DEDICATIONS by Ofir Klemperer

DEDICATIONS - Ofir Klemperer - Piano

Composed 2023-2024.
Recorded by Daniel Gunther at Jack Straw, Seattle WA December 2025.
Drawing by Michal Rubens.

Dedicated to the innocent people who were forced to go through hell and managed to come back, and to the families who lost their loved ones in the Israeli Palestinian conflict.


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The piece Dedications is a collection of musical letters to specific people. They are messages. Prayers. It is about October 7 2023, and about the Israeli-Palestinian devastating conflict, from the perspective of an Israeli who left Israel in 2006 and lived years in The Hague NL, Cincinnati OH, Atlanta GA, and Olympia WA.

In November 2023 I recorded myself playing piano while I was imagining dialogues and situations with different people.
I then took a few months and transcribed and analyzed the material and tweaked it and arranged it so it would be more cohesive and have a better flow. Then I practiced the new written versions.
I performed this piece several times in public, in Olympia and Seattle, and I recorded it many times at home and in different studios.
The final recording is from a session I did at Jack Straw in Seattle in December 2025, in order to finish this chapter in my life and move on.
Still, I would be happy to play it, or send the score to pianists!

Here are some descriptions of what I had in mind when I played these pieces.

Storytelling -
We are in a fairytale! This is not a month after October 7th! This is bed time stories to a little girl!
Once upon a time in a land far far away there lived a princess in a kingdom and bla bla bla she was innocent and there was a dragon and there was a bad queen who enforced her to whatever and one day a strange person encountered the princess and that person revealed themselves as a witch who casted a spell that could be broken only by act of true bla bla… Our prince is going on a voyage to confront the villain and as he is experiencing wonders and miracles he is being trapped in a maze - a spiral! that leads him directly to the Heart, of his True, Love.
Whatever. This is a music *of* narration. Disney, tailored to touch all essential bricks that build a story, and sometimes its superficial stitchings and glitches are showing.
Reality is too much to look at.

Musicians Feel -
The narration continues. We zoom in on a group of musicians and imagine how they would play together.
This is how musicians feel and express and function in synchronization. Musicians know how to skip beats together intuitively. They know to back up each others’ errors and converse musically and in an inspiring way.
This movement was recorded the first time in November 2023. It sounded very much like the final version, just rawer and slower. It is the ideal music that the musicians I played with all through the years make me think of.
The point is that you shouldn't even need to hear the rest of the band. You know how it would be played with a full rock band, or an ensemble. It is the (description of the) essence of locking intention, breath, and mind as a group.

Friends Dance -
With the musicians and their energy are the people who witness the event, who send back the energy to the musicians. The people who dance. This is a (description of a) party - the light, the drugs, the way the space is being held for people to move together and experience euphoria, and allow the sound and their reality to bend, to be muted, to see only the shining light of a disco ball in a completely darkened ghost world.
Why does it end? Why did it end? Why do parties end?
Well our party turned into hell on earth.
Our friends the movers experience a silence before the storm, without thinking of the hell that will be unleashed as they come out of their psychedelic trip. This end is the trap in time in psychedelic hell.

Covering Emotions with Emotions -
Trapped in repeated quick swipes from one heartbreaking news story to another, the silence of reality with its true devastation hits a personal home, and sets in to stay. It cannot be sent away anymore. Everything else would evaporate.
This is about not being able to mourn, or to look at reality in the face.
Evoked emotions without the processing.
The distraction from the real meaningful, true notion of the things that matter.
The inability to give in to the feeling of truth. A shock that basically leads to depression.

Baby’s Breath -
We are holding a sleeping baby. The baby’s breath is in irregular beats. We focus on every breath. Is this the last breath? Wasn’t the last one everything that ever mattered in life?
Additive notes change the harmonic context of the moment before them.

Basic Muscle Memory -
Tantra. What else is left.
The burning and roaring path of emotional consciousness that takes each of us alone and together as society through milliseconds and the generations as we glide towards a physical enlightenment in this world and away from it, simply towards peace.

Waiting Out of the Woods -
After a fatiguing battle with who knows what demons, we are getting out of the woods.
It was a long, never-ending, excruciating search for a path, and we finally meet the trusted person who waited loyally and patiently outside the woods with their beaten metallic blue Toyota, ready to take us wherever we need to go next, for as long as it takes.

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The movements Baby’s Breath, Musicians Feel, Friends Dance, and Basic Muscle Memory were originally improvised in a sequence.
Covering Emotions with Emotions and Storytelling were improvised in sequence as well a few days later.
Waiting Out of the Woods is inspired by a poem by Ronnie Gross. It was composed to a different piece and was finally added to this piece to create a suited closure again, just like in “Destination Terminus” for ensemble VIM, and in the 2024 release “Pillows (Music You Could Finally Ignore)”.

Thank you for listening deeply,
Ofir

Ofir Klemperer (born in Israel 1982). is a composer, improviser, singer/song writer, and producer..
Leaning heavily on the analogue synthesizer the Korg MS-20,
his music is melodic in its core, and through orchestrating classical instruments along with punk-rock and electronics, he applies to his melodies an experimental approach and Noise.

ofirklemperer.org