Massachusetts, U.S. – New Commissions Workshop
September 7-15, 2008Secluded Tanglewood Music Center was an idyllic retreat for gathering Silk Road Ensemble musicians and composers to exchange techniques and develop new music. The Ensemble made the most of this rare weeklong immersion.
Composers Gabriela Lena Frank and Rabih Abou-Khalil, whose Ritmos Anchinos and Arabian Waltz the Silk Road Ensemble recently toured, joined Ensemble composers Sandeep Das and Siamak Aghaei and arranger Colin Jacobsen. Though unable to travel to Tanglewood, Italian composer Giovanni Sollima communicated with Ensemble members prior to and throughout the week. The works of these six composers and arrangers offer a multitude of voices, echoes and overtones ranging from Peru and Jewish Eastern Europe, to Lebanon and Germany, to Sicily, Iran, India and the United States.
To culminate the week of workshops, the Silk Road Project opened the final rehearsal to the public at no charge. Composers and performers discussed the collaborative process.
Gabriela Lena Frank jumped at the chance to hone compositional skills with the pipa and a range of percussion instruments. As Ensemble members demonstrated three examples of her week’s work, playing instruments such as the marimba in unfamiliar ways, Frank challenged the audience to determine what was composed and what spontaneous. “Most of the time there aren’t opportunities to revise or pick up new skills,” she said. “To have eight whole days to do nothing but experiment is like a treasure to me.”
Giovanni Sollima’s The Taranta Project unites Western classical, jazz, rock and Mediterranean influences. By turns somber and playful, hushed and agitated, the piece’s six movements employ some uncommon techniques such as vocalized and body rhythm (Shane Shanahan struck his legs, chest and cheeks to percussive effect) and scordatura (Eric Jacobsen tuned his cello’s C-string one octave low to produce “power chords.”)
Having grown up in Beirut, Lebanon, Rabih Abou-Khalil later studied Western classical music in Germany and describes himself as “a child of both worlds.” His new piece My Wife’s Nightie (or The Benevolent) is concerned with the sensual and emotional qualities of rhythm and melody.
Where the Wind Will Take Us resulted from close collaboration between Siamak Aghaei and Colin Jacobsen. In this lament written in two dastgahs, or modes—one linear, from ancient Greece, the other particular to Aghaei’s village in southern Iran, both thousands of years old—Aghaei’s singing accompanies the santur, echoed by the ethereal shakuhachi.
Sandeep Das’s Mohini revisits a work begun with the Ensemble several years ago. Introducing the piece, Das gestured to his fellow musicians. “For someone like me from India who had never even seen these instruments before,” he said, “to wind up writing music for them—that’s what this Project is about.”
Commissioning new music is vital to the Silk Road Project. Not only is it necessary to continually create new works for the Ensemble’s unique combinations of instruments, but the workshop process also allows time for lasting relationships between musicians to emerge, contributing to a continuum of ongoing development. The Silk Road Project hopes to share these new works with audiences during its 10th-anniversary season from 2008-2010.
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