Commissioned by the 2009 Keshet Eilon Mastercourse with the support of the State of Israel Ministry of Culture and Sport, Culture Directorate, Music Department; and the Yehoshua Rabinowitz Tel Aviv Foundation for the Arts.

Listen to the piece

In the summer of 2004, a group of Chechen terrorists overran a school in Beslan, Russia, and held its pupils and teachers hostage for a number of days, culminating in the murder of at least 150 pupils. Thereafter, the Russian Archbishop eulogized them in a prayer he called “Prayer for the Innocents.” The eulogy, and its circumstances, affected me deeply, and prompted me to dedicate the middle movement of my second string quartet to the memory of the children.When Keshet Eilon asked me to compose a work for its summer 2009 Mastercourse, I decided to base it partly on that movement, expanding it for two string quartets.

“Prayer for the Innocents” consists of three parts. It opens with a cadenza played by the first violin of one of the quartets, based on a simple repetitive gesture, suggesting a person praying. The heart of the piece lies in the second part, in which the ensemble plays the prayer itself. Here I wanted to blend Western and Eastern music traditions so that the prayer would reflect the deep connection between these cultures despite the current apparent antagonism between them. The style of the prayer when it is first played (by one of the quartets) is similar to that of instrumental music of the late Renaissance or the early Baroque. Immediately thereafter, the second quartet responds by repeating the same theme, but with the addition of Eastern elements and using a Middle Eastern scale typified by quarter tones. Both quartets then explore the depth of the prayer and of the pain it expresses, until it is impossible to identify which is praying in a Western style and which in an Eastern style. The third part presents a recapitulation of the elements of the opening cadenza, this time not by a soloist but in the form of an eight-part canon, suggesting a desert wind.