Style and Musical Development

The first musical experience that Rachel Galinne recalls occurred when she was five. "I heard on the radio Mozart's Variations on the children's song 'Ah! Vous dirai-je, Maman'. The work left such an impression on me and a strong desire to understand the connection between the various variations that I just had to write such a work myself…" When Rachel Galinne studied piano and could play Bach Inventions, Sonatas by Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven and works by Schubert and Chopin, she began improvising musical pieces in Baroque, Classical and Romantic style and dreaming of composition studies.

In the early 1970's Galinne began studying musicology at the Stockholm University in Sweden. The curriculum was influenced by a significant event in the Swedish musical scene that occurred a few years earlier, when composers György Sándor Ligeti and Witold Lutosławski were invited to teach composition at the Stockholm Music Academy. This event influenced an entire generation of Swedish composers, as well as composition studies and musical life in Sweden. It is not surprising, therefore, that as part of her musicology studies Rachel Galinne also took an analytical course on the works of Ligeti, who had such an influence on her.

Galinne sealed her studies with a course on works by Gustav Mahler, thus studying the post-Romantic language which served as a bridge to contemporary music.

In 1975 Galinne immigrated to Israel and fulfilled her childhood dream by studying harmony, counterpoint and composition at the Rubin Academy of Music at Tel Aviv University. There she completed her first and second degrees in composition with composer Leon Schidlowsky, harmony with composer and theoretician Yitzhak Sadai, counterpoint with composer and theoretician Joseph Dorfman and score reading with composer Mordecai Seter.

In 1980 she took part in a composition course in France under Witold Lutosławski and in 1984 participated in a prestigious seminar of contemporary music in Darmstadt. "While studying composition with Schidlowsky", tells Galinne, "We had many conversations about the meaning of contemporary music, the Second Viennese School and the importance of Arnold Schoenberg and of literature and culture in general. Only then did I begin to understand the connection between theoretical studies and my personal life and feelings, and between these and the act of creating. I began my journey as an independent composer." And indeed, during her studies Galinne already wrote her first modernistic pieces that gained much success: Islossning – Breaking the Bonds of Ice, for two pianos and percussion (1984) and Cycles for Orchestra (1986).

However, at the end of the 80's, Galinne began searching for a new tonality; "A pan-tonal language", as she put it, "in which all existing styles will find their place in a new unity." In his article Israeli by Choice – Rachel Galinne, music critic Nathan Mishori states that the prevailing phenomenon in the 1960's of contemporary composition studies while discarding the old compositional disciplines, "enabled many to refrain from that same 'unfair' competition with Mozart and his contemporaries… but Rachel decided that she must deepen her roots in the classical past and from there attempt to cultivate her own music".

In order to maintain compositional unity despite the stylistic variety, intended to combine classical structural elements and contemporary contours, Galinne created original theories, which she presents in two articles published in IMI News: In Search for an Answer in 1992 and Striving for Universality in 1996. In these articles Galinne attempts to prove that the mere dense polyphony in orchestral or choral works can create an impression of modernist texture, while those same materials, in three or four voices only, can create a more traditional impression. Thus, for example, the dense sixteen-part textures in her work And We Shall Sing My Songs of Praise for a-cappella choir (1993) create a modern texture, while the work Fugue for String Quartet (2003-4) features four-part writing in the fugue theme on the notes of the name B-A-C-H, which creates a connection with the past. Both in her First Symphony and her Second Symphony, as well as in the work And We Shall Sing My Songs of Praise, Galinne uses canonic writing, which enables gradual transitions from textures built on dissonant intervals to textures of a consonant nature. "In my later chamber works", says Galinne, "The movement between the styles is lighter and stems seemingly from itself, without the need for any theory".

The influence of classical disciplines on Galinne's work is also expressed in the classical ensembles and titles of many of her works: Sonata no. 1 for violin and piano, Sonata of Light, Sonata no. 2 for violin and piano, A Voice Crieth in the Wilderness, Trio for Clarinet, Viola and Piano, Fugue for String Quartet, Concerto for Chamber Orchestra, Concerto for Two Pianos and Orchestra, First Symphony, Second Symphony and more.

Judaism was always an inseparable part of Rachel Galinne's identity as a composer, and most of her text settings originate from the Bible. The only modern secular texts she used were written by Else Lasker-Schüler (in the song cycle Schwarze Gesänge – Dark Songs) and by Nelly Sachs ("O die Schornsteine – Oh the Chimneys"), in Hebrew translation in her work Nation Shall Not Lift Up Sword Against Nation. Both poetesses were of Jewish-German origins and both fled the Nazis – Lasker-Schüler to Palestine and Nelly Sachs to Sweden.

Through her music Rachel Galinne identifies herself not only as an Israeli with a Swedish background, but also as a composer of a Jewish identity, who experiences the cultural and historic tradition of the Jewish people. Galinne says, "I receive the inspiration for my works from the great intellectual tradition of the Jews who contributed to European culture and history, such as Gustav Mahler and Arnold Schoenberg". Galinne's works often express an almost messianic belief in the coming of peace and justice for Israel and the world, "despite the tragic element in contemporary Jewish-Israeli history".