Two Pieces Fuse Arab and Western Music
December 3, 2015 | by David Patrick Stearns
The music isn’t likely to sound like anything most Americans have heard: The polarities between Arab and Western music, both obvious and subtle, are such that their fusion in this Saturday’s concert, Words Adorned: Andalusian Poetry and Music, at Bryn Mawr College might seem impossible. Then it becomes perfectly doable.
“It’s supposed to blend the sounds of this pluralistic, cosmopolitan city,” said Hanna Khoury, music director of Al-Bustan Seeds of Culture Music Program, which instigated the year-in-the-planning concert with the Crossing choir in works by two Syrian-born composers.
The commissions would seem to be a conscious East-West meeting of the minds, but they’re more a matter of tapping what is already out there but perhaps hasn’t been asked for. Works featured on Abou-afach’s website gravitate toward one musical camp or the other, the Arab works sounding Arab, indeed, and the forays into American jazz sounding authentically American. That doesn’t mean the middle ground represented by works on the Words Adorned concert were a stretch for them.
CLICK HERE to read full interview.
