Revadim—Hebrew for “strata”—was written for the Musica Nova Consort and premiered at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art on February 6, 1995.
The instrumentation was chosen for two main reasons: it unites three distinct families of instruments—winds, strings, and keyboard/percussion—into a single ensemble, and it offers a particularly wide range of registers. This is further extended by the use of English horn and bass clarinet as doublings for the winds.
The work is cast in three movements played without pause. Although all three are drawn from the same musical material, each presents it from a radically different perspective, as though the listener is examining the same object under shifting lights. At its core, the piece explores processes of gradual transformation. Duration, register, dynamics, texture, and articulation all undergo continuous change, and as these strata shift, the relationships between musical elements are transformed, taking on new shapes and meanings.
The piece begins and ends on a single pitch—E—which acts as an axis around which the entire work evolves. The sound world is influenced by the micropolyphonic writing of György Ligeti, where dense textures and subtle movement create the sensation of layers unfolding and dissolving over time.