Amos Elkana

My path as an artist has never followed a single line. I am a composer, guitarist, and electronic musician, and for most of my life I have moved between different musical worlds, countries, technologies, and ways of thinking. I was born in Boston and grew up in Israel, and my education took me through the United States and Europe, studying at Berklee, New England Conservatory, in Paris, Denmark and Berlin, and later at Bard College. Along the way I studied with composers and artists whose approaches were often radically different from one another. That diversity became fundamental to the way I think about music.

I have never been very interested in belonging to a particular school or aesthetic. I am interested in curiosity. My music can involve an orchestra, an electric guitar, electronics, spoken voices, video, improvisation, or a small acoustic ensemble. Technology has always been part of my musical imagination, but not as an end in itself. I use whatever means seem necessary to create the particular world of a piece.

Increasingly, I find myself drawn to questions that reach beyond music itself: memory, history, identity, responsibility, and the strange ways in which individual lives intersect with larger historical forces. One of the most important works I have written in recent years is Que sais-je?, a 65-minute work for ensemble, electronics, archival voice and video dedicated to my father, the historian and philosopher Yehuda Elkana. He survived Auschwitz as a child and later devoted much of his intellectual life to thinking about memory, history and the dangers of allowing the past to determine the future. The piece grew out of my attempt to enter into a conversation with him after his death. It combines his recorded voice with music and archival material, but ultimately it is less a portrait than a series of questions: What do we inherit? What should we remember? What should we allow ourselves to forget? How do we live with history without becoming imprisoned by it?

Those questions have become even more urgent for me in recent years. I live in Tel Aviv, but I have always experienced my identity as something larger and more complicated than nationality. I have American, German and Israeli citizenship, have spent substantial parts of my life in different countries, and have family, friends and artistic relationships across borders. I believe deeply in the ability of art to resist the simplification of people into political or national categories. Especially now, I feel a responsibility to make work that preserves complexity, doubt and empathy at a time when all three can be difficult to sustain.

There have been challenges. A life devoted to contemporary music requires persistence. Large projects can take years to bring into existence. Performances disappear almost as quickly as they happen. Funding is uncertain, institutions change direction, and much of an artist's life consists of creating opportunities for work that does not fit easily into existing structures. But I have also learned that these difficulties are part of the process. I continue because making music remains the way I understand the world. At 59, I feel more curious rather than less curious, and I am still discovering things in sound that surprise me.

My aspirations are therefore not primarily about reaching a particular career milestone. I want to keep making ambitious work, to collaborate with extraordinary musicians and thinkers, and to bring that work into contact with people in different places and communities. I want performances to become conversations rather than isolated events. I am particularly interested in encounters with audiences and students, where a piece can become the beginning of a discussion about music, memory, technology, history, or simply how we listen.

For me, artistic practice is important precisely because it creates a space in which certainty is not required. Music can hold contradictory things simultaneously. It can be intellectual and visceral, personal and political, abstract and deeply autobiographical. It can ask a question without reducing it to an answer.

That possibility is what keeps me creating.