As we work on the words and music in our “Heaven and Hell” set, I am getting whiplash alternating between sheer terror at the unfamiliarity of the Persian tonal and linguistic idiom, and unexpected pleasure in mastering new sounds and adjusting to different sonorities. Juxtaposing Omid Zoufounon’s settings of Rumi’s poetry with more familiar Renaissance celebrations and laments by Gesualdo and Palestrina, along with a contemporary setting of a little-known colonial American text, our rehearsals have been both unsettling and rewarding–but I believe the final result will be an exciting and satisfying experience.
Somewhat sheepishly I realize how provincial I am in my musical experience: I rarely have sung non-Western music in a non-European language, and I hadn’t realized how limited my comfort zone was until I was yanked out of it by this set. I’ve written about seeing familiar music (in my case Beethoven’s 9th) in unfamiliar ways, and I’d begun to see how important it is to me that most of the time I truly understood the meaning of the words I was singing–whether in Latin or German or French or Italian or even Russian, the stock in trade of much of our repertoire. Only when we sang in Finnish (thanks to our soprano Mari Marjamaa) did I have such a sense of being “at sea” linguistically, and even then that was only for a single song in a concert.
As we grapple with Rumi’s poetry we have had the benefit of Omid’s expertise and his circle of family and friends, as in our first rehearsal we recorded the poems spoken by Omid’s mother, following along in our binders as the beautiful susurrating sounds jumped off the page. As she read we could all hear her love of the poetry, as well as see the affection amongst the family as they quietly clarified points in Farsi to each other–altogether a moving experience for me. From unexpected vowel sounds, like the “a” in “vaz” sounding like “at” and not “father,” to the softly struck “kh” in “khosh,” a little like the “ch” in the German “Nacht,” but unusually-for-us at the beginning of a word, we were occupying a new linguistic universe. We are still working hard to own and present these texts convincingly, even though at first we not only didn’t know what words meant, but didn’t know where one word left off and another began.
The tonal system requires adjustment as well: it’s one thing to intellectualize that there is a special symbol for “A-double-flat,” which is not actually double flat, but really a quarter flat, between A-flat and A-natural, but it’s another thing to try to sing that scale in a mode that I’ve never heard of, tilting my head like a dog hearing an unfamiliar sound. Sure it’s kind of like blue notes in jazz, but not where I was expecting. Yet that first evening we had the benefit of hearing Omid’s dear father demonstrate why he is considered a virtuoso among Persian musicians, as he treated us to too-short solos on his violin, his sure command of the instrument contrasting with his slightly frail appearance. Once our tech guys programmed an electronic keyboard to play the blue-Persian notes, our accompanist Kymri could scoot over from the old-fashioned piano and join in the fun.
Rhythmically there are challenges too: we must inhabit a 7/4 time signature not in the way we might have done in the past (1-2 1-2 1-2-3) but the other way (1-2-3 1-2 1-2), just different enough to cause some light chop in the rehearsal flight path. Yet here again we’ve had the benefit of a little help from Omid’s friends: a couple of weeks ago he introduced the percussionist Shahab Paranj, to give us an idea of what we’d be hearing at concert time. I have to confess that when he first started playing this frame drum, the Daf, with its tambourine-like elements, I was a little skeptical as I saw a strange faraway look in his eye as he started; within fifteen seconds our eyebrows were rising and jaws were dropping as he smoothly moved into dazzling accelerating runs using fingers and thumbs and shakes to bring out a ridiculously rich palette of extra sounds and ornaments. OK then, I thought, this is gonna be cool, and I started to understand why he looked as if these rhythms were taking him to another place.
The more I listen to our work in rehearsal, and tune in online to the suggested background study on Radio Darwish and other Persian-music sources, the more aware I am that here’s an arc to it, a sense to it, that I am learning to appreciate. That’s a great thing to feel and to share, and it’s one of the great things about PME. Likewise, it’s great to work with Omid, who freely admits that this large-scale collaboration on this type of music with a conventional choir is pretty unprecedented, and who is so open and un-diva-like about every aspect of our work together.
Usually the first half of a rehearsal focuses on the Persian, and then we turn to Gesualdo and Palestrina’s settings of love and jealousy, misery and elation, their familiar sonorities and avant-garde-for-back-then chromaticism reinforcing how much I rely on my expectation and listening experience to guide my reading. My first real enthusiasm listening to non-pop music came when I got hooked on an LP of Gabrieli’s Canzone, and I found myself transported by the harmonies and polyphony, floating from my living room in suburban San Jose to the Renaissance churches I had been dragged to as a kid. Here too, a connection: the ex-stasis of Rumi’s devotees, the dervish tapping into forces outside the normal plane–these strike me somehow as connected to what the Renaissance composers knew, the Neoplatonic acknowledgment that music is a tool for making the soul receptive to the divine as well as the diabolical. Hence the debates on whether music was a tool for good or evil that continue to this day.
Rounding out the concert we received an addition a month ago from a local composer whom we’d worked with before: Michael Roberts’ The Wonders of the Invisible World, belying its benign title, evokes a hellish period in American history, when the dream vision of a prominent leader led to the deaths of scores of suspected witches. As our director Lynne set the context for us before our first read-through, Cotton Mather’s text, derived from his own dreams, testifies to Satan’s forces invading and controlling the souls of this newly formed outpost of America, and the intensifying rhythmic accelerations capture the hysteria of an irrational mass movement in chilling yet musically exciting ways. Although evidently Mather later backed off of his reliance on his dream visions to try and convict suspected evildoers, for me this piece offers a compact yet eloquent warning about the dangers of demagoguery and unreason. Hell reigns on earth when reason is overridden by fear or political agendas….
Food for thought as we continue our progress through 2012 in all its glories!
John Stenzel, March 2012
