic line occupy an important place among the musical components.

(B) Second period (1959–1967): Characterized by the use of dodecaphonic technique.

(C) Third period (from 1967 on): Characterized by all (instrumental) works being written in one condensed movement. The single note, with its potential implications, is the micro-structural idea. Time, the sound in its various aspects, the rhythmic figure, the color and the texture are the dominant components... The influence of electronic music is in evidence. Transition from one period to the next is gradual, the language in all of them being atonal and the compositions developing from one basic idea.

(D) All Tal's works contain a recapitulation, which he terms "closing the cycle"... Tal sees his compositions as a metaphor for geometric circle, a perfect form, the life cycle. Life begins with the note C (doh) – a "center of gravity"... Tal employs innovative instrumental and orchestral techniques while retaining a predisposition for tradition, especially the Baroque... He divides the orchestra into sound and color group, sometimes also attaching a special texture to each group. This technique is personal and could be called "a special language". The whole orchestra is used sparingly, only at strategic points...

"...Undoubtedly one can find a wealth of musical motifs in Israeli folklore, but it is the courageous composer that absorbs it for an extra-national goal, to create a universal artwork. A work related to temporal phenomena and values is bound to dilettantism. It will lack the origin of every artwork, which, similarly to nature, is super-natural and eternal." —Josef Tal "...Israeli music is not the outcome of tonality or modality, of atonality or dodecaphony, nor of serial technique or electronics. These are nothing more than the means to which the folkloristic quotation, the combination of Mediterranean fifths, the a la hora rhythm, also belong. The means itself is good as long as it serves a living content and a vital will. In every living language the dialect must necessarily undergo changes: so in music too." —Josef Tal "...As a born creator, Tal has thus enjoyed the inestimable advantage of isolation (for which, to pose an extreme case, Beethoven had to pay with his hearing); notwithstanding his straightforward, elemental love for the Jewish national home, he was too inventive a musician to be caught up in nationalist movements or submit to such Judaic or Jewish pressures... While the European composer, and especially the avant-gardist, has tended to worry about trends, unconfessed fashions... - Tal has been evolving his natural post-tonal style in total detachment from Europe's and indeed America's much-publicized secret societies... The result has been a supra-factional as well as supra-national output which immediately attracts musical listeners who have not themselves been deafened by their theoretical and/or national allegiances..." —Hans Keller