Tweet
NATIVE INFORMANT
Huffington Post
April 22 2013
by Mohammed Fairouz., Composer
Posted: 04/22/2013 12:04 pm
The oldest music on my latest album, Native Informant, was written in
2008 but the sounds that inform all the music on this disk started
coming to me years before that when I was a teenager. My earliest
travels to Lebanon took me to Bourj Hammoud, a densely constructed
district of Beirut teeming with history and populated largely by
Armenians. Many survivors of the Armenian Genocide settled in this
area. The prime role that history plays in day-to-day life couldn't be
more apparent. Bourj Hammoud's winding streets are a survey of history
and if they could talk they would tell us that the study of history
is particularly important because history can be our greatest teacher.
But the streets of Bourj Hammoud aren't mute. Music seems to emerge
from every corner. Much of this music is live and nearly all of it
is Armenian from the folk music played on the Duduk to the songs
of revered composers like Ganatchian and Komitas. During my time in
Bourj Hammoud, I befriended an elderly piano seller who shared his
favorite Armenian greats with me. I was struck by the immediacy of
the tunes I heard: so shamelessly melodic but consistently deep. This
was sophisticated, multilayered stuff and yet the people on the street
could sing it. In fact, they did. I never musically recovered.
That's just one element in the landscape of the contemporary
Arab World. There's an overabundance of material in the region and
certainly enough to rock an artist with inspiration. On the bus ride
from Beirut to Damascus I read through a volume of poetry by Mahmoud
Darwish and first came across the tender and startling poem that I
was eventually going to set to music in 2008. This poem became the
basis for my lullaby (called Tahwidah) that opens the Native Informant
album. Tahwidah is a short art song that ruminates on deep loss.
Mahmoud Darwish was well-known throughout the Arab World in his
lifetime as a leader among avant-garde poets, championing free-verse
and innovative poetic structures over the revered ancient forms. So
when I first read the opening of Tahwidah, I was surprised to see
that the poetry read almost like ghazal (a traditional form of Arabic
love poetry). There was even meter and rhyme as a woman sings of the
different forms that her lover might take. It's not until the last
line of the poem that Darwish breaks out of this lyricism with the
revelation that "this is what a woman/said to her son/at his funeral".
The poem knocked me out and obsessed me for the rest of the bus ride
to Damascus.
I spoke with Darwish about setting it to music and the idea was to
set it together with other poems from his cycle in which Tahwidah
appeared. Many years later, Darwish was scheduled to come to New
York to give a poetry reading at the Edward Said Memorial Lecture on
September 28th 2008 and we arranged to talk while he was in town.
Darwish never arrived: he died suddenly a month before his trip to New
York. I interrupted work on my first opera, Sumeida's Song (which I
was completing at the time) and wrote my musical setting for soprano
and clarinet, Tahwidah, as my first reaction to the poet's death.
It took me four years to include Tahwidah on an album. In the meantime,
many clarinetists and singers had performed the work but I had to find
just the right combination for the first recording of the song. The
Native Informant album opens with a profound counterpoint between
the Jewish Klezmer master clarinetist David Krakauer, the words of an
iconic Palestinian poet, Mellissa Hughes' tender, theatrical soprano,
and the music of an Arab American composer.
I discovered more layers of meaning to Mahmoud Darwish's poem in the
following days. Damascus unveiled the alternately triumphant and dark
history of the Arabs in the 20th century. Nowhere was this darkness
more apparent than in Damascus' Army Museum. Examining the maps and
weapons of a disastrous series of wars (1948, 1973 and especially
the psychological and physical devastation of the 1967 war) made
it very clear to me why Darwish was hurt into poetry. The ancient
history of the city was also on full display as I entered the Old
City of Damascus through Bab Touma (Thomas' Gate), saw St. Paul's
residence and the crib of early Christianity before continuing on to
the great Ummayid Mosque in the heart of the Old City (which houses
the head of John the Baptist). My music has often been described as
"cross-cultural" and I have to think that the early experience of
walking through the historic Jewish, Christian and Muslim quarters
of Old Damascus impacted me tremendously as an artist.
Later that evening I had drinks of arak and ate grape leaves at
a restaurant in the Bab Touma area among Arabs of many faiths and
backgrounds. It's been hard for me to see the destabilization of
Damascus. Especially visceral was when, in October 2012, explosions
rocked Bab Touma itself and brought this vibrant corner of the city
into the current Syrian Civil War.
Tahwidah is not the only lullaby on this album. The final movement of
my violin sonata, Native Informant, (the title piece of the disk) is
also a lullaby. It takes its point of departure from the Armenian music
I heard back at Bourj Hammoud. When Rachel Barton Pine commissioned
a violin sonata from me, my initial idea was to end it with something
fast and flashy. I got to know Rachel pretty well during the process of
writing the work and crafting it for her "voice". The first movement
I wrote in Native Informant was the central lamentation titled For
Egypt. It was February 2011, the Tahrir Square uprisings in Cairo were
in full swing and reports of protesters being killing were hitting
the news. For Egypt was my first response to the loss of human life
in Cairo. The voice of the solo violin in this movement is alternately
pleading, crying, wailing and even expressing a little bit of hope. Far
away from Cairo, Rachel Barton Pine and I met up at the Central Park
West apartment where she was staying in New York and she read this
movement from my handwritten manuscript. I'll never forget the first
simple and profound words that came out of her mouth when she finished
playing through the movement for the first time: "it's so sad".
While I was composing Native Informant, Rachel and her husband
announced that they were going to have a baby. I knew from the
very start that I wanted to end my piece with a sort of rebirth
and when Rachel shared the happy news with me I had the idea of
crafting the final movement as a slow and tender lullaby for Rachel's
daughter-to-be. The result was a lullaby in which I tried to capture
the sophistication and immediacy of those Armenian lullabies with
tunes that people in the street could sing. The music is nocturnal
and introverted. The violin imitates a harp lulling a child to sleep
and the melody has that slightly plaintive quality of the Armenian
lullabies.
The final work on the album also took me back to Lebanon but to a
part of the country far from Bourj Hammoud. The work was my response
to a commission from the Imani Winds for a wind quintet and I titled
it Jebel Lebnan (Mount Lebanon).
Mount Lebanon is the historic name for the mountainous country as a
whole but it's also a specific region of the country where I stayed for
several days in a town called Bikfaya. This town and its surrounding
areas are Maronite Christian strongholds and it was there that I saw
the various monuments to the Pierre Gemayel, the founder of the right
wing Lebanese Phalangist Party. His son, Bashir, was to become one of
the presidents of Lebanon during the country's civil war and it was
in reaction to Bashir's assassination that the Phalangists presented
the massacres at Sabra and Shatila in 1982.
I visited the Shatila Refugee Camp and (twenty years after the
massacre) it was one of the most horrifying things I have ever seen
in my life. I watched the old newsreels and heard the moans of men,
women and children who had lost everything. It was in that moment
that, deep inside me, I conceived of what was to become the first
movement of my wind quintet Jebel Lebnan many years later. Titled,
Bashir's March, this movement starts with a wild cry from the e-flat
clarinet and piccolo screaming at the top of their shrill ranges
against an ever-downward moving march in the horn and bassoon.
The relentless music of Bashir's March gives way to an interlude called
Nay (the Arabic word for flute): an inward-looking flute solo heard
in the dead of the night. The work continues, without pause with a
funeral march: Ariel's Song. It's in the middle of this movement that
the quintet reaches its darkest depths.
Jebel Lebnan's final movements represent a rebirth of the human spirit
(spring after winter). Dance and Little Song activates the heart and
the limbs through a dancing motif and it's followed by Mar Charbel's
Dabkeh, an Arabic round dance that invokes the spirit of Lebanon's
patron saint.
Much of the music on the Native Informant album speaks to my love
for the Arab World, the beauty of its people, the generosity of its
culture and my relationship with its artists and poets. A lot of it
is also an expression of my deep yearning for healing and peace in
uncertain times. Most of all, in a region that is extraordinarily
complex and often reductively misunderstood the music I've collected
on this CD is a chronicling of human events (a study of history)
in the best way I know how.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mohammed-fairouz/native-informant_b_3119521.html
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
Huffington Post
April 22 2013
by Mohammed Fairouz., Composer
Posted: 04/22/2013 12:04 pm
The oldest music on my latest album, Native Informant, was written in
2008 but the sounds that inform all the music on this disk started
coming to me years before that when I was a teenager. My earliest
travels to Lebanon took me to Bourj Hammoud, a densely constructed
district of Beirut teeming with history and populated largely by
Armenians. Many survivors of the Armenian Genocide settled in this
area. The prime role that history plays in day-to-day life couldn't be
more apparent. Bourj Hammoud's winding streets are a survey of history
and if they could talk they would tell us that the study of history
is particularly important because history can be our greatest teacher.
But the streets of Bourj Hammoud aren't mute. Music seems to emerge
from every corner. Much of this music is live and nearly all of it
is Armenian from the folk music played on the Duduk to the songs
of revered composers like Ganatchian and Komitas. During my time in
Bourj Hammoud, I befriended an elderly piano seller who shared his
favorite Armenian greats with me. I was struck by the immediacy of
the tunes I heard: so shamelessly melodic but consistently deep. This
was sophisticated, multilayered stuff and yet the people on the street
could sing it. In fact, they did. I never musically recovered.
That's just one element in the landscape of the contemporary
Arab World. There's an overabundance of material in the region and
certainly enough to rock an artist with inspiration. On the bus ride
from Beirut to Damascus I read through a volume of poetry by Mahmoud
Darwish and first came across the tender and startling poem that I
was eventually going to set to music in 2008. This poem became the
basis for my lullaby (called Tahwidah) that opens the Native Informant
album. Tahwidah is a short art song that ruminates on deep loss.
Mahmoud Darwish was well-known throughout the Arab World in his
lifetime as a leader among avant-garde poets, championing free-verse
and innovative poetic structures over the revered ancient forms. So
when I first read the opening of Tahwidah, I was surprised to see
that the poetry read almost like ghazal (a traditional form of Arabic
love poetry). There was even meter and rhyme as a woman sings of the
different forms that her lover might take. It's not until the last
line of the poem that Darwish breaks out of this lyricism with the
revelation that "this is what a woman/said to her son/at his funeral".
The poem knocked me out and obsessed me for the rest of the bus ride
to Damascus.
I spoke with Darwish about setting it to music and the idea was to
set it together with other poems from his cycle in which Tahwidah
appeared. Many years later, Darwish was scheduled to come to New
York to give a poetry reading at the Edward Said Memorial Lecture on
September 28th 2008 and we arranged to talk while he was in town.
Darwish never arrived: he died suddenly a month before his trip to New
York. I interrupted work on my first opera, Sumeida's Song (which I
was completing at the time) and wrote my musical setting for soprano
and clarinet, Tahwidah, as my first reaction to the poet's death.
It took me four years to include Tahwidah on an album. In the meantime,
many clarinetists and singers had performed the work but I had to find
just the right combination for the first recording of the song. The
Native Informant album opens with a profound counterpoint between
the Jewish Klezmer master clarinetist David Krakauer, the words of an
iconic Palestinian poet, Mellissa Hughes' tender, theatrical soprano,
and the music of an Arab American composer.
I discovered more layers of meaning to Mahmoud Darwish's poem in the
following days. Damascus unveiled the alternately triumphant and dark
history of the Arabs in the 20th century. Nowhere was this darkness
more apparent than in Damascus' Army Museum. Examining the maps and
weapons of a disastrous series of wars (1948, 1973 and especially
the psychological and physical devastation of the 1967 war) made
it very clear to me why Darwish was hurt into poetry. The ancient
history of the city was also on full display as I entered the Old
City of Damascus through Bab Touma (Thomas' Gate), saw St. Paul's
residence and the crib of early Christianity before continuing on to
the great Ummayid Mosque in the heart of the Old City (which houses
the head of John the Baptist). My music has often been described as
"cross-cultural" and I have to think that the early experience of
walking through the historic Jewish, Christian and Muslim quarters
of Old Damascus impacted me tremendously as an artist.
Later that evening I had drinks of arak and ate grape leaves at
a restaurant in the Bab Touma area among Arabs of many faiths and
backgrounds. It's been hard for me to see the destabilization of
Damascus. Especially visceral was when, in October 2012, explosions
rocked Bab Touma itself and brought this vibrant corner of the city
into the current Syrian Civil War.
Tahwidah is not the only lullaby on this album. The final movement of
my violin sonata, Native Informant, (the title piece of the disk) is
also a lullaby. It takes its point of departure from the Armenian music
I heard back at Bourj Hammoud. When Rachel Barton Pine commissioned
a violin sonata from me, my initial idea was to end it with something
fast and flashy. I got to know Rachel pretty well during the process of
writing the work and crafting it for her "voice". The first movement
I wrote in Native Informant was the central lamentation titled For
Egypt. It was February 2011, the Tahrir Square uprisings in Cairo were
in full swing and reports of protesters being killing were hitting
the news. For Egypt was my first response to the loss of human life
in Cairo. The voice of the solo violin in this movement is alternately
pleading, crying, wailing and even expressing a little bit of hope. Far
away from Cairo, Rachel Barton Pine and I met up at the Central Park
West apartment where she was staying in New York and she read this
movement from my handwritten manuscript. I'll never forget the first
simple and profound words that came out of her mouth when she finished
playing through the movement for the first time: "it's so sad".
While I was composing Native Informant, Rachel and her husband
announced that they were going to have a baby. I knew from the
very start that I wanted to end my piece with a sort of rebirth
and when Rachel shared the happy news with me I had the idea of
crafting the final movement as a slow and tender lullaby for Rachel's
daughter-to-be. The result was a lullaby in which I tried to capture
the sophistication and immediacy of those Armenian lullabies with
tunes that people in the street could sing. The music is nocturnal
and introverted. The violin imitates a harp lulling a child to sleep
and the melody has that slightly plaintive quality of the Armenian
lullabies.
The final work on the album also took me back to Lebanon but to a
part of the country far from Bourj Hammoud. The work was my response
to a commission from the Imani Winds for a wind quintet and I titled
it Jebel Lebnan (Mount Lebanon).
Mount Lebanon is the historic name for the mountainous country as a
whole but it's also a specific region of the country where I stayed for
several days in a town called Bikfaya. This town and its surrounding
areas are Maronite Christian strongholds and it was there that I saw
the various monuments to the Pierre Gemayel, the founder of the right
wing Lebanese Phalangist Party. His son, Bashir, was to become one of
the presidents of Lebanon during the country's civil war and it was
in reaction to Bashir's assassination that the Phalangists presented
the massacres at Sabra and Shatila in 1982.
I visited the Shatila Refugee Camp and (twenty years after the
massacre) it was one of the most horrifying things I have ever seen
in my life. I watched the old newsreels and heard the moans of men,
women and children who had lost everything. It was in that moment
that, deep inside me, I conceived of what was to become the first
movement of my wind quintet Jebel Lebnan many years later. Titled,
Bashir's March, this movement starts with a wild cry from the e-flat
clarinet and piccolo screaming at the top of their shrill ranges
against an ever-downward moving march in the horn and bassoon.
The relentless music of Bashir's March gives way to an interlude called
Nay (the Arabic word for flute): an inward-looking flute solo heard
in the dead of the night. The work continues, without pause with a
funeral march: Ariel's Song. It's in the middle of this movement that
the quintet reaches its darkest depths.
Jebel Lebnan's final movements represent a rebirth of the human spirit
(spring after winter). Dance and Little Song activates the heart and
the limbs through a dancing motif and it's followed by Mar Charbel's
Dabkeh, an Arabic round dance that invokes the spirit of Lebanon's
patron saint.
Much of the music on the Native Informant album speaks to my love
for the Arab World, the beauty of its people, the generosity of its
culture and my relationship with its artists and poets. A lot of it
is also an expression of my deep yearning for healing and peace in
uncertain times. Most of all, in a region that is extraordinarily
complex and often reductively misunderstood the music I've collected
on this CD is a chronicling of human events (a study of history)
in the best way I know how.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mohammed-fairouz/native-informant_b_3119521.html
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress