Prior to CMT’s October 4, 2026 performance with Israeli Chamber Project, Joel Schimek, CMT Executive Director, was joined for a Between the Notes pre-concert chat by composer Noam Faingold, along with clarinetist Tibi Cziger (founder and Artistic Director of ICP) and pianist Assaff Weisman (founding member and Executive Director of ICP).
JS: To get us in the listening headspace, would you tell us about your new work, An Interlude Between Two Places?
NF: This piece is about moving. I was born in Israel and moved to the United States when I was five. I feel like a lot of my identity was formed by that move. We come from a multi-ethnic family from a variety of countries and continents, and so I feel like I have a connection to anyone that feels like their identity was shaped by moves at some point in their life. For this immigration-based concert, I thought I would explore that kind of emotional and philosophical content. This piece is a little about the experience of having my identity formed by that. It starts off with – I was thinking of – a national anthem for people who are not from anywhere or are from between places. And so, it starts off with a kind of melodic line that you might hear in a national anthem type of situation.
JS: On Friday, October 2, you participated in a composition seminar at the University of Tulsa, and you described that your works tend to be melodic, very melody-driven, and that you compose based on tunes that go through your head. What is your process for catching and recording those tunes?
NF: I keep an ongoing musical diary, as it were, that’s several hundred pages. Any time I have a musical idea, I notate it, and then, at various points, I write little notes about what kind of character I think it might have, what kind of instruments I think it might make sense to tell that story, and then I wait for the opportunity to develop it. Although, in this case, it didn’t really happen that way. I was sitting in my parents’ house the last time I was here (a few months ago), and I just started singing, and then I started writing and composing. So the funny thing is: I keep this notebook, but most of the time I have to write a piece of music, I don’t necessarily go in there. Maybe the act of doing it keeps you ready to do that. I know that the composer Brahms used to solve musical riddles in his free time when he was walking, and that kept him sharp for being able to compose when inspiration hit, and I think about that a little bit.
TC: Maybe that’s an elimination process. You write down everything you don’t use.
NF: Even more than you think, because every time I write a piece of music, I have to write it wrong first. So I write a completely functional piece of music, that if I were to turn it in, no one would really question anything about it, and then I go and I rewrite the entire thing. That happens every time.
TC: Same way we perform. [laughs]
NF: It’s nice to discover new connections.
JS: In the early days of a new work and commissions, what does the interplay between the two parties – artist and composer – look like?
NF: I do something a little bit more unusual ([Assaff and Tibi] can correct me if you think I’m deluded), but I like to interview the people that I’m writing for. I have a set of questions where I try to search for commonalities to try to inform the personality of the piece. I always ask questions in order to try to make it more collaborative, because the composition culture in the 20th century, especially, has been very much: “I write, you play,” which I think is kind of sad, actually. When you go through music school, you’re kind of taught to do this at people rather than with people. I’m also very influenced by this 20th-century thing of having a kind of “objective” – something that informs what you compose. I personalized that by making it a subject. I want to know what other people like, what they hate, what they wish they had a piece of music to express something about, what techniques do they enjoy doing or hate doing. I find that I’m surprised 100% of the time whenever people answer that question. It’s always stuff I didn’t expect. Sometimes something as basic as, “I hate plucking strings.” I had a very prominent bass player tell me that one. I never would have guessed that. Because you hear that [technique] so much. And he had a very good reason for that: in classical, when you’re playing with a bow, you spend years, decades, figuring out how to create and shape a sound, and while you’re bowing, that sound is alive. It’s kind of like painting a wall – while that brush stroke is going, you’re in control of the texture of that brush stroke. And I think that a lot of players think and feel that way. When you’re plucking a string, the sound dies right away. So, I learned something that I had not considered before after decades of training. It’s fun to [pluck the strings] – I play bass also – this is very personal. But I’d never considered the idea that someone might feel very anxious about not being able to control the shape and length of a sound. So, I love these questions because it’s very educational, but it also helps inform. I talked to Assaff while we were working on [the new piece].
AW: I was the selected interviewee, and I have to say, it was my first time being in that situation with a composer. I don’t know that I remember every answer that I gave you, but I did find the process quite new and interesting, and I was very curious to see the resulting piece. It’s nice to know that there’s something being written with you as a person in mind, and not just a piece that goes out into the world at some point – I might play it or I might not.
NF: I don’t remember every question either, but at this point, the piece exists, and when I look at it, it’s almost like I have to figure out how to interpret someone else’s music, which is also fun and confusing. One of the things I remember is that you mentioned you really liked a piece that also happens to be one of my favorite pieces, that I had spent so much time living with, that it felt easy enough to go in and out of that piece a little bit – the Mendelssohn C minor Trio, one of my favorite pieces of all time, by pure coincidence. I don’t quote the piece, but I feel like I borrowed from its language in the ways that already felt natural to me, and then among various other things.
JS: As performers, part of the initial learning process of traditional repertoire often is listening study – listening to recordings of works and then coming up with your own interpretation. From an artist’s perspective, what does that process look like for learning a new piece that’s both new to you and to the world, where you may not have that luxury?
AW: Personally, many pieces in the standard repertoire that we learn, we know already by ear, but there are lots of opportunities when we don’t. I try to avoid listening to a recording for as long as possible for exactly that reason – not to be contaminated by other people’s interpretation, as wonderful as it might be. And so, for me, it’s not so different. With contemporary composers, one of the big factors is figuring out their language. With past composers, even if you’ve not played that piece, you know the language, you know the context. Today, everyone has their own language, and a lot of time is spent on figuring out: how do these markings on the page fit within a system that this composer works within? Then, everything goes from there. Not having a recording is actually very freeing. In this case, of course, we had the opportunity to play for Noam and get his feedback, which is much better than somebody else’s recording.
JS: In my mind, it’s a fairly unique thing to have a touring ensemble that’s so adaptable to different instrumentations and different formats. Tell us a little bit about how that all got started.
TC: Next year will mark [Israeli Chamber Project’s] 20th year. For us, we look back and we’re not sure ourselves how all that started. We were a bunch of Israeli musicians back in New York, and decided that we feel something in common, not just a geographical thing, but somehow culturally, and the fact that we were all brought up on chamber music. We all had some musical ideas that we could somehow share, and we just gathered ourselves and we started playing together – that was 2007. The first [priority], we told ourselves, was to have a season that would look like the way we would want the tenth season to look like. We started off 100 miles per hour, and had tours, commissioned new pieces, and played regular chamber music repertoire. Gradually, we became an ensemble. Today, we’re trying to celebrate our 20th year.
JS: There’s a lot of opportunities that come from working together as a group, as well as unique challenges. It feels like the breadth of programming that’s available would almost be overwhelming.
TC: First of all, the geographical thing is quite challenging, since some of us live in the States, some live in Israel, some in Europe. By now, we do feel like a string quartet. Getting us in the same place together at the same time, that’s what the challenge is. The instrumentation gives us a lot of freedom and a lot of possibilities when commissioning new pieces and arrangements. One of our arrangements is already published with Boosey & Hawkes; we have many other arrangements which are quite successful because we keep getting emails asking for the music. I think the challenge is having everyone together at the same time. But then, the fact that we have wind players, string players, a harp player, and piano allows us to do different instrumentations and have programs where you have different instrumentations on stage from small to large, giving more options, more of a “festival” type of programming, rather than the regular piano trio or string quartet, more conservative chamber music settings.
JS: When you’re working with a composer for the first time (and as a composer with artists for the first time on a new work), do you like to take a more active approach in hashing out the details, or do you tend to sit back and just experience it?
NF: This would be a great time to tell me that you want to do things completely different. [laughs]
AW: You’re playing something else instead of…
TC: Would you mind stepping out for a second?
NF: I’ll go have my coffee.
AW: I think it’s very dependent. It’s like meeting someone for the first time. You develop a dynamic, you play off one another, and we’re just happy to see where things go. A piece of music requires putting it out into the world in sound. It’s not enough on paper, right? You need the composer to write it, and you need the musicians to realize it. That’s what makes the music, and that relationship can happen in any number of ways. It’s always lovely to meet before, and to work on things together; that’s not always a possibility. When it is, then it’s like it injects a speed serum into the process – the ideas fly back and forth much quicker, it’s much more immediate, and so you get to a more coherent result faster.
NF: I’m very sensitive to the annoying things about composer culture. One of the things that stands out to me is, over the years, having done this sort of thing, that I feel my job is to give permission to not do things that I wrote. So much of coming into their rehearsal is to say: “it’s okay to not do this.” Because on the performance side, there’s so much pressure to do exactly what is written, out of respect, in the culture of interpreting new pieces. I feel like that’s probably the most useful thing that I can do.
TC: I think composers have the impossible job of trying to transfer what they feel through something that is written into something that we have to feel ourselves and then execute. There’s a few stages there, and I don’t envy [composers], because music is abstract, of course. You can write as much as you want, but it would never be enough for the performer to really understand what you mean. Writing a forte means nothing, writing a piano means nothing; writing dolce – fine, sweet, but what does that mean? Eventually, it’s our job to make sure that we understand the language and understand the world of the composer, where he comes from, what he’s trying to achieve with this piece emotionally, and then make it ourselves. We don’t have to always agree with what they right, and we think, “this might work better,” or “we feel this in a different way,” and that’s where the interesting things start to happen because you have that interaction. Some composers say, “go ahead, it’s yours now. I’ve written whatever I had to write.” You know, Mozart has no complaints, since he died. [laughs] People can interpret them as they want. I think that’s, eventually, quite an impossible job to achieve everything by just writing down what you hear.
NF: I think a smart composer creates a series of conditions that facilitate this to happen. Sometimes you’re just telling people what not to do, which is an interesting thing to do. But also knowing that performers are trained to inject approximately 20% (give or take) within an interpretation of a piece; this whole culture of writing notes down to be played was never really intended to be fully specific with every single thing all the time. If you get a certain level of education or access to a certain kind of mentorship, you’ll have teachers who tell you this, and they teach you how to insert that 20% – sometimes more, sometimes less – depending on the composer. I don’t envy performers because it’s such a fragmented culture now. There used to be agreement that this was just the way it happened, but now we’re in an era where there are so many different forms of performer practice and you have to read who you’re talking to and what they’re bringing and what they’re expecting.
JS: Israeli Chamber Project tours with a variety of different repertoire and different programs. When you go into a concert season, you have this collective “festival” model, as you put it. What does the programming process look like for you all? Does everyone contribute their own thoughts?
TC: It’s not a democracy. [laughs] Definitely not a democracy, because then it would just be anarchy. There’s always that balance with having programs would fit the different venues. When you go on tour, you need them to fit different venues on the same tour. We sometimes go on tour with one-and-a-half programs, or sometimes even two, to make sure it fits. Sometimes a series has the same piece you’re looking to have on your program, and they had [that piece] just last year, so you can’t do that. There are all these challenges. Getting the season’s program always starts with some “seed,” either from the presenters or ourselves, or an idea for something extravagant, and then you start building off of that. As an artistic director, I know our players really well. I speak to them a lot, and I get their wishes or ideas; if I have to consult them about certain things, I would. So, it’s a process, it’s a puzzle. I don’t ask them all if the program is okay. Sometimes the program is 2 years ahead, 3 years ahead. It has to be managed delicately, but eventually it’s something that we, as directors, eventually put our foot on.
AW: Tibi’s being a little modest. First of all, yes – it’s not a democracy, because there’s twelve people in our group which means there’s fifteen opinions about anything at any given time, and you just cannot take everything into consideration. You ask for suggestions, but Tibi as the artistic director has the final say. We are all encouraged to give input. But a huge part of the puzzle, as you said, is on the presenter side – Route 66 is a great program idea here [in Tulsa], but we played in New York a couple of days ago, and how does that work, right? So there are millions of parameters that have to be taken into consideration, and it’s a real juggling act that has us tearing our hairs out at certain points. At the end of the day, you remember – concert time, you go on stage, you make wonderful music with your friends, all the work seems worth it.
TC: There’s one other thing – you as an audience. What we tried to do from our first season was to gain the trust of our audience. We have our regular concerts in Israel and in New York; we have our regular audience that we know people from attending our concerts. Almost every program has a piece that would not be known to the audience – either by a contemporary composer or a known composer. We try to revive as many works [as possible] that we feel need to go on stage. Quite often our audience would come to a program not knowing 20%, 30%, 40% of what we’re going to play. That requires the trust of the audience. That also requires the audience to come with an open mind and say, “okay, we don’t know this piece, but we know that they’re good performers. We know they’ll play it well, and we’ll come with open ears and open minds, and sit and try to understand. If we don’t, maybe next time, or maybe we’ll go home and look into that piece.” I think that’s the triangle between the presenter, us [as performers], and the audience coming to programs. For instance, we’re playing a trio by Shulamit Ran. [to audience] Raise your hand if you’re afraid of what’s going to happen there. [laughs] Or whether you were afraid when you saw the program. You said, “there’s also Dohnányi, so that will balance it out, sweeten it.” Shulamit Ran’s [Soliloquy] is a haunting piece, it’s a beautiful piece, and I hope that you trust us to form a way that you will enjoy it, or at least experience something when we play it.
JS: What are some of the more memorable performances you’ve participated in?
TC: For better or worse? [laughs] There was a tour that Assaff and I were dreaming of that we did back in 2016. We had a production of [Arnold Schoenberg’s] Pierrot Lunaire in Israel with staging, with, of course, no conducting, with a singer who was acting as well. It was a minimalist staging. That was a dream to put that on stage. It’s all available online on YouTube, by the way. We keep getting comments on our performance. Then, we had a dream of taking on tour Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale. Between World War I and World War II, Stravinsky created this piece because the only way to play was to tour with a little group without piano, as they were shaky times. We wanted to be that travelling theatre band, and we did that back three years ago. So that was quite amazing. We travelled with our staging – with a ladder, with a bench, with all the things we did. We planned that for years, so that’s one of them, but there were many.
AW: [Israeli Chamber Project’s] 20th anniversary is coming up, which means, if you do some quick math, we started in 2008. Only people who know nothing about anything would think about starting a nonprofit in 2008, if you remember that. In many ways, I still feel like we’re in the same place. The only reason this works is because we really don’t know what’s not possible. We don’t have a staff. It’s a big organization, right? In a sense, we’re an international company, and the two of us run it. And so the memorable stuff is very often on stage. It’s unbelievable that a group like us can get to read the great halls of the world, which we’re very fortunate to do. But so many of the memorable things happen behind the scenes as we’re getting ready to tour a production with lighting and sound and stage direction – which, honestly, we have no training in doing. Somehow, it works just because we’re up 25 hours a day and find the time to call this producer and that costume designer. A lot of it is just the experience of going through it. Production is not an easy thing, and when, on top of it all, at 8 o’clock, you have to go on stage and play the music – we’re juggling a lot. So, it’s wonderful to have those flagpole concerts at Carnegie Hall in New York or Suntory Hall in Tokyo, but it’s also wonderful to just find new places where people are listening. In the end, that’s the most valuable experience that we feel on stage very strongly. We feel the concentration level of the audience; the openness level of the audience; the interest level of the audience, which can go up and down during a concert. But when those are locked in, we feel like there’s a two-way channel open. That’s the most memorable thing, regardless of the venue or the city.
JS: We’ll be going to Jenks High School to work with students in their Chamber Orchestra program. What do you all hope that students will take away from that?
NF: I used to teach there, so I hope they’re not mad that I’m back. [laughs] But it will be nice to be back in that space again. For me, I create a lot of “home spaces” in my life. That’s just the way that happens with our background, and moving every couple of years. So, I hold on to spaces in a very different kind of a way, maybe than a lot of people. Honestly, it will be nice to share music there.
AW: I hope that students listen, and that we introduce them to some possibilities that they’re not aware of. When you’re a young person and you’re studying an instrument, very often the focus is on your limitations – what you need to break through. But you can be shown wider vistas, depending on who’s standing in front of you. All we hope is to provide a little bit of showing what’s possible, what might be possible, a little bit of inspiration; that it is a meaningful way to spend a life, crafting art and listening to one another, which is what chamber music is all about. Whether these students end up being musicians themselves or not, I think that’s a very valuable lesson for them. Honestly, we also always learn something ourselves in all these engagements: what people are concerned with, how location informs what they’re concerned with, some musical ideas that we may not have. Again, it’s a two-way street. So, I’m sure we will get as much out of it as we hope they will.
This pre-concert chat has been edited for length and clarity.
