21st Kompolize Winter 2024
Winner of the 21st International Composition Competition Kompolize Winter 2024 was Ayala Asherov. Her work Sounds Without Words – A Musical Poetic Triptych (2018/2023) received its world premiere with the Lietzeorchester on 1 March 2024 at the Emmaus-church in Kreuzberg and on 3 March 2024 at the Concert Hall of the Berlin University of the Arts (Hardenbergstraße).
Ayala Asherov was born in Israel in 1968 into a family of actors. Her grandparents were among the founders of the Israeli National Theater Habimah in Tel Aviv. After studying at the Rimon School of Music in Tel Aviv and the Berklee College of Music in Boston, she completed her studies in 2000 with a master's degree in film music at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts.
Since the relationship to words and drama is a very personal part of Ayala Asherov's artistic approach, she always looked for opportunities to work in an interdisciplinary manner. Her compositional spectrum ranges from songs and music for the concert hall to programmatic and multimedia projects including film, theater, exhibitions and dance.
Her songs were recorded and published by famous Israeli artists. In 1994, the well-known Israeli singer Ofra Haza sang “Along the Sea” (“Le'Orech Ha Yam”, lyrics and music), and since then it has been one of the most recorded songs in recent Israeli music history. In 2015 she released her debut album as a singer-songwriter “Colors & Shapes”, her songs have been interpreted by Quentin Baxter, Charlton Singleton and Qiana Parlor, among others. The list of performances of her works – be it chamber music, symphonic music, opera, film music and much more – is long.
In addition to her activities as a composer, she also developed programs for musical and literary education, such as “Music Tells The Story”™ at the College of Charleston, at the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance and, most recently, in collaboration with the Israeli Public Broadcasting Corporation (IPBC).
Ayala Asherov has received numerous awards. She was winner of the Wild Acres Residency and the Athena Music Festival in the chamber music section, the ASCAPlus Award, the South Carolina Film Commission or the Indie Grants Award. Her music can be heard on Spotify and YouTube.
Ayala Asherov, Program Note for Sounds Without Words – A Musical Poetic Triptych:
I have written the piece in 2018, converting already existing musical material into an orchestral piece. This material I originally used to underscore the TV show “Carolina Stories” about one of South Carolina's founding fathers, Charles Pinckney. The music and the creative processes have taken a path of it’s own to become an autonomic musical composition, telling a whole new story. In 2023 in reaction to the demonstrations raising in the streets of Israel, I decided to revise the piece which was derived by words of the American Constitution, realizing words might be failing us while music caries far and beyond. Joshua Sobol’s poem "Something about language fails us" spoke deeply of that feeling, so I devided the three verses to go along with the three movements.
All three movements are an expression of sounds, melodic lines and rhythms without much of a development, deliberately eliminating a sense of form. It is almost a series of musical events not necessarily connecting one to another, passing by in front of the listener, presenting each time a new sensation.
At the premiere of Sounds Without Words, Ayala Asherov read Joshua Sobol's poem "Something about language fails us".
