Declared a “fresh, young voice, worth following” (Gramophone Magazine), Avner Dorman was the Alabama Symphony’s 2010-11 Composer-in-Residence. Born in 1975, Dorman completed his master’s degree at Tel Aviv University, where he majored in music, musicology, and physics, and his doctorate at the Juilliard School, studying with John Corigliano. At 25, he became the youngest composer to win Israel’s prestigious Prime Minister’s Award for his Ellef Symphony. That same year he was awarded the Golden Feather Award from ACUM (the Israeli Society of Composers and Publishers). His work has attracted some of the world’s leading conductors, including Zubin Mehta, Marin Alsop, Asher Fisch, and Simone Young, and has been performed by the Israel Philharmonic, the Munich Philharmonic, the UBS Verbier Festival Orchestra, Nashville Symphony, the Hamburg Philharmonic, and the Cabrillo Music Festival, among others. A resident of the United States, Dorman currently serves as Associate Professor of Music Theory and Composition at the Sunderman Conservatory of Music at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania.
Justin Brown led the Alabama Symphony Orchestra in the world premiere of Astrolatry (worship of the stars) on March 25, 2011. As Dorman describes the work,
While I was writing Astrolatry, I spent more time outside of large cities than ever before in my life. More than anything else, I found myself in awe of nature in a way I never felt before. Lightning, rain, winds, and the night sky were so much larger and more impressive than they are in the city; and for the first time in my life, I could truly understand why ancient peoples worshipped the stars.
The piece begins with the sky, as it appears when one first looks up at night: complete darkness. Then, one by one, stars begin to reveal themselves, and as the pupils of the eye widen, more and more stars and constellations appear, and we notice colors, interactions, and motion.
The first section of the composition is a dance of the revelations of the stars. Some are isolated; some come in groups; some are pretty and naïve; and some are filled with motion and conflict. Towards the end of the section, the southern star appears, calming the celestial objects with a soft tango and leading the section to its culmination in a peaceful and full-lit sky.
A swift falling gesture figuratively drops us back to earth where the worship of the stars is about to take place. A steady quarter-note beat played by low drums propels the ritual. (Though the narrative deals with prehistory, musically the ritual takes its beat from genres of electronica such as techno.) The steady beat builds up the ecstasy of the ritual, only halted by the entrance of the tribe’s leader (in the Marimba). Through the repetition of a simple melody in 5/8 over the 4/4 beat, the leader brings the worshippers to catharsis.
Just before the piece ends, we all stop for a moment and take one last look at the cosmos, admiring its beauty and mystery.
