The Music behind the Words

The Music behind the Words

Kinan Azmeh’s Songs for Days to Come

Shirley Apthorp

In Syria, says Kinan Azmeh, you will not get your school graduation certificate unless you pass your classes in Arabic literature. In any other subject, a fail is permissible. But if you don’t know your poetry, you’re out. Ordinary people on the street will be able to quote long poems by heart; when he was growing up in Damascus, Azmeh says, poetry was the only art form that could fill an arena. “This is a very, very old phenomenon. The town of Ukaz, close to Mecca, was known for its market and poetry fair in pre-Islamic times. In the Arab world, poetry has always been incredibly present.”

Perhaps because it was so all-pervasive, Azmeh took no particular interest in poetry as a child. He learned his school poems by rote, but it was with mathematics and physics that his true passion lay. When he joined a rock band as a teenager, he was drawn into in the sound and structure of songs, but even then, he says, the lyrics did not strike him as significant. “We used to do cover songs, and our lead singer used to recite them phonetically. I don’t think he understood them any more than I did, and they only made sense for other people who also didn’t understand the words.”

It was only after the Syrian Uprising of 2011 that Azmeh began to pay attention to the poetry of his compatriots: “I felt that suddenly Syrians were writing about things that mattered more. People were more courageous about writing down how they felt on topics that were considered taboo before. There was poetry discussing politics, the human condition, religious freedom—even God or the lack of a God—things that had not been talked about before in public life.

I wanted to know what they were writing about, and this led me to some of their poetry that was created even before 2011.”

In 2013, Azmeh had written his first work of vocal music, the Ibn Arabi Suite for voice, clarinet, and symphony orchestra, for which he used texts by the eponymous poet, a Sufi mystic and scholar who lived in the late 12th and early 13th century. But when pianist and programmer Lenore Davis invited Azmeh to write a chamber work for her St. Urban concert series in New York in 2014, Azmeh knew it was time to turn his attention to contemporary poetry from his homeland.

“I have many poets among my friends,” he explains, “so I asked them to start sending me their work, and I embarked on an incredible journey of reading poetry by people I knew—because I also wanted to have that luxury of being able to discuss the works with their authors.” The outcome was two song cycles for piano, voice, cello, and clarinet, each some 20 minutes long, written in 2015 and 2017, respectively, each featuring the works of five poets. A third, introducing a further four poets, was also commissioned by Lenore Davis and has its premiere at the Pierre Boulez Saal in tonight’s concert.

“The title of the whole project is Songs for Days to Come,” Azmeh says, “because I do think that these poems are an incredible window into how a shift of thought happened. And I wanted to show how these topics are becoming topics of songs, for many, many days to come.” The musical performances are interleaved with live readings by poets. Just as he appreciated the songs of his teenaged band—and for that matter, he adds, the Beatles—without actually understanding what the words meant, so Azmeh thinks hearing the sound of poetry spoken in its original language is an essential aural experience. “There’s a subtle, very minimalistic pitch-shifting that goes on,” he says, “which I find quite interesting. Even if you don’t understand the words, there is a musical element I think that one can latch onto.”

The selection of texts was an unashamedly subjective process. “I really wanted to work with poems I liked—for me it was that simple. And the result is that in the first cycle there are two poems that talk about God, and two that discuss, in an abstract way, the concept of freedom. In the second cycle, I expand on that theme. But in the end, I really just let myself go along with the poet’s words.” The rhythm of the spoken word becomes the starting point for each of the pieces. Ancient Arabic poetry, Azmeh explains, was constructed around a series of prescribed meters—much like Ancient Greek meters. Contemporary poetry tends to be free from metric constraints, but inevitably still contains its own unique rhythm.

“I think any language can lend itself to be set to music,” the composer-clarinetist says, “if you understand how that language works. So the first thing I did was to divide every poem and to analyze it rhythmically. I wanted to see what kind of pulse I would get. But when I start to compose I often forget all of this and just find that the first few words of a poem can open a huge world in which some kind of melody idea comes to you.” Azmeh writes in the old-fashioned way, with a pen on paper, carrying with him a sketchbook that he fills with musical thoughts that occur to him in ofteninconvenient moments.

“The poems are different in terms of character, so I arranged the order according to what comes out of them musically. The whole process of composing is quite messy—I have a million versions of my sketches, and a lot of times it’s trial and error. With these song cycles, I read the poems over and over and over, just to familiarize myself with the sounds. And a lot of new ideas come to mind when you do that.”

The choice of piano, cello, and clarinet was circumstantial, Azmeh says. “Initially I write for people, I don’t write for particular instruments. And I wanted to work with Dima Orsho, who has been a collaborator of mine for many years. She and I used to be together in the clarinet section of the Syrian Symphony Orchestra back in the late 1990s, so we’re very good friends. Eventually she stopped playing clarinet and just focused on singing. She’s classically trained but seamlessly switches hats between different musical vocabularies, besides being a wonderful improviser.”

Regarding the cello and piano, Azmeh explains, “I didn’t want to include any instruments that would limit the possibility of these pieces being performed by non-Arabic speakers. I didn’t want the piece to become a kind of ethnic demonstration of Arabic music— I really wanted it to be a song cycle that can go along with any other song cycles of similar instrumentation.”

Improvisation, such an integral part of Azmeh’s performance persona, doesn’t feature in either of the first two cycles, but is present in the third. “Every time I write something for myself,” he declares, “I take it for granted that I’m going to improvise. I recently finished and premiered a new concerto with the Seattle Symphony. For the first time I wanted to write a piece that could live beyond my playing it, that I could give to other clarinetists and have it make complete sense the moment they look at the score. I had practiced my parts really hard, but on the day of the premiere, I found myself improvising, because I simply enjoy doing that. And that made me think that this third cycle should have these little windows of improvisation where people can do something they like at that moment. It has many open-ended development sections, a kind of flexible form, so that the line is blurred between the improvised and the composed. You should be unsure of whether the performer is improvising or reading from the page. And that comes from my belief,” he adds, “that some of the best composed music is that which sounds spontaneous, as if it’s improvised, and some of the best improvisations are those that sound structured, with a strong motivic development idea behind them, as if they had been written out.”

Like a Bach toccata? “Bach is such a great model for how spontaneous incredibly well-written music can sound!” Azmeh says. Improvisation, he reflects, began to go out of fashion for performers at around the time that composers began writing out cadenzas, but is making a formidable return; most of those with whom he studied music, both in Damascus and in the U.S., are musicians who also improvise. For Azmeh, it’s a key factor of his work: “It makes it incredibly exciting to go on stage. Yes, there’s a score, but there’s a door that you have never opened. You don’t open that door until you actually go onstage, and then you see what happens. It’s such a thrill! I think it brings an urgency to a performance. It becomes more fragile, and I think it spills over. The moment you improvise,” he explains, “it affects how you play written music, and the other way around. When you are composing, you spend hours trying to choose which note you want to play at any given point. When you’re improvising, you have a split second to make that choice. But still, you’re making a choice. And when you realize that you have unlimited choices in both cases, everything is possible, right?”

Just as the borders between improvised and through-composed music become fluid in Azmeh’s hands, so Western and Arabic musical idioms tend to merge in his work. The microtonal maqams on which Arabic music is based are diverse and highly complex, and the matter of how to fuse them with Western instruments, especially those with a fixed tuning like a piano, has occupied a great deal of thought for a number of today’s music institutions.

For Azmeh, the process of bringing the disparate worlds together is an intuitive one. “Of course your ear is the ultimate judge,” he admits, “but you really need to know how these different worlds work. When I play or compose, I don’t say to myself, let me put some Arabic vocabulary here. Sometimes I feel a phrase needs a certain twist, sometimes it doesn’t—and there is always a way to realize it. You can use a piano as a percussive instrument. You can find different tricks to ac commodate a vocabulary. That’s actually one of the most exciting challenges—to make things work in spite of the instrument. For me, the instruments are not the goal. It’s what you want to say behind playing the instrument. Which is why I’ve always been interested in the longer road: how does that work with the piano part? There’s a standard way of doing it, where you simply avoid any notes that clash. But I prefer something more colorful, where the outcome is more than the sum of the parts.”

As a teenager in Damascus, Azmeh studied Western classical music but listened to a wide range of Arabic, Armenian, and Kurdish music in his everyday life. These days, he feels at home in jazz idioms and rock music as well as in symphonic and chamber music. And then there is the world of electronic music. The first part of Songs for Days to Come is without electronics, but the second takes sections of the first and mixes them with the live music in pre-recorded tracks. The influences he draws on are diverse, Azmeh explains, from Schubert and Schumann to the rhythms employed by Indian tabla players, to the folk music of Romania, to the rhythmic patterns of spoken languages. “Some people label that as a mix of the Western and the Eastern,” he says. “I really don’t think along those lines at all. For me the opposite is the case—the music is a continuum, and these are all different vocabularies that are part of the same whole.”