Music and Exile

Proposed by Klarafestival – Brussels, Belgium

Composition for string quartet and tape.

When people travel, for whatever reason, their music travels with them. With the title ‘Music & Exile’, MusMA 2017 takes a look at the musical consequences of exile, migration, refuge, diasporas, asylum and displacement.

Music is often the most vivid reminder of home and probably the last thing to be forgotten. When composers migrate, they use their music to enter into a dialogue with a new audience. Nowhere in the world does one-sided ‘pure’ music or culture exist. It is always a matter of inter- and transcultural processes and exchanges. It is precisely this dynamic that brings cultures to life and music contributes to its beating heart. How do the roots of a composer influence the culture and music of the host country? What remains of the original cultural context? And what if composer returns from exile, back to his or her home country?

We have selected the poem “The violins” of the Palestinian Poet Mahmoud Darwish as a point of departure. Every new piece should take this poem as a source of inspiration, should reflect on it. This can be literally or less clear. Mahmoud Darkish one of the most important voices in the Arabic poetry world.

The violins
The violins cry with the gypsies going to Andalusia
The violins cry over the Arabs leaving Andalusia
The violins cry for a lost time that won’t return
The violins cry for a lost homeland that might return
The violins burn forests in that far, far darkness
The violins bloody the horizon and smells my blood in the vein
The violins cry with the gypsies going to Andalusia
The violins cry over the Arabs leaving Andalusia

The violins are a horse on a string of delusion and water
The violins are a field of wild lavender that gets far and doesn’t draw near
The violins are a beast, tortured by the nail of a woman that touched it and went away
The violins are an army, building a cemetery from granite and music
The violins are the chaos of hearts gone mad in the wind in the foot of a dancer
The violins are flocks of bird, fleeing an incomplete flag
The violins are the complaint of the wrinkled silk in the night of a lover
The violins are the sound of the faraway wine and its previous desire
The violins sing here and there for revenge against me
The violins search for me everywhere to kill me
The violins cry for the Arabs leaving Andalusia
The violins cry with gypsies going to Andalusia

(Translated from Arabic by Ali Harb)