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A conductor, composer, and an artist who integrates music with the performing arts, Roni Porat composes music for chamber ensembles and full orchestra, as well as for dance, theater, and children’s programs. He is currently conducting for “HAUTA” in Tel Aviv—a show combining music he composed and theater based on a piece written by Israeli playwright Hanoch Levin.
“I’m all love and thankfulness, and this is how I live,” Porat said credited his wide-ranging talents to a humble and grateful attitude toward life.
“I am thankful for opportunities that I have been given to be who I am today. For me, being a grateful person is a privilege, and my gratitude allows me to be present and aware.
Porat works with the Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra and three other major orchestras in Israel. He performs in other countries as well. Every summer he is invited to conduct and to teach conducting in Hungary, through an international course with excellent conductors from all over the world.
He began his musical studies at a relatively late age. During his studies in the Jerusalem Music Academy, he spent his summer vacations doing street shows in Europe and the United States. These experiences helped him acquire both theatrical and practical skills.
After graduating from the academy, he embarked on a musical career as a composer and conductor—one that put special emphasis on imparting the love of music to children and youth. By initiating special concerts for the young, he introduced these audiences to classical music with the help of theater: through humor and miming.
“I owe my sense of freedom on stage to the street shows I have done abroad. It is there that I acquired the skill of communicating with an audience, which helps me to this day.”
A Unique Understanding of Music
Roni Porat has a unique understanding and approach to music. “Music is shapeless. Our attachment to form distances us from its essence. Musically, it has structure and form, but the sound—who can grasp what it is? Music is a place of being.”
When discussing the role of a conductor, he said the conductor is the only one in the concert who does not produce a sound, yet generates it all. “He is the living expression of the composer in the physical world. He stands between the composer’s ideas and the orchestra, and in this in-between [spot] he creates magic.”
Porat considers it the conductor’s responsibility to understand all the parties involved: the composer, the players, and the audience. “If you wish to be a good leader, then you should be able to see forward and be two moves ahead. While the composition is being played, I, of course, hear it with my ears, but simultaneously I already hear the next move.”
Porat believes the most important about conducting is personal charisma.
In fact, Porat radiates vitality and kindness. Meeting with him is pleasant and inspires optimism. He reveals great sensitivity, and one can identify the happy child in him, elated by the wonders of life revealed to him.
Nevertheless, something in his face gives the impression of pain. When asked about the type of music he composes, he smiles and says: “My wife says I use my music to express my pain. Composition exists in another dimension; I am not aware that it’s happening.”
Next... Turning Points
Turning Points
At the age of 29, he experienced a crisis that lasted about a year and a half. In that period he found the expression he terms “over awareness.”
“Anything of structure just seemed to crumble in front of me and became shapeless. That is how I came to grasp that everything was temporary, and I was able to look into my ego. That, in turn, led to an awakening, and from that point there was no way back.”
Porat is now in his 50s; he is a father to four sons and lives with his family in a kibbutz, Kiriyat Anavim. A few years ago, he had another turning point. “I received another gift: following the economic crisis, I looked for a way to enter the business world and ended in the area of training. I took several courses on the subject and found out that that was, in fact, what I was—a trainer, an instructor!
Thus professionally, Porat is now less interested in appearing before an audience than in counseling and helping people. “I feel very strongly that it is a privilege to be able to impart and to provide people with tools that can improve their lives.”
“Personal training interested me in particular. The inner dialogue, the subconscious, habits, ego … I realized they all existed within music also.
He combines musical work with his coaching workshops and views this integration as wholly natural.
He explains why certain musical works have a strong presence in the world—so strong that they leave their signature.
According to Porat, one’s inner self, dialogue, subconscious, habits all exist within music. “Music, too, has its habits. For example, in Beethoven’s 5th there is a motive that repeats itself over and over, it sorts of becomes a habit, and this way acquires presence.
So it is with people. A habit, or even a sentence a person repeats frequently, acquires presence and makes an effect.”
Under the habits, lies awareness. “When we feel secure in our being awake, we allow ourselves to give in to what is more sublime than us and merge into the universal awareness.”
The statement comes from Porat’s mouth and heart alike.
“Awareness is an unusual power that enables everything. A person who is aware cannot be a violent person; it doesn’t work together. Being violent or short-tempered indicates deficient self-management. For me to identify that space between stimulation and reaction, stopping there, and making a choice means freedom. This is what I aim to achieve each and every day, and that is my contribution to a better world,” he explained.
“Today I look around for energy that bestows the gifts of life and I found it in the workshops I conduct and the meetings I had with people. It is our duty to share this energy, without holding back.”
For more information about Roni Porat, visit: www.roniporat.com.
