Emmanuel Witzthum - Shevarim

Emmanuel Witzthum - Shevarim (Fractures)

For brass quartet (2024)...

The shofar, an ancient horn traditionally fashioned from a ram’s horn, has long functioned as an instrument of signal, rupture and resonance. Across centuries, its raw and unstable timbre has carried associations of warning, remembrance, awakening and return. Rather than focusing on its liturgical role, Shevarim (Fractures) draws upon the physicality of the shofar’s voice itself: fractured breath, broken calls, unstable overtones and the psychological weight of repetition.

The title Shevarim translates as “breaks” or “fractures”, one of the three principal shofar calls, formed from three broken cries often associated with weeping or rupture. Alongside the sustained Tekiah and the urgent, fragmented T’ruah, these archetypal forms become structural and rhythmic material within the work.

Witzthum reinterprets these ancient sonic gestures through brass quartet, treating the ensemble less as a traditional chamber formation and more as a resonant body of breath, pressure and metallic vibration. Attacks splinter and dissolve, fanfare-like figures emerge only to collapse inward, and moments of density give way to exposed silence and suspended harmonic space.

Rather than presenting the shofar as a symbolic religious object, the work approaches it as a primal acoustic phenomenon, a sound positioned somewhere between human voice, alarm signal and collective memory. Through cycles of deconstruction and reconstruction, Shevarim (Fractures) inhabits a liminal territory between noise and utterance, intimacy and distance, fragmentation and repair.

The result is a plaintive and deeply physical work that reflects upon instability, dislocation and the fractured emotional texture of the present moment, while searching, through resonance itself, for the possibility of connection.