Notes:

I wish to dedicate this work, by gracious suggestion of His Royal Highness Prince Turki Al-Faisal, to the children who have fallen victim to global conflict.
His Royal Highness adds the following statement: “A most worthy subject for this dedication and sentiment are the children who are dying as a result of the wars raging in all parts of the world. If only peace would come, these children would be alive.”

As a composer who is uninterested in the idea of “music for the sake of music” or “abstract” music, the genre of the tone-poem has always held a special place in my heart when it comes to purely instrumental music. I’ve always regarded the symphony orchestra, with it’s diverse strands of different instruments with their different colors, origins and dynamics, as an ideal collective of human beings who come together for the exulted purpose of creative labor. The ideal counterpoint of these different voices coming together but not losing their individuality (their own purpose for being) seems like an ideal model for the cultures of the world to live in counterpoint with one another. Rather than losing their individual voices, they enhance the whole collective; they form a beautiful tapestry of counterpoint. This is Beethoven’s symphonic community of “Alle Menschen werden Brüder”.

So when I received a commission to write my first tone-poem for orchestra after four symphonies, several concertos and other orchestral works, I chose for my subject what JFK described as “the most important topic on earth: peace.” But peace is too general a notion to describe the highest aspirations of symphonic forces raising their voices in counterpoint. This peace had to be one, like Beethoven’s, of universal human brotherhood.

“What kind of peace do I mean and what kind of a peace do we seek?”, JFK continues, “Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave.”

In the decades since JFK delivered that speech, our greatest diplomats and artists alike have discarded of the myopic idea of a Pax Americana or a Pax Britannica etc. The best have been working for the only sort of sustainable peace and that must be a peace of harmony and counterpoint, the type of peace embodied in the highest ideals of the symphony orchestra and the inspiration that humanity can derive from the music that this special community can produce: a universal peace, a Pax Universalis.

“I am talking about genuine peace,” continues Kennedy, “the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, and the kind that enables men and nations to grow, and to hope, and build a better life for their children — not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women, not merely peace in our time but peace in all time.”

Pax Universalis is my most consistently joyful work to date and stands as a ode to this vision of peace and the hope that we will one day achieve it. The extroverted Andalusian musical elements of the work are a reference to the lost Islamic Golden Age of Al-Andalus, the closest we have come to reaching ideal peace on Earth in the Arab and Islamic imaginations. Prince Turki captured the immense sense of joyful meaning of this age of harmony when he said aloud what many Muslims worldwide have daily on their minds: “The loss of Andalucia is like losing part of my body.”

-Mohammed Fairouz (2015)

Commissioned by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra for Maya Beiser

Commission made possible through the generous support of Peter D. Cummings

Movements:

I.    Yowm Ad-Dīn (The day of Reckoning)
II.  Al- Maccaber (The Graves)
III. Jannat: Saud Al-Faisal In Memoriam (Heavens)

Notes:

I believe in angels and not just as figments of Arab and Middle Eastern mythology. For the people of the desert, the angels are more than characters in stories: they are essential to our understanding of the natural world around us. They are our way of expressing the elements of the universe. In Islam, the angels appear physically as being formed of light although some, like Gabriel, can appear to us in any form. I feel the presence of angels wherever there is light and I can’t say with certainty, given the shapeshifting capabilities of the archangels, that I haven’t conversed with an angel or two!

For the people of the desert, the angels also express the eternal constants of life: Azrael is the angel of death, Michael is the arch-angel of rain and thunder but also of mercy. The cello soloist in this concerto represents, at different moments, the four main angels shared in all three major Middle Eastern monotheisms: Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

We begin with the first movement titled Yowm Ad-Dīn (Arabic for “The Day of Reckoning”), a representation of apocalypse and the final judgement. The very first sound we hear at the opening of the movement is the din of tumult lead by the trumpets representing Israfel’s sounding of the trumpets of the apocalypse. The explosive music is inspired by the following lines from the Quran’s 82nd chapter, The Cleaving: “When the sky cracks; and the planets scatter; and the seas explode; and the graves are overturned…”. The opening is followed by a swirling motion in the flutes and the cello rising out of the depths. The music quickly transforms into the convulsive dance of Michael’s thunder which then gives way to a second theme in which the cello, in the voice of Michael, offers his mercy to the world. Michael’s hymn is rejected by the earthly crowds (represented by a clamorous orchestral cacophony) and he assembles his supernatural armies to bring and end to all earthly life.

Yowm Ad-Dīn ends with a great explosion followed by a downward-moving transition that takes us without pause to the second movement, Al Maccaber (Arabic for “The Graves”). In this slow movement the cello speaks with the voice of Azrael leading us from one funereal procession to another. The movement is inspired by these lines from the 102nd chapter of the Quran, The Rivalry: “Competition for worldly increase diverts you; until you visit your graves”. The key to understanding this invocation is that the grave is not a final resting place but rather a place that, after death, we temporarily visit while we wait for our souls to be resurrected.

The final movement begins with the joyous resurrection of the soul into an ecstatic paradise. Jannat is the Arabic word for the heavens and the movement is written to the memory of Prince Saud Al-Faisal. Prince Saud lived his life in the pursuit of peace and reconciliation to the best of his abilities. While I was composing this movement I rediscovered one of his statements that I’ve long cherished, words that embody his life’s mission of striving for harmony in the world. “I believe” says Prince Saud, “there can never be a clash of civilizations between us. It is a contradiction in terms. Civilizations are not competing products in the marketplace but rather the collective effort of human genius built on cumulative contributions from many cultures.” It was a pleasant thought for me to think, despite the fact that we may never achieve complete harmony here on earth, that there could be a place where the world’s peacemakers could find eternal harmony and peace after death.

Throughout this finale, the cello takes the form of Gabriel, the messenger of ultimate truth. And the flowing optimistic lines of the music are inspired by the Quran’s description of those who live their lives in the cause of peaceful and righteous deeds as they are finally admitted “to gardens beneath which rivers flow, wherein they abide forever.”

Mohammed Fairouz (2015)

Mohammed Fairouz announces his collaboration with best-selling novelist and award-winning journalist David Ignatius in an interview on MSNBC’s Morning Joe. The partnership is for a new opera titled The New Prince, commissioned by the Dutch National Opera, Amsterdam.
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A Soliloquy for Solo Cello
Movements:

I. Lullaby: Rock Me to Sleep
II. Profanation
III. Meditation

Notes:

When I was a child, I was afraid of the dark. My mother would always tuck me into bed, play some music for me and reassure me with the words: “your Guardian Angel is watching over you”.

I’ve always been reassured by this idea that there are effervescent spirits of light that watch over people, protect them and keep them safe from harm. Over the years, the angels of Middle Eastern lore have played an important part in my thinking and my music (as in my string quartet, The Named Angels). Chief among these spirits is the beautifully named angel Gabriel. When I began to compose this work I imagined it as a soliloquy sung by the Angel; a song without words.

The first movement is a lullaby that evokes the Gabriel lulling a child to sleep and watching over him peacefully through the night. Throughout the movement we hear a soulful breathing in the music. The tone is tender, gentle and uses that uniquely songlike quality of the cello’s upper register.

The second movement, Profanation, is disjointed, loud and brash. The child has grown up. He has learned the compulsory game of day-to-day life. Perhaps has learned cynicism. Profanation represents the intrusion of logistical life; the hustle of getting through the loud days and not being able to pay attention to the simple elements. It is the loss of the purity of the early lullaby.

In Islam, the angels are creatures of light while the jinn are made of fire and man is composed from a clot of blood and mud. And so, the final movement, Meditation, is a return to thinking about those simple elements: the eternal presence of the angels and jinn in the light and fire of the earth. This movement is filled with pregnant silences and room for thought. After the dense commute of life, we hear the mediation of late years. It is a meditation from old age that recalls the purity of a childhood lullaby.

Mohammed Fairouz (2015)

An Oratorio in Two Parts
Libretto by Najla Saïd

Cast:

Jibreel, Tenor
Dawoūd, Baritone
Chorus of Children
Chorus of Adult Men and Women

Notes:

The premise for my latest oratorio, Zabur, is really very simple. A young poet, blogger and writer named Dawoūd (David) is stuck in a shelter with a group of men, women and children and also with his companion Jibreel (Gabriel) while the din of artillery surrounds them and their city. As a way of focusing his mind away from the unbearable sounds and endless grief Dawoūd takes to his writing. With parts of the city on generator power Dawoūd writes by candlelight but also has no way of sharing his writing with the world. The usual avenue of just publishing his words online is not available. The terror of daily life has become mundane. Dawoūd can only write music and poetry now: “songs of sorrow and sadness but also of praise and wonder”. The music and poetry cut to the core. They capture so immediately and acutely what the journalistic need to chronicle every last detail cannot seem to capture.

Not able to publish his creations online, Dawoūd is inspired to share them with the men, women and children of the shelter by his companion and muse Jibreel. Their voices rise in song.

Starting with this premise, Najla Saïd was able to construct a moving libretto that resurrects the legendary Middle Eastern figures of David and Gabriel into the contemporary Middle East. She humanizes Dawoūd and his psalms of sorrow, praise and wonder. The psalms are no longer relics but living human documents.

Zabur is the Arabic word for the Psalms and by setting the texts in Arabic we chose to return the Psalms to one of the original ancient languages of the Middle East.

Zabur is also a sort of war requiem. documents the tragedy of war and how war touches all human beings and, most notably, the children. The oratorio begins with a flash forward of the terrible outcry in the last moments of the people in the shelter as they meet a violent fate. But by the time that this premonition returns as the actual moment of destruction in Part II, they’ve been working and creating for some time so that when the bombs finally come and destroy the shelter, all the pages of their collective labor are left and a full final hymn has been created. Zabur ends with them all “rising up” to sing their last song together and Dawoūd’s eternal, resonating final lines. These lines allow the people to move beyond their confused, disastrous present and touch something timeless and eternal:

“Do not take me away, my God, in the midst of my days;
your years go on through all generations.
In the beginning you laid the foundations of the earth,
and the heavens are the work of your hands.
They will perish, but you remain;
they will all wear out like a garment.
Like clothing you will change them
and they will be discarded.
But you remain the same,
and your years will never end.

The children of your servants will live in your presence;
their descendants will be established before you.”

Mohammed Fairouz (2015)

Follow, Poet (2015)

Amazon | Universal Music Classics/Deutsche Grammophon

Mohammed Fairouz makes his Deutsche Grammophon Debut in January 2015 with the release of Follow, Poet. The album features premiere recordings of the song cycle Audenesque, performed by Kate Lindsey, as well as the ballet, Sadat. Both works are performed by the New York chamber orchestra Ensemble LPR conducted by Evan Rogister.

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Movements:

I. O Florida, Venereal Soil
II. Fabliau of Florida (To Elizabeth Sobol)
III. Infanta Marina
IV. A High-Toned Old Christian Woman
V. Domination of Black

Notes:

In his early volume, Harmonium, Wallace Stevens came out as an irresistibly fresh and sensual poetic voice. I’ve always been attracted to the vigorous, refreshing quality of the poems since I was a child and when I received a commission to write for countertenor and flute, I thought that the instrumentation (a vivid treble sound-world) would be a perfect playground for Stevens’ fresh evocations of the great outdoors. After all, this soundscape was to combine two of the world’s oldest instruments: the human voice and the flute. But when I sat down to set these poems to music, I found a fascinating tension between the old and the new, between the reverential and the sleazy and between the great outdoors and the great “indoors” of self-examination and introspection.

The first three poems of this cycle display Stevens’ life-long love affair with Florida. In the first, O, Florida Venereal Soil, the state is described in sexual terms: even the wind is “lascivious”. The opening has a quality of invocation asking Florida, “venereal soil” to disclose a few things “for themselves” to the lover. There’s a slapstick quality to some of the linguistic invention: “The negro undertaker/Killing the time…”. But there’s also wild and high music in the evocation of the “donna”. Highlighting the playfulness of the way that Stevens manipulates the sounds of syllables helps to show why this poem is a composer’s dream:

Donna, donna, dark,
Stooping in indigo gown

There’s a sense of inner-symmetry that is inherently musical and also a refreshing sense that the poet is having a lot of fun with the sounds of words. Even this early in the cycle, though, the insinuations of darkness are present (“Donna, donna, dark”, “A scholar of darkness”, “the negro undertaker”) but throughout it all is a lewd sexuality (I set “Virgin of boorish births” as a sort of sleazy take on an imaginary Lutheran chorale). The poem ends on an extrovert erotic note: 

“A hand that bears a thick-leavened fruit,
A pungent bloom against your shade.”

We stay firmly rooted in Florida with the second song of the cycle, Fabliau of Florida. Just as the first song looks back to Milton (“venereal trains”) with its title referencing the goddess Venus in “Venereal Soil”, Fabliau of Florida looks back to the fables (fabliau) of Chaucer’s day. The poem is a beautiful experience in imagery where foam and cloud become one and “sultry moon-monsters” dissolve. The music is sustained and freed of the pulse of time with the flute droning on like the endless tide of the ocean. The transcendent and overpoweringly eternal presence of nature is captured in the last lines:

“There will never be an end
To this droning of the surf.”

 The donna of the first song returns as the princess of the sea in the third song, Infanta Marina. Here the flute begins with the active magic of the twirling “motions of her wrist” with which the princess makes the “grandiose gestures/Of her thought”. The magic of alliteration also prevails as the poet continues his play with the sounds of language, in particular the letter “s” as in “sleights of sails/Over the sea” or “subsiding sound”.

While the alliterative sorcery continues in the fourth song, A High-Toned Old Christian Woman, the poem also introduces Stevens’ lawyerly skills in classical rhetoric. The poem is styled as a debate that reins in on the stodgy convictions of a “high-toned old Christian woman”. Stevens goes a step further than saying that religion and poetry are both fictions. If they are fictions that reflect the multifaceted aspects of a human maker rather than any kind of god, Stevens contends that poetry is, indeed, “the supreme fiction”. The debate continues and is brilliantly constructed to vacillate between the judicious and hilariously pompous. At the same time that the poem looks forward, it also refers to the past: a “classical peristyle” vs a “Gothic nave”. It’s a wild journey  and the song features the shrill “wake-up” intrusiveness of a high piccolo in place of the flute. The poem is also rich with a party of linguistic sounds as in “Your disaffected flagellants, well-stuffed/Smacking their muzzy bellies in parade” and the bold jazziness of “Such tink and tank and tunk-a-tunk-tunk”. It ends, perfectly, with fictive things “winking” and causing our high-toned old widow to wince.

The final poem takes place at the intersection of outdoor imagery and terrifying introspection. Domination of Black takes us back to the images of darkness. The form of the song, as a lament, reveals itself with an elegiac flute soliloquy that slowly winds down from the upper register of the flute to its lowest note. It starts “at night, by the fire” and continues like a miniature horror show with the turning of the leaves. Soon, the picture turns to that of the “heavy hemlocks” and the memory of an ambiguous cry of peacocks. The cry of the cryptic peacocks takes us back, through the psychological corridor, to the turning of the leaves as the “colors of their tails/Were like the leaves themselves”. Stevens comes back to this continuous turning four times in the poem and each time the music presents it with slight variation but with the same inescapable obsessiveness until it builds up with the “loud fire” to a loud confusion where we are unable to know whether we are hearing the cry of the peacocks or a cry against the hemlocks.

As the music calms down the turning continues. The final lines say something of suicidal thoughts as the poet gives up to the domination of darkness:

 “I saw how the night came,
 Came striding like the color of the heavy hemlocks
 I felt afraid.
And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.”

Texts:

I. O Florida, Venereal Soil

A few things for themselves,
Convolvulus and coral,
Buzzards and live-moss,
Tiestas from the keys,
A few things for themselves,
Florida, venereal soil,
Disclose to the lover.

The dreadful sundry of this world,
The Cuban, Polodowsky,
The Mexican women,
The negro undertaker
Killing the time between corpses
Fishing for crayfish…
Virgin of boorish births,

Swiftly in the nights,
In the porches of Key West,
Behind the bougainvilleas,
After the guitar is asleep,
Lasciviously as the wind,
You come tormenting,
Insatiable,

When you might sit,
A scholar of darkness,
Sequestered over the sea,
Wearing a clear tiara
Of red and blue and red,
Sparkling, solitary, still,
In the high sea-shadow.

Donna, donna, dark,
Stooping in indigo gown
And cloudy constellations,
Conceal yourself or disclose
Fewest things to the lover —
A hand that bears a thick-leaved fruit,
A pungent bloom against your shade.

II. Fabliau of Florida

Barque of phosphor
On the palmy beach,

Move outward into heaven,
Into the alabasters
And night blues.

Foam and cloud are one.
Sultry moon-monsters
Are dissolving.

Fill your black hull
With white moonlight.

There will never be an end
To this droning of the surf.

III. Infanta Marina

Her terrace was the sand
And the palms and the twilight.

She made of the motions of her wrist
The grandiose gestures
Of her thought.

The rumpling of the plumes
Of this creature of the evening
Came to be sleights of sails
Over the sea.

And thus she roamed
In the roamings of her fan,
Partaking of the sea,
And of the evening,
As they flowed around
And uttered their subsiding sound.

IV. A High-Toned Old Christian Woman

Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame.
Take the moral law and make a nave of it
And from the nave build haunted heaven. Thus,
The conscience is converted into palms,
Like windy citherns hankering for hymns.
We agree in principle. That’s clear. But take
The opposing law and make a peristyle,
And from the peristyle project a masque
Beyond the planets. Thus, our bawdiness,
Unpurged by epitaph, indulged at last,
Is equally converted into palms,
Squiggling like saxophones. And palm for palm,
Madame, we are where we began. Allow,
Therefore, that in the planetary scene
Your disaffected flagellants, well-stuffed,
Smacking their muzzy bellies in parade,
Proud of such novelties of the sublime,
Such tink and tank and tunk-a-tunk-tunk,
May, merely may, madame, whip from themselves
A jovial hullabaloo among the spheres.
This will make widows wince. But fictive things
Wink as they will. Wink most when widows wince.

V. Domination of Black

 At night, by the fire,
The colors of the bushes
And of the fallen leaves,
Repeating themselves,
Turned in the room,
Like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind.
Yes: but the color of the heavy hemlocks
Came striding.
And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.

The colors of their tails
Were like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind,
In the twilight wind.
They swept over the room,
Just as they flew from the boughs of the hemlocks
Down to the ground.
I heard them cry—the peacocks.
Was it a cry against the twilight
Or against the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind,
Turning as the flames
Turned in the fire,
Turning as the tails of the peacocks
Turned in the loud fire,
Loud as the hemlocks
Full of the cry of the peacocks?
Or was it a cry against the hemlocks?

Out of the window,
I saw how the planets gathered
Like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind.
I saw how the night came,
Came striding like the color of the heavy hemlocks
I felt afraid.
And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.

—Wallace Stevens

Note from the poet:

“Mohammed Fairouz takes my oblique and eccentric poem, with its straightforward language and tangled emotions, and unearths its opulently operatic interior:  hearing his brilliant setting of ‘German Romantic Song,’ I’m thunderstruck by how sensitively he has delineated the various chambers of the poem’s heart, how novelistically he has turned plain statement into suspenseful quest, and how wittily he has concocted musical equivalents for sub rosa verbal innuendos.  In my life, nothing equals the pleasure of hearing, for the first time, Mohammed’s elevation of my taciturn poetic monologues into singable splendor.”

Text:

German Romantic Song

Cryptic owl on my sill,
olive branch in the gold-bowered cope,

when I was a child I didn’t know
what the word “colleague” meant:  darkness?
My father had many colleagues;
I had none.

I told his assistant, twenty-one years ago,
“I wonder which I love most,
words or music.”
I can’t remember her advice,
though later she sued my father—
a long story.  Perhaps
ecstasy can’t be sought?
Materialism is no longer my amour,
I’m forever a bridegroom to bliss and its disguises.

Poems and Prayers (2014)

iTunes | Amazon | Naxos

“A young man’s extraordinary effort to say what needs to be said, feel what needs to be felt and demonstrate what needs to be demonstrated about the Israeli and Palestinian morass in the Middle East”

—Mark Swed, Los Angeles Times

Movements:

I. Liwa: Sheikh Zayed Road at Dawn
II. Dabkeh: Shar’i Hamra at Dusk
III. Chanson: Rue d’Argentine, 2am
IV. Ayre: Exhibition Road, 9am
V. Musical Number: 26th/9th, Hudson Guild at Midnight

Notes:

Place has always been vital to me and the places that mean the most to me are cities. More than just areas to live, the world’s great cities have characters of their own that reflect the people and generations who built them. At their best, our cities express the extraordinary potential for cosmopolitan harmony and coexistence that comes with people interacting, working together and sharing creative space and ideas.

Each of the cities in Locales has a deeply personal meaning for me. All are places where I’ve spent a great deal of time. Each movement of Locales serves as a musical snapshot of a specific location within the cities at a specific time of day. My intention wasn’t to create a literal portrait of the soundscape of these cities but rather to capture their atmosphere and spirit. This music is as much about the cities as what they mean to me. So the movements of Locales progress, from east to west, as a series of diary entries. Each movement also offers my take on local musical forms.

We begin our journey on one of the most impressive roads on the planet. Liwa: Sheikh Zayed Road attempts to capture the audacity of human vision that resulted in a harsh, sleepy corner of the Arabian Desert being transformed into the site of one of the world’s most iconic skylines. The music takes the form of a Liwa, a traditional dance of the Gulf Arabs. A Liwa usually begins with a slow plaintive solo played on the mizmar, an instrument that resembles the oboe with its piercing double-reed sound, and then picks up pace with whirling gestures.

Our next stop, Beirut, is expressed through the most iconic Arabic dance form: the Dabkeh. The music begins atmospherically with the sun setting over Hamra Street in downtown Beirut but quickly picks up the pace. This mirrors the daily transformation of Hamra Street from an intellectual and artistic haven by day to the vibrant nightlife punctuated by wild clubs, bars, tattoo parlors and general merriment. The liveliness of this dabkeh is my tribute to the ever-perseverant and fun-loving people of the state of Lebanon.

I spent many sleepless nights as a teenager in my apartment on Rue d’Argentine in Paris’ 16th arrondissement. In this movement, the oboe becomes a singer as I take the vocal form of the Chanson to express the endless peace, calm and elegance of this beautiful street at 2am.

It became a daily ritual for me coming home from after-school German classes at London’s Goethe-Institut to pause and take in the spirit of Exhibition Road. On the short walk from the Goethe-Institut to the South Kensington Tube Station I would take quick detours to pass the Royal Albert Hall, the Museum of Natural History, the Science Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum. Every Friday I would stop in the Victoria and Albert to visit the Rodin sculptures as loyally as I would visit a good friend. This short gentle movement, in the form of an English Ayre, is a small token of my love for Exhibition Road.

The westward journey of Locales ends in my hometown of New York and in my neighborhood of Chelsea. The movement takes its name from the Hudson Guild, an organization that embodies the best of community spirit in big cities. The music is a description of a noisy midnight street scene on 26th Street in the West Side of Manhattan and is extremely active. This brash, extroverted music takes the tone of that most New York-related art-form: the Broadway musical number.

—Mohammed Fairouz

Movements:

1. Proust Among the Nations

2. The House of Memory

3. Engame: Proust and Genet in the Middle East

Mohammed Fairouz’s 3rd Symphony “Poems and Prayers” will be released in May 2014.  Soloists Sasha Cooke, David Krakauer and David Kravitz join the UCLA choruses and Philharmonia. Also on the disk is Tahrir for clarinet and orchestra featuring Krakauer as soloist.

Mohammed Fairouz is the subject of a major feature in the Los Angeles Times titled “Mohammed Fairouz is a Composer of the World”.

via Los Angeles Times.

Notes:

The comic book writer Dennis O’ Neil described Batman’s Gotham City as “Manhattan below Fourteenth Street at eleven minutes past midnight on the coldest night in November” to which William Safire, writing in The New York Times adds: “from SoHo to Greenwich Village, the Bowery, Little Italy, Chinatown and the sinister areas around the base of the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges.”

In this chilling environment, Bob Kane created arguably the most colorful rogues gallery of villains in any comic book series. I selected four of these figures as the basis for my 14^th -17^th Piano Miniatures, a series of character pieces in which I sketched out attributes of these extreme and deep characters. These miniatures are designed to be performed as a set titled The Rouges Gallery.

1. Mr. Freeze (Piano Miniature #14)

   Mr. Freeze is a tragic character. Driven by a desire to cure his terminally ill wife, Nora, he cryogenically freezes her in an unauthorized experiment only to have his employers pull the plug on the whole affair and, in the process, trigger an industrial accident that leaves him in his current cold state. Freeze’s condition also slows down his body’s aging process basically making him immortal.

   Much has been written about the symbolism of cold for Mr. Freeze (that molecules slow down when colder). As a result, the music of this miniature is extremely slow and makes use of the high registers traditionally used to evoke coldness in music. The music is stoic but tinged with tragedy and loss. In the middle of the miniature, we hear a tinkling melody that I wrote to evoke Nora in the extreme high range imitating the sound of a music box. This is a reference to the makeshift music box that Mr. Freeze creates featuring an ice sculpture of his wife. It is his only source of happiness during his incarceration.

2. Scarecrow (Piano Miniature #15)

   Originally a student of phobias, Scarecrow uses his psychological knowledge as well as his signature fear-gas to exploit the fears of his victims. The music of this miniature is extremely fast and relentless imitating the increased heartbeat of a terrified victim. There are echos of the Dies Irae (Day of Wrath) throughout. Just as it seems to calm down, this minute-long panic attack comes to a tumultuous close.

3. Two-Face (Piano Miniature 16A/16B)

   Once Gotham City’s dashing and idealistic district attorney, Harvey Dent is driven to insanity when the left side of his face is hideously scarred by acid. This unleashes all of his inner demons and obsession with dualities. Believing that justice is arbitrary, Two-Face makes all his decisions with the flip of a coin.

   At this point in the set, the pianist flips a coin to determine whether the audience will hear miniature 16A (Harvey Dent) or 16B (Two-Face). Miniature 16A sets the calm and magnanimous spirit of Dent centered around an starry-eyed chorale ever reaching upward. There is only a hint in this music that things could go terribly wrong.

   Miniature 16B takes Harvey’s musical motifs and transforms them into violent blackened sounds invoking Two-Face’s ruthless and psychotic character.

4. The Riddler (Piano Miniature #17)

   The Riddler is my favorite of Batman’s Rogues. The master of puzzles leaves clues to his deadly crimes in the form of Riddles to challenge his opponents and prove his intellectual superiority. The music is obsessively punctuated with a seven note motif that spells out
   “R-I-D-D-L-E-R” using a modified version of the 19^thcentury “French” system of generating musical cryptograms:

   A	B	C	D	E	F	G	♭
   H	I	J	K	L	M	N	♮
   O	P	Q	R	S	T	U	♯
   V	W	X	Y	Z

   The flamboyance of the music is inspired by Frank Gorshin’s depiction of the character as well as Jim Carrey’s interpretation (inspired by Gorshin).

   At the opening of the score, a riddle is presented from the comic book Batman #23.2: Riddler #1, one of my favorite Riddler comics: “My servants cannot leave me, In all they number five. They bring me everything I want, and I keep them alive. What am I?”

   The answer is presented cryptographically in counterpoint to the “R-I-D-D-L-E-R” motif and then as a second theme of its own. A hint to the answer is also given in the fact that this is a piano piece: “H-A-N-D”.

-Mohammed Fairouz

In the Shadow of No Towers (2013)

iTunes | Amazon | Naxos

“Based on Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel of the same name, Fairouz’s four-movement piece features a powerful performance by the University of Kansas wind ensemble conducted by Paul W. Popiel of a composition that magnificently blends sharp commentary, satire, and deep-felt emotion over the course of 35 minutes. Beginning with a terrifyingly literal take on the event itself, Fariouz’s piece explores the complexities, contrasts, and contradictions of post 9-11 America, and further solidifies his reputation as one of the most exciting young composers in classical music today.”

—Christian Williams, Utne Reader

Notes:

Each of the three movements of my Violin Concerto takes its inspiration from an aspect of life in Al-Andalus, the legendary medieval Arab emirate. The legacy of Al-Andalus is cherished in the modern Arab World as a period of intellectual and creative flowering. The three movements recount the events chronologically and the result of engaging the richness of this period is one of my most consistently optimistic works.

During the 2003 invasion of Iraq, there were reports of American troops fighting at the Ibn Firnas Airport north of Baghdad but few Americans knew who Ibn Firnas was or why there was an airport named for him. Among Arabs, the story of Ibn Firnas is a famous one taught in schools and recounted from generation to generation. Abbas Ibn-Firnas was a poet, philosopher and inventor who, in the mid-800s, became the first human being to scientifically attempt flight. The first movement of my concerto, Ibn-Firnas’ Flight, celebrates this momentous event.

Mu’min Ibn Said, the court poet of Cordoba, usually critical of Ibn-Firnas, described how he “flew faster than the pheonix in his flight when he dressed his body in the feathers of a vulture”. Every aspect of this movement speaks of flight in some way: the music is fast and relentless with the violin soaring above fluttering figures in the orchestra. The movement is engineered at roughly 11 minutes, the reported duration of Ibn-Firnas’ flight. The tone is kinetic and filled with adrenalin: the rushes of excitement that one can only imagine from being airborne for the first time. The triumphant melodies of the movement are a testament to my awe of Ibn-Firnas’ nerve and audacity and my admiration for his fulfillment of our human desire to take wing and fly roughly a thousand years before the Wright Brothers.

The second movement, The Ring of Doves, provides a tender contrast to the first. Ibn-Hazm is known in the Arab World as a leading philosopher of jurisprudence and most of his 400 or so texts are documents of legal philosophy. But of the 40 works that survive, one stands out: a treatise on love beautifully titled The Ring of Doves. Written in 1082, it is Ibn-Hazm’s only work of literature and it’s sensual writing inspired the amorous tone of this second movement. The sweet maquam-inspired melodies are mirrored by an intimate orchestration. Descriptions of the intertwining of bodies are translated into serpentine instrumental duets.

Dancing Boy, the final movement, takes Ibn-Kharuf’s homoerotic poem from the year 1205 that describes a virtuosic young dancer as its point of departure. This has been a favorite poem of mine for many years and is a standard classic taught to Arab schoolchildren so it was a real joy to bring Ibn-Kharuf’s lithe, suggestive, boy to life with an wink.

After a brief invitation to the dance, the music turns to a full-fledged Dabkeh: the most famous of Arabic dance forms with its simple weaving melodies and driving moderate rhythm omnipresent in the Arab World from the Atlantic ocean in the west to the Indian Ocean in the east. The music engages the energy and sexuality of the poem: at times orgasmic and at times lighthearted. Each musical section “sets” a stanza of the poem with the violin playing the unsung lyrics in celebration of Ibn-Kharuf’s eternal Dancing Boy:

As his movements twist and wind
He plays havoc with my mind,
Lightly tossing off his dress
To be robed in loveliness.

Now he writhes with supple ease
Like a bough before the breeze,
Gambols now as a gazelle
In its covert on the fell.

Now retreat, and now advance:
How the reason he enchants,
And upon the feelings plays
As does Fortune with our days.

Now he lithely screws his feet
Till upon his head they meet,
As the tempered sword will bend
Till its handle grasps its end.

-Mohammed Fairouz

Notes:

On the fiftieth anniversary of Martin Luther King’s I Have A Dream speech, I wrote an elegy for an unarmed black teenager who was shot and killed by a man who was suspicious of his appearance. The fact that Trayvon Martin was gunned down and his killer legally acquitted of his murder in 2013 has, not secretly, been a cause for grief among people of color in the United States today.
In the days that followed, on my regular daily walks thorough the streets of Manhattan the words of Langston Hughes’ poem, Let America Be America Again, rang through my head. I’d memorized the poem as a kid and its darkest lines seemed particularly poignant today:

(There’s never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this “homeland of the free.”)

Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery’s scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek—
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.

With the sounds of street-life, these verses intermingled with the percussive sounds of anger. I sat down a few days later and, over the course of a few hours, these sounds became my 13th Piano Miniature. The work is dedicated, respectfully, to the memory of Trayvon Martin and takes its title from the most hopeful lines in Langston Hughes’ poem:

O, yes, I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath—
America will be! -

-Mohammed Fairouz

Notes:

My 12^th Piano Miniature is a little song without words. The tempo and unadorned lyricism is partly inspired by my love for the early Tin Pan Alley tear-jerker ballads. The secret unsung lyrics are from a poem by Seamus Heaney. This miniature was my first gentle reaction to his death and is dedicated to Seamus in gratitude for his generosity and friendship toward me.

-Mohammed Fairouz

Mohammed Fairouz writes about his Third and Fourth Symphonies as part of NPR’s “Searching for the Great American Symphony” series.

via NPR.

Mohammed Fairouz’s 4th Symphony “In the Shadow of No Towers” will be released on Naxos in November 2013.  Click here for more info.

Movements:

1. אל מלא רחמים
   (God, full of mercy)

2. אני, שקטפתי פרחים בהר
   (I, who pluck flowers from the hilltops)

3. אני, שהבאתי גוויות מן הגבעות
   (I, who brought corpses from the mountains)

4. אני שמשתמש רק בחלק קטן
   מן המילים במלון
   (I, who use but a tiny portion
   of the words in the dictionary)

5. אני, שמוכרח לפתור חידות בעל כורחי
   (I, who am forced to decipher riddles)

Notes:

El Male Rachamim (God, full of mercy) takes its title from both the poem by Yehuda Amichai and the litany that inspired it. The Jewish funeral prayer recited by the hazzan accompanies the ascension of the soul and is used to evoke the memory of the deceased. My response for solo piano, written to the memory of György Ligeti, takes a narrative approach to the text. It’s cast in five sections that flow continuously with little pause.

The opening lines of Amichai’s poem turn the ancient prayer on its head: “God full of mercy/If only God were not full of mercy/There would be mercy in the world and not just in him”. These lines are at once shocking, irreverent and deeply heartfelt. The tone of the music is dark and ominous. It pulsates with groans that rise out of the the depths of the piano. At once, the piercing voice of the cantor is heard. There is a terrible breathing throughout and occasional eruptions.

This is immediately followed by a more lyrical, flowing movement.“I, who pluck flowers from the hilltops”, suggests a surface sweetness that conceals an inner crying. There is an expansive quality to the music inspired by the speaker of Amichai’s poem “looking over all the valleys”.

“I, who brought corpses from the hilltops” is a full-on dance of death. The piano rages with percussive blows and Amichai’s contemporary interpretation of the prayer is punctuated with passages that evoke air-raid sirens. The first pause in the work corresponds with the first real conclusion in the poem at the end of the Amichai’s first stanza: “I can tell you that the word is void of mercy”.

The fourth section of the work, “I who use but a tiny portion of words in the dictionary” limits the musical vocabulary to a downward-moving cantorial descent. The atmosphere is at its most openly mournful with a painful, slow inevitability.

Finally we have an image of one who is “forced to decipher riddles”. The movement strives for an apotheosis but is seemingly blocked from reaching it. The simple lyricism of the movement slowly transforms to an exulted memory of the dead before giving up its spirit. The music finally returns, like Amichai’s poem, to the opening invocation and ends with an ultimate exhalation of breath.

—Mohammed Fairouz

Poem:

אל מלא רחמים

אל מלא רחמים
אלמלא האל מלא רחמים
היו הרחמים בעולם ולא רק בו
אני, שקטפתי פרחים בהר
והסתכלתי אל כל העמקים
אני, שהבאתי גוויות מן הגבעות
יודע לספר שהעולם ריק מרחמים

אני שהייתי מלך המלח ליד הים
שעמדתי בלי החלטה מול חלוני
שספרתי צעדי מלאכים
שלבי הרים משקלות כאב
בתחרויות הנוראות

אני שמשתמש רק בחלק קטן
מן המילים במלון

אני, שמוכרח לפתור חידות בעל כורחי
יודע כי אלמלא האל מלא רחמים

היו הרחמים בעולם
ולא רק בו

God, Full of Mercy

God full of mercy,
If only God were not full of mercy,
There would be mercy in the world and not just in him.
I, who plucked flowers on the mountain,
Who gazed out over all of the valleys,
I, who brought corpses from the hilltops,
I can tell you that the world is void of mercy.

I, who was the king of salt beside the sea,
Who stood against my will before my window,
Who counted the footsteps of angels,
Whose heart lifted weights of anguish
In dreadful contests.

I, who use but a tiny portion
Of the words in the dictionary.

I, who am forced to decipher riddles,
I know that if only God were not full of mercy
There would be mercy in the world
And not just in him.

—Yehuda Amichai

University of Kansas Wind Ensemble; Paul W. Popiel, Conductor

University of Kansas Wind Ensemble; Paul W. Popiel, Conductor

University of Kansas Wind Ensemble; Paul W. Popiel, Conductor

In the Shadow of No Towers is featured in The Wall Street Journal with interviews from Art Spiegelman, Mohammed Fairouz and Rachel Barton Pine: One Man’s Memoir of 9/11 Becomes Another’s Symphony

Movements:

I. July 23rd 1952
II. Jehan
III. The Death of Nasser/ The Leader
IV. Jerusalem
V. The Day The Leader Was Killed

Notes:

Snapshots from the extraordinary life of the late Egyptian president, Anwar Sadat, are the basis for this ballet for percussion and chamber orchestra. Sadat was a controversial figure during his lifetime and his legacy has been complex both in the Arab World and beyond. Choosing from an abundance of materials, I selected five iconic scenes to capture in this work.

The first scene, July 23^rd 1952, is cast against the backdrop of the Egyptian revolution that occurred on that date. Anwar Sadat, together with such legendary figures as Mohammed Naguib and Gamal Abdel-Nasser was a member of the Free Officers Movement, a group of Army officers who lead the coup against the British-installed King Farouk and brought an end of colonial rule in Egypt.

Anwar Sadat was notably the first voice of the revolution, announcing it on the radio stations since the other officers admired his command of the Arabic Language.

The overall tone of this scene is conspiratorial with the xylophone vaguely resembling electronic communications. There are also passages of music that express newfound national aspiration and joy. The newly adopted Egyptian National Anthem is embedded under layers of activity.

Piercing xylophone turns to a mellower marimba in the second movement named for Sadat’s wife-to-be: Jehan. The scene is a lyrical pas-de-duex in tone with sinewy love duets. The marimba carries “Jehan’s theme” and interweaves with a baritone-like cello.

The pitched instruments give way to somber tenor drum which leads a deeply-felt funeral march marking the death of the president Gamal Abdel-Nasser. It captures the immense anguish felt across the Arab World at the death of the great pan-Arab leader. The scene gives way to a softer end as Jehan’s theme reemerges as though urging Sadat into leadership.

A sounding shofar begins the fourth scene which marks Sadat’s arrival in Jerusalem, the start of his monumental journey to address the Israeli Knesset and finally bring decades of war between the Arabs and Israelis to an end. The Jewish shofar intermingles with the sounds of Jerusalem’s church bells and finally the mosque’s azan (call to prayer). The sounds of the three religions (in musical order that resembles their entrances into the world) form a tapestry of counterpoint followed by impassioned writing in the strings resembling the soaring tones of Sadat’s incredible speech to the Israeli Knesset. The brief flash-forward to the final scene anticipates the consequences for Sadat of his courageous journey.

The Day the Leader Was Killed is the final scene. It takes its title from Naguib Mahfouz’s book on the assassination of Anwar Sadat.  There’s a general sense of anxiety in the music and a return to the shrill sound of the xylophone. This time it leads the terrible repetition of a military parade. Sadat’s economic policies are wreaking havoc on the lives of ordinary Egyptians but the military parade continues with overstated brightness and exuberance. The 1981 parade is abruptly destroyed by the assassination of the leader by the Muslim Brotherhood. The moment of horror is captured in musical slow-motion with the relentless xylophone attacks sounding like the attacks of bullets. The ballet ends with the joining of all the themes together in a large outcry. Jehan’s theme joins with the theme of Anwar Sadat, both looming larger than life.

The moral in the life-story of this complex leader is as relevant now as it was at the start of his journey in 1952.

In Sadat, I use two of the oldest forms of human expression, percussion and dance, to retell aspects of his story to a new world.

—Mohammed Fairouz

Movements:

I. Barada
II. May 25th 2012
III. Naaman’s Song
IV. Shora

Notes:

It’s a testament to the immense influence of Damascus in the Arab World that the Arabic nickname for the city, “Al-Sham”, is also the name for the whole Arabian Levant. The last few years of upheaval in Syria have been difficult for me to digest given the cultural and musical transformation that I underwent as a kid travelling through Damascus. Today, as The New York Times describes an entire “lost generation” in Syria, the need to musically respond is more desperate in me than ever. The sonic results of many of these thoughts are collected here in my first cello suite: Al-Sham.

Barada, the opening introduction, takes its name from the river that runs through Damascus. It captures the fluid motion of the eternal river as it winds through the ancient city interrupted by the terrible and decaying grandeur of the Old City. The movement has a breezy, folk-tune quality reminiscent of the Syrian and Armenian melodies heard on the banks of Barada.

This winds down without pause to May 25^th 2012, a movement that takes its title from the date of the massacre at Houla in which 108 people (25 men, 34 women and, remarkably, 49 children) were massacred. The music starts in a dark place and builds to a screaming outpour of grief. It vacillates between heartfelt lamentation and introversion. The cello is made to scale its highest heights and fall to the lowest depths. This visceral music captures the extreme grief and disgust that I felt on that day.

The following movement takes us back to the River Barada through the biblical tale of Naaman, the ancient Syrian general who attempts to cleanse himself of his leprosy in the river. He eventually seeks out the help of Elisha who famously tells him to wash himself in Jordan. This movement represents a moment of cleansing and recovery.

The final movement sees the reactivation of the limbs through the Shora, a vigorous and energetic Syrian dance. This unashamed music is a celebration of the dance, of the vitality and strength of the Syrian people and of the ability of the human spirit to recover after suffering unspeakable loss.

—Mohammed Fairouz

“It has long been a cherished ambition of mine to weave together the loose strands and frayed edges of New York’s metropolitan arterial tapestry”

-          Robert Moses

Program Notes:

Pieces of music have been written about the George Washington Bridge, the Brooklyn Bridge… if there’s a musical work about Triborough, I haven’t heard of it. But Triborough is my favorite of New York City’s great bridges. Not one bridge, but three giant bridges in one, Triborough is one of those great human accomplishments that raised architecture to the level of sculpture. Since I was a little boy, I’ve found its art deco detailing unbelievably beautiful and the story of its construction inspiring.

At the opening of my piece, you can hear the kinetic energy of Triborough: the excitement and nervous energy of the forbidding task of putting together 13,500 feet of elevated viaduct and 14 miles of roadway in the middle of the Great Depression. Reopening cement factories from Maine to Mississippi, the work of men and women in 132 different cities across 20 states went into the construction of the Triborough Bridge. Underlying it all is the furious rush of water: the audacious drive of human beings to “repair” what nature has done.

The energy gives way to an austere chorale in which Robert Moses appears as master builder looking at New York City from the sky view of a great planner and seeing the incredible fact that the streets of three great boroughs, Manhattan, The Bronx and Queens seem to be rushing together and all of a sudden, at the point where they seem to meet, they’re held apart by these narrow bands of water in the middle of which is Randall’s Island! The chorale has a spacious, lofty feel to it: the glaciers that had rumbled down from Hudson Bay eons ago had torn Long Island loose from the mainland United States; Robert Moses stitched it back together again with the Triborough Bridge. And since Long Island contains Brooklyn as well as Queens, Triborough was finally uniting an entire city.

New York City is full of monuments that defy depression and this bridge is one of city’s finest achievements. More than just architectural splendor and a monument to the best of public works, it speaks to the human capacity to rise above our circumstances and to do great things in the most difficult times. My little ode may be the first musical tribute to this bridge but I can’t think of a structure more magically musical than mighty Triborough.

Mohammed Fairouz, 2013

Press:

Seven Days, Vermont
Feature: Capital City Concert Premieres a Work by Rising Arab-American Composer Mohammed Fairouz

Burlington Free Press
Feature: Composer Reveals Arab-American Story Behind His Music

Burlington Free Press
Feature: Montpelier Flutist Uses Music To Explore Arab-American Identity

“Teta” (Arabic for grandmother), commissioned by Capital City Concerts, is a three-movement work intended to reflect the Arab-American immigrant experience. The opening “Folktune/Flashback” employs an Arabic maqam modal scale (with different intervals than the traditional Western scale) with the ensemble playing in octaves in a sing-song style. With piccolo substituted for flute, it sounded like a raucous but happy Arab party.

“On Leaving/The Journey” opens with a prolonged flute solo, modal and quietly rhythmic, and then is joined by the strings in a quiet journey mixing modal and Western harmonies. Suddenly there is an explosion of raw sounds from all, but this subsides to the quiet journey, only to happen all over again.

“Putting It Together” opens with another prolonged flute solo, this in a bright Western tonality, which proves to be the theme for a five-part fugue creating a “fabric” or “tapestry.” … its tonal quality was beautiful.

The performance itself was impassioned. Kevra used her expressive sound to ply the exotic lines, while the Borromeo – in a decidedly secondary role – complemented with rich sounds delivered sensitively. This is a work that would benefit from repeated listening.”

—Jim Lowe, Rutland Herald

Program Notes:

My initial thoughts of writing a work about elements of the Arab-American experience was to create a vibrant celebration of culture. As I delved deeper into the topic, visited the “Little Syria” exhibit in Manhattan, read Wadad Makdisi Cortas’ A World I Loved: The Story of an Arab Woman and other books on the experience of exile and “the journey”, I began to imagine a much deeper (and in many ways darker) piece.

The work is in three movements without a break: a continuous narrative. The first movement Folktune/Flashback is a made up folk melody that remembers the Old Country. Like most memories of things lost, it’s overly nostalgic and positive (if slightly unrealistic): everything is lemon trees and scented with Jasmine. The movement is written entirely in maquam (Arabic mode) and uses the unisons characteristic of classical Arabic music. The piccolo embellishes and ornaments the lines resulting in a traditional heterophony.

This goes directly into the second movement. The tone of this music is much more plaintive and introspective. It is music about the pain of leaving everything you know and making the journey into the uncertain. There are anxious outbursts in the music but it quickly collects itself into a quiet (and even slightly hopeful) tone.

The final movement begins with an extended flute solo that echoes of Arabic maquam. Before long, we realize that this is actually the subject of a fugue: the most Teutonic and “Western” of musical techniques. This is music of the New World: we’ve made a long journey from the opening traditional heterophony and strict maquam and we’re now in a new, occidental-inflected world.  The hope in this fugue is that the voices exist in a tapestry of counterpoint: each voice maintains its individual beauty but starts to fit in to the new whole.

—Mohammed Fairouz

A Theatrical Song Cycle
Music by Mohammed Fairouz/Lyrics by Wayne Koestenbaum

Premise:

The premise:  as if in the demented, war-haunted last episode of Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz, or in a German expressionist landscape remastered to resemble an outtake from Disney’s Sorcerer’s Apprentice, our pale hero (erototomane, cinéaste, clown, troubadour, analysand, synaesthete) wanders through circles of a moonlit inferno, where he confronts shadows of charmed, histrionic luminaries, including Susan Sontag, Virginia Woolf, Patty Duke, Mae West, Diana Vreeland….   Each of Pierrot’s encounters, like an unanswered question, spills back on itself, with the recursive, schizoid elegance of a rondo;  Pierrot is traveling backward, not forward, with the suddenness of an orgasm arrested before its spasms commence.   Pierrot gives birth;  Pierrot gets a tonsilectomy;  Pierrot poses problems;  Pierrot shuns a dying drunk expatriate;  Pierrot makes snide remarks in front of Patty Duke;  Pierrot sits beside Susan Sontag at a dinner party;  in Pierrot’s presence, the Madonna sews a quilt celebrating gay marriage.  The audience’s role is to rescue Pierrot from his spell by paying close attention to every movement of his body and every inflection of his singing, speaking voice:  every consonant, every vowel, binds the listener to Pierrot’s embarrassed, eager-to-please body.  (The participatory erotics of Pierrot Lunaire will not leave the listener unmolested.)

—Wayne Koestenbaum

Lyrics:

1.  Moondrunk
for Michael Couper

“my skin, except in dreams, is antiseptic”
a student sends me his novel, idiomatic, adorable, but needing vast correction
Bette Davis wears a guilt-inducing outfit
most of her face covered by a fur hat

Eve Arden, seated in my row, archly nods and genuflects
alluding to her Miss Brooks role
which I pretend to remember so she won’t be offended
I say hi to a freak with scab-caked fingers after ignoring his crib all night
“my skin, except in dreams, is antiseptic”

2.  Pale Laundrymaid
to Patricia Spencer
 

my shrink brings sweetbreads dressed in raspberry vinegar to the backyard potluck
also mâche, which she tosses with her hands
the sweetbreads taste fat-free, a saltless panache
not a desireable dish but magically nutritious

sweetbreads advertise her quixotic prudence
and surpass the crappy barbecue served in my quadrant
my shrink brings sweetbreads dressed in raspberry vinegar to the backyard potluck
also mâche, which she tosses with her hands

my brother scissors off a tulip’s head
a chemical condition fools him into thinking his deed salutary surgery
he gratuitously slays healthy flowers
under the guise of bringing them to life
my shrink brings sweetbreads dressed in raspberry vinegar to the backyard potluck

3.  Moonfleck
to Valerie Coleman

Patty Duke is (apparently) black
we wear the same red Prada shoes but mine are scuffed and faded
a person who looks like Patty Duke serves as my babysitter
this fact comes up in conversation with Patty Duke

I make a snide remark about Patty Duke in front of Patty Duke
not entirely knowing that Patty Duke is present
Patty Duke is (apparently) black
we wear the same red Prada shoes but mine are scuffed and faded

problem:  I don’t telegraph my pathos or frame it analytically
Patty Duke frowns when I praise her aphorisms
she suffers a memory lapse and takes a repeat to mask her error
for whose benefit the charade?
Patty Duke is (apparently) black

4.  Red Mass
to Corbin Hines

my mother in her sixties gives birth to twins
definitive proof of miraculousness
Diana Vreeland drops by for dinner
uninvited, she brings one cucumber and one tomato

hastily I add scallions and curry to the soup pot
within the dream I tell this dream to a feminist linguist
my mother in her sixties gives birth to twins
definitive proof of miraculousness

in Vogue Diana Vreeland reads about the meal or the trend it represents
the very meal I’m serving her, which makes me persona non grata
yet also an avatar of revolutionary panic
Diana Vreeland grants me access to her parka as if we’re still in Vietnam
my mother in her sixties gives birth to twins

Native Informant (2013)

iTunes | Amazon | Naxos

“The title-piece, Native Informant, a 2011 sonata for solo violin (brilliantly rendered by Rachel Barton Pine), draws from sources as diverse as Arabic round dance and American cabaret. Chorale Fantasy…played here by the Borromeo Quartet, brilliantly marries Arabic maqam modality with the counterpoint of a Bach chorale.

The songs, too, cover much ground, with texts ranging from Wayne Koestenbaum’s Best-Selling Jewish Porn Films in Fairouz’s Posh…to his rather elegiac Tahwidah…In both cases, from the aptly dubbed ‘baritenor’ Christopher Thompson to soprano Melissa Hughes, the respective vocalism is supremely nuanced…the Arab-American Fairouz succeeds…by emphasising the elements that resonate best around him.”
—Ken Smith, Gramophone

A portrait disk of new chamber and vocal music by Mohammed Fairouz will be released on Naxos in March 2013. Click here for more info.

via The World.

via the New York Times.

SUMEIDA’S SONG (2012)

iTunes | Amazon | Bridge Records

“Mohammed Fairouz wrote Sumeida’s Song, a lushly scored chamber opera, when he was only 22. Its concerns with peace and communal healing place it in the humane tradition of such works as Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra and Don Carlos.”
—Marion Lignana Rosenberg,  WQXR

Movements:

A Prayer to the New Year

I.
II.
III.
IV.

Notes:

Fadwa Tuqan has taken her place as one of the most important poets of the 20^th century and one of the most beloved Arab poets of all time. A legend in her own time, schoolchildren across the Arab world memorized her verse as soon as it was published. She embodied a politically turbulent time and expressions of loss and dispossession became emblematic of much of her poetry. Fadwa Tuqan introduced me to A Prayer to the New Year two years before her death in 2003. The poem has stuck with me for the better part of a decade. It’s one of Tuqan’s most simple, beautiful and lyrical works.

Some of Tuqan’s work can be terribly bitter but in all of the tumult and turmoil, A Prayer to the New Year expresses hope and aspiration with the same defiance and passion as her darkest poems. The work opens with the clamorous sounding of bells that my teta (Arabic for grandmother) described to me as resounding through the air from Jerusalem to Nablus (Tuqan’s hometown) to Bethlehem at Christmas-time and into the New Year. The first song ends with a repeated question of what is to come and hopeful anticipation for the best.

The second song is filled with an excited, exultant sense of the power of love while the third, showcasing the darker mezzo-soprano sound, repeats the plea for love as it hints at the devastation of the surrounding world.

The final song is a prayer to be raised on the wings of angels from the darkest depths to the heights of joy. It answers the questions of the first song with resounding affirmation, piercing light and, above all, defiance in the face of despair.

—Mohammed Fairouz (2012)

Texts:

A Prayer to the New Year 

In our hands is a fresh yearning for you,

in our eyes songs of praise and unique melodies,

into your hand as choral offerings we will thrust them.

O you who emerge as a sweet fountain of hope,

O you who are rich with promise and desire.

What is in store for us that you hold?

What have you got?

*

Give us love, for with love the treasures of bounty within us burst forth…

With love our songs will grow green and will flower

and will spring with gifts

riches

fertility.

*

Give us love, so we may build the collapsed universe within us anew

and restore

the joy of fertility to our barren world.

*

Give us wings to open the horizons of ascent,

to break free from our confined cavern, the solitude

of iron walls.

Give us light, to pierce the deepest darkness

and with the strength of its brilliant flow

we will push our steps to a precipice

from which to reap life’s victories.

—Fadwa Tuqan

“One of the most talented composers of his generation”

—BBC World News

“… an important new artistic voice”

—New York Times

“…[a] postmillennial Schubert.”

—Gramophone

Notes:

Throughout 2012, Bashar Al Assad’s regime has been murdering men women and children who have been asking for change in Syria. A recent news report displayed dozens of children found dead in Homs. The reporter commented on how they looked peaceful “as though sleeping”.

A few days later I sat down to write a new piano miniature in response to a commission from the International Beethoven Project. Their theme was “revolution” and the new miniature was to be inspired by the Eroica Symphony, Beethoven’s most revolutionary (and politically laced) work. It seemed natural for me to respond by commenting on the current revolution and loss of life in Syria. The result is a simple little elegy called For Syria in which  the piano’s singing line is a lullaby for those sleeping children: a lullaby that they have been robbed of the chance to hear.

-Mohammed Fairouz

“Sumeida’s Song is an intensely dramatic 60-minute four-character opera with a searing score that deftly draws from Arabic and Western contemporary musical sources. It tells of a son who returns to his peasant village in Upper Egypt in the early 20th century, having been educated at a university in Cairo. Awaiting him is his stern mother, who for 17 years has nurtured a hatred for the man she believes murdered her husband and is bent on having her son avenge her father’s death.

“… Mr. Fairouz’s multilayered music catches the complexities and crosscurrents of this family and the grim realities of their lives… There are hints of various Western contemporary idioms in his musical language: American neo-Romanticism; stretches of near-atonality that evoke Berg; astringent washes of sounds that seem inspired by Ligeti, who was one of Mr. Fairouz’s teachers. Yet the Arabic elements of his style—microtonal modes, spiraling dance rhythms, plaintive melodic writing—give fresh, distictive jolts to the Western elements… It would be rewarding to hear Sumeida’s Song with its full orchestration in a larger space. But this gripping chamber version shows the dramatic potential of black-box opera.”

—Anthony Tommasini, New York Times

“On Tuesday night one of America’s most esteemed concert bands, the University of Kansas Wind Ensemble, came to Carnegie Hall to introduce a commissioned work with the potential to resonate well beyond the usual college circuit,Mohammed Fairouz’s Symphony No. 4. Mr. Fairouz, a versatile, prolific young New York composer, based his piece on “In the Shadow of No Towers,” a graphic-novel memoir by Art Spiegelman about the personal impact and wider ramifications of the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center.

The notion of an Arab-American artist addressing Sept. 11 with an ostensibly lowbrow mix of band music and comics might have seemed paradoxical, but what resulted is technically impressive, consistently imaginative and in its finest stretches deeply moving.”

—Steve Smith, New York Times

“Mohammed Fairouz, a talented composer… experiments with dissonance and microtonality to expressive effect. ‘Four Critical Models’ (2009) uses the violin for its penetrating tone and the saxophone for its insinuating smoothness in a spiky opening; a slow, haunting second movement; and a pensive finale. Inspired by writings about music and Orientalism, the piece features a brilliantly handled third-movement indictment of stereotypically ‘Arab’ music. (Think of snake charmers.) Every time a clichéd riff emerged, it would quickly disintegrate, exhausted and uncertain. That piece followed Mr. Fairouz’s warmly sympathetic 2010 setting of the Borges poem ‘The Poet Declares His Renown’ for baritone and string quartet.”

—Zachary Woolfe, New York Times

“Mohammed Fairouz’s ‘Refugee Blues’ is an arresting, self-contained melting pot: it begins with Middle Eastern modal writing and moves decisively into Western melody, with driven rhythms that convey the shape (metrically and emotionally) of that dark Auden poem.”

—Allan Kozinn, New York Times

“In a repertoire tailored to her talents, (Maya) Beiser made a haunting episode of Mohammed Fairouz’s setting of Kol Nidrei, chanting the original Aramaic prayer for the Jewish Day of Atonement while accompanying herself on her electrified instrument in an act of communion both defiant and serene. A strummed rhythmic figure returned in recorded form and the counterpoint was stirring.”

—Allan Ulrich, Financial Times

“Mohammed Fairouz’s “Pierrot Lunaire” is an art-song cabaret trespassing as opera by a remarkably prolific New York-based composer born in 1985… written for the extravagantly transgressive tenor Timur Bekbosunov, is a setting of 10 drunkenly hallucinatory texts by another irresistible extravagant, the cultural critic and poet Wayne Koestenbaum.

“I like Wayne,” Fairouz said in a video introduction, “because he’s highbrow enough for my tastes. But he’s quite dirty.”

Fairouz and Koestenbaum pay crazy homage to the centenary this year of Schoenberg’s “Pierrot Lunaire,” which (as with Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring”) also just turned 100. The ensemble of flute, clarinet, violin, cello and piano is the same that Schoenberg used, and it was nice to have six numbers premiered from Fairouz’s “Pierrot” barely more than three miles from where Schoenberg lived in Brentwood.

Of course, this is Schoenberg in company with Virginia Woolf in a funny detox clinic lobby where liquid runs down her leg, perhaps schmaltz. This is Schoenberg as transcribed by Liberace and Edward Said as Yiddishkeit. The score is sweet and sour, sophisticated and screwy, sentimental and angry, and oddly spiritual for being able to incorporate all the above.

Bekbosunov was born to be this 21st-century “Pierrot,” brilliantly animating every note, expression and transgression.”

—Mark Swed,  Los Angeles Times

“First, there was a Borromeo-only curtain-raiser: Mohammed Fairouz’s ‘Chorale Fantasy,’ premiered by the quartet last year. Fairouz’s music is thoughtfully cross-cultural; the ‘Chorale Fantasy’ explores that trope with restrained effect. Modernist tangles turned into medieval austerity, while contrapuntal lines starting in Romantic territory, reminiscent of, say, Max Reger, tipped over into more maqam-like inflections. Kitchen cantillated against a rhythmically insistent drone from the other three, which then transformed into a whirl of dance. But the overall tone was contemplative, searching, and optimistic. The gentle friction between notes and styles and eras resolved, at the end, into a glowing triad.”

—Matthew Guerrieri, Boston Globe

“Sumeida’s Song [is] the first opera by the gifted and accomplished young Arab–American composer Mohammed Fairouz (b. 1985)… The themes are the perennial conflicts of tradition versus modernity, revenge versus forgiveness, blind faith versus progressive enlightenment. Sumeida’s Song announces its distinctive, uncompromising musical intentions in its opening bars with a succession of dissonant train whistles amid a spare, acerbic musical underpinning, suggesting bleak lives and impending conflict. Even when the singing voices enter, and the musical language softens to include open fifths, we are clearly in an exotic realm.

“Those voices belong to Asakir, the mother of Alwan, the opera’s tragic hero, and Asakir’s sister, Mabrouka… Fairouz uses masterly variation of orchestral textures to pace the drama. The tension between mother and son is immediately obvious in Act II: this is no joyous family reconciliation; they are of completely different worlds. Fairouz also introduces the use of quarter-tones, characteristic of Arabic melodic modes, to mirror Asakir’s mental disintegration; this is highly effective, and it’s a vivid contrast with her iterations of ‘God knows best,’ which take place with a clangorous unison C accompaniment. In Alwan’s response to her, ‘I shall tell them,’ he becomes the voice of nobility, amid grand, visionary music. Asakir’s Act III ‘Impossible Life’ skillfully blends elegiac lyricism with near-painful dissonance, an almost unbearable journey through her psyche. When Asakir pleads with Sumeida to kill Alwan, Fairouz plies his orchestrational craft to create horrifying high drama.

“Sumeida’s Song is by no means easy listening, but it packs a ferocious punch, which was, we must assume, exactly the composer’s intention.”

—Joshua Rosenblum, Opera News

“Based on Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel of the same name, Fairouz’s four-movement piece (In the Shadow of No Towers) features a powerful performance by the University of Kansas wind ensemble conducted by Paul W. Popiel of a composition that magnificently blends sharp commentary, satire, and deep-felt emotion over the course of 35 minutes. Beginning with a terrifyingly literal take on the event itself, Fariouz’s piece explores the complexities, contrasts, and contradictions of post 9-11 America, and further solidifies his reputation as one of the most exciting young composers in classical music today.”

—Christian Williams, Utne Reader

“The real highlight came after intermission, when Mohammed Fairouz’s In the Shadow of No Towers (Symphony No. 4), received its world premiere… Inspired by Art Spiegelman’s divisive comic about the aftermath of 9/11, Fairouz’s symphony unfolds over four movements, with each based on one of Spiegelman’s panels… The first movement, The New Normal, depicted a family asleep on a couch watching TV, shocked out of their slumber on 9/11 (evoked by a terrifying blast of brass and percussion), only to fall back asleep on September 12. Notes of a Heartbroken Narcissist built an eerie atmosphere of anxiety and fear through bass, low piano, and edged cymbals, sounding like a sword constantly being sheathed and unsheathed. One Nation Under Two Flags divided the ensemble in two—one side representing “blue” states, the other “red”—and included everything from Glass-like structures to a Sousa-like march. The final movement, Anniversaries (duration: 9’11”), featured the ominous tick of a clock, depicted by woodblocks. Fairouz soon added noble brass that eventually builds to a Shostakovich-like bombast, intended to be just as tongue-in-cheek as the finale to that composer’s Fifth Symphony.”

—Peter Matthews, Feast of Music

“Biblical in sweep, the opera (Sumeida’s Song) tells a story of a clash of old thought and new thought and, while written in 2009, comes, for Western listeners, on the heels of the unrest in Egypt that has led to the forming of a new type of government for that region. Fairouz is dedicated to bringing Eastern and Western thought together, and breaking down the barriers that prevent people from being everything they are, and moving forward together. This opera has winds of change swirling around and through it, and it’s one you must see. This young composer is someone to watch.”

—Sherri Rase, [Q]onStage

“At 26, the Arab American composer Mohammed Fairouz writes music that is sprightly and inventive, drawing on both Western and Eastern modes to forge a style that is winningly cosmopolitan…. The ascetically scored chamber music includes a fanciful set of airs for solo guitar, a deftly funny suite of piano miniatures, and ‘Lamentation and Satire,’ a fierce, abrasive string quartet splendidly performed by the Lydian String Quartet. All are dexterously crafted…. The most urgently heartfelt piece here is the opening ‘Litany,’ a fantasy on the Muslim call to prayer…”

—Joshua Kosman, San Francisco Chronicle

“The Borromeo players achieve the special balancing act of paitence and ferocity in Mohammed Fairouz’s Lamentation and Satire, an intensely felt score in which the instruments engage in compelling duos, a fugue of doleful uregncy and a farewell utterly bereft of hope.”

—Donald Rosenberg, Gramophone Magazine

“Mohammed Fairouz’s Refugee Blues, a riff on W.H. Auden’s poem of the same title, was one of the sharpest emotional impacts of the evening with a Marc Blitzstein brand of anger and white-knuckle piano accompaniment to such stanzas as ‘Thought I heard the thunder rumbling in the sky/It was Hitler over Europe saying, ‘they must die’/O we were in his mind, my dear, O we were in is mind.’”

—Olivia Giovetti, WQXR

“Inspired by the Art Spiegelman graphic novel of the same name, Fairouz delivers as powerful and evocative a work for wind ensemble as Karel Husa’s Music for Prague 1968. Beginning with “The New Normal,” this four movement symphony draws in a wide array of creative and affective ensemble colors but none more colorful as in the second movement “Notes of a Heartbroken Narcissist.” In this second movement, metal percussion, harp, piano, and double bass scrape and groan through a grey-inspired aural landscape. The not entirely playful third movement “One Nation Under Two Flags” portrays a “Red Zone” and “Blue Zone” through musical juxtapositions of a sort which would make Ives proud. The final movement, “Anniversaries” uses a ticking clock motive throughout to highlight the notion of passing time but also to imply a ticking time bomb. The composition rides this metaphor well by transforming a simple steady rhythm into something ominous and foreboding. Throughout the entire disc, the University of Kansas Wind Ensemble sounds fantastic. All the musical layers are clear and articulate but their precision does not come through sacrificing emotion and lyricism…”

—Jay Batzner, Sequenza21

“Mohammed Fairouz wrote Sumeida’s Song, a lushly scored chamber opera, when he was only 22. Its concerns with peace and communal healing place it in the humane tradition of such works as Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra and Don Carlos.”

—Marion Lignana Rosenberg, WQXR

“In the sublime column was Arab-American composer Mohammed Fairouz’s short song-cycle, Three Fragments from Ibn Khafajah, an 11th century Arab poet, for soprano, flute, violin, cello and guitar. The three short poems, sung in Arabic, dealt with morality, religion and love.

“[Mary] Bonhag sang the tiny first part, almost plainsong in style, with a warm but haunting lyricism. The second part began with exotic, Middle Eastern-flavored instrumental music, joined by Bonhag passionately delivering the text. Finally, warmth and tenderness – still with the same exotic flavor – ensued in this short but powerful work.”

—Jim Lowe, Vermont Times Argus

“Mohammed Fairouz’s Akhenaten: Dweller in Truth… Think relentless and tireless uneven metrics within a common time framework, breathless rhythms and a shrieking piccolo that surges faster than a speeding bullet and more powerful than a locomotive intensifying en route to a climactic whip. The throbbing grooves suck you in; the thunderous textures don’t let go. As an audience member, I couldn’t help breaking a sweat. The work dangerously verges on the fringe of lusty turbo flash. But with ample inventiveness that hint at Fairouz’s thoughtful craftsmanship, his Akhenaten will be heard as often as the composer’s popular vocal works.

“Fairouz may be a child of the cosmopolitan Internet age: His music synthesizes minimalism, hard rock, jazz and jazz hands, musical theater, avant-garde and ethno-folk styles. But he does so in such a way that diverse creative impulses coexist and keep their individual distinct character.”

—Joel Luks, CultureMap Houston

“Mohammed Fairouz’s treatment of W.H. Auden’s Refugee Blues rises to the historical and emotional scope of the poem–callousness to immigrants’ humanity and desperation, alas, still a topic of no small relevance. Gaissert’s rich, resonant, varicolored tone was aptly suited to Fairouz’s dramatic vocal writing.”

—Scott Rose, The New Civil Rights Movement

Audenesque is dedicated to my friends Kate Lindsey and James Zakoura without whose support, the cycle would not exist.

Movements:

In Memory of W.B. Yeats

I.
II.
III.
IV. Audenesque

Notes:

Auden’s In Memory of W.B. Yeats is a poem celebrated with good reason. It’s an emotionally searing, intellectually substantive and formally acute piece of work that has all the trademarks of Auden’s brilliant wit. Above all the poem allows us to experience the transformative journey from the cold, despondent, mourning of the dead with which it opens to its opulent and reaffirming closing statements. The three parts of In Memory of W.B. Yeats have a musical architecture inherent to them. At the very opening of the poem, Auden sets a scene that brings us to the dead of winter, to a time when nations are likened to barking dogs, locked and frozen against one another. The world is at war and, to add insult to injury, an artistic titan, William Yeats, dies on January 28th 1939 together with his much needed poetic voice.

Auden famously said that “Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead” and In Memory of W.B. Yeats is a great example of such a work of art. It opened the way for Joseph Brodsky, with his known admiration for Auden, to adapt the form of Auden’s poem in his Verses on the Death of T.S Eliot. When Brodsky himself died in the dead of winter on January 28th 1996 at his New York City apartment it moved Seamus Heaney to call the same day that had claimed both Yeats and Brodsky a “Double-crossed and death-marched date” in a masterful poem that adapts Auden’s four-beat quatrain to memorialize Brodsky. Seamus and I first spoke about his poem when we were discussing poetry for a different collaboration and it became clear to me that setting his poem with Auden’s in a cyclical form would present an irresistible arch of influence; a conversation linking Yeats, Eliot, Brodsky and Heaney. I decided to set Auden’s elegy as a cycle of three songs, followed by a fourth, Heaney’s tribute.

Audenesque begins with a catastrophe: the death of an artistic giant. With utter bleakness, Auden describes the mercury sinking, the airports deserted, and a cold world. When it is proclaimed twice, with great intensity, “What instruments we have agree /The day of his death was a dark cold day”, it is clear that he is talking about a coldness, as Heaney later points out, “in the poet and the word”.

The stormy first song of Audenesque gives way to the setting of the second part of Auden’s elegy. This song highlights the strings and celeste. In this intimate setting, Auden addresses Yeats for the first time. Here, poetry’s triumph is its survival in a place “where executives would never want to tamper” rather than achieving any heroic transfiguration.

Without pause, the third song begins, setting the final, metered section of Auden’s Elegy. Here, I mark the score “austere and measured” and the metered chimes ring allegorically as Auden intones for the first time the name of William Yeats. After recapping the status quo and reaching its lowest point, the music starts to heat up. It’s at the end of this poem that the miraculous transfiguration of traditional elegies happens for Auden as it did for poets of the past:

Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;

With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress.

The poet becomes a messianic hero who can descend to “Dante’s deep hell” (as Heaney puts it) and return to farm a verse that inspires us to our highest heights.

The final song sets Seamus Heaney’s Audenesque, a poem that brings the dialogue of these poets to the present day and is also the most poignant analysis of Auden’s poem. At the opening of his poem, Heaney calls both Joseph Brodsky and Wystan Auden by name. The music of this song reflects on dialogue, remembrance, a train ride that Heaney shared with Brodsky, “politically incorrect jokes involving sex and sect”; it is warm, humorous and visceral. The end of this setting brings us back to Auden’s miraculous transformation, achieved again by Seamus Heaney within the same constrained quatrains. In the last two stanzas Heaney speaks directly to the spirit of Brodsky in one of the most beautiful examples of the power of what, in Heaney’s words, “good poets do” and what good poets are capable of doing.

—Mohammed Fairouz (2012)

Texts:

In Memory of W.B. Yeats

I.

He disappeared in the dead of winter:
The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,
And snow disfigured the public statues;
The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

Far from his illness
The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests,
The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays;
By mourning tongues
The death of the poet was kept from his poems.

But for him it was his last afternoon as himself,
An afternoon of nurses and rumours;
The provinces of his body revolted,
The squares of his mind were empty,
Silence invaded the suburbs,
The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers.

Now he is scattered among a hundred cities
And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections,
To find his happiness in another kind of wood
And be punished under a foreign code of conscience.
The words of a dead man
Are modified in the guts of the living.

But in the importance and noise of to-morrow
When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse,
And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed,
And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom,
A few thousand will think of this day
As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual.

What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

II.

You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:
The parish of rich women, physical decay,
Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.

III.

Earth, receive an honoured guest:
William Yeats is laid to rest.
Let the Irish vessel lie
Emptied of its poetry.

In the nightmare of the dark
All the dogs of Europe bark,
And the living nations wait,
Each sequestered in its hate;

Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.

Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;

With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;

In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.

—W.H. Auden

IV. Audenesque

Joseph, yes, you know the beat.
Wystan Auden’s metric feet
Marched to it, unstressed and stressed,
Laying William Yeats to rest.

Therefore, Joseph, on this day,
Yeats’s anniversary,
(Double-crossed and death-marched date,
January twenty-eight),

Its measured ways I tread again
Quatrain by constrained quatrain,
Meting grief and reason out
As you said a poem ought.

Trochee, trochee, falling: thus
Grief and metre order us.
Repetition is the rule,
Spins on lines we learnt at school.

Repetition, too, of cold
In the poet and the world,
Dublin Airport locked in frost,
Rigor mortis in your breast.

Ice no axe or book will break,
No Horatian ode unlock,
No poetic foot imprint,
Quatrain shift or couplet dint,

Ice of Archangelic strength,
Ice of this hard two-faced month,
Ice like Dante’s in deep hell
Makes your heart a frozen well.

Pepper vodka you produced
Once in Western Massachusetts
With the reading due to start
Warmed my spirits and my heart

But no vodka, cold or hot,
Aquavit or uisquebaugh,
Brings the blood back to your cheeks
Or the colour to your jokes,

Politically incorrect
Jokes involving sex and sect,
Everything against the grain,
Drinking, smoking like a train.

In a train in Finland we
Talked last summer happily,
Swapping manuscripts and quips,
Both of us like cracking whips

Sharpened up and making free,
Heading west for Tampere
(West that meant for you, of course,
Lenin’s train-trip in reverse).

Nevermore that wild speed-read,
Nevermore your tilted head
Like a deck where mind took off
With a mind-flash and a laugh.

Nevermore that rush to pun
Or to hurry through all yon
Jammed enjambements piling up
As you went above the top,

Nose in air, foot to the floor,
Revving English like a car
Hijacked when you robbed its bank
(Russian was your reserve tank).

Worshipped language can’t undo
Damage time has done to you:
Even your peremptory trust
In words alone here bites the dust.

Dust-cakes, still - see Gilgamesh -
Feed the dead. So be their guest.
Do again what Auden said
Good poets do: bite, break their bread.

—Seamus Heaney

Movements:

I. Mikhail’s Thunder
II. Azrael, Malak al-Maut
III. Jibreel at Hira
IV. Israfel’s Spell

Notes:

Since I was a little boy, I’ve been fascinated with the mythology of angels in Middle Eastern folklore. They embody justice, power, kindness, healing, death, and other universals that have made them pervasive in many of the world’s cultures. It is natural to express these attributes musically, since music is present in all human communities — it transcends the present and expresses the eternal, never-changing truths of the human condition.

The Named Angels refers to those angels that are named and recognized in the Islamic, Christian and Jewish traditions: Michael, Israfel, Gabriel and Azrael. Each of the four movements represents a character portrait of a specific Angel. The piece begins with a quick and vigorous movement titled Mikhael’s Thunder. Mikhael (Arabic for Michael, an archangel in Jewish, Christian and Islamic teachings) is an angel attributed with great visceral strength. He brings thunder to Earth but is also identified in the Quran as an angel of mercy, and in Book of Revelation he leads God’s armies against Satan’s forces. The movement captures that dichotomy as it vacillates between thunderous gestures and what I’ve marked as a “Hymn of Mercy” in the score.

Following Michael’s explosive portrait is a slow movement called Azrael, Malak Al Maut (Arabic for Azrael, Angel of Death). Azrael is the name used commonly used to refer to the Angel of death in the three Middle Eastern Monotheistic faiths. This narrative movement is framed by two chorales: an opening funeral chorale and a closing transformative chorale. It captures the attitude of the naturalness (even innocence) of death described in the Quran. This movement is more programmatic in structure than the others. It begins with a depiction of the exhalation of a last breath and proceeds to depict Azrael carrying the spirit beyond life and the metamorphosis of the human spirit in the apotheosis that ends the movement.

The next movement, Jibreel at Hira, begins without a pause. Jibreel (Gabriel) is the chief angel in Islam. He is the main messenger to the Prophets, delivering important words from God to Moses, Abraham, Jesus and others according to the Quran. In the Quran as well as the New Testament, Gabriel foretells the birth of Jesus to the Virgin Mary while in the Old Testament he appears on several occasions as a messenger to the prophets. Gabriel delivers his final message to Mohammed at a cave called Hira. On a night that Muslims celebrate yearly as the Night of Power, Gabriel appears to Mohammed as he is meditating and commands him to read. The illiterate Mohammed begins to miraculously read in what becomes the first revelation of the Quran. The first part of the movement captures Jibreel’s tender and simple voice as he speaks to Mohammed and the movement builds in intensity capturing the transfixed ecstasy of the Prophet repeating the Angel’s revelation.

The final movement Israfel’s Spell, begins with an invocation of Israfel’s trumpet sounding the Day of Judgment. This heralding theme interweaves with hints of a quick dance. In the Quran, the shaking of the Earth is described as the Earth dancing a dabkeh (a vigorous and ancient Arabian dance form). This develops into a fullyfledged apocalyptic dance. Edgar Allen Poe’s rendition of Israfel was the point of departure for this musical movement. At the opening of the poem Israfel, Poe quotes a particularly musical passage of the Quran: “And the angel Israfel, whose heartstrings are a lute, and who has the sweetest voice of all God’s creatures.” This informs the first lines of the poem that, in turn, gave me the title for this movement:

In Heaven a spirit doth dwell
“Whose heartstrings are a lute”
None sing so wildly well
As the angel Israfel,
And the giddy stars (so legends tell),
Ceasing their hymns, attend the spell
Of his voice, all mute.

—Mohammed Fairouz (2012)

Media:

Notes:

When I was invited by BBC World News to be a featured artist in the Collaboration Culture TV Series, I immediately asked if they would pair me up with a Bollywood dancer. They searched Mumbai and engaged Shakti Mohan, a star on the Bollywood scene and I was then given three days to create the music of a new dance work for Shakti. I selected the American String Quartet and clarinettist David Krakauer to perform the music and composed a work that incorporates Klezmer as well as Arabic Maquam.

When Shakti arrived in New York, she was faced with my music and while it was completely unfamiliar to her, she began moving to it intuitively. The resulting work, for a Klezmer clarinettist, such a “traditional” ensemble as a string quartet and an Indian dancer, titled Hindustani Dabkeh, brought together Hindu and Muslim, Arabic and Jewish, Eastern and Western elements in an unconflicted counterpoint that art seems to accomplish with greater ease than politics.

-Mohammed Fairouz

Press:

The Wall Street Journal
Feature: One Man’s Memoir of 9/11 Becomes Another’s Symphony

Huffington Post
Article: In the Shadow of No Towers 

ARTINFO
Feature: “In The Shadow of No Towers World Premiere at Carnegie Hall”

Exit Strata
Fetaure: Mohammed Fairouz’s Symphonic Spiegelman 

Huffington Post/ NYC-ARTS: 10
 Feature: 10 Years After Iraq, A Symphony on the 9/11 Aftermath

“On Tuesday night one of America’s most esteemed concert bands, the University of Kansas Wind Ensemble, came to Carnegie Hall to introduce a commissioned work with the potential to resonate well beyond the usual college circuit, Mohammed Fairouz’s Symphony No. 4. Mr. Fairouz, a versatile, prolific young New York composer, based his piece on “In the Shadow of No Towers,” a graphic-novel memoir by Art Spiegelman about the personal impact and wider ramifications of the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center.

The notion of an Arab-American artist addressing Sept. 11 with an ostensibly lowbrow mix of band music and comics might have seemed paradoxical, but what resulted is technically impressive, consistently imaginative and in its finest stretches deeply moving. Rather than adapting Mr. Spiegelman’s narrative literally, Mr. Fairouz uses a handful of potent images as a starting point for his own idiosyncratic elaborations.

In the first movement, “The New Normal,” Mr. Fairouz uses a comfortably mundane opening theme to evoke a triptych of panels depicting a family watching television before, during and after the attacks. Bombast erupts midway through, after which the initial theme resumes, warped with dissonances and crowned with a funereal trumpet solo (played eloquently here by Janis Porietis).

“Notes of a Heartbroken Narcissist” sets gentle, melancholy strains on piano, harp and double bass against scraping, skittering percussion, meant to suggest workers digging through the wreckage. In “One Nation Under Two Flags” the ensemble splits into separate groups. A marching-band configuration plays garish, jingoistic fanfares inspired by those in Stephen Sondheim’s score for “Pacific Overtures”; they clash with the urgent, angry strains, redolent of Philip Glass’s cinematic style, played by the rest of the musicians.

“Anniversaries,” a concluding movement calculated to last 9 minutes 11 seconds, evokes memories simultaneously fading and swelling; over a steady ticktock rhythm on woodblock and claves, a melancholy theme on saxophones wanders through various soloists and sections, building to a more controlled reprise of the opening movement’s outburst.”

—Steve Smith, New York Times

Note from Art Spiegelman:

“Mohammed Fairouz and I are both from different tribes (though we are both thoroughly Rooted Cosmopolitan New Yorkers). He belongs to the Composer Tribe (a group that devotes itself to keeping time, while we comix artits find ways to represent time spatially). Composers often don’t share Mr. Fairouz’s interest in narrative (something that’s just part of the job description for us Cartoonists) but he and I seem equally obsessed with structure in our respective mediums—and clearly we both were shaken by the tumbling structures that struck Ground Zero back in 2001.

Though my idea of a wind ensemble is something often made up of kazoos and jugs, I’m moved by the scary, somber and seriously silly symphony he has made (especially that martial schizo-scherzo he built around “One Nation Under Two Flags!”) I’m honored that the composer found an echo in my work that allowed him to strike a responsive chord and express his own complex responses to post 9-11 America. He emerges from the rubble with a very tony piece of highbrow cartoon music.”

—Art Spiegelman

Note from the composer:

In the Shadow of No Towers (Symphony #4 for Wind Ensemble) takes its inspiration from details in Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel of the same name. Like Poems and Prayers, my Third Symphony for Chorus and Orchestra, the work engages serious ideas. In this case each movement takes as its point of departure a graphic detail from Spiegelman’s book.

The first movement, The New Normal, takes us back to September 11th 2001 and, in its three large sections, literally depicts the events of that day as Spiegelman explores them in the following sequence.

The events are not seen but they are understood. The music begins by depicting the electronic monotony of the first panel. When the calendar turns to 9/11 in the second panel the music explodes reflecting the sense of shock and awe that wakes the “anyone” viewers from their complacent sleep. After a cold and quick funeral march, the music does not stay “awake” but is lulled back into the repetitive sleep of the opening. But in the final panel, the calendar is replaced by a flag, the effects of the shock are still apparent on the people and the music is not quite “right” with a dissonant trumpet line that is decidedly out of place. It seems that nothing has really changed. Everything is the same, but not quite.

Notes of a Heartbroken Narcissist (below) is the inspiration for the second movement of the work. Like the graphic sequence, it relies on limited colors that are selected from the larger ensemble. It is music of deep reflection and, like the sequence, reads in descending order. Much of my music has dealt with issues of self-representation and this mournful movement captures this poignant and conflicted sentiment that I felt in the aftermath as a New Yorker and an American of Arabic heritage.

The third movement, One Nation Under Two Flags, serves the role that a traditional Scherzo would in a symphony. This movement responds to Spiegelman’s commentary on a divided nation in the detail to the right. He draws a portrait of the United Blue Zone of America versus the United Red Zone of America to which I responded by literally breaking the wind ensemble into two different bands (I’ve reproduced the score layout to the first page of this movement in my manuscript below it).

In this movement which begins with grotesquely Souza-esque gestures from the Red Zone dovetailing into a resistance from the Blue Zone, the music of each band is pitted relentlessly against the other with the two sides not listening to one another. This develops themes of political satire that I also incorporated much less explicitly in Poems and Prayers.

There’s a generally quick and outraged feel in the music of the urban Blue Zone and a jingoistic, fanfare-y thrust to the music of the Red Zone. The two musics sometimes comment on one another while sometimes they shout over each other to form a cacophony. This is my most explicit critique of loud nationalism.

There is a moment in this movement however where the two sides come together to sound as one in an over-the-top exultation of patriotism (complete with sounding bells and whistles) before diverging again to the same rhetoric and finally spinning out of control to a tumultuous conclusion.

The final movement of the work, Anniversaries, starts with a ticking that will stay with us throughout the movement. It is, in its first part, inspired by the following graphic detail about the passage of time and the ticking of a time- bomb. There is a general anxiety that underlies this music and the constant ticking of the movement. This is music that is unable to mourn, instead concerning itself with the passage of time and the commemorations of each anniversary.

Throughout the movement the music grows louder and louder and the memory of the towers come to loom far larger than life. With each anniversary, there is both a fading of the true memory and an enlargement of mythic status.

—Mohammed Fairouz (July 2012)

Notes:

The first Piano Miniature “Nocturnal Snapshot” was written in the middle of the night. When I realized that it was 2AM and that I was still contemplating what to write, I pulled out the Hanon exercises to put my fingers to work. Hanon provided me with an unlikely source of inspiration (!) and crept into this first miniature as an accompaniment to the main tune.

Piano Miniature No. 2 was the result of a challenge to write a piece without dissonance. It’s a slow dance of arpeggios.

Piano Miniature No. 3 incorporates a snippet of Bach’s “Art of the Fugue”.

Piano Miniature No. 4 is a musical joke that continues where No. 3 left off.

Piano Miniature No. 5 is a contrapuntal invention that uses a twelve-tone theme. It makes a musical joke out of two traditionally “academic” concepts.

Piano Miniature No. 6 “Addio” is a farewell on the departure of a beloved. He will remain nameless.

Piano Miniature No. 7 was written while I was serving as a faculty composer at SongFest in Malibu, California. It is a tender little song for solo piano that I wrote quickly while trying to capture the peace and warmth of the Pacific sunset.

Bargemusic, our irreplaceable floating venue in New York, is the subject of Piano Miniature No. 8. The waves rock the barge in a flowing pattern while the Manhattan sky explodes in the background. I wrote the piece on travels in L.A. (and with the “clean” L.A. skyline in my eye). I found myself adding some “grit” to the lines when I returned! Piano Miniature No. 8 is dedicated to Beth Levin, who premiered the work along with No. 7 at Bargemusic.

Lullaby for a Chelsea Boy juxtaposes a tender and static song against a distant memory of the night before. It is dedicated to Kathleen Supove.

Liberace has always been a musical hero of mine and a really fascinating person to boot. This little character piece captures some of the flamboyance of the great gay pianist. It was written as a celebration for another great gay pianist (and a very different one), Steven Blier on his wedding.

—Mohammed Fairouz

Notes:

The first Piano Miniature “Nocturnal Snapshot” was written in the middle of the night. When I realized that it was 2AM and that I was still contemplating what to write, I pulled out the Hanon exercises to put my fingers to work. Hanon provided me with an unlikely source of inspiration (!) and crept into this first miniature as an accompaniment to the main tune.

Piano Miniature No. 2 was the result of a challenge to write a piece without dissonance. It’s a slow dance of arpeggios.

Piano Miniature No. 3 incorporates a snippet of Bach’s “Art of the Fugue”.

Piano Miniature No. 4 is a musical joke that continues where No. 3 left off.

Piano Miniature No. 5 is a contrapuntal invention that uses a twelve-tone theme. It makes a musical joke out of two traditionally “academic” concepts.

Piano Miniature No. 6 “Addio” is a farewell on the departure of a beloved. He will remain nameless.

Piano Miniature No. 7 was written while I was serving as a faculty composer at SongFest in Malibu, California. It is a tender little song for solo piano that I wrote quickly while trying to capture the peace and warmth of the Pacific sunset.

Bargemusic, our irreplaceable floating venue in New York, is the subject of Piano Miniature No. 8. The waves rock the barge in a flowing pattern while the Manhattan sky explodes in the background. I wrote the piece on travels in L.A. (and with the “clean” L.A. skyline in my eye). I found myself adding some “grit” to the lines when I returned! Piano Miniature No. 8 is dedicated to Beth Levin, who premiered the work along with No. 7 at Bargemusic.

Lullaby for a Chelsea Boy juxtaposes a tender and static song against a distant memory of the night before. It is dedicated to Kathleen Supove.

Liberace has always been a musical hero of mine and a really fascinating person to boot. This little character piece captures some of the flamboyance of the great gay pianist. It was written as a celebration for another great gay pianist (and a very different one), Steven Blier on his wedding.

—Mohammed Fairouz

via The L Magazine.

via the New York Times.

Mohammed Fairouz was chosen by the BBC to be a featured artist for the television series Collaboration Culture, which aired globally on BBC World Service TV. As part of the program, which includes an in-depth profile of the composer, Fairouz developed and unveiled an entirely new dance work, Hindustani Dabkeh, featuring David Krakauer, the American String Quartet and Bollywood star Shakti Mohan.

Media:

Notes:

When Seamus Heaney selected the three poems, In Iowa, Höfn and Anything Can Happen as the basis for our first collaboration he rationalized it by writing to me “I thought a triptych could be made as follows – the first two being ominous, the third catastrophic – the omen fulfilled, as it were.”

We knew from the very start that Anything Can Happen, my first choral work since my Requiem Mass (2006) would be a heavy work. I found, in the process of putting together the texts with Seamus that there were beautiful parallels to the narrative of these three apocalyptic poems in passages from the Arabic Injeel (the equivalent to the New Testament) that I ended up setting in the original old Arabic to form the inner movements of the piece. These movements are titled Suras (literally “Pictures” or “Images”) to which I provide my own translation from the original Arabic.

In Iowa is a powerful sonnet that opens, as many epics open, with a storm (think of Shakespeare or The Illiad). The setting of Iowa was especially attractive for this poem as one of the co-commissioners for this work, together with Cantori New York, Boston Back Bay Chorale and the Marsh Chapel Singers are the Grinnell Singers at Grinnell College where Seamus originally wrote the poem. The emergence of the biblical language “Verily I came forth…” is cast for the baritone soloist here. This movement is followed by the First Sura which is a setting in Arabic from a section of the Arabic Injeel somewhat corresponding to the recounting of the cruxifiction from the book of Matthew. The imagery of the tearing of the veil at the third hour corresponds closely to Seamus’ imagery in In Iowa.

Following this is the center movement cast for the male voices of the chorus. It is a setting of Höfn and recounts the melting of a glacier. This image of the earth flooding (with overtones of global warming) links not only to the closing lines of In Iowa (Not of parted, but of rising waters) but also to the next Sura.

The Second Sura is a setting in Arabic that corresponds to a sequence from the Book of Revelation in which the dragon, banished from Heaven attempts to drown the mother of humanity by drowning her and her children in a flood which it unleashes. In failing the dragon vows revenge on the woman and future generations.

The finale is a setting of Anything Can Happen. This music is violent. Much has been said about the imagery relating to the September 11th terrorist attacks on America in this poem but the poem contains even more. It is filled with all types of apocalyptic imagery which are realized in an androgenous opening for the whole chorus, some violent outbursts and an eventual collapse. The work closes with the pulsating lines of the chorus singing “Telluric ash and fire spoils boil away.”

Anything Can Happen is dedicated to Seamus Heaney with gratitude for his support and friendship. —Mohammed Fairouz (2012)

Texts:

I. In Iowa
In Iowa once, among the Mennonites
In a slathering blizzard, conveyed all afternoon
Through sleet-glit pelting hard against the windscreen
And a wiper’s strong absolving slumps and flits,
I saw, abandoned in the open gap
Of a field where wilted corn stalks flagged the snow,
A mowing machine. Snow brimmed its iron seat,
Heaped each spoked wheel with a thick white brow,
And took the shine off oil in the black-toothed gears.
Verily I came forth from that wilderness
As one unbaptized who had known darkness
At the third hour and the veil in tatters.
In Iowa once. In the slush and rush and hiss
Not of parted but as of rising waters.

—Seamus Heaney

II. First Sura
And Jesus screamed with an astonishing voice
And the veil of the Temple was torn in two
From its top to its bottom
And the earth shook
And the mountains shattered
And the graves opened up
And many of the departed saints rose
And they exited their tombs
And entered the holy city.

—from the Arabic Injeel (trans. Fairouz)

III. Höfn
The three-tongued glacier has begun to melt.
What will we do, they ask, when boulder-milt
Comes wallowing across the delta flats
And the miles-deep shag ice makes its move?
I saw it, ridged and rock-set, from above,
Undead grey-gristed earth-pelt, aeon-scruff,
And feared its coldness that still seemed enough
To iceblock the plane window dimmed with breath,
Deepfreeze the seep of adamantine tilth
And every warm, mouthwatering word of mouth.

—Seamus Heaney

IV. Second Sura
And when the dragon saw that he had been banished to the Earth
He cursed the woman who had borne the Child
The woman was given two blessed wings with which to fly to the exterior, to her position
And so there passed a period of time and many periods of time
And so the dragon unleashed flooding waters as a river so as to drown the woman
And the earth opened up swallowing the dragon’s flood and saving the woman
And the dragon was enraged and swore revenge
He left to invent means to destroy the woman and all her children
Who revere God
And keep the commandments of Jesus Christ the Messiah

—from the Arabic Injeel (trans. Fairouz)

V. Anything Can Happen
Anything can happen. You know how Jupiter
Will mostly wait for clouds to gather head
Before he hurls the lightning? Well just now
He galloped his thunder cart and his horses

Across a clear blue sky. It shook the earth
and the clogged underearth, the River Styx,
the winding streams, the Atlantic shore itself.
Anything can happen, the tallest towers

Be overturned, those in high places daunted,
Those overlooked regarded. Stropped-beak Fortune
Swoops, making the air gasp, tearing the crest off one,
Setting it down bleeding on the next.

Ground gives. The heaven’s weight
Lifts up off Atlas like a kettle lid.
Capstones shift. Nothing resettles right.
Telluric ash and fire-spores boil away.

—Seamus Heaney

“In Iowa,” “Höfn,” and “Anything Can Happen” from District and Circle, 2006 Used by Permission

CRITICAL MODELS (2011)

iTunes | Amazon | Dorian Sono Luminus

“There’s an embarrassment of riches on Critical Models, the debut solo album by 20-something composer Mohammed Fairouz. And yet the chamber nature of the record’s six pieces lends an unshakable sense of intoxicating intimacy.” [full review]
—WQXR/Q2 Album of the Week

“Mohammed Fairouz’s “A Source of Light” juxtaposed a letter by Isaac Newton and a poem by 20th-century poet Charles Bukowski. The latter looked at the deaths of many great artists, but with a wit and humor that ultimately proved transcendent.”

—William Randall Beard, Minneapolis Star Tribune 

“Fairouz’s work (Sumeida’s Song)  is a brilliant synthesis of Western opera and Arab musical traditions—specifically, the microtonal inflections typical of Arabic maqam… Fairouz’s command of traditional operatic craft would be astonishing for a composer twice his age—and at times, the work sounds almost Straussian in its textured web of motifs; imaginative and rigorous and expressive… ”

—Dan Visconti, NewMusicBox

“Mohammed Fairouz’s Bonsai Journal … It’s a technically difficult piece and the poetry seems deliberately separated from the music, as if the two are competing for air space, though there is an underlying dance. By including this piece by a ‘newer generation’ composer, we get a view into the world to come, which, as demonstrated here, seems serious, intense, complex. ”

—David Wolman, Fanfare Magazine

“The twenty-four-year-old Fairouz (who was present at the event, and who shyly got up from the audience to take his bows with the musicians) is obviously very talented, with a distinct musical voice of his own already.”

—Wendy Lesser, Threepenny Review

Adaiha Mac-Adam Somer, cello; Paul Boyd, piano; Houston Composers Orchestra; Clifton Evans, conductor

Mohammed Fairouz’s opera Sumeida’s Song will be released on Bridge Records in October 2012. Click here for more info.

“The audience proved enthusiastic about Arab-American composer Mohammed Fairouz’s knotty and complex but finely crafted 2008 Lamentation and Satire. The 25-year-old New York City resident was on hand to introduce the intriguing work. The Lamentation proved to be a heart-wrenching plea, while the satire was a raucous fugue, but it all held together as a distinct and convincing statement. The Borromeo seemed most comfortable with the work; in fact, it recently released a recording of it.”

—Jim Lowe, Vermont Times Argus

“The occasion was the world premiere of Mohammed Fairouz’s double concerto for violin and cello entitled States of Fantasy … the music alone was a rich experience; in the greater context of the music’s origin, the experience was intellectually and psychically provocative. The program on Saturday evening … entitled “Duologues: Beethoven and Fairouz”…  At first the juxtaposition of these two composers on the program seemed random, but the experience of the two composers’ music in proximity revealed similarities of intensity and passion, along with the integration of literary and historical inspiration … It is most difficult to critique a new work such as this because there is no point of comparison, except to the larger context of music’s ability to project directly as feeling and meaning without intellectual intervention. By this measure the concerto succeeded without question.”

—Phyllis Nordstrom, Classical Voice of New England

“The concert event that began as an act of healing in the wake of 9/11 has endured as an annual testament to peace. In this program the Borromeo Quartet, the Imani Winds, and the baritone Randall Scarlata gather to perform work the world première of Furia by Mohammed Fairouz .”

—The New Yorker

NPR’s Mary Louise Kelly speaks with Fairouz about assembling the symphony and the stories behind some of the movements.

via NPR.

via The World.

Text by Seamus Heaney; Grinnell Singers; John Rommereim, conductor

Text by Seamus Heaney; Grinnell Singers; John Rommereim, conductor

Text by Seamus Heaney; Grinnell Singers; John Rommereim, conductor

American Vernacular (2014)

iTunes | Amazon |New Focus Recordings

” Mohammed Fairouz alludes to Liberace and Tin Pan Alley in two of his three miniatures…Fairouz’s third miniature, “America never was America to me” reacts to the 50th anniversary of the ‘I Have a Dream’ speech filtered through the events of Trayvon Martin’s murder ” —Jay Batzner, Sequenza21

Exiles Cafe (2013)

iTunes | Amazon | ArkivMusic

“This sixth of Fairouz’s series of piano miniatures is subtitled “Addio”. I include it here in tribute to all the farewells that are said, in all the journeys of exile.” —Lara Downes, Exiles Cafe Liner Notes

FIVE BOROUGH SONGBOOK (2012)

iTunes | Amazon | GPR Records

“Mohammed Fairouz’s ‘Refugee Blues’ is an arresting, self-contained melting pot: it begins with Middle Eastern modal writing and moves decisively into Western melody, with driven rhythms that convey the shape (metrically and emotionally) of that dark Auden poem.” —Allan Kozinn, The New York Times

David Krakauer, clarinet; Ensemble 212; Yoon Jae Lee, conductor

Text by W.H. Auden; Blythe Gaissert, mezzo-soprano; Thomas Bagwell, piano

Media:

Press:

CultureMap
Profile & Interview: Beyond Poems and Prayers

Houston Chronicle
Profile & Interview: Young Composer Finds Inspiration in the Middle East

Houston Public Radio
Interview

Media:

Notes:

I am honored to have Mohammed Fairouz set my three poems to music; his treatment-sensitive to every syllable, every emotional undercurrent-heightens and amplifies my rather reticent and oblique words, and gives them a strange, feverish directness. All three poems come from my 2006 book Best-Selling Jewish Porn Films. The first, “Ballad of the Layette,” appears in that book as a free-standing poem; the second and third, “Blue Sea Songs” and “Posh,” are part of a longer sequence, called “The Pourquoi Club.” Mohammed chose these three epigrammatic lyrics for idiosyncratic and not entirely explicable reasons. I think he liked the idea of paying homage to Ned Rorem (whom I mention in “Blue Sea Songs”); and the presence of Rachmaninoff (in “Ballad”) and Walter Benjamin (in “Posh”) gave added European historical/cultural resonances to the cycle. The three poems together don’t tell a story, but they suggest a covert bildungsroman, or a growth from a wordless baby, in “Ballad,” who lacks the “proper aural sifting mechanism” but who from his perch of pampered incompetence can look forward to a sad future of “Rachmaninoff and road rage”-to a mournful and erotically hapless adolescent in “Blue Sea Songs,” who is in search of Ned Rorem sea songs that only exist in dreams-to the more openly introspective narrator of “Posh,” whose weeping father brings to mind the self-slaughtered Walter Benjamin, and who declaims, at the cycle’s end, that the tenor repertoire “expired” in 1942, as if the damages of the Holocaust and WWII included the death of opera. To this morbid subtext, Fairouz adds, throughout the cycle, a dash of wit, playfulness, and lability, with rapid changes in emotion, spasms of self-display, and quicksilver shifts in harmony and color, with detours whose affects range from the plushly lyrical to the spikily acerbic. Irony, in his settings, is everywhere, but so is tenderness, as if the ghost of Poulenc were to speak, or sing, again, to remind us of what the future (embodied in Fairouz’s gift) still promises.

—Wayne Koestenbaum

Texts:

I. Ballad of the Layette

Sing a song of Baby’s illiteracy.
Words hit consciousness
and vanquish formulae.
*
Sing a song of Baby’s European layette.
Nanny collapsed,
awed, in a heap on the floor.
*
Sing a song of deadbeat dads,
impoverished barnyard animals,
logic only I can follow.
*
Sing a song of Baby’s future,
talent scouts and holding pens,
Rachmaninoff and road rage.
*
Baby lacks the proper
aural sifting mechanism.
His mind lays out for me alone its platter of goodies.

II. Blue Sea Songs

I can’t find the Ned Rorem
sea songs in the card catalogue,

and the librarian won’t let me enter the stacks.
Those three songs have a blue tinge.

Unfortunately, the don’t exist-
I dreamt them.

He wrote hundreds of real songs.
Why can’t I content myself with those?

A highfalutin violinist loved them, too,
and forgave me for freezing her out.

III. Posh

My father said a Latin mass, using his “posh” accent.
Then, at a hotel window, looking down

to Madison Avenue, he wept:
I was stuck with complete sentences.

After my father’s window weeping spell
his face was young again, like Walter

Benjamin’s. Walking the rose garden’s
thorned periphery, he didn’t smile.

Slowed down, thick with thought,
he wore green clip-ons, green jacket.

Much about him was green.
Occasionally a cheerful man pierced my abstraction.

Theres no point in re-recording the tenor
repertoire: in 1942 it expired.

—Wayne Koestenbaum

These poems originally appeared in the collection, Best-Selling Jewish Porn Films (Turtle Point Press, 2006), and are reprinted by permission of the publisher.

Movements:

I. Bashir’s March
Interlude: Nay
II.Lamentation: Ariel’s Song
III. Song and Little Dance
IV. Mar Charbel’s Dabkeh

Media:

Press:

“The piece de resistance was a new Mohammed Fairouz suite, Jebnal Lebnan (meaning ‘Mount Lebanon,’ the historical name for the mountainous country), which the Imani Winds recently recorded. The composer explained beforehand that its withering opening segment, Bashir’s March, was inspired by his visit to the site of a former refugee camp there, ‘the most horrific thing’ he’d ever seen. Monica Ellis’ bassoon drove it with a chilling nonchalance, the rest of the ensemble fleshing out a coldly sarcastic, Shostakovian martial theme that Jeff Scott’s french horn took to its cruelly logical, mechanically bustling extreme. After a solo interlude where Coleman got to subtly  imitate an Arabic ney flute, the group hit a high note (if you’re willing to buy the premise of a dirge being a high note) with the second movement, Lamentation: Ariel’s Song. Ominous atmospheric washes led to an elegantly plaintive bassoon solo and a methodical crescendo that built from elegaic to fullscale horror, its fatalistic pulse suddenly disappearing, leaving the atmospherics to linger ominously before ending on a more lively but equally wary note. This angst subsided somewhat but still remained through the rest of the work: the tango-like Dance and Little Song, with their bracing close harmonies and Scheherezade allusions, and Mar Charbel’s Dabkeh, a cleverly interwoven rondo of sorts featuring Coleman on pennywhistle that ended energetically with a confluence of klezmer, gypsy and Arabic tonalities, an apt evocation of a land that’s been a melting pot (and a boiling point) for centuries.” [full review]

—Lucid Culture

Notes:

Jebel Lebnan literally translates as “Mount Lebanon”. This work for wind quintet was commissioned by the Imani Winds and musically chronicles events from the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990) and their effect on the current face of Lebanon.

The first movement, Bashir’s March, refers to Bashir Gemayel, leader of the Lebanese Phalange Party held responsible for the massacres at the Sabra and Shatilla Refugee Camps. The movement is marked “intense and relentless with no compassion or tenderness” and opens with a wild scream in the clarinet and piccolo. The movement continues on a downward and conflicted spiral symbolic of violence until it collapses. Following this movement is an interlude for solo flute called Nay (the Arabic word for flute). This interlude is the free song of an Arabic flute heard in the night from the distance of the mountains.

This leads to a funeral march Ariel’s Song, which is a slow movement and a heartfelt lamentation on the wanton loss of life (the war resulted in an estimated 150,000 to 230,000 civilian fatalities with many more people displaced).

Following this funeral march is something of a reawakening. This is a celebration of the resilience of the Lebanese people as spring follows winter (I have always been amazed by the capacity of the Lebanese to go clubbing in Beirut while the city is being bombarded).

The final movement, called Mar Charbel’s Dabkeh, is an Arabic round dance. This is mostly lyrical music and embodies the concepts of simple song and melody so cherished in the Arab World. It invokes the spirit of Mar Charbel, Lebanon’s Patron Saint.

—Mohammed Fairouz

Media:

Press:

“Mohammed Fairouz’s ‘Refugee Blues’ is an arresting, self-contained melting pot: it begins with Middle Eastern modal writing and moves decisively into Western melody, with driven rhythms that convey the shape (metrically and emotionally) of that dark Auden poem.”
—Allan Kozinn, New York Times

Text:

Say this city has ten million souls,
Some are living in mansions, some are living in holes:
Yet there’s no place for us, my dear, yet there’s no place for us.

Once we had a country and we thought it fair,
Look in the atlas and you’ll find it there:
We cannot go there now, my dear, we cannot go there now.

In the village churchyard there grows an old yew,
Every spring it blossoms anew:
Old passports can’t do that, my dear, old passports can’t do that.

The consul banged the table and said,
“If you’ve got no passport you’re officially dead”:
But we are still alive, my dear, but we are still alive.

Went to a committee; they offered me a chair;
Asked me politely to return next year:
But where shall we go to-day, my dear, but where shall we go to-day?

Came to a public meeting; the speaker got up and said;
“If we let them in, they will steal our daily bread”:
He was talking of you and me, my dear, he was talking of you and me.

Thought I heard the thunder rumbling in the sky;
It was Hitler over Europe, saying, “They must die”:
O we were in his mind, my dear, O we were in his mind.

Saw a poodle in a jacket fastened with a pin,
Saw a door opened and a cat let in:
But they weren’t German Jews, my dear, but they weren’t German Jews.

Went down the harbour and stood upon the quay,
Saw the fish swimming as if they were free:
Only ten feet away, my dear, only ten feet away.

Walked through a wood, saw the birds in the trees;
They had no politicians and sang at their ease:
They weren’t the human race, my dear, they weren’t the human race.

Dreamed I saw a building with a thousand floors,
A thousand windows and a thousand doors:
Not one of them was ours, my dear, not one of them was ours.

Stood on a great plain in the falling snow;
Ten thousand soldiers marched to and fro:
Looking for you and me, my dear, looking for you and me.

March, 1939

—W.H. Auden (1907-1973)

Dedicated to Steven Spooner and Jacqueline Rose

Movements:

I. The Last Resistance
II. Retro Recollections on 21st and 8th
III. Freud Goes to Abu Ghraib
IV. Men and Women in Dark Times

Notes:

My Second Piano Sonata “The Last Resistance” takes its title from Jacqueline Rose’s collection of essays. This four movement work engages the spirit of the post 9/11 essays by portraying the prophecy of difficulty of times ahead in the first movement, a representation of post 9/11 Manhattan in the second, a lamentation in the third movement (“Freud Goes to Abu Ghraib”); and a vicious finale featuring musical portraits of men and women in dark times.

—Mohammed Fairouz

Inspiration:

Notes:

The first Piano Miniature “Nocturnal Snapshot” was written in the middle of the night. When I realized that it was 2AM and that I was still contemplating what to write, I pulled out the Hanon exercises to put my fingers to work. Hanon provided me with an unlikely source of inspiration (!) and crept into this first miniature as an accompaniment to the main tune.

Piano Miniature No. 2 was the result of a challenge to write a piece without dissonance. It’s a slow dance of arpeggios.

Piano Miniature No. 3 incorporates a snippet of Bach’s “Art of the Fugue”.

Piano Miniature No. 4 is a musical joke that continues where No. 3 left off.

Piano Miniature No. 5 is a contrapuntal invention that uses a twelve-tone theme. It makes a musical joke out of two traditionally “academic” concepts.

Piano Miniature No. 6 “Addio” is a farewell on the departure of a beloved. He will remain nameless.

Piano Miniature No. 7 was written while I was serving as a faculty composer at SongFest in Malibu, California. It is a tender little song for solo piano that I wrote quickly while trying to capture the peace and warmth of the Pacific sunset.

Bargemusic, our irreplaceable floating venue in New York, is the subject of Piano Miniature No. 8. The waves rock the barge in a flowing pattern while the Manhattan sky explodes in the background. I wrote the piece on travels in L.A. (and with the “clean” L.A. skyline in my eye). I found myself adding some “grit” to the lines when I returned! Piano Miniature No. 8 is dedicated to Beth Levin, who premiered the work along with No. 7 at Bargemusic.

Lullaby for a Chelsea Boy juxtaposes a tender and static song against a distant memory of the night before. It is dedicated to Kathleen Supove.

Liberace has always been a musical hero of mine and a really fascinating person to boot. This little character piece captures some of the flamboyance of the great gay pianist. It was written as a celebration for another great gay pianist (and a very different one), Steven Blier on his wedding.

—Mohammed Fairouz

Available:

Score

Hal Leonard

Notes:

The first Piano Miniature “Nocturnal Snapshot” was written in the middle of the night. When I realized that it was 2AM and that I was still contemplating what to write, I pulled out the Hanon exercises to put my fingers to work. Hanon provided me with an unlikely source of inspiration (!) and crept into this first miniature as an accompaniment to the main tune.

Piano Miniature No. 2 was the result of a challenge to write a piece without dissonance. It’s a slow dance of arpeggios.

Piano Miniature No. 3 incorporates a snippet of Bach’s “Art of the Fugue”.

Piano Miniature No. 4 is a musical joke that continues where No. 3 left off.

Piano Miniature No. 5 is a contrapuntal invention that uses a twelve-tone theme. It makes a musical joke out of two traditionally “academic” concepts.

Piano Miniature No. 6 “Addio” is a farewell on the departure of a beloved. He will remain nameless.

Piano Miniature No. 7 was written while I was serving as a faculty composer at SongFest in Malibu, California. It is a tender little song for solo piano that I wrote quickly while trying to capture the peace and warmth of the Pacific sunset.

Bargemusic, our irreplaceable floating venue in New York, is the subject of Piano Miniature No. 8. The waves rock the barge in a flowing pattern while the Manhattan sky explodes in the background. I wrote the piece on travels in L.A. (and with the “clean” L.A. skyline in my eye). I found myself adding some “grit” to the lines when I returned! Piano Miniature No. 8 is dedicated to Beth Levin, who premiered the work along with No. 7 at Bargemusic.

Lullaby for a Chelsea Boy juxtaposes a tender and static song against a distant memory of the night before. It is dedicated to Kathleen Supove.

Liberace has always been a musical hero of mine and a really fascinating person to boot. This little character piece captures some of the flamboyance of the great gay pianist. It was written as a celebration for another great gay pianist (and a very different one), Steven Blier on his wedding.

—Mohammed Fairouz

Available:

Score

Hal Leonard

Movements:

I. Lyric Sketch
II. Rounds
III. For Egypt
IV. Scherzo
V. Lullaby of the Ex Soldat

Media:

Press:

Strings Magazine
Rachel Barton Pine on the Sonata for Solo Violin

Notes:

The challenge of writing a big work for an instrument like the violin is party due to the amazing baggage that comes with the instrument. Like the guitar, the violin holds an important position across genres and cultures. Native Informant is a five movement response to a commission from Rachel Barton Pine.

The first movement, Lyric Sketch, is an art-song with secret lyrics. It begins with the violin playing an imitation of a piano intro and then the “voice” comes in. The “song” is complete with a vocal-like high note and ends with a short outro. Rounds, the second movement, is a vigorous Arabic round dance. This fast and flashy movement brings Arabic fiddling into the picture (the violin has a long history in Arabic folk music). It is music of abandon.

The third movement, For Egypt, begins with a descent from the heights of the violin’s range right down to the bottom. It is a heartfelt lamentation of both intimate sadness and outright grief at the loss of civilian life in the 2011-12 Egyptian Revolution.

The fourth movement is, by contrast just plain fun. This Scherzo captures the retro spirit of New York’s cabaret music that is so dear to me. Although there are no explicit musical quotes in the movement, overtones of Porter, Gershwin and Blitzstein dominate much of the movement. Its cuteness offsets the tragedy of the third movement and prepares for the rebirth signified by the last movement.

The fifth movement, Lullaby of the ex-Soldat, is a tribute to the immense history contained within Rachel’s instrument. I was aware, while writing this piece, that I was writing for an instrument that jammed with Brahms and had a long history before that. We also discovered that while I was working on the Sonata, Rachel became pregnant. So the last movement is dedicated to her daughter Sylvia Michelle Pine, in celebration of birth and renewal.

—Mohammed Fairouz

Texts from the Diaries and Correspondence of Alma Mahler
Kate Lindsey, mezzo soprano; Craig Terry, piano

Texts from the Diaries and Correspondence of Alma Mahler
Kate Lindsey, mezzo soprano; Craig Terry, piano

Texts from the Diaries and Correspondence of Alma Mahler 
Kate Lindsey, mezzo soprano; Craig Terry, piano

Media:

Press:

PRI’s The World
Feature and Inteview: Concerto ‘Tahrir for Clarinet and Orchestra’ Inspired by Egyptian Uprising

New York Times
Article for The Score: After Tahrir, New Voices in a Global Fugue

Media:

Notes:

For Victims is a dramatic scene for baritone and string quartet based on two poems by David Shapiro: For Victims and The Dead will not Praise You. The work was commissioned by American Opera Projects and David brought together these two texts for this piece. The first text (that comes back at the end) is a memorial to the victims of Nazi atrocities who perished in the Holocaust. The second, The Dead will not Praise You, is a specific memory of the Cantor Berele Chagy, David’s grandfather. In an interview, David mentions the personal connection he has to the subject matter of his poem: “Even in my own family, the facts of murdered aunts were kept from me for decades. But my father and mother made their lives around and against racism, bigotry, and hatred. All too banal, spread out in history like a fable? No, a powerful musician like Mohammed works the hardest to show that art produces truths like a Holocaust museum, filled with almost hopeless music, not the false Romance of Wagner, but a new kind of structure that must be heard after Auschwitz.

Text:

For Victims

They have used the bodies of children
As improvised bridges
Which they later cross.
First the sun and the moon,
Then the earth comes in.
But they have lost
The atmosphere, which belongs to them

Light passersby

My grandfather emerges
in a synagogue
with familiar accents
unlike his noble voice
a pudgy little man
sweet tenor coloratura flautando
He marches down the aisle
with a blue white crown
Women ask questions
and they are charmed
and he is beloved
like etymology
Is my mother in attendance
or is she dead?
What are questions now?
Are the dead permitted to
sing? Is he serious?
Are the dead permitted
to return and sing?

—David Shapiro, ‘For Victims’ and ‘The Dead will not Praise You’
Copyright 2007 by David Shapiro
Used by permission of David Shapiro and The Overlook Press

Jeder Mensch was commissioned for, inspired by, and is dedicated to my friend Kate Lindsey.

Movements:

I. The Eternal Source
II. Today I Realized Something Very Strange
III. The Celebration of the Spirit

Media:

Press:

“Ms. Lindsey sang each song in the cycle with vigor and passion, underscored by the thick and difficult sonorities expressed in the challenging piano accompaniment, executed admirably by Ms. Witman. The cycle also revealed the considerable compositional skills of Mr. Fairouz. In the audience for the occasion, Mr. Fairouz was acknowledged by Ms. Lindsey at the conclusion of the cycle, and was greeted with a warm round of applause by the audience.”
—Terry Ponick, Washington Times

Texts:

I. The Eternal Source
Today I know the eternal source of all strength. It is in nature, in the earth, in people who don’t hesitate to cast away their existence for the sake of an idea. They are the ones who can love. I go on living with my face lifted high, but with my feet on the ground – where they belong.

II. Today I Realized Something Very Strange
Today I realized something very strange. – I am not happy – and not unhappy. It came to me suddenly that I am living what only appears to be a life. I hold so much inside of me, I am not free – I suffer – but I don’t know why or what for. My ship is in the harbor, but it has sprung a leak.

III. The Celebration of the Spirit
“Gustav Mahler – from the struggles of abstraction, Oskar Kokoschka, the genius, Walter Gropius, the improviser of cultures and wills – And Joseph Fraenkel, the genial improviser … From Walter I want children – from Oskar, works – from Fraenkel, the celebration of the spirit that he never offered me. I wish that Fraenkel had moved into my house to live the rest of his life with me.”

—from the Correspondence and Diaries of Alma Mahler

“The waves of intensity, if not the intellectual rigor, lifted for a minute with a handful of miniatures by Mohammed Fairouz, who was in attendance. Still young (he’s in his twenties) and amazingly prolific, Fairouz is a wide-ranging thinker with several considerably powerful, unselfconsciously deep works to his credit – and he can also be very funny. Joan assembled a set that was both amusing and captivating: an attempt to make an etude interesting, in a very successful, Schumann-esque way; a challenge to write a piece containing no dissonances (it was mostly arpeggios); a joke that began way up the scale and ended way down; an austere twelve-tone piece and a brief, vividly autumnal requiem”

—Lucid Culture

Text by Wayne Koestenbaum; Christopher Thompson, Baritenor; Steven Spooner, Piano

Text by Wayne Koestenbaum; Christopher Thompson, Baritenor; Steven Spooner, Piano

Text by Wayne Koestenbaum; Christopher Thompson, Baritenor; Steven Spooner, Piano

Rachel Barton Pine, violin

*with the kind permission of Naxos

AS IT WAS, AND WILL BE (2011)

info | The Living Archive Store | GM Recordings

“The Borromeo players achieve the special balancing act of patience and ferocity in Mohammed Fairouz’s Lamentation and Satire, an intensely felt score in which the instruments engage in compelling duos, a fugue of doleful urgency and a farewell utterly bereft of hope.” —Donald Rosenberg, Gramophone Magazine

Movements:

I. Condemnation
II. Scherzo
III. Elegy
IV. Coda

Media:

Press:

“The impressive New York ensemble Lunatics at Large gave a revelatory concert at Tufts, curated by visiting Tufts composer Kareem Roustom, of chamber music by young Arabic composers with scores ranging from the perfumed nostalgia of Karim Al-Zand’s Quelques fleurs, to Zaid Jabri’s heartbreaking elegy for the late Iraqi/Syrian composer Solhi Al-Wadi, to 26-year-old Mohammed Fairouz’s startlingly fresh Unwritten, a setting of three David Shapiro sonnets about Socrates.”
—Boston Phoenix

Texts:

I. Condemnation
On the border of the illusion
Phaedo condemned the death of Socrates
But in so doing he missed a single day
And rendered his own judgement like and entertained breeze
It was a jailer who introduced us
He was a jailer with no appetite
And you know how fire is delivered
By children frittering it away in frozen speech
Men call this pleasure like a place of rapport
But it-is it bliss to juggle the body
Like a house with great pain persuaded to stand
The swans change a lot before they discover gods they serve
He sat on his bed and had time to say a big thing
The wind ascending at the corners of the cardboard world

II. Scherzo
On the Border of the illusion
Socrates and Phaedrus made a shimmering detour
They pleased themselves in their descent
On the border of the illusion where they reassembled the cut sentences
Phedrus applauded the truth of leaving
But today my shoes are all worn out
Socrates said I want you very much
But try to find another time to sit together
Phaedrus was the pleased student shadow and fresh air
Socrates was going to the young rhythm
I want to repay this very good but tell me
Do you beleive in this fabulous affair
It is he, it is me, it is charm in lieu of sleep
I am surrounded by the summer you sent me, your throat on this stained floor

III. Elegy
On the Border of the illusion (at the very edge)
Socrates said Let’s go Crito obsess yourselves
You were a slave with tender hands and dwindled too
Sometimes we’ll come back to give out poison
Now it’s all boiled up and just as ready
One likes to drink and having drunk
You feel those heavy weights like a dog
The lips of Socrates were very peaceful then
You had your lips next to me drinking and having drunk
You covered up your closest friends with a mind
It was cut like sails with the same razor
It was ice and radiant touching to be him
Now we owe a rooster to foget it would be impossible
In a convulsive movement time says time and closes your eyes

IV. Coda
And that was the end of our friend
The wisest and best on this earth lightly inclined
Be mute for me,
contemplative violin.

—David Shapiro (1983)

Movements:

I. Kaddish
II. Lullaby
Minyan
III. Night Fantasy
Oseh Shalom
IV. Memorial Day for the War Dead

Media:

Press:

NPR’s All Things Considered
Profile & Interview: Three Poetic Traditions Inspire a Mideast Symphony

Notes:

“Poems and Prayers”, my third symphony, is a poetic Middle Eastern journey scored for solo vocalists, large mixed chorus and orchestra. An evening length piece, the symphony expresses ancient and modern texts ranging from the Aramaic Kaddish to modern Israeli and Arabic poetry by Mahmoud Darwish, Yehuda Amichai and Fadwa Tuqan weaving together a narrative of shared loss and dispossession as well as hope and reconciliation. The work opens with a full choral and orchestral outbreak. The chorus intones the words of the ancient Kaddish. In this first movement the solo vocalists take on a cantorial role with the chorus acting as the congregation. It is a fast paced call and response culminating with the words of the Hebrew “Oseh Shalom”. This is arguably the most famous section of the Kaddish and translates as “He who makes peace in His heights/ may he make peace for us/ and upon all Israel”. From the “amen” of the first movement we move to a more introspective second movement conveying the contemporary Arabic text of Mahmoud Darwish. In this lullaby we have the image of a woman joined by a solo clarinet singing a song to her beloved in the night (the orchestra takes on the colors of the night). In the final line of this movement it is revealed that she is singing a lullaby to her dead son embodied by the clarinet. Following this we have the response of the men’s chorus acting as a Minyan (traditionally a quorum of adult Jewish men who come together to pray on solemn occasions). Accompanied by the strings of the orchestra the men sing a passionate and rhetorical version of the Oseh Shalom. The next movement is titled “Night Fantasy” and is a setting of text by the 20th century Arab feminist poet Fadwa Tuqan. Her text is, the Lullaby, a cry in the night. She expresses the failure of words to defend her people and family. This helpless lament is accompanied by a solo violin. Another return of the Oseh Shalom follows but this time sung with purity and without much rhetoric by the women’s chorus. The final movement of Poems and Prayers is a setting of the great Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai’s Memorial Day for the War Dead. This large scale movement is expressed by the full chorus, orchestra and vocal soloists. It embodies many atmospheres from the sharing of grief to the frustration at the futility of war and its losses and the yearning to find “some great happiness” that may be hiding behind all this. An epilogue with the final return of the Oseh Shalom follows. This time it is sung by everyone once again (just as in the ancient past of the first Kaddish movement) but added to the Kaddish are those words that have been added by reform sects since the 1970s “V’al kol yosh vey teveyl” which mean “and for all the nations of the world”. And so we end with a transformation of an ancient prayer of peace not only for the tribe but for all the Earth.

—Mohammed Fairouz (2012)

Texts:

Kaddish

May His great Name grow exalted and sanctified (Amen.)
in the world that He created as He willed.
May He give reign to His kingship in your lifetimes and in your days,
and in the lifetimes of the entire Family of Israel,
swiftly and soon. Now say:
Amen. May His great Name be blessed forever and ever.
Blessed, praised, glorified, exalted, extolled,
Blessed is He.
beyond any blessing and song,
praise and consolation that are uttered in the world. Now say:
Amen
May there be abundant peace from Heaven
and life upon us and upon all Israel. Now say:
Amen
He Who makes peace in His heights, may He make peace,
upon us and upon all Israel. Now say:
Amen

Lullaby

If you’ll not be a rain, my love,
then be a tree
drenched in fertility… be a tree
and if you’ll not be a tree, my love,
be a rock
drenched in humidity… be a rock
and if you’ll not be a rock, my love,
be a moon
in the sleep of lovers… be a moon
(This is what a woman told
her son at his funeral)

—Mahmoud Darwish (translated from the Arabic by Mohammed Fairouz)

Minyan

He Who makes peace in His heights, may He make peace,
upon us and upon all Israel. Now say:
Amen

Night Fantasy

I sit down to write, what should I write?
What’s worth saying?
My family, my country, my people:
Oh how I hate to sit down and write
on this day
Will I protect my family with words?
Will I save my country with words?
All words, today,
are salt never flowering
in this night…

—Fadwa Tuqan (translated from the Arabic by Mohammed Fairouz)

Oseh Shalom

He Who makes peace in His heights, may He make peace,
upon us and upon all Israel. Now say:
Amen

Memorial Day for the War Dead

Memorial day for the war dead. Add now
the grief of all your losses to their grief,
even of a woman that has left you. Mix
sorrow with sorrow, like time-saving history,
which stacks holiday and sacrifice and mourning
on one day for easy, convenient memory.

Oh, sweet world soaked, like bread,
in sweet milk for the terrible toothless God.
“Behind all this some great happiness is hiding.”
No use to weep inside and to scream outside.
Behind all this perhaps some great happiness is hiding.

Memorial day. Bitter salt is dressed up
as a little girl with flowers.
The streets are cordoned off with ropes,
for the marching together of the living and the dead.
Children with a grief not their own march slowly,
like stepping over broken glass.

The flautist’s mouth will stay like that for many days.
A dead soldier swims above little heads
with the swimming movements of the dead,
with the ancient error the dead have
about the place of the living water.

A flag loses contact with reality and flies off.
A shopwindow is decorated with
dresses of beautiful women, in blue and white.
And everything in three languages:
Hebrew, Arabic, and Death.

A great and royal animal is dying
all through the night under the jasmine
tree with a constant stare at the world.

A man whose son died in the war walks in the street
like a woman with a dead embryo in her womb.
“Behind all this some great happiness is hiding.”

—Yehuda Amichai

Epilogue

He Who makes peace in His heights, may He make peace,
upon us, upon all Israel and upon all the nations of the world. Now say:
Amen

Movements:

I. Fantasy
First Elegy
II. Funeral March: A State of Mourning
Second Elegy
III. Variations on an Imaginary Hymn of State

Media:

Press:

“The occasion was the world premiere of Mohammed Fairouz’s double concerto for violin and cello entitled States of Fantasy … the music alone was a rich experience; in the greater context of the music’s origin, the experience was intellectually and psychically provocative. The program on Saturday evening… entitled “Duologues: Beethoven and Fairouz” … At first the juxtaposition of these two composers on the program seemed random, but the experience of the two composers’ music in proximity revealed similarities of intensity and passion, along with the integration of literary and historical inspiration… It is most difficult to critique a new work such as this because there is no point of comparison, except to the larger context of music’s ability to project directly as feeling and meaning without intellectual intervention. By this measure the concerto succeeded without question.”   —Phyllis Nordstrom, Classical Voice of New England

Notes:

My Double Concerto “States of Fantasy” was written for Nicholas Kitchen and Yeesun Kim and was inspired by Jacqueline Rose’s monumental book of the same name. The Double Concerto is the first written for this astounding duo who have played together since their teens and are partners in music as well as life. The work is in two major parts. The first consists of the first movement (Fantasy) and an elegy for violin and cello without orchestra. The second part consists of the second movement which is a funeral march, a second elegy for violin and cello alone and the third movement (Variations on an Imaginary Hymn of State). The first part explores how musical fantasy relates to the psychological notions of fantasy while the funeral march explores the opposite: a state of being. The last movement is a series of variations on a national anthem of my invention for an imaginary state. The work was written on commission from Ensemble 212 as part of their 2010-11 composer in residence program.

—Mohammed Fairouz (2010)

For a long time now, I have been trying to grasp the relationship between the complexity of our inner lives and the violence of the world. In a way I have been trying to issue a wager to those who would prefer to consider these apart, or who do not see how the hidden, unconscious parts of who we are play their role in the rise and fall of nations. States of Fantasy is the book in which I first turned my attention to how this plays itself out in relation to injustice, and to the seemingly unending conflict between Israel and the Palestinians in the Middle East. I am thrilled that Mohammed Fairouz has taken the book as the inspiration and starting point for his Double Concerto. As it moves from fantasia to elegy to an anthem for a state that cannot be named, from the play of freedom to mourning to the limit form of national identity, I am overcome by just how appropriate a musical, contrapuntal, rendering of this vexed interaction between the public and the private can be. As if there were no better form than music – on this I like to think the late Edward Said would have agreed – for exploring the anguished yet creative traffic between the stresses of the world and of the mind.

—Jacqueline Rose, Author States of Fantasy (June 23, 2010)

Press:

“First, there was a Borromeo-only curtain-raiser: Mohammed Fairouz’s ‘Chorale Fantasy,’ premiered by the quartet last year. Fairouz’s music is thoughtfully cross-cultural; the ‘Chorale Fantasy’ explores that trope with restrained effect. Modernist tangles turned into medieval austerity, while contrapuntal lines starting in Romantic territory, reminiscent of, say, Max Reger, tipped over into more maqam-like inflections. Kitchen cantillated against a rhythmically insistent drone from the other three, which then transformed into a whirl of dance. But the overall tone was contemplative, searching, and optimistic. The gentle friction between notes and styles and eras resolved, at the end, into a glowing triad.”  —Matthew Guerrieri, Boston Globe

Notes:

Chorale Fantasy was written in response to the Borromeo String Quartet’s initiative to commission a set of chorale preludes. This short work lives in the world between maqam (Arabic modes) and gentle counterpoint. It opens with a short introduction leading to a violin line with unheard lyrics against an insisting drone. It then conspires into a whirling dance reaching a vocal climax and returns at the end to the gentleness of the opening.  All of the parts of Chorale Fantasy are written within the singing range of the human voice. The work is affectionately dedicated to the Borromeo Quartet.

-Mohammed Fairouz

Texts by David Shapiro; Performed by Lunatics at Large

Text by David Shapiro; Performed by Lunatics at Large

Text by David Shapiro; Performed by Lunatics at Large

Text by David Shapiro; Performed by Lunatics at Large

Movements:

The Birth of Light
The Ballad of the King’s Mercy

Texts:

I. The Birth of Light

Over the starlit rooftops, in Iran,
echoes the agonized voice
of those who only want
to say something.
Not the litany of the muezzins
and their monotonous prayers,
asking no questions, insisting on the same answers.
It’s the green song tearing
off the black cloth of the ayatollahs
as if from high above the houses
it would be possible to anticipate
the birth of light
that bloodies the dawn.

—Affonso Romano de Sant’Anna (Translated by Lloyd Schwartz)

II.

III. The Ballad of the King’s Mercy

Abdhur Rahman, the Durani Chief, of him is the story told.
His mercy fills the Khyber hills—his grace is manifold;
He has taken toll of the North and the South—his glory reacheth far,
And they tell the tale of his charity from Balkh to Kandahar.

Before the old Peshawur Gate, where Kurd and Kaffir meet,
The Governor of Kabul dealt the Justice of the Street,
And that was strait as running noose and swift as plunging knife,
Tho’ he who held the longer purse might hold the longer life.

There was a hound of Hindustan had struck a Euzufzai,
Wherefore they spat upon his face and led him out to die.
It chanced the King went forth that hour when throat was bared to knife;
The Kaffir grovelled under-hoof and clamoured for his life.

Then said the King: “Have hope, O friend! Yea, Death disgraced is hard;
Much honour shall be thine”; and called the Captain of the Guard,
Yar Khan, a bastard of the Blood, so city-babble saith,
And he was honoured of the King — the which is salt to Death;
And he was son of Daoud Shah, the Reiver of the Plains,
And blood of old Durani Lords ran fire in his veins;
And ’twas to tame an Afghan pride nor Hell nor Heaven could bind,
The King would make him butcher to a yelping cur of Hind.

“Strike!” said the King. “King’s blood art thou—his death shall be his pride!”
Then louder, that the crowd might catch: “Fear not—his arms are tied!”
Yar Khan drew clear the Khyber knife, and struck, and sheathed again.
“O man, thy will is done,” quoth he; “a King this dog hath slain.”

Abdhur Rahman, the Durani Chief, to the North and the South is sold.
The North and the South shall open their mouth
to a Ghilzai flag unrolled,
When the big guns speak to the Khyber peak, and his dog-Heratis fly: Ye have heard the song — How long? How long?
Wolves of the Abazai!

That night before the watch was set, when all the streets were clear,
The Governor of Kabul spoke: “My King, hast thou no fear?
Thou knowest—thou hast heard,”—his speech died at his master’s face.
And grimly said the Afghan King: “I rule the Afghan race.
My path is mine—see thou to thine—to-night upon thy bed
Think who there be in Kabul now that clamour for thy head.”

That night when all the gates were shut to City and to throne,
Within a little garden-house the King lay down alone.
Before the sinking of the moon, which is the Night of Night,
Yar Khan came softly to the King to make his honour white.
The children of the town had mocked beneath his horse’s hoofs,
The harlots of the town had hailed him “butcher!” from their roofs.
But as he groped against the wall, two hands upon him fell,
The King behind his shoulder spake: “Dead man, thou dost not well!
‘Tis ill to jest with Kings by day and seek a boon by night;
And that thou bearest in thy hand is all too sharp to write.
But three days hence, if God be good, and if thy strength remain,
Thou shalt demand one boon of me and bless me in thy pain.
For I am merciful to all, and most of all to thee.
My butcher of the shambles, rest—no knife hast thou for me!”

Abdhur Rahman, the Durani Chief,
holds hard by the South and the North;
But the Ghilzai knows, ere the melting snows,
when the swollen banks break forth,
When the red-coats crawl to the sungar wall,
and his Usbeg lances fail:
Ye have heard the song — How long? How long?
Wolves of the Zuka Kheyl!

They stoned him in the rubbish-field when dawn was in the sky,
According to the written word, “See that he do not die.”

They stoned him till the stones were piled above him on the plain,
And those the labouring limbs displaced they tumbled back again.

One watched beside the dreary mound that veiled the battered thing,
And him the King with laughter called the Herald of the King.

It was upon the second night, the night of Ramazan,
The watcher leaning earthward heard the message of Yar Khan.
From shattered breast through shrivelled lips broke forth the rattling breath,
“Creature of God, deliver me from agony of Death.”

They sought the King among his girls, and risked their lives thereby:
“Protector of the Pitiful, give orders that he die!”

“Bid him endure until the day,” a lagging answer came;
“The night is short, and he can pray and learn to bless my name.”

Before the dawn three times he spoke, and on the day once more:
“Creature of God, deliver me, and bless the King therefor!”

They shot him at the morning prayer, to ease him of his pain,
And when he heard the matchlocks clink, he blessed the King again.

Which thing the singers made a song for all the world to sing,
So that the Outer Seas may know the mercy of the King.

Abdhur Rahman, the Durani Chief, of him is the story told, He has opened his mouth to the North and the South, they have stuffed his mouth with gold. Ye know the truth of his tender ruth—and sweet his favours are: Ye have heard the song—How long? How long? from Balkh to Kandahar.

—Rudyard Kipling

Rachel Calloway, mezzo soprano; David Kravitz, baritone; Young New Yorkers Chorus; Michael Kerschner, director; Ensemble 212; Yoon Jae Lee, conductor

Text by Mahmoud Darwish; Rachel Calloway, mezzo soprano; David Krakauer, clarinet; Ensemble 212; Yoon Jae Lee, conductor

Text by Fadwa Tuqan; Rachel Calloway, mezzo soprano; Ensemble 212; Yoon Jae Lee, conductor

Young New Yorkers Chorus; Michael Kerschner, director; Ensemble 212; Yoon Jae Lee, conductor

Text by Yehuda Amichai; Rachel Calloway, mezzo soprano; David Kravitz, baritone; Young New Yorkers Chorus; Michael Kerschner, director; Ensemble 212; Yoon Jae Lee, conductor

Text by Yehuda Amichai; Rachel Calloway, mezzo soprano; David Kravitz, baritone; Young New Yorkers Chorus; Michael Kerschner, director; Ensemble 212; Yoon Jae Lee, conductor

Text by Yehuda Amichai; Rachel Calloway, mezzo soprano; David Kravitz, baritone; Young New Yorkers Chorus; Michael Kerschner, director; Ensemble 212; Yoon Jae Lee, conductor

Nicholas Kitchen, violin; Yeesun Kim, cello; Ensemble 212; Yoon Jae Lee, conductor

Nicholas Kitchen, violin; Yeesun Kim, cello; Ensemble 212; Yoon Jae Lee, conductor

Borromeo String Quartet

BOSTON DIARY (2010)

iTunes | Amazon | Albany Records

“Mohammed Fairouz’s Bonsai Journal… It’s a technically difficult piece and the poetry seems deliberately separated from the music, as if the two are competing for air space, though there is an underlying dance. By including this piece by a ‘newer generation’ composer, we get a view into the world to come, which, as demonstrated here, seems serious, intense, complex.”
—David Wolman, Fanfare Magazine

“Fairouz’s juxtaposition (in his solo guitar work Airs) of modal, Middle Eastern music and strains of Baroque figuration with modernist techniques in the third movement were subtly crafted and executed”

—Arts Editor

Notes:

The first Piano Miniature “Nocturnal Snapshot” was written in the middle of the night. When I realized that it was 2AM and that I was still contemplating what to write, I pulled out the Hanon exercises to put my fingers to work. Hanon provided me with an unlikely source of inspiration (!) and crept into this first miniature as an accompaniment to the main tune.

Piano Miniature No. 2 was the result of a challenge to write a piece without dissonance. It’s a slow dance of arpeggios.

Piano Miniature No. 3 incorporates a snippet of Bach’s “Art of the Fugue”.

Piano Miniature No. 4 is a musical joke that continues where No. 3 left off.

Piano Miniature No. 5 is a contrapuntal invention that uses a twelve-tone theme. It makes a musical joke out of two traditionally “academic” concepts.

Piano Miniature No. 6 “Addio” is a farewell on the departure of a beloved. He will remain nameless.

Piano Miniature No. 7 was written while I was serving as a faculty composer at SongFest in Malibu, California. It is a tender little song for solo piano that I wrote quickly while trying to capture the peace and warmth of the Pacific sunset.

Bargemusic, our irreplaceable floating venue in New York, is the subject of Piano Miniature No. 8. The waves rock the barge in a flowing pattern while the Manhattan sky explodes in the background. I wrote the piece on travels in L.A. (and with the “clean” L.A. skyline in my eye). I found myself adding some “grit” to the lines when I returned! Piano Miniature No. 8 is dedicated to Beth Levin, who premiered the work along with No. 7 at Bargemusic.

Lullaby for a Chelsea Boy juxtaposes a tender and static song against a distant memory of the night before. It is dedicated to Kathleen Supove.

Liberace has always been a musical hero of mine and a really fascinating person to boot. This little character piece captures some of the flamboyance of the great gay pianist. It was written as a celebration for another great gay pianist (and a very different one), Steven Blier on his wedding.

—Mohammed Fairouz

Available:

Recording

iTunes | Amazon | Dorian Sono Luminus

Score

Hal Leonard

Text by Ibn Shuhayd; Scott Hawley, baritone; Brett Hodgdon, piano

Movements:

I. Invovation
II. Illumination
III. Meditation

Notes:

The title of this work, Ka-las, is the Sanskrit word for “time” which, in its masculine singular form, is the central word in the famous line: ka-lo ‘smi lokaks,ayakr,t pravr,ddho (I am time, the mighty destroyer of worlds) from the eleventh chapter of the Bagavad Gita. In these lines that are the subject of the first movement, the prince Arujna invokes the lord Vishnu, imploring him to reveal the nature of his newly taken multi-armed form. Vishnu responds with the above quoted apocalyptical line. In the Invocation, this narrative is carried through recitations from both the clarinetist and violist in the original Sanskrit, starting, as many ancient invocations do, with a repeated command: “Tell me”.

The revelation of Vishnu’s new form as the “destroyer of worlds” leads to the second movement: Illumination. This is a reference to the radiant brilliance of the god’s form as well as to an earlier verse in the Gita that refers apocalyptically to the light of a thousand suns. The playing is virtuosic, the sounds and textures luminous and the character sometimes quirky, sometimes deeply intense.

The overwhelming momentum of the Illumination brings us to a brief cadenza for the clarinet and, as the movement continues to wind down, a hymn and, finally, the same cadence that punctuated the first movement.

After achieving Illumination, we come to the final movement: Meditation, which reflects lyrically and whimsically on something now distant. The tone is dolorous, even nostalgic and culminates with the voice of Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer in his testimony following the successful testing of the atom bomb at Los Alamos: “… I remembered the line from the Hindu Scripture, the Bagavad Gita: Vishnu, trying to impress upon the prince his duty, takes on his multiarmed form and says ‘I am become death, the destroyer of worlds’. I suppose we all felt that, one way or another.”

—Mohammed Fairouz (2009)

An Opera in Three Scenes
based on Tawfiq El-Hakim’s Song of Death

Photo from the World Premiere Production of Sumeida’s Song by Jill Steinberg

Press:

“Sumeida’s Song is an intensely dramatic 60-minute four-character opera with a searing score that deftly draws from Arabic and Western contemporary musical sources. It tells of a son who returns to his peasant village in Upper Egypt in the early 20th century, having been educated at a university in Cairo. Awaiting him is his stern mother, who for 17 years has nurtured a hatred for the man she believes murdered her husband and is bent on having her son avenge her father’s death.

“… Mr. Fairouz’s multilayered music catches the complexities and crosscurrents of this family and the grim realities of their lives… There are hints of various Western contemporary idioms in his musical language: American neo-Romanticism; stretches of near-atonality that evoke Berg; astringent washes of sounds that seem inspired by Ligeti, who was one of Mr. Fairouz’s teachers. Yet the Arabic elements of his style—microtonal modes, spiraling dance rhythms, plaintive melodic writing—give fresh, distictive jolts to the Western elements… It would be rewarding to hear Sumeida’s Song with its full orchestration in a larger space. But this gripping chamber version shows the dramatic potential of black-box opera.”

—Anthony Tommasini, New York Times

NPR’s Deceptive Cadence
Lean but Seen: The Joy of Smaller Opera

WQXR Operavore
Feature: Prototype Festival Tests Notion that Modern Opera is Dead

Gramophone
Article: The Generation of Sumeida’s Song 

Synopsis:

Scene I.
A peasant house in a peasant village
in Upper Egypt

Asakir and Mabrouka, two Upper-Egyptian peasant women, are sitting in silence and listening for a train’s whistle. Once they hear the whistle sounded, Asakir anxiously questions whether her son Alwan is on the arriving train. Her sister, Mabrouka, reassures her that Alwan will be arriving as per a letter that the assistant schoolmaster of the village read over to them.

Asakir tells Mabrouka that she hopes that the identiy of her son has not been revealed to the rest of the village-people. Mabrouka assures her sister that the village has been led to believe that Alwan drowned in the water-well when he was a child of two years. Citing village rumours, Asakir expresses her doubts that the Tahawis, a family with whom the Azizi family of Asakir and Mabrouka have an ancient blood-feud, really believe that Alwan is dead.

Asakir proclaims to Mabrouka that soon the whole village will learn that her son, the son of her murdered husband, is still alive and that the murderer of his father and the rest of the Tahawis should fear his vengeance. Asakir desperately awaits her son’s return to restore the honor of the Azizis after a wait of seventeen years. She reveals that she had instructed her nephew, Mabrouka’s son Sumeida who has been sent to fetch Alwan from the station, to sing as a sign that his cousin has come.

Mabrouka remembers how so long ago she smuggled her nephew Alwan away from the village to Cairo and left him with a relative of Asakir’s who Asakir instructs to raise the boy as a butcher “so that he may use a knife well.” Alwan, however runs away from the butcher shop to join the ranks of students at the great Azhar University and attains the rank of Sheikh.

When the next whistle is heard announcing the departure of the train from the station, Asakir and Mabrouka rejoice that Alwan must have come and that he will surely avenge his father’s death and restore the family honor. Their joy gives way to doubt and eventually desolation when they do not hear Sumeida’s singing. Slightly delayed, however, Sumeida’s song is heard emerging from the distance and heralding the long-awaited arrival of Alwan. Asakir celebrates with the statement: “from now, oh, Suweilam Tahawi, your hours are numbered!”

Scene II
The same house

Asakir and Mabrouka are waiting by the entrance in anticipation of Alwan’s arrival and soon Sumeida enters announcing his cousin. Alwan enters and is embraced by his mother. He then greets his aunt Mabrouka who tells him that “our hope lies in you” and leaves with her son Sumeida.

Asakir, now alone with her son, quickly dispenses with pleasantries and tells Alwan to “wait while I bring you something you have never seen before.” She goes off and returns with a saddlebag that she has kept for seventeen years. She explains to her son that this is the saddlebag in which his father’s body was brought to her carried upon his donkey. She describes finding her husband’s head in a pocket while in the other she discovered the rest of his body cut into pieces. Finally, she presents her son with the knife of the murder saying that she has kept it with the blood on it so that it has rusted.

After an initial silence. Alwan gravely asks who is responsible for this crime and Asakir answers without hesitation that it is Suweilam Tahawi. When he asks her how she knows, she explains that the whole village knows. Composing himself, Alwan asks his mother if the crime was investigated to which she explains that “We have no enemies but the Tahawis.” Retaining his Azharite calm, he questions her as to how she knows that it was Suweilam Tahawi himself and about the origins of the enmity between the two families. In attempting to answer his questions, she repeatedly resorts to “God knows best.”

Alwan then tells his mother that he has not come to kill but to tell the villagers that he wishes to bring them a better life where they will “live like human beings in houses, where the animals do not sleep with them” and where they have access to education, a better quality of life and clean running water.

Not understanding, Asakir dismisses her son’s “bookish talk” and tells him to prepare himself to avenge his father’s death. Taking heart, Alwan raises his head and tells his mother that he will not kill. After a moment of disbelif, Asakir, concealing her dismay, asks her son what he means by this. More convinced and forceful than before, Alwan states unequivocally “I won’t kill.”

After this, she clashes with her son head-on. Going out of her mind, she convulsively repeats her hoarse and screaming pleas “seventeen years…the blood of your father…seventeen years…” She repeats this as someone possessed while Alwan, concerned for her, tries vainly to reason with her. She disowns her son and orders him out of her house. She curses him and, realizing the futility of his position, Alwan tells her that he will return to the station in order to return to Cairo. He prays for her and asks that her agitated soul be calmed and tells her that he will await her in Cairo where he will “explain my point of view to you in a place of calm far from here.” He leaves his mother disabled with shock and staring blankly into the distance.

Scene III

Asakir is sitting in her place, motionless. A moment later, Sumeida appears putting his head round the door and pushing it open gently. With determination, Asakir recovers her senses and beckons Sumeida who asks about Alwan. Asakir tells her nephew that Alwan has returned to the station “to flee from taking revenge for his father.” She then engages in a long lament saying that the disgrace is unbearable and will make her life in the village impossible. She predicts that the voices of the village will be raised saying “What a failure of a belly that brought fourth such a child!” and proceeds to strike at her bell with violent blows.

She strikes herself again and again while Sumeida tries to prevent her from harming herself. Asakir then asks Sumeida to bring the knife that she has kept for seventeen years so that she can use it to rip open her belly. Sumeida tells his aunt that she has gone mad. She stares at him and asks “Sumeida-are you a man?” When he asks what she wants from him, she tells him to take the knife and plunge it into the chest of her son Alwan.

Sumeida protests but Asakir explains to him that if he was a man he wouldn’t allow his cousin to dishonor the Azizis and that, if he were to condone his cousin, he would not be able to walk like a man amongst people. The people of the village, she says, will taunt him as “a woman hiding behind a woman.”

Blinded with defensive rage, Sumeida stretches out his hand resolutely and tells his aunt to give him the knife. She is about to give him the knife when she hesitates and says that she must wash off the rust and blood first. Sumeida impatiently demands the knife so as to catch Alwan “before he makes his escape on the evening train.” Asakir gives Sumeida the knife with resolution and invokes that “may his blood wash off his father’s blood that has dried on the blade.” Sumeida tells her that she will her his voice raised in song if Alwan’s killing is brought about and hurries to catch up with his cousin.

Mabrouka enters a moment later carrying a dish of salted fish on her head for Alwan. Asakir tells Mabrouka that Alwan has fled and cowered from avenging his father’s death and so has died. Mabrouka declares this a degradation for the Azizis but Asakir tells her that Alwan will soon be buried in the ground. Not understanding, Mabrouka asks where her son Sumeida has gone and, when Asakir tells her that he has gone “after Alwan to stop him from going,” Mabrouka urges Asakir to give up on hoping that Alwan will stay to answer her “pleas for perdition.”

Asakir anxiously questions Mabrouka as to whether she thinks Alwan has caught the train and then hears the sound of the train whistle as the train leaves the station. Mabrouka becomes more and more frightened and confused while Asakir questions her as to whether she can hear Sumeida singing. Increasingly concerned, Mabrouka tells her sister that she cannot hear any singing and Asakir concludes, in utter despair, that “he hasn’t caught up with him.”

Mabrouka pleads with Asakir to listen to her but Asakir screams that she hears nothing. Mabrouka then hears Sumeida’s singing and turns, terrified by her sister’s state and asks desperately what is happening.

Sumeida’s song is heard, this time heralding the death of Alwan. Asakir pulls herself together lest she collapse; even so a faint suppressed cry, like a rattle in the throat, escapes her lips. After intoning the words: “my son,” she finally collapses.

Available:

Recording

iTunes | Amazon | Bridge Records

Score

Hal Leonard

Movements:

I. Catchword: A Modernists’ ‘Dilemma’
II. Intervention: Une Musique Informelle
III. Catchword: An Oriental(ist) Model
IV. Intervention: A Dialectical Synthesis

Notes:

The Four Critical Models are comprised of two catchwords and two interventions. The controversial catchwords are mediated by the intervention so that the structure of the four movement piece is: catchword/ intervention/catchword/intervention.

Each of the four models take, as their point of departure, a thought or musing that is open to question. The four quotes, placed above each model in the score are:

I. Catchword: A Modernists’ “Dilemma”

” I think you can understand why those of us who dare to attempt to make music a much as it can be rather than as little as one can get away with- music’s being under the current egalitarian dispensation- and who’ve entered the university as our last hope, our only hope, and ergo our best hope, hope only that we’re not about to be abandoned.”

—Milton B. Babbitt, The Unlikely Survival of Serious Music

II. Intervention: Une Musique Informelle
For John Heiss

The problem, however, is not to restore the traditional categories, but to develop equivalents to suit the new materials, so that it will become possible to perform in a transparent manner the tasks which were formerly carried out in an irrational and ultimately inadequate way… The materials will emerge from every successful work they enter as if newly born. The secret of composition is the energy which moulds the material in a process of ever-greater appropriateness.

—Theodore . W. Adorno, Vers une Musique Informelle

III. Catchword: An Oriental(ist) Model
For Ahmed Issawi

The European is a close reasoner; his statements of fact are devoid of any ambiguity; he is a natural logician, albeit he may not have studied logic; he is by nature sceptical and requires proof before he can accept the truth of any proposition; his trained intelligence works like a piece of mechanism. The mind of the Oriental, on the other hand, like his picturesque streets, is eminently wanting in symmetry. His reasoning is of the most slipshod description. Although the ancient Arabs acquired in a somewhat higher degree the science of dialectics, their descendants are singularly deficient in the logical faculty. They are often incapable of drawing the most obvious conclusions from any simple premises of which they may admit the truth. Endeavor to elicit a plain statement of facts from any ordinary Egyptian. His explanation will generally be lengthy, and wanting in lucidity. He will probably contradict himself half-a-dozen times before he has finished his story. He will often break down under the mildest process of cross-examination.

—Evelyn Baring, Lord Cromer, Modern Egypt

IV. Intervention: A Dialectical Synthesis

Modern thought and experience have taught us to be sensitive to what is involved in representation, in studying the Other, in racial thinking, in unthinking and uncritical acceptance of authority and authoritative ideas, in the socio-political role of intellectuals, in the great value of skeptical critical consciousness. Perhaps if we remember that the study of human experience usually has an ethical, to say nothing of a political, consequence in either the best or worst sense, we will not be indifferent to what we do as scholars. And what better norm for the scholar than human freedom and knowledge? Perhaps too we should remember that the study of man in society is based on concrete human history and experience, not on donish abstractions, or on obscure laws or arbitrary systems. The problem then is to make the study fit and in some ways be shaped by experience, which would be illuminated and perhaps changed by the study. At all costs, the goal of Orientalizing the Orient again and again is to be avoided, with consequences that cannot help but refine knowledge and reduce the scholar’s conceit. Without the “Orient” there would be scholars, critics, intellectuals, human beings, for whom the racial, ethnic, and national distinctions were less important than the common enterprise of promoting human community.

—Edward W Said, Orientalism Now

Text:

After the Revels

When the wine he drank
put him to sleep and the eyes
of the watchmen closed also.
I approached him timidly
like one who seeks to come close,
but on the sly, pretending not to.
I crept toward him imperceptible
as a dream, moved myself close
to him, softly as a breath.
I kissed his throat, a white jewel,
drank the vivid red of his mouth,
and so passed my night with him
deliciously, until darkness smiled,
showing the white teeth of dawn.

—Ibn Shuhayd (992- 1034)
Translated by Cola Franzen

Ra Young Ahn, violin; Michael Couper, alto saxophone

Released by: Sono Luminus 

Release/catalogue number: DSL-92146

Release date: Nov 15, 2011

Text by William Wordsworth; Scott Hawley, baritone; Brett Hodgdon, piano

Notes:

Tahwidah is the Arabic word for “Lullaby”. The first idea for this little song came from discussions I had with Mahmoud Darwish about setting some fragments from his epic poem, A State of Siege, to music. This never materialized and Tahwidah, written in late 2008 was my first reaction to the poet’s death that year. The lullaby is scored for soprano and clarinet and represents a nocturnal image of a woman singing to her love. The poem seems unusual for Darwish in that it is metered and resembles the 6th century form of ghazal. It is not until the last lines of the poem that Darwish breaks out of the meter and reveals that the woman has been singing to her son at his funeral.

—Mohammed Fairouz

Text:

If you’ll not be a rain, my love,
then be a tree
drenched in fertility… be a tree
and if you’ll not be a tree, my love,
be a rock
drenched in humidity… be a rock
and if you’ll not be a rock, my love,
be a moon
in the sleep of lovers… be a moon
(This is what a woman told—her son at his funeral)

—from Mahmoud Darwish’s A State of Seige (translated from the Arabic by Mohammed Fairouz)

Maarten Stragier, guitar

Maarten Stragier, guitar

Released by: Sono Luminus 

Release/catalogue number: DSL-92146

Release date: Nov 15, 2011

Text by Mahmoud Darwish; Mellissa Hughes, soprano; David Krakauer, clarinet

*with the kind permission of Naxos

Borromeo String Quartet

Borromeo String Quartet

Movements:

I. Fanfare
II. Nocturne
III. Interlude No. 1
IV. Chorale: Meditation
V. March: Burlesque
VI. Interlude No. 2
VII. Caprice
VIII. Aria
IX. Impromptu
X. Pastorale

Notes:

While experiencing Mohammed’s musical compositions, I felt such astonishment stunningly beautiful sound and visual aesthetic were truly overhwhelming.

As someone dedicated to the study of music notation, I would like to comment especially on Mohammed’s masterful genius in communicating with innovative notational resolutions and his use of improvisatory techniques to achieve such remarkable beauty that is difficult to dismiss from one’s mind and heart after the experience.

I would like to mention in particular, his Bonsai Journal’s, Impromptu, (Tempo libero e flessibile) where the notation is so inventive and intelligent as to allow the voice and piano to fabricate a sublime essence that moves with ease and gentle beauty that is not seen or heard in new music today with such sensitivity and style. This young distinguished composer, with works transcendent of formula and standard goes beyond to break boundaries to achieve new and precious music to be enjoyed that is timeless in nature.

—Theresa Sauer, Musicologist, Author of Notations 21 Anthology of Innovative Notation (Mark Batty Publisher/Thames & Hudson Internationally)

At the moment of writing Bonsai Journal I was interested in experimenting with and with multiple moods and tones. I was left alone to tend my partner’s extensive possibilities of encountering objects and experiences from multiple perspectives bonsai collection for a week and decided to write a few poems each day responding to individual trees. The poems were written quickly and casually as a set of variations on a theme.

I wanted to avoid straight description, but rather find a set of oblique “takes” on my relationship with the trees. I passed the poems on to Mohammed Fairouz very soon after writing them, before I had reflected long or begun any extensive editing. Several things struck me when I first heard this piece.

First, Fairouz has tapped into and fulfilled the rough hewn, open energies of the poems and found a way to complement and fulfill their tones and preoccupations; but more importantly, he has found a path between them, and done some inventive and virtuosic bridge building. His settings of the sections draw out the various poetic angles of approach, unearthing subtexts, underlining complex ironies, drawing up allusions to emotional gestures shared by poetry and music.

I was won immediately by the opening Fanfare, with its burst of Emersonian excess balanced against an astringency and abruptness that suggests the otherness and recalcitrance of the trees, their resistance to being known and sung. With his grasp of the whole range of western music and its forms, Fairouz draws on post-modern and eclectic approaches to either re-inscribe the text in a surrounding aura, and saturate the language in other sensory dimensions, as he does in the full sensual array of the Nocturne, or highlight the aesthetic ironies of the encounter with trees that are hardly natural beings at all, but already domesticated, shaped artistic objects, as he does in the March: Burlesque.

I was deeply moved by the way the Aria extracts a hidden vein of love and loss in the poems in ways I was not necessarily aware of at the time of writing. Yet, with hindsight, the encounter with the bonsais couldn’t help but suggest an absent lover, and the beloved’s aspect of otherness.

Finally, I found my own preoccupation with the way time is wound and coded within the trees, the way each tree seems to exist within its own time signature, mysteriously embodied in the gorgeous stretching and suspension of movement built in to the final Pastorale.

I imagine that it is very rare, considering their possessiveness, for poets to feel that a poetic work can achieve its ultimate fulfillment in a musical setting, but with Bonsai Journal I must give Mohammed credit for an interpretation both true and clairvoyant.

—Judson Evans, poet, chair of liberal arts Boston Conservatory

Text:

Bonsai Journal

1.
Each has a different way of waiting,
resists personification making you guess
the address of each profile.

2.
In the dark, lilies like horns from an old Victrola
The spool of waxed string left to stake them, the cylinder that locked
to a copper trough with its crude, built-in stylus. But there’s no music.
When I lean back on the steps, the summer stars are clustered
around the silhouette of a maple.
The stars smell like a dust of cinnamon.

3.
This one the color of a storm that never gets closer the way we realize
when we fly through them cloud patterns seen from earth are incomprehensible hourglass inversions.

4.
The birds land like dinosaurs in their branches.
They hold to a different measure. As a child climbing a tree
was not a form of play. It was work and mystery and prayer.
You first learned the dispossession, unearthing disclaimers
of the branches. Unaccomodated by the way your weight was
not assumed nor your perception.
You were discommoded. A rude reorganization of the limbs.

5.
With this one I feel the embarrassment of greetings, difficult gestures
in a foreign tongue. The same non-recognition. Doubled.
A failure of face time.

6.
Lights out. The trees stay intricate and closed inside their force field.
They don’t sleep, devising scenes of Caravaggian bondage.

7.
Green candle with multiple wicks the architect
building an island from candle wax
must draw down ravens into a bell.

8.
Remove the arteries and veins
lay down capillaries in slow increments, until the heart is listless in its nest.
The hand turned Nile of its pulse is between your fingers, its clutch of roots
another, darker hand.

9.
They put a bundling board between them courting, sparking, stewing, Grannie
and Grampy Pine. They bound themselves in Ace bandage and afgans, hot compresses,
hot toddies, poultices and salve, a capsule containing coiled information from 4-H, Oddfellows, almanacs and schedules of model trains.

10.
As if an elaborate top were spun that slowing, didn’t topple out of phase, but kept composure, retrograde spin of some odd
moon in the saddle of other gravity, until its drone tuned
into a backward duration.

I can see its castle now, its moat
of motionlessness from here, its torque of sap and sawdust, and the needles
in their files, the library of needles.

—Judson Evans

Movements:

I. Funeral March: The Order of the Burial of the Dead
II. Scherzo
III. Intermezzo: Remembrances of Things Played
IV. Homage to a Belly-Dancer

Notes:

Symphonic Aphorisms is composed of four movements and based on the idea of the aphorism as a flexible and serviceable form for the concise expression of ideas. This idea of the aphorism was exploited by Goethe in his Maxims and Reflections and, to radical effect, by Adorno in Motifs or in the Minima Moralia. The aphorism may be added to the many forms, including the essay, that, having their foundations in prose, have inspired musical forms.

The first movement takes its name from the Book of Common Prayer and my reading of modernist, particularly T.S Eliot’s, interpretations of the funereal rituals that the Order of the Burial of the Dead puts forth. The movement contains elements of the traditional funeral march as well as aspects of concertante writing in the dialogue between the string soloists (who feature in the middle of the movement) and the rest of the orchestra.

In the second movement, which is a scherzo in character and title, the slow pace, sobriety, and elegiac character of the first movement is dispelled in favor of a quick, sarcastic scorrevole which, in its rushing stepwise gestures, is not unlike a courante movement from a dance suite. The third movement functions as an intermezzo. Titled “Remembrances of Things Played” after Proust and, later, Said, the movement invokes the immediate musical past: that of the modernism currently embodied by Babbitt, Boulez, Perle and Schuller among others. Although the third movement is not an attempt to mirror the personal styles of those composers, the flute “cadenza” (with Tam-tam and Claves) remembers the sounds of Le marteau sans maître.

The form of the fourth movement: “Homage to a Belly-Dancer”, can best be characterized as a modified Tahmila. The opening material, as in a traditional Tahmila, presents a motivic exposition of the maqam: in this case, flute line which modulates from octatonic to maqam Hijaz. This movement sees the use of the Darabuka for the first time in the piece. As a percussion instrument, the Darabuka is very commonly used in the accompaniment of belly-dancers and is often an integral member of the Arabic orchestra. The “call and response” relationship between the Darabuka and the rest of the orchestra as well as the recurrence of the opening material at the end of the movement further link this music to that of traditional Tahmilas. The presence of the Darabuka is also used, along with the general orchestration of this movement, to, at times, evoke the sound of the takht: the type of Arabic orchestra that most often compliments Belly-Dancing. The subversive use, and transformation, of these traditional musical devices was inspired by the music (and friendship) of the senior Egyptian composer, Halim El-Dabh to whom the movement is dedicated. The musical materials of Homage to a Belly-Dancer also take, as their point of departure, Said’s description of the Belly-Dancer Tahia Carioca in his essay of the same title.

—Mohammed Fairouz, September (2007)

Notes:

“Exile is life led outside habitual order. It is nomadic, decentered; but no sooner does one get accustomed to it than its unsettling force erupts anew”
—E.W. Said

I. Edward Said In Memoriam

Adagio doloroso 4/4

The opening is marked pp with the added freedom of “rubato.” Prevalent two-note slurs tug at us with a constant poignancy. At bar 8 “Adagio molto” reinforces an unhurried pace but the dynamics erupt into ff furioso at 9. At measure 10 a melody in forte is introduced by the left hand; highly accented. Besides dotted 16ths a pattern of an eighth and two sixteenths dances as it propels the music to an apex at measure 18 in ff. At 21 the mood mellows to “dolce cantabile” in piano; Andante and Adagietto signal a sweeter, easier flow of 16ths.

While there exists a Bach-like framework of four voices, at the same time one feels the presence of a singing quality, with a melodic right hand poised to take hold. A fugue opens to a melody; a melody dissolves back to a fugue. Bar 31 offers dramatic accents (sffz), staccati and more accents at a tempo of Allegro. At 42: (Bells) and the (echo) of bells.

Moderato at bar 55 begins a fugal section in mp which builds to mf and later f. The music is strict, contrapuntal, jaunty. 73: ff / Allegro- previous snippets of material and melody proceed in a tight rhythm, juggling between right and left hand. At 89 a molto ritardando slows to an Adagio molto e sentimento. This final section is a reminder of the dolorous quality of the opening and the stretches of sixteenths, once strict, are now expressively legato. ppp….

II. Between Worlds

One achieves at most a provisional satisfaction, which is quickly ambushed by doubt and a need to re-write and redo that renders the text uninhabitable.
—E. W. Said

Adagio molto 6/8

A languorous opening melodic with starkly contrasting dynamics creates a barren quality to the music. One feels lost in middle earth, searching, uneasy, unsure. At measure 120 “on my illness” in parenthesis manifests in tied sixteenths against ominous eighths in the left hand within a large spans of interval. The effect is one of tortured longing as the pattern gradually builds from p to ff.

Measure 151: ff, subito p, crescendo to ff (violent)- this kind of marking and eloquently placed words throughout the work highlight the dramatic writing even in its smallest gestures of 16ths- some tender, others fiercely angry. The music is terse here and carries with it a large arc of emotional color and feeling. Sudden changes in sound and mood, large- spanned intervals in the bass, and at 198 (De Profundis) a complete slowing of the pace. Measure 202: (Better that, than the sleep of self-satisfaction and the finality of death). Finally the markings “molto ritardando and (very gentle)” prepare us for the approaching Scherzo, or third movement.

III. Scherzo ~ Homage to Michael Gandolfi

Allegretto 2/4

Lilting 16ths enter naively in staccato and then under slurs. They are the perfect organic outgrowth of the movement before. The mood is light but with the underpinning of seriousness to come.

Dynamics such as crescendo to forte/ subito p continue to shape the 16ths in motion, stretching and condensing, stretching and condensing. The voices and lines are utterly clean and unencumbered- taut, accented, dance-like, beautiful.

Measure 249: Adagio (on the tears of Basra) pp (poco rubato)

Here the music is programmatic with a mix of East and West, drama in sffz accents, the lines always as exposed as a three-part Invention. Again the abrupt changes of dynamics and tempi work towards keeping the listener rapt. There is an interesting clash of feeling and intent throughout the work that imbues it with duality and complexity.

At measure 298 the 16ths disappear as simply as they began, an ending that bespeaks cycles and reappearances, mystery and the unknown.

—Beth Levin (April 2010)

Notes:

The first Piano Miniature “Nocturnal Snapshot” was written in the middle of the night. When I realized that it was 2AM and that I was still contemplating what to write, I pulled out the Hanon exercises to put my fingers to work. Hanon provided me with an unlikely source of inspiration (!) and crept into this first miniature as an accompaniment to the main tune.

Piano Miniature No. 2 was the result of a challenge to write a piece without dissonance. It’s a slow dance of arpeggios.

Piano Miniature No. 3 incorporates a snippet of Bach’s “Art of the Fugue”.

Piano Miniature No. 4 is a musical joke that continues where No. 3 left off.

Piano Miniature No. 5 is a contrapuntal invention that uses a twelve-tone theme. It makes a musical joke out of two traditionally “academic” concepts.

Piano Miniature No. 6 “Addio” is a farewell on the departure of a beloved. He will remain nameless.

Piano Miniature No. 7 was written while I was serving as a faculty composer at SongFest in Malibu, California. It is a tender little song for solo piano that I wrote quickly while trying to capture the peace and warmth of the Pacific sunset.

Bargemusic, our irreplaceable floating venue in New York, is the subject of Piano Miniature No. 8. The waves rock the barge in a flowing pattern while the Manhattan sky explodes in the background. I wrote the piece on travels in L.A. (and with the “clean” L.A. skyline in my eye). I found myself adding some “grit” to the lines when I returned! Piano Miniature No. 8 is dedicated to Beth Levin, who premiered the work along with No. 7 at Bargemusic.

Lullaby for a Chelsea Boy juxtaposes a tender and static song against a distant memory of the night before. It is dedicated to Kathleen Supove.

Liberace has always been a musical hero of mine and a really fascinating person to boot. This little character piece captures some of the flamboyance of the great gay pianist. It was written as a celebration for another great gay pianist (and a very different one), Steven Blier on his wedding.

—Mohammed Fairouz

Available:

Recording

iTunes | Amazon | Dorian Sono Luminus

Score

Hal Leonard

Notes:

The first Piano Miniature “Nocturnal Snapshot” was written in the middle of the night. When I realized that it was 2AM and that I was still contemplating what to write, I pulled out the Hanon exercises to put my fingers to work. Hanon provided me with an unlikely source of inspiration (!) and crept into this first miniature as an accompaniment to the main tune.

Piano Miniature No. 2 was the result of a challenge to write a piece without dissonance. It’s a slow dance of arpeggios.

Piano Miniature No. 3 incorporates a snippet of Bach’s “Art of the Fugue”.

Piano Miniature No. 4 is a musical joke that continues where No. 3 left off.

Piano Miniature No. 5 is a contrapuntal invention that uses a twelve-tone theme. It makes a musical joke out of two traditionally “academic” concepts.

Piano Miniature No. 6 “Addio” is a farewell on the departure of a beloved. He will remain nameless.

Piano Miniature No. 7 was written while I was serving as a faculty composer at SongFest in Malibu, California. It is a tender little song for solo piano that I wrote quickly while trying to capture the peace and warmth of the Pacific sunset.

Bargemusic, our irreplaceable floating venue in New York, is the subject of Piano Miniature No. 8. The waves rock the barge in a flowing pattern while the Manhattan sky explodes in the background. I wrote the piece on travels in L.A. (and with the “clean” L.A. skyline in my eye). I found myself adding some “grit” to the lines when I returned! Piano Miniature No. 8 is dedicated to Beth Levin, who premiered the work along with No. 7 at Bargemusic.

Lullaby for a Chelsea Boy juxtaposes a tender and static song against a distant memory of the night before. It is dedicated to Kathleen Supove.

Liberace has always been a musical hero of mine and a really fascinating person to boot. This little character piece captures some of the flamboyance of the great gay pianist. It was written as a celebration for another great gay pianist (and a very different one), Steven Blier on his wedding.

—Mohammed Fairouz

Available:

Recording

iTunes | Amazon | Dorian Sono Luminus

Score

Hal Leonard

Text by William Butler Yeats; Scott Hawley, baritone; Brett Hodgdon, piano

Notes:

The first Piano Miniature “Nocturnal Snapshot” was written in the middle of the night. When I realized that it was 2AM and that I was still contemplating what to write, I pulled out the Hanon exercises to put my fingers to work. Hanon provided me with an unlikely source of inspiration (!) and crept into this first miniature as an accompaniment to the main tune.

Piano Miniature No. 2 was the result of a challenge to write a piece without dissonance. It’s a slow dance of arpeggios.

Piano Miniature No. 3 incorporates a snippet of Bach’s “Art of the Fugue”.

Piano Miniature No. 4 is a musical joke that continues where No. 3 left off.

Piano Miniature No. 5 is a contrapuntal invention that uses a twelve-tone theme. It makes a musical joke out of two traditionally “academic” concepts.

Piano Miniature No. 6 “Addio” is a farewell on the departure of a beloved. He will remain nameless.

Piano Miniature No. 7 was written while I was serving as a faculty composer at SongFest in Malibu, California. It is a tender little song for solo piano that I wrote quickly while trying to capture the peace and warmth of the Pacific sunset.

Bargemusic, our irreplaceable floating venue in New York, is the subject of Piano Miniature No. 8. The waves rock the barge in a flowing pattern while the Manhattan sky explodes in the background. I wrote the piece on travels in L.A. (and with the “clean” L.A. skyline in my eye). I found myself adding some “grit” to the lines when I returned! Piano Miniature No. 8 is dedicated to Beth Levin, who premiered the work along with No. 7 at Bargemusic.

Lullaby for a Chelsea Boy juxtaposes a tender and static song against a distant memory of the night before. It is dedicated to Kathleen Supove.

Liberace has always been a musical hero of mine and a really fascinating person to boot. This little character piece captures some of the flamboyance of the great gay pianist. It was written as a celebration for another great gay pianist (and a very different one), Steven Blier on his wedding.

—Mohammed Fairouz

Available:

Recording

iTunes | Amazon | Dorian Sono Luminus

Score

Hal Leonard

Notes:

The first Piano Miniature “Nocturnal Snapshot” was written in the middle of the night. When I realized that it was 2AM and that I was still contemplating what to write, I pulled out the Hanon exercises to put my fingers to work. Hanon provided me with an unlikely source of inspiration (!) and crept into this first miniature as an accompaniment to the main tune.

Piano Miniature No. 2 was the result of a challenge to write a piece without dissonance. It’s a slow dance of arpeggios.

Piano Miniature No. 3 incorporates a snippet of Bach’s “Art of the Fugue”.

Piano Miniature No. 4 is a musical joke that continues where No. 3 left off.

Piano Miniature No. 5 is a contrapuntal invention that uses a twelve-tone theme. It makes a musical joke out of two traditionally “academic” concepts.

Piano Miniature No. 6 “Addio” is a farewell on the departure of a beloved. He will remain nameless.

Piano Miniature No. 7 was written while I was serving as a faculty composer at SongFest in Malibu, California. It is a tender little song for solo piano that I wrote quickly while trying to capture the peace and warmth of the Pacific sunset.

Bargemusic, our irreplaceable floating venue in New York, is the subject of Piano Miniature No. 8. The waves rock the barge in a flowing pattern while the Manhattan sky explodes in the background. I wrote the piece on travels in L.A. (and with the “clean” L.A. skyline in my eye). I found myself adding some “grit” to the lines when I returned! Piano Miniature No. 8 is dedicated to Beth Levin, who premiered the work along with No. 7 at Bargemusic.

Lullaby for a Chelsea Boy juxtaposes a tender and static song against a distant memory of the night before. It is dedicated to Kathleen Supove.

Liberace has always been a musical hero of mine and a really fascinating person to boot. This little character piece captures some of the flamboyance of the great gay pianist. It was written as a celebration for another great gay pianist (and a very different one), Steven Blier on his wedding.

—Mohammed Fairouz

Available:

Recording

iTunes | Amazon | Dorian Sono Luminus

Score

Hal Leonard

Notes:

The first Piano Miniature “Nocturnal Snapshot” was written in the middle of the night. When I realized that it was 2AM and that I was still contemplating what to write, I pulled out the Hanon exercises to put my fingers to work. Hanon provided me with an unlikely source of inspiration (!) and crept into this first miniature as an accompaniment to the main tune.

Piano Miniature No. 2 was the result of a challenge to write a piece without dissonance. It’s a slow dance of arpeggios.

Piano Miniature No. 3 incorporates a snippet of Bach’s “Art of the Fugue”.

Piano Miniature No. 4 is a musical joke that continues where No. 3 left off.

Piano Miniature No. 5 is a contrapuntal invention that uses a twelve-tone theme. It makes a musical joke out of two traditionally “academic” concepts.

Piano Miniature No. 6 “Addio” is a farewell on the departure of a beloved. He will remain nameless.

Piano Miniature No. 7 was written while I was serving as a faculty composer at SongFest in Malibu, California. It is a tender little song for solo piano that I wrote quickly while trying to capture the peace and warmth of the Pacific sunset.

Bargemusic, our irreplaceable floating venue in New York, is the subject of Piano Miniature No. 8. The waves rock the barge in a flowing pattern while the Manhattan sky explodes in the background. I wrote the piece on travels in L.A. (and with the “clean” L.A. skyline in my eye). I found myself adding some “grit” to the lines when I returned! Piano Miniature No. 8 is dedicated to Beth Levin, who premiered the work along with No. 7 at Bargemusic.

Lullaby for a Chelsea Boy juxtaposes a tender and static song against a distant memory of the night before. It is dedicated to Kathleen Supove.

Liberace has always been a musical hero of mine and a really fascinating person to boot. This little character piece captures some of the flamboyance of the great gay pianist. It was written as a celebration for another great gay pianist (and a very different one), Steven Blier on his wedding.

—Mohammed Fairouz

Available:

Recording

iTunes | Amazon | Dorian Sono Luminus

Score

Hal Leonard