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Performed by EXAUDI; conducted by James Weeks
March 3, 2017; Milton Court Concert Hall We are breaths of Earth
Bodies of Dust Quake with a doubt uneasy A blind man reads his fingers’ ends Quake with a doubt uneasy Blind, reading their fingers’ ends Will you excuse me For Coughing Comet-dust and humankind are kin |
Though vegan and atheist (and also blind), the poet whose words I use in this piece is not of recent times. Nor is he from a place we now rather loosely call Western. Abul ʿAla Al-Maʿarri (973-1057) was born less than an hour's drive from Aleppo in the intellectually thriving Abbasid period. His writings are part of the oft-forgotten Arabic tradition that became the connective tissue from the likes of Lucretius to the likes of Voltaire. I have cut together some of his words, in translation, into a brief image of his worldview. The musical material is derived from tetrachords in the Maqam tradition (1000+ year old music largely from the pan-Islamic world), but used harmonically instead of melodically. What results harmonically might make us think of spectral music, though the pitches were not arrived at via that approach. The result, with both text and music, is a piece that I hope questions cultural origins and lineages.
Blog post furthering these thoughts: http://www.libraryofarabicliterature.org/2017/on-finding-music-in-al-ma%CA%BFarris-poetry/ |