The Neue Vocalsolisten rehearsing Madrigal d’Essilio. From L to R: Johanna Vargas, Susanne Leitz-Lorey, Truike van der Poel, Martin Nagy, Guillermo Anzorena and Andreas Fischer
Performance at Irtijal festival on April 3rd at the Ballroom Blitz in Beirut
For more info on the Irtijal festival 2022 program, please click here
My video Kingdom is part of a beautiful selection of works curated by Rayya Badran on Ashkal Alwan's open-access video streaming platform, aashra. Click below to view it, and here to view the selection.
Click here to listen to my latest composition Sediments performed by the Danapris String Quartet. It will be available on the New Music Show of the BBC Radio 3 for 24 days. Sediments begins at 1:37:25
My video For Voice And Forest (2016) will be screened at Modka Beiroet in Zutphen, Holland, part of “The Fabric of Memory” exhibition by Fatima Barznge. Opening on February 5 and 6.
Photo by Thibault De Schepper
Arsenal will be part of a new exhibition entitled How Will It End, opening at the Villa Empain (Brussels) on December 2nd.
The exhibition, designed by the Fondation Boghossian in co-production with the Pompidou Centre, offers an “unprecedented dialogue between its exceptional collections and pieces by Lebanese artists of all generations. Produced in recent years or following the tragic explosions of 4th August 2020, their works are tracing out possible paths to the future, between despair and gentleness, exiles and new anchorages.”
The exhibition, curated by Alicia Knock, curator for the Contemporary Art and Research department of the National Museum of Modern Art of the Centre Pompidou, and Louma Salamé, Director of the Boghossian Foundation, will last until Feb. 6th 2022.
To know more about the exhibition and the participating artists , please click here
To know more about Arsenal, please go to Installations and Experimental Works
Photo by Thibault De Schepper
Photo by Thibault De Schepper
Looking forward to talking about my work as a composer in Tamara Stepanyan’s beautiful documentary Village de Femmes. This event is sponsored by the SACEM, the Society of Authors, Composers and Publishers of Music and will take place at the Centre Pompidou in Paris on December 3rd.
To know more about the screening, please click here
On November 24th, an online seminar at the Hochschule Für Musik Und Tanz in Cologne was organized to the composition students of Prof. Brigitta Muntendorf. The topic, “Artistic Collaboration”, inspired me to review the different types of collaborations in dance, theater, film and contemporary art that I took part of over the years, by showing the students extracts from different projects and films. The seminar was part of NULLNULLEINS, a laboratory for interdisciplinary interaction, in which the artistic experiment and joint reflection with guests from the fields of composition, performance, choreography, direction, philosophy and sociology, among others, are at the center.
For more information on NULLNULLEINS, please click here (in German)
“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
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
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 (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 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:
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 👇🏻⬇️
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.
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.
© musikprotokoll
For more info about the musikprotokoll im steirischen herbst festival, please click here
