Recitation (2024)
Lovorka Nemeš Dular- piano
.abeceda Contemporary Music Festival III
June 28th, 2024
Festivalna dvorana Bled
I give myself to the noise to become us, screaming for our liberation
It is heartbreaking and infuriating to witness the state of Israel weaponize Jewish trauma to justify its abhorrent violence and to convince many Jewish-Americans of that violence's necessity. This is the logic of liberal identity politics, which implore us to look out for only ourselves so that we may achieve "safety" by any means necessary. But where is the safety in the palm of Empire? The Empire will chew you up and spit you out, only to give you its guns to fulfill the broken sense of belonging that it stole. To get us to carry out its bidding, the Empire has handed us the same badge of whiteness that it wore to justify our extermination. The Empire paints Palestinians invisible to detach us from their humanity, so we can naturalize and carry out their displacement and slaughter. Our safety is not dependent on Palestinian suffering. Our safety is bound in their liberation: contingent not on isolating neoliberal individualism or national identification, but on a politics of solidarity/affinity. It is imperative to redefine us.
Jewish grief is immense, but it is not exclusive. Let us cry and fight together rather than surround ourselves in a fortress of walls and border checkpoints. Lilla Watson lets us know about the importance of collective liberation: "If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together." This is the tangled path to shared safety, and the context that inspired this piece, which even in its soloistic nature, affirms the collective in its devoted anthemic repetition bathed in the resonant sounds of ghostly communal chants. Solidarity is clearly a noisy and sacrificial endeavor. Free Palestine.
I have no grandiose illusions of the revolutionary potential of a piece of piano music. This is simply the piece that I must write at this present moment. Thank you .abeceda ensemble for commissioning the piece, Matt LeVeque for the title and advice, Ana Luisa Díaz de Cossío, Drew Sensue Weinstein, Pranav Nigam, Eva Herscowitz and Eliot Burk for the advice, and the many thinkers (Angela Davis, Donna Haraway, Rashid Khalidi, bell hooks, Raja Shehadeh, Naomi Klein, Octavia Butler, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Attali, Bernhard Lang, and many others) who have inspired this piece.