”Hosha’ano’t are ancient prayers for the Jewish Succoth Festival. Each prayer pleads for the elements of the world such as water and fire, for the blessing of the crops and for help against pests or natural disasters. This appears together with songs of praise to the beauty of the temple. The repeated ”Hosha’an’a” in these prayers is a response after each rhyme or part of the prayer.

The Hosha’ano’t hymns are built primarily from the combination of words and phrases, almost completely devoid of compound phrases (without verbs or adjectives). The text which is concise and charged, but not open, conceals associations and radiates complexity. This is indeed poetry that encodes various layers of meaning from Biblical and Talmudic literature. Each group of phrases is dominated by a consonant or syllable and the resulting rhyming is asymmetric at times. Reading the verses, without scholarly knowledge or awareness of the direct quotation and various interpretations, provides a unique and independent musical experience. Setting these to music, I wanted the consonants and rhythms to be heard.

I read these phrases like a code, a collection of ”encoded messages”. I therefore preferred, in the first stages of composition, to be assisted by the Latin transcript of the text in order to detach myself from the literary-textual meaning, thus exposing myself to the pure musical message. I felt that from the music of the text’s consonants and rhythms, as well as its conciseness, stems an immense inner force. I understood that such a text could not be sung in the customary form. The music that resounds from these verses, as a result of the various recurring consonants and syllables that create asymmetric rhymes and rhythms, led me to write for a ”speaking” or ”reading” voice, rather than a ”singing” one, in the traditional sense of the word. I therefore decided to limit and reduce the melodic lines and harmonic progressions and structure the entire work (not only the vocal part) in light of the musical-recitative image, like the voice of the reader of the verse who has but a few secretive words, charged with layers of meaning and memories.”

Betty Olivero