Label : Urmawi Center for Mashreq Music | Year : 2005

Innovative contemporary Arabic music from Palestine, virtuosic playing on Oud and Buzuq.

These pieces were composed in a manner that suits the musical idiom of Arab instruments, specifically Oud and Buzuq. As opposed to the tradition of Arabic music where vocal music has been the main idiom of expression, these pieces place the Instrument at the heart of the creative process. This music aims to reveal its own essence to the listener with no verbal mediation. Hence, it is music that unfolds its own rhetoric. These compositions try to explore the widest spectrum of expression achievable by these instruments. The absence of lyrics draws the composer to search for an alternative compass with which to navigate his route through uncharted waters.

Every Arab musician has experienced the frustrating incoherence of Arabic instrumental musical forms. Yet, this dullness might become a fertile ground for creativity and motivate the composer to weave new forms nourishing from the needs of the musical material.

“Isfahan” displays an intricate use of the five beat meter, as a musical theme that develops with the other themes and not as a mere measurement metric unit. This technique contributed enormously to the design of the piece’s unique form, which was not constructed according to a rigid preset structural scheme. The same applies to the human voice in “Blue dive”*, where it abandons its traditional role as an interpreter of the verbal text. Instead it becomes an additional musical instrument that glides within its independent melodic orbit, from which it responds to the other echoing instruments as an equal rather than subordinating the instrumental accompaniment as a supportive pillar. Here again a new concept inspires the structural features needed to enhance the polyphony of two Buzuqs, voice and percussion.

Is oriental music a “Tarab” dedicated servant by definition? Is it really doomed to express only “ecstatic joy” or “devastating sorrow”? - Two opposed extremes that ultimately unite through music and create a unique state of mind known as “Tarab”! What about the rest of the emotional realm that dominates the majority of our human being? What about fear? What about jealousy? What about hope, anxiety, boredom, greediness, despair, frustration, melancholy? And what about the daily “exultation” when passing the military checkpoint in one piece? What about the religious conviction which shamefully collapses once the “Lord of the white world”, defending his “holy cross”, reaches over and crucifies you, your brothers and your mother tongue over the tin of the shanty huts in Jenin or Al-Basra? What should a composer write on that day and what should a musician play – Dreamy Andalusian Muwashahat? Ottoman dandy dances? Won’t the serenity of their beats be discordant with the nightly hectic bombing of Bethlehem? How could he evade searching for the musical expression of Crucifixion?

“Psalms” was composed during the years of the last Intifada, as the only escape road from the absurdity that endangers sanity, and as the only answer I can give to the recurring question that haunts each and every Arab today: “ Who are you?”

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