DREAM TIMBRE
Season Opening Concert
October 10, 2026 | 8:00 PM
Felicia: House for Sound Art
26 Bialik St., Tel Aviv
Admission: 60 NIS

Program

Dream Timbre: Reality Nightmare by Assaf Shatil (2026), premiere

Quintessential by Pauline Oliveros (1996)

Eine Kleine Gamelan Music by Daniel Goode (1980)

Piano Study no. 1 by Maayan Tsadka (2015)

Performers: Orr Sinay, double bass; Maayan Tsadka, percussion/wind instruments; Adi Snir, saxophones; Ilan Barkani, percussion; Assaf Shatil, piano and synths; Tomer Galili, percussion

About the Works

At the upcoming concert we will give the premiere of a new work for ensemble and electronics by Assaf Shatil, inspired by the sound world of David Lynch's work and blurring the line between the real and the imagined.

Also on the program is a piano work by the composer Maayan Tsadka, a kind of sonic meditation on resonance, taking the acoustics and mechanics of the instrument as its starting points.

Two pieces from the international contemporary/experimental repertoire complete the program: Pauline Oliveros with a playful piece that produces a sonic haiku, and Daniel Goode with a rhythmic, repetitive piece drawing on Indonesian music and process music.

Quintessential by Pauline Oliveros (1996)
A text score in which the music emerges from the relationships among the performers, the sounds, and the space. The piece is based on game-like rules between the players, which generate the broad form while allowing the performers to make different musical decisions, listening to the moment.

Pauline Oliveros (1932–2016) was one of the central figures of 20th-century experimental music. Her work ranged across electronic music, improvisation, and text scores. She developed the idea of Deep Listening, which became a central concept in contemporary music and sound art.

Eine Kleine Gamelan Music by Daniel Goode (1980)
The piece is based on a rhythmic pattern and short three-note melodies that repeat in various variations according to the performers' choices during the performance. Despite the reference to gamelan in its title, Goode wrote the piece so that it can be performed on instruments of any kind and in any tuning system. Over the years it has been performed and recorded by a variety of ensembles, including a guitar duo.

Daniel Goode is an American composer and clarinetist, born in New York (1936). His work is influenced by diverse sources, including birdsong, drone music, Indonesian gamelan, and minimalist music, and in particular by the idea of music as a gradual process. Since 1976 he has been a member of Gamelan Son of Lion, a Javanese gamelan ensemble dedicated to new music, for which he has composed many works.

Piano Study no. 1 by Maayan Tsadka (2015)
This piece is part of a series of piano works whose starting point is the acoustics and mechanics of the instrument. The first piece focuses on the internal resonance of the piano strings and on our mechanisms of listening. Throughout the piece, the performer holds down certain keys with the left hand (leaving those strings free to resonate), while the right hand repeats chromatic patterns in order to evoke and amplify sympathetic resonance, isolate particular tones in the overtone series, and create a delicate harmonic progression without "actively" playing the keys.

Dream Timbre: Reality Nightmare by Assaf Shatil (2026), premiere
The term "dream timbre" is taken from an article by the music scholar Isabella van Elferen, "Dream Timbre: Notes on Lynchian Sound Design," in which she examines how tone color, texture, and ambiguous sound sources in David Lynch's films create dreamlike, enveloping spaces in which the boundaries between the real and the imagined are blurred. Dream Timbre: Reality Nightmare is a homage to David Lynch and, at the same time, a direct reference to the experience of living in Israel, within a reality where the boundaries between nightmare and dream mix and blur.

The piece was written for an amplified ensemble including percussion, vibraphone, piano, synthesizers, double bass, and alto saxophone, alongside live electronics. The electronics include live sampling of the ensemble's players, among them the solo percussionist, and real-time processing of the sampled material. The processed sounds are distributed through a quadraphonic speaker system, creating a listening space in which sound can move dynamically through the room. The acoustic and electronic sounds merge, transform, and drift away from their original sources, creating an environment in which the identity and origin of sound become unstable.

The piece consists of five continuous movements:

First of all, we were ghosts
Rooms versus corridors
Curtains
The severed ear
A dream within a dream

Assaf Shatil is a multidisciplinary composer and pianist living and working in Tel Aviv, Israel. He is a senior lecturer at the Faculty of Music at the Levinsky-Wingate Academic College. His works have been premiered by ensembles such as Musica Nova (Israel), Ensemble of the 21st Century, the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra, JACK Quartet (New York), WasteLAnd (Los Angeles), The Sound Ensemble (Seattle), Ninth Planet (San Francisco), and others. He holds a PhD in composition from the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he studied with Larry Polansky, Michelle Lou, and David Evan Jones.