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Musikprotokoll 2021

“Nul n’a jamais écrit ou peint, sculpté, modelé, construit, inventé, que pour sortir en fait de l’enfer.” Nobody ever wrote or painted, sculpted, modeled, built, invented, for any reason other than to exit from hell, says Antonin Artaud. Writing music may be the only way to stay “sane” when everything around is falling apart.

Sediments is the title of the string quartet I wrote for Musikprotokoll festival 2021 in Graz, Austria, curated by Susanna Niedermayr and Rainer Elstner. The composition will have its premiere on October 8, 2021 performed by the acclaimed Danapris String Quartet from Ukraine.

For more info about the festival, please click here

12 Districts - Collaboration with Ensemble Modern

The Ensemble Modern has devised a music program that is part of the This Is Not Lebanon festival, providing commissions for both compositions and productions.

My performance entitled 12 Districts is part of this program curated by Jaan Bossier, Uwe Dierksen and Christian Hommel (Ensemble Modern). The concerts are scheduled on September 11th 2021 at the Frankfurt Lab and on September 12th at the Amphitheater in Hanau.

For more info about the This Is Not Lebanon Festival, please click here

Madrigal d'Essilio performances

On August 6th, the award winning vocal ensemble Neue Vocalsolisten will perform Madrigal d’Essilio, my composition for 6 voices at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin. The piece is part of the Voice Affairs concert bringing together musicians into contemporary composition, electronic music, sound art, improvisation and avant-pop.

The concert will open the Festival of Contemporary Music taking place from August 6th until August 8th, 2021.

On August 9th, the concert will be performed at the music festival in Darmstadt, at the Sporthalle Mornewegschule. The performance will be broadcast live.

For more info about the festival in Berlin, please click here

For more info about the festival in Darmstadt, please click here

Arsenal at Studio La Città

Arsenal (2017), my disassembled piano installation will be on display at Studio la Città, Verona until September 25th, 2021. The installation is part of a group show entitled I am one acquainted with the night, curated by Marc Mouarkech in collaboration with Galerie Tanit. The title of the exhibition is from a poem by Robert Frost declaring familiarity with darkness.

Fractal

Fractal is a composition which sounds entirely consist of recordings made with metallic, plastic, wooden tools and paper on the internal metal bridge of Beirut Art Center. This new piece is part of a micro commission entitled The Bridge Cuts Ever So Close To My Balcony.

The passageway was used as an instrument to channel, reflect, embody, conjure, pulsate, vibrate, record, reanimate and repatriate “our little museified artefact, to resuscitate it with the echoes and vantage points of these last seemingly endless couple of years” (from the curatorial text of BAC).

This micro-commission was made with the support of 21dB.

To listen to the entire track, click on my soundcloud link:

https://soundcloud.com/czaven/fractal3

Listening with Reem Shadid

I never thought I could pull off a full on interview in Arabic, but I did. Here’s a link to a fun conversation I had with Reem in her show on Radio Alhara about my work on dissecting sound, memory and music. Check it out 👇🏻⬇️

Eclat Festival for New Music 2021

Initiated by Christine Fischer, director of Musik der Jahrhunderte/festival ECLAT in Stuttgart, and of the vocal group Neue Vocalsolisten, along with the Ultima Festival in Oslo, the “Voice Affairs” project will finally start taking shape with online rehearsals.

The festival will include my composition for 6 voices entitled Madrigal d’essilio (Madrigal Of Exile), that I wrote during covid lock down, Lebanese economical collapse and post August 4 explosion of the Beirut port. The composition is inspired by the elements related to astronomy in Dante’s Divine Comedy, and Sayat Nova’s poem, Tamam Ashkhar (The Whole World).

Dante and Sayat Nova were both timeless poets addressing human nature while in exile. They both wrote and narrated their stories in vernacular: Dante in Tuscan Italian, Sayat Nova in Tbilisi Armenian.

While Dante Alighieri is well known in the west, Sayat Nova is not. An Armenian ashough, or troubadour, Sayat Nova was born in Georgia in the 18th century, at a time when nation states did not exist. He traveled the Caucasus, speaking fluent Eastern Armenian, Azeri, Georgian, Persian, and some Arabic. His works are mostly secular and full of romantic expressionism.

Both writers were in exile, literally as well as figuratively, finding home in their works, or in love.

Musikprotokoll im steirischen herbst 2019

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Getting ready for Graz, Austria and the Musikprotokoll 2019 edition. I’ll take part in a discussion on critical music in ARTikulationen organized by Deniz Peters, head of the Artistic Doctoral School of the University of Music and Performing Arts in cooperation with musikprotokoll. In addition to the discussion, my piece for trombone and piano entitled Doris’s Drone will be performed for the first time by Studio Dan, part of the Augmented Reality project.

Doris’s Drone is inspired by the song Que Sera, Sera (Whatever Will Be, Will Be) by Jay Livingston and Ray Evans and sang by Doris Day in Alfred Hitchcock’s drama “The Man Who Knew Too Much” (1956). The lyrics of the song describe the journey of a little girl from childhood to adulthood, asking at each step “What will I be?” followed by an identical cheerful refrain: “What will be, will be.”

The original song is a waltz in C Major, reflecting the illusory spirit of hopefulness following World War II as concocted in the films of the era. Its melody and rhythm are joyful, far from the anxieties of the Cold War or wars of independence gripping the Third World. A confident, secure, happy fate is the promise to all the children who consume Hollywood in the 1950s.

Doris’s Drone is a parody in the form of a miniature composition of the song, 60 years after its release. It is a reinterpretation that takes neither the hopeful content seriously nor itself, in an age where optimistic rhetoric seems more and more of a distant hollow din.

For more info about the musikprotokoll im steirischen herbst festival, please click here

Lecture at the L.A.U. Byblos | March 5th 2019

For more infos, please click here

Atlas Workshops in Marrakesh | Dec 3rd 2018

Thrilled to have participated in the Atlas Workshops, part of the 17th edition of the Marrakesh International Film Festival, where the process of composing music for films was put forward.

I presented 4 different extracts from films I worked on showing the different ways to approach film scoring, depending on each story. The workshops’ aim was to assist emerging regional directors who are currently preparing their first, second, or third feature-length narrative or documentary film, and encourage them to think ahead about the musical universe of their story.

*The Last Man, feature film by Ghassan Salhab (2005)*

*Tramontane, feature film by Vatche Boulghourjian (2016)*

*Beirut Hold’em, feature film by Michel Kammoun (2019)*

*Village de Femmes, feature documentary by Tamara Stepanyan (2019)*

Recording music in Armenia

The experience of recording a soundtrack for Tamara Stepanyan’s upcoming feature documentary Village de Femmes at the Maison De La Radio in Yerevan, Armenia was quite unique. The establishment built during Soviet era has been renovated, and the basement holds an incredible archive of historical recordings from the beginning of the century, as well as analog Studer reel to reel vintage players. To top it all, Samvel (the sound engineer) has perfect pitch and writes for the orchestra, and the piano I recorded on was an incredible bright red grand Blüthner.

This is my third collaboration with Tamara, and the second one with her mother, the incredible Nariné Harutyunyan on cello.

A new soundtrack finalized

Just finalized the soundtrack for Michel Kammoun’s upcoming feature film Beirut Hold’em at Jawad Chaaban One Hertz Studio in Beirut. The score includes strings, percussions, kanoun, and a vintage Fender Rhodes that we were lucky to find at Jawad’s studio.

Human moments in world war III at the Tanit Gallery

8 February 2018 - 5 April 2018

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Inspired by the Sci-Fi short story by Don DeLillo, my 2 channel sound and video installation Human Moments in World War III (2018) is on display at the Tanit Gallery, part of the Féminités Plurielles collective exhibition.

Video stills from the 8 min “Human Moments In World War III”

Perpetuum Mobile at the Maxxi Museum in Rome

15 November 2017 - 20 May 2018

My 12 channel installation, Perpetuum Mobile is part of the Sounding The Neighbors exhibition that opened at the amazing Maxxi Museum, designed by Zaha Hadid, in Rome. The exhibition is curated by Hou Hanru and Giulia Ferracci and will last until May 2018.

The exhibition that includes 36 artists, architects, filmmakers, musicians, dancers, researchers and activists from Beirut is described as the "story of a city, a laboratory of resistance, artistic innovation and hope seen through over 100 works".

This new edition of Perpetuum Mobile is installed on the plaza of the museum and is sponsored by Bose.

To learn more about the exhibition, please click here

Perpetuum Mobile in Beit Beirut

5 - 15 November 2017

The Arab Fund for Arts and Culture- AFAC celebrates its 10th anniversary with a two-week long program that includes exhibitions and screenings. I'm happy that Perpetuum Mobile, funded by AFAC in 2014 is part of the selected works on display!

The 12 channel installation will be exhibited in Beit Beirut, located on the former "green line": Previously known as the Yellow House, Beit Beirut was a forward control post and sniper base during the civil war. It is now restored and turned into a museum.

To learn more about the AFAC exhibitions and screenings, please click here
To learn more about Beit Beirut, please click here