Israeli composer Lior Navok describes his 10-minute orchestral piece, Blue, Yellow, Smoke, composed during the early days of the Russia-Ukraine War, as trying to “capture the melancholic mood of war.”
The effort resulted in Navok being the recipient of the prestigious Engel Prize for 2025. Founded in 1945, the Yoel Engel Prize awards excellence by contemporary composers, and past recipients include greats like Mordecai Seter and Paul Ben-Haim.
Along with Novak, the prize was jointly awarded to the Zemereshet website for its significant contribution to documenting and preserving early Hebrew song.
Addressing the composition’s title, Navok clarifies the intended symbolism: “‘Blue, Yellow’ is of course the Ukrainian flag. ‘Smoke’ is what this war brought about. What it caused.”
Navok is one of Israel’s leading contemporary composers, having earned numerous accolades over the years. A Tel Aviv resident who studied for many years in Boston, Navok is somewhat unusual among his peers, having initially focused on jazz before shifting to contemporary classical music.
Blue, Yellow, Smoke is highly condensed and economical. “It is not programmatic music, nor does it rely on any quotations,” Navok clarifies. Instead, it is a composition that “looks down sorrowfully from above on all the horrors humanity has failed to learn from history.” Though influenced by the war, he describes the work as being permeated by a sense of the universal as much as the personal.
Music and politics intertwined
The junction of music and politics is central to Navok’s oeuvre; his compositions consistently coalesce social matters and injustices.
“I believe the artist resides within society and in a specific reality at a certain time – in the world! Music must respond, or it will stay locked in its own academic or non-academic bubble, and that is not my approach,” he insists.
Living up to this philosophy, Blue, Yellow, Smoke is not his first politically engaged piece. In 2015, he composed An Unserem Fluss, an opera tackling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and delving into themes of religious fanaticism and extremism while still maintaining, as he explains, “a kernel of hope and love.”
The events of October 7, 2023, have naturally shifted the focus of Navok’s work. When asked if the recent tragedies have changed his perspective, he reveals he is completing a new piece titled Quicksand.
“I saw the colloid of sinking sands, the thick bog that we are walking into,” he explains. He has also dedicated other substantial works to the current crisis, including The Waiting Hours, which is about the karma imposed upon a soul in the cycle of reincarnations.
Recently he also joined forces with Avigail Arnheim and Lior Kriel in a project called “Direct Study,” where texts relating to October 7 were read. Looking ahead, Navok is preparing two new CD releases, “one featuring jazz standards from my very distant past before I got into the world of modern classical music and another, titled The Waiting Hours, consisting of new solo piano works using traditional notation.”
From the award-winning, sorrowful glance of Blue, Yellow, Smoke to the recent reflection on the current crisis in Quicksand, Navok’s compositions are a testament to his core belief: The artist cannot afford to reside in an ivory tower. His music never stays silent about worldly injustices and continues to confront and uphold humanistic ideals and values.
Listen to the full performance of Lior Navok’s Blue, Yellow, Smoke: https://www.liornavok.com/contemporary-music-repertoire/orchestral-music/ukrainian-war-music