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The Necessity of what is UNNECESSARY (2017)

six solo voices (sop., m.s., c.-t., ten., bar., bs.)

6.5 minutes

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/​

Score

Download here: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B3qbUKqKk1WCYUh4eEx1eHkwYmM