The piece “Songs not Sung” is my attempt to showcase the saxophone in a manner which is subtle and discreet but yet powerfully expressive. The work is built on four tones, first sounded in the saxophone, which serve as a foundation for the long, vocalise-like melodies that flow meditatively throughout. The piece is written intentionally without any meter, allowing various harmonies and colors to blur into each other in an opaque, watercolor-like manner. The main dramatic affect in the work comes from the interaction between the soloist and the strings, with a multitude of song-lines competing for attention.
The Dervishes are a group of ascetics from the Sufi sect of Islam, traditionally respected for their wisdom and art. They are perhaps most widely known for their whirling dance (sema), a symbolic meditation in which they attempt to abandon their ego and reach spiritual perfection. In their words, “While whirling, his [the dancer’s] arms are open: his right arm is directed to the sky, ready to receive God’s beneficence; his left hand, upon which his eyes are fastened, is turned toward the earth. He conveys God’s spiritual gift to those who are witnessing the Sema. Revolving from right to left around the heart, he embraces all humanity with love.”
The piece is modeled in many ways around the concept of the sema. While the physical dance itself is rather slow and meditative, I instead tried to imagine the mind of the dervish as he reaches towards this idealized transcendence. The tempo is persistently rapid, the meter is highly unstable, and the melodic lines, inspired from Persian music, are highly chromatic and disconnected. The color of the alto saxophone strikes a powerful balance between the sorna (an Persian double-reed instrument) and the human voice. The structure of the piece itself follows a circular form, starting and ending with the same concept.
Traditional Hindu society is known for highly valuing a woman’s chastity. This is demonstrated in the ancient practice of sati, in which a recently widowed woman would voluntarily or involuntarily commit suicide by burning to death on her husband’s funeral pyre. Though the tradition has been officially banned by the government of India, it is still sometimes practiced to this day.
The piece attempts to dramatically narrate the mental space of a woman preparing and enduring the act of self-immolation. In setting the piece I decided to use the driving rhythmic and melodic character of the South Indian bharatnatyam dance style to depict the increasingly chaotic nature of fire. Western motifs of death and fire are also used, such as modified versions of the Dies Irae prominently used throughout. The emotional contour of the work alternates between episodes of unadulterated panic and strained calm, until both extremes attempt to reconcile at the conclusion.
“Madhavi’s Dance at the Royal Court” is based on a passage from Cilappatikaram (The Anklet), a famous South Indian epic poem written around 200 AD by the Tamil poet prince Ilango Adigal. The plot of the epic revolves around two lovers, Kannaki and Kovalan, who are married in the poem’s first stages. Kovalan, after seeing the debut of Madhavi (a young court dancer) is smitten by her and neglects his marriage vows, as is described as follows-
“Madhavi had broad shoulders, long tresses of hair adorned with flowers and the most expressive eyes… she danced, captivating her audience to a trance of joy. The movements were natural and full of grace, not a step wasted, not a gesture misplaced but each sure and fully evocative. It was like seeing a wild animal in its natural setting in action, the smoothness and swiftness and grace of it…Kovalan’s senses were so full of the dancer Madhavi that he forget all else and could not bring himself to part from her. He forgot his wife Kannaki as well as the honor of his ancestors.”
In writing the music I drew heavily from the musical and rhythmic aspects of bharatnatyam, an ancient classical dance form originating in South India; the use of the sleighbells, for example, is used to imitate the sound of the dancer’s anklets. The full force of the wind ensemble is utilized to depict the raw sensuality described by Adigal, with the piece driving steadily towards its frantic and dramatic climax.
“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world,” wrote Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein in 1922. It is interesting to me that composition for the human voice has most often focused on exploring the territory inside one’s own language; it is rare to see a work deal in multiple languages, perhaps because musical text setting is most often prioritizes concrete meaning over symbolic communication itself. As a student of Middle Eastern languages I decided to start a project to reverse these priorities, by creating a work that primarily emphasized the rich linguistic relationships between the languages of the region.
The histories of the Hebrew, Arabic, and Persian languages are intertwined with each other through war and peace. Hebrew and Arabic are closely related in that they are both Semitic languages. Both share a common ancestor and influenced each other extensively; as a result they share a large amount of grammatical features and vocabulary. Persian is the historic language of the peoples of the Iranian plateau and is in the Indo-European family, structurally more similar to English than Hebrew or Arabic. But Persian has incorporated a large number of Semitic words into its lexicon due to the Arab conquest of Persia as well as the historic presence of Jews in Iran.
I was inspired to write this work by the eponymous poem by Persian poet Rumi which deals extensively with questions of cultural and spiritual identity. Language in the Middle East, as everywhere, is a determining factor in how a culture defines itself. All three languages have survived and thrived despite threats to their existence and as such they are important symbols of continuity and resilience.
In creating the piece I chose two poems from each language; one from a religious source and the other a secular love poem. Religious poetry in all three cultures has been foundational in establishing and codifying the language itself, and as such I thought it to be an appropriate way to introduce the languages in a solo presentation. In setting the love poems I explored linguistic commonalities in a dialogue-like format involving all three speakers, emphasizing shared phonetic and grammatical aspects of the languages such as acoustics and articulation. The work is introduced and concluded by the Rumi poem.
The dichotomy between commonality and individuality are reflected in the central motive of the work:
Taken individually, the first unison note and the second quartal chord imply a sense of intervallic unity and cohesion between the three voices. The second chord in context, however, is tonally distant and dissonant from its predecessor.
Provided below are transliterations and translations of the poems from their native language into English. Special thanks to Drs. Paul Schoenfield, Behrad Aghaehi and Gernot Windfuhr for their assistance in translations and transliterations.