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Hatikva
NOTICE:
This was composed long before the current ongoing genocide of Palestinians, and I was not yet aware of the 75-plus years of the oppression of the Palestinian people by the Israeli government and many of the Israeli citizens. I look forward to the day when Hatikva and Fida'i (the Palestinian National Anthem) can peacefully coexist and be performed by combined ensembles of Israelis and Palestinians.
Text Source
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Music
Music by Don "Orfeo" Rechtman
Instrumentation
Brass Quintet
Hatikva by Don "Orfeo" Rechtman (1987)
is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
(This means you can perform it non-commercially or commercially without having to pay royalties, but you are required to acknowledge its authorship and where you got it. You cannot modify it without written permission from Don "Orfeo" Rechtman.)
Sheet Music
(Disregard the old copyright notices on the printed pages; the above Creative Commons now applies.)
Full Score
Recording
This May 10, 2002 recording is of the Orfeo Brass Quintet in Boulder, Colorado.
Video
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Practice Tracks
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Lyrics Printout
As long as deep in the heart,
The soul of a Jew yearns,
And forward to the East
To Zion, an eye looks
Our hope will not be lost,
The hope of two thousand years,
To be a free nation in our land,
The land of Zion and Jerusalem.
Viewing the Hebrew lyrics below requires Internet Explorer.
Transliteration | התקוה |
Kol od balevav p'nimah | כל עוד בלבב פנימה |
Nefesh Yehudi homiyah | נפש יהודי הומיה |
Ulfa'atey mizrach kadimah | ולפאתי מזרח קדימה |
Ayin l'tzion tzofiyah | עין לציון צופיה |
Od lo avdah tikvatenu | עוד לא אבדה תקותנו |
Hatikvah bat shnot alpayim | התקוה בת שנות אלפים |
L'hiyot am chofshi b'artzenu | להיות עם חופשי בארצנו |
Eretz Tzion v'Yerushalayim | ארץ ציון וירושלים |
The title of the national anthem, HATIKVA, means “The Hope.” It was written by Naftali Herz Imber (1856-1909), who moved to Palestine in 1882 from Galicia. The melody was arranged by Samuel Cohen, an immigrant from Moldavia, from a musical theme in Smetana's "Moldau" that is based on an Eastern European folk song.
Hatikva expresses the hope of the Jewish people, that they would someday return to the land of their forefathers as prophesied in the Old Testament. The Jewish people were exiled from Israel in 70 C.E. by the Roman army led by Titus who destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem. During the two thousand years of exile, the Jewish people said special daily prayers for return to Israel while facing the East in the direction of Jerusalem. They celebrated the holidays according to Hebrew seasons and calendar. Zion is synonymous with Israel and Jerusalem.
Notes (yeah; really funny!)
Arranged by Don "Orfeo" Rechtman.
Hebraic Anacronym To Inform Kids Very Accurately:
An Aleatory Work for 6 Oboe Reeds, 8 Cellos and 9 Belly Dancers
Aleatory (Chance) Music is
...music that cannot be predicted before (the) performance, or...which was composed through chance procedures... (The Oxford Dictionary of Music)
Apparently the Big Bang, if it ever did indeed “boing,” occurred as a chance incident, as did the formation of the galaxies and the solar system. And then the odds were certainly beaten when circumstances chanced into an arrangement that allowed life to form on an atmosphered planet that chanced to be just the right distance from what odds said would be an average size star. In fact, one of the few things more improbable than a life form is the creation of a work of art by one of them. And then consider how chancy it is for one of these life forms to create a musical work that so very improbably sounds upon repeated playing like the Israeli National Anthem, Hatikva! Thus this composer contends that even the most stringently structured piece of music is eternally enshrouded within a quantum cloud of chance.
The composer was ostracized from Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore in response to his refusal to write avant garde or modern music (this was in 1969, when the avant garde movement was at its height). The avant garde composer Earle Brown once described Orfeo as “trying to be the greatest Seventeenth Century composer who ever lived.”
Since then, he has received numerous commissions, completed residences through the Georgia and National Councils of the Arts, performed on stage, written for theater, presented master classes at both the university and high school levels, and taught privately. He is currently doing technical writing (including typesetting music) because, like so many artists, hunger is an ever-pervasive consideration and he is a wimp when it comes to suffering for arts’ sake.
This arrangement of Hatikva was originally written for “performance by the Atlanta Symphony Brass Quintet in honor of Ahavath Achim’s Centennial Celebration,” and was performed March 1, 1987.
The first section is a statement encompassing the beauty and nobility of the Jewish people. The second section, the waltz, explores their romantic and lighter sides. The third depicts the struggle, heard as a variation in the form of a stream of rapid notes, but even amidst the struggle, the nobility, the original theme in low brass, is heard above all else. The fourth and final section is a (everybody sing!) chorale, symbolic of the ever-present unity of the Jewish people. As the Israelis are not without, indeed cannot be without, a sense of humor, the piece ends with a “Star Wars” ending. The dedication is to life and the living in the Jewish spirit, and reads “Le’chayim!;” “To Life.”
Don "Orfeo" Rechtman, May 5, 1988
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