After Tahrir, New Voices in a Global Fugue

Earlier this year, a series of unprecedented events began erupting throughout the Arab World. Using blogs, Facebook, Twitter and other social networking, a group of largely young people in Egypt achieved the demise of a regime that held sway for 30 years. They accomplished what “conventional” media had been prohibited from trying to accomplish. Today, as I write for a Web-based series as an Arab-American composer the relevance of this is not lost.

Many of my works have dealt with the contemporary Middle East — with the trials and travails of that region as well as the stories of Arab-Americans in this country. Other works have nothing to do with the Middle East. That I can choose to set a work in a village in Upper Egypt (“Sumeida’s Song”) or compose a song cycle to texts by Alma Mahler (“ Jeder Mensch”), is a clear indication of the increasing cosmopolitanism of the musical world in which we find ourselves. (A video performance of “Jeder Mensch” can be found here.)

The era of the white European male as the only model for a typical composer has long been history. This is not to dismiss the value of an important stream of musical thought and development, but rather to acknowledge that this tradition is now part of something larger and more inclusive. Today in the United States, we are witnessing the emergence of previously unheard voices, like those in Tahrir Square. Composers from China to the Middle East are among the most important working in America today. (The current Pulitzer Prize winner, Zhou Long, from China, is a notable example.) What is even more exciting is that nearly all composers are reaching for, and drawing musical materials from, their roots. These roots can be a drum kit, a bluegrass fiddle, folk dances from Mount Lebanon, DJ mixes, Arabic Maqam (modes), the bending notes of the sitar or the nay and infinite others. These composers are now comfortable articulating in fresh ways the music in which they have been most immersed.

This can be more than “fusion” or “crossover.” The most compelling works achieve a contrapuntal synthesis. But counterpoint is one of the least sexy aspects of composing. In “Humanism and Democratic Criticism,” Edward Said argued for the necessity of a “return to philology” in literary criticism, but in this case, I would argue for an analogous return to something else: counterpoint. Not in any strict, dusty or pedagogical sense of the term but a counterpoint that exemplifies the musical cosmopolitanism of our time.

There is a concern among many of the world’s cultures (the Arab culture perhaps most prominent among them) about losing one’s identity in a globalizing world. In a contrapuntal passage of music, each line, even when woven together with other lines to form a cohesive tapestry, retains its own beauty. In this musical technique I see a lesson for the cultures of the world: to exist in counterpoint with one another, with each retaining its individual cultural traits, but enriching the whole. I have used contrapuntal devices as symbolic of this larger meaning throughout my work.

One contrapuntal device, the canon, has had special meaning. The Arabic word for “law” is “kanun” and seems to have obvious connections to the English words — describing a canon of works or being canonized — which have a strict and pronounced series of laws that define them. The first movement (“Fantasy”) of my double concerto for violin, cello and orchestra “States of Fantasy,” which takes its name from Jacqueline Rose’s magisterial book, consists largely of a series of canons phasing progressively further apart from one another and becoming undone (the law becoming undone). The second movement (“Funeral March: A State of Mourning”) culminates in a large fugal outburst from the orchestra alone in representation of mass mourning, a shared history of suffering, as opposed to the individual mourning of the soloists. The least contrapuntal movement is the third (“Variations on an Imaginary Hymn of State”), which takes as its basis a national anthem of my own invention, with variations, to lampoon the hysteria of ultra-nationalism and the bad anthems that come with it.

I discovered a profound counterpoint between klezmer and Arabic music when I gave David Krakauer the part to my “Tahrir for Clarinet and Orchestra.” The work takes its title from Tahrir Square where those remarkable voices demanding change were raised. Tahrir simply means “liberation” in Arabic. The work is largely driven by the Arabic modes (maqam) and by the complex layering of rhythmic patterns that we find so often in the music of the Arab World. But David brought with him an additional layer of counterpoint to the work in the textures and accents of Jewish klezmer bands. The ease with which the klezmer idiom combined with that of the Arabic maqam through the shared heritage of the clarinet to form an unlabored synthesis is a statement worth noticing. The millennia old Jewish and Arabic musical idioms share very much in common and run fire in our veins today.

In my third symphony,“Poems and Prayers,” scored for vocal and instrumental soloists, chorus and orchestra, I chose the Aramaic, Hebrew and Arabic texts to illuminate the counterpoint between them. There is a striking interplay between the languages even on a phonological level. And the deeper intentions of the poets are interesting: what the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish is striving for can be described as contrapuntal, rather than oppositional, to what Yehuda Amichai, an Israeli poet, is aiming to achieve. Both are writing about the struggles of their people and the struggle over the land with great poetic virtuosity. Both are working with creative, rather than destructive, force. They meet in several key places and draw on the generative texts (prayers like the Kaddish) in a way that gives the texts of the symphony a dramatic arch.

Counterpoint is not always consonant. There is a radical disconnection between the beautiful homoerotic Arab poems of the golden ages of Andalucía or Baghdad and the abysmal state of gay rights in the contemporary Arab World. Traveling throughout the Arab world, I experienced first-hand the risk of participating in demonstrations. This influenced my choice of texts by Ibn Khafajah (“Three Fragments of Ibn Khafajah”) and Ibn Shuhayd (“After the Revels”). These tender texts have elicited the most surprise of all my songs. My intention in setting them was in celebration of love as a gay composer, but they are subversive, too. The third song in “Three Fragments” is a winding fugue played by the ensemble (flute, guitar, violin and cello) while the singer intoning the love poem is separate, “locked out,” from participation in the fugue. Like anything Middle Eastern these songs quickly acquire a political connotation. Those voices from Tahrir Square have already begun to call again for more universal participation and human rights.

It is convenient to represent cultures as monolithic entities especially if they are to be seen as a threat to “our” way of life. It is clear from the poetry, music and voices in general that the Arab culture is not such an entity. There is much diversity and counterpoint within the culture itself. In this age of musical and political cosmopolitanism, as opposed to alienating exclusivism or anything-goes pluralism, I hope for a celebration of every viable strand in our tapestry.

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Mohammed Fairouz is a composer of numerous songs, song cycles and longer works, including symphonies, concerti, solo and chamber music and the opera “Sumeida’s Song.” His music has been performed frequently in venues worldwide. More of his work can be found at his Web site.