Loading ...A young star composer brings global perspective to DSO
Mark Stryker,
Detroit Free Press
This week the Detroit Symphony Orchestra gives the world premiere of a major cello concerto written by an Arab-American composer of Emirati and Palestinian descent, performed by an Israeli-born American cellist in a synagogue, in a metro area with the highest percentage of Arab Americans in the country.
And no one is more thrilled by the symbolism of music reaching across the divides of culture, ethnicity and religion than the gifted, politically alert 30-year-old composer at the center of it all.
“Music is for me and so many other people, going all the way back to Beethoven and even further, is the ideal way of creating community,” said Mohammed Fairouz, speaking by phone from New York.
“Traditionally, it doesn’t matter what culture you come from, whether you’re in the Liwa desert or in New York City or Vienna, music has always been about live, community experiences. It’s about bringing people together, and people do have this incredible need to come together. It’s been answered in all sorts of ways. Music is one. Prayer is another.”
Fairouz, one of the most talked about and prolific composers of his generation, represents a kind of sweeping aesthetic and global perspective that feels very much of the moment both inside and outside the concert hall. Cross-cultural currents run deep in his art, which seamlessly folds the vocalized melodic inflections, pungent scales and rhapsodic rhythms of Middle Eastern music into an authoritative and seemingly encyclopedic command of the forms and techniques of classical music.
Titled “Desert Sorrows,” the cello concerto is a 30-minute work scored for amplified cello and large orchestra. According to the program notes and interviews, the piece takes its inspiration from the four main angels shared by Christianity, Judaism and Islam. The solo cello inhabits these varying spirits, from Azrael, the angel of death, to Gabriel, messenger of revelation. The music ranges from the apocalyptic to the cantorial. Fairouz, as he often does, draws on improvisatory, speech-like melodies simmered in the evocative, bent-pitch sound world of the maqam, the Arabic system of melodic modes.
“He’s very skillful,” said cello soloist Maya Beiser. “He’s got a great talent for melody, a great talent for orchestration and form. What’s unique is he brings the Middle Eastern elements but incorporates those within classical-romantic tradition. His music is very 19th Century in many ways. His innovations are not in rethinking forms, but in the music itself and incorporating these elements so organically.”
The concerto grew out of Fairouz’s friendship and collaborations with Beiser, a musician with a well-known taste for adventure and genre-hopping. As the idea took shape, Beiser brought into the loop former DSO board chairman Peter Cummings. The pair met a number of years ago when Cummings was moonlighting as host of a radio program on SiriusXM Satellite Radio that explored links between classical music and popular culture. Cummings and Beiser took the project to DSO music director Leonard Slatkin, who embraced the idea. Cummings and his wife, Julie, funded the commission.
Premiering the work at Congregation Shaarey Zedek in Southfield entered the equation when it became clear that the scheduling coincided with dates for the DSO’s neighborhood series, which sends the orchestra to locales around metro Detroit. Slatkin jumped at the opportunity to premiere the piece at the synagogue as a way of building a bridge between Arab and Jewish cultures. “Music transcends any boundaries that we might see in society,” said the conductor, who is Jewish. “We can understand more about another culture through the music than we can through rhetoric.”
Still, no one could have predicted more than year ago when the project was coming together that the concerts would arrive as a wave of anti-Muslim sentiment — many would say bigotry — has risen to a fever pitch in American politics. The context adds an extra jolt of social relevance to the performances.
Yet, from the perspective of Devon Akmon, director of the Arab American National Museum, the most compelling aspect of the premiere is that it will amplify the voice of an original young Arab-American composer, working in a nontraditional style that will challenge perceptions about what music by Arab Americans can or should sound like.
“For us at the museum, philosophically we’ve been trying to move Arab-American art forms from the margins to the mainstream,” Akmon said. “In this instance, you have this immense young talent, and many in this region are completely unaware of him.”
After Thursday’s premiere, the program shifts to the Macomb Center for the Performing Arts in Clinton Township on Friday and concludes Saturday at the orchestra’s regular home at Orchestra Hall in Detroit. A public conversation with Fairouz, Beiser and Slatkin is also scheduled for Wednesday at the synagogue.
Born a New Yorker
Fairouz arrives in Detroit just as his reputation is ascending to another plane of visibility. His DSO commission represents an important step up the ladder of prestige, and it comes just in front of the release of “Follow, Poet” (Deutsche Grammophon). Fairouz becomes the youngest composer ever to be feted with a recording of entirely his own works on the landmark classical label. The CD includes vocal music on texts by poets W.H. Auden and Seamus Heaney, as well as the composer’s 2013 ballet score on the life of Anwar Sadat, the former Egyptian president who brokered peace with Israel before his assassination in 1981.
Fairouz grew up mainly in New York (where he was born), London and Dubai, but he traveled widely and he considers his identity fluid. His parents were physicians and medical diplomats. Fairouz was drawn to music and composing early, and he kept his ears open to everything he heard, from Arab music to opera to the vernacular styles that came blasting out of taxi cabs.
“There is this ancient Arab saying that a person who travels extensively cannot remain ignorant,” said Fairouz. “It’s like the Prophet saying to his followers, ‘Seek knowledge, no matter how far it is you have to travel, even if you have to go to China.’ ”
Fairouz studied at Curtis Institute in Philadelphia and the New England Conservatory, and his principal teachers have included György Ligeti, Gunther Schuller and Richard Danielpour. Fairouz has an enormous catalog for a composer so young. His website lists about 100 works, including four symphonies, an opera, ballet, large-scale vocal scores, song cycles and a dazzling array of solo and instrumental works.
His music has been performed by, among others, the Borromeo String Quartet, the Imani Winds, clarinetist David Krakauer, the Knights Chamber Orchestra, violinist Rachel Barton Pine, mezzo-soprano Kate Lindsey, Ensemble LPR and Pittsburgh Opera.
Changing the world
Fairouz is a thoughtful conversationalist. He resists reductive analysis and is always on the lookout for the connective tissue between aesthetics, cultures, history, art and life. He doesn’t like the term “fusion” for his music because it seems to suggest a kind of superficial pastiche; the synthesis of influences he aims for happens on far deeper, intuitive and perhaps elusive frequencies.
“I see it all as a continuum,” he said. “I don’t see it as one culture over here and that one over there. In my notes about the concerto, I quote Prince Saud Al-Faisal, who said, ‘Civilizations are not competing products in the marketplace.’ They’re not boxed off from one another. It’s not like here’s the European canon and it has its own narrative completely walled off from everything else. That’s how it’s taught, but it’s wrong. … The world is much more messier than that.”
The subject of politics and art brings forth similar complexities. Fairouz believes that all art is political and that even an artist who sets out to create apolitical art is making a politically motivated choice. It’s also naive to think that anyone can see a work of art and remove their own experience from the equation, he said.
At the same time, however, Fairouz hates the idea of “political art” in the sense of work that uses a particular point of view as an ideological hammer to bludgeon an audience. “Art has to be far more layered than that,” he said.
In the end, Fairouz remains deeply committed to the idea that music can help bring people together, change perceptions and, literally, change the world. “I don’t think that it can,” he said. “I know that it is.”
Fairouz began to list examples, among them the Abu Dhabi Festival, a long-running celebration of art and culture that brings musicians and performers together from both the East and West and has grown into one of the premier events of its kind in the world. Fairouz also trumpeted the remarkable West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, founded by the Jewish conductor Daniel Barenboim and the late Palestinian literary scholar Edward Said, which brings together young Israeli and Arab musicians.
“It’s not reckless idealism,” Fairouz said. “We’ve seen people changed forever by such initiatives. … They don’t change governments. It’s not on the presidential level or the ambassador level. It’s people coming together without any political expectation, talking about music, talking about poetry, sharing their experiences. When people make face time with each other, because we’re a tribal species, meaningful peace starts to happen.”
Source: www.freep.com