Rattlesnake Creek in Missoula, Montana. A photo that looks like a painting, the texture of the water making brushstrokes somehow… not at all intentional on my part. I love the colors of the Rattlesnake’s rocks, and wanted to keep them with me.
Yes, the sky is falling, and also creative work is rising.
Creative, heart-based truth is leading the way I wish to follow. The performance of Les Arrivants in concert with the Glacier Symphony orchestra was a good example, a nourishing blast of brilliance that I’ve been cherishing and revisiting over the last month.
It’s hard to speak about the music, because it’s such a qualitative experience, so emotionally connected. Of course I have a Rilke quote for this. In a letter responding to someone asking about the influence of another poet on himself, Rilke says the influence is “dissolved in memory and experience… interwoven with it,” and that it mainly “consists in developing one’s capacity for wonder and for work and in compelling one back to nature.” That’s how art works: you can’t point at anything specific and say it did this to me, but it does something. It affirms something you already knew…. it motivates your own work.
Birch with pink inner bark and cool fungus, outside Kalispell, Montana
A bird’s nest with blue tarp strands and bits of my husband’s hair, which I cut out in the driveway and always hoped the birds would make use of it. This was in an Ocean Spray bush, found in winter - I don’t know whose nest it was.
Those of us who watch Les Arrivants perform live tend to overuse the word “amazing.” I say it myself, and I hear other audience members as they approach the musicians afterward or try to express their reactions. I think it’s because this group takes us somewhere new and unexpected, outside of any ready vocabulary we might have. Part of the mind is still chewing on the experience long after it’s over, and in the moment of greeting them it’s still just new and delightful and moving, and we haven’t had time to understand how we’ve been touched. It’s a powerful enough experience that it requires a time of processing, metabolizing new input that goes way beyond any form of mere entertainment or pleasure.
The first time I saw them, all this was true, and they were alone as a trio, in a relatively small venue. This time they collaborated with a symphony orchestra, playing five works in a row that were newly orchestrated, three of them world premieres of original compositions by each of the three musicians. It was like dwelling in a series of multidimensional worlds called up by these unique minds, one after another. Unbelievable.
Low tide on the Salish Sea.
Although they’ve coordinated with an entire symphony and have expanded the sound and texture and grandeur of each orchestrated piece, they retain the sense of intimate communication and responsiveness among themselves as a trio. Even with a full orchestra behind them, the three play for each other and include the audience in the warm-hearted way that defines their music. The more you know their music, the more you appreciate their sense of play and conversation, the way they explore and support each other.
The introduction to Bagelissimo, the Mile-End Tango, was a great example of this. Abdul-Wahab Kayyali and Amichai Ben Shalev indulged in a languid, almost teasing exploration, tickling and caressing all sorts of possibilities before giving the orchestra the gratification of the bright tango beat (which the orchestra clearly loved playing.) Ben, having done the orchestral arrangements for the five pieces being premiered, seemed to be on a justified high, judging by the look on his face as he sat surrounded by the sounds he had summoned from the instruments, and in his own solo work & virtuoso treatment of the bandaneon.
Wanting to say something about improvisation and weaving, as I attempt to learn double weave, copying motifs from Shahsevan tribal weavings (nomadic Iran). As with a musician’s skill, a weaver’s increased familiarity with a technique and the design possibilities gives more opportunity to improvise and be inventive within the format. I have my hand in too many different weaving techniques to master any one, probably, but I’m working on gaining some fluency in the design languages and the structural rules that inform them. Watch this space for more on weaving & improvisation.
I can’t remember much about the oud solos, except that I wanted them to go on forever. I’ve already been expressive about how much this musician’s work moves and inspires me, and this performance was further confirmation. The emotional intensity of the concert was front-loaded, since the first piece was played by Les Arrivants without orchestra, and the next piece was Shaymaa’s Dance, Abdul-Wahab Kayyali’s piece composed upon the death of Palestinian poet & academic Refaat Alareer’s eldest daughter, months after his own death. The music envisions the two of them dancing at her wedding.
The composition is an imaginary celebration of the simple continuation of life that will never happen for these two, who along with other members of their family, were killed in separate, targeted Israeli airstrikes in Gaza. The grief and infinite pain of this vision permeate the lilting melody and sweetness of this classic, lyrically moving waltz. (A brief excerpt is in the Glacier Symphony link above.)
This image is from the article linked above, from a protest in Cologne, Germany soon after Alareer’s death.
Unfortunately, the world premiere of this work was accompanied by a compromise of its power. Whoever finalized the program for the Glacier Symphony chose to edit the artist’s statement, without consulting or involving the artist/composer. As a result, the description of Shaymaa’s Dance was scrubbed of any reference to Palestine, Gaza, airstrikes, genocide, or even the violent and targeted death of these two individuals. While Refaat Alareer’s name is mentioned, the situation is glossed as “loss,” and thus impossible to interpret unless you already know who he is.
The composition and premiere of this piece is what motivated me to instantly seek tickets, bring my family to the concert, and tell others. To have it sanitized in the interest of genocide-denialist sensitivities seems counter to the purpose of playing it, and of inviting Les Arrivants to Kalispell. Fortunately, the music speaks for itself, and I know that Kayyali and Les Arrivants will have more occasions to highlight this work and reach ever wider audiences with their brilliance, now that they have taken this first step into orchestral collaboration.
I’ve been working with Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus lately, and the phrase that keeps cycling through my mind with regard to this music is from the final sonnet of Part 1, which talks about Orpheus’s dismemberment at the hands of the raging Maenads. The German is “aus den Zerstörenden stieg dein erbauendes Spiel”: From among those who would destroy you, your uplifting (edifying) play arose. The word Spiel, or play, is the playing of the instrument, and you could say ‘tune’ or ‘song’, but ‘play’ evokes the improvisation that is so integral to the work of these musicians. Each of them is raising something new and edifying each time they play. The premiered compositions of this concert were ‘erbauendes Spiel’ on a grand scale, but every performance involves this uplifting play, and among the forces of destruction that currently surround us, lifting up an edifying song feels like a sacred calling.
The tatreez-supporting jacket also had its debut at this performance. No photos allowed in the theater, but here’s Abdul-Wahab Kayyali wearing it, speaking with admirers from the audience after the show with Amichai Ben Shalev.
On the topic of censoring Palestinian voices, the response of universities is getting me down… (eta: understatement, and Rebecca Solnit says it way better than I can here. Read, follow, act on her encouragement.)
Despite their evident financial emphasis and power games, all of which was more than obvious to me as an Ivy League undergraduate thirty years ago, part of me still wants the university to be a bastion of clear thinking, a safe place for dangerous intellectual experiments and risky conversations. It must be the part of me that never gave up the dream that being a serious student and an intelligent person was the way to move forward, to achieve lofty aspirations and enhance the world.
I was raised with this implicit ideal: the university was the place to go to exchange thought, to further ideas and creative growth. There was no doubt in my mind about this. And of course, this led to repeated disappointment. I perceived things clearly enough to dissuade me from pursuing academia as a professional. And yet, I see now in my current bafflement, there was lingering faith somewhere in my mind, that universities were the stage where things could happen that would expand and change our society.
And I don’t know why I feel closer to universities, or expect more of them, except that academia is where you’d typically belong if your primary activities are writing, thinking, and comparative study. Doing these things has made me feel close to academia and pay attention to how it works, even though it’s never been my job. My independent study of poetry and textile research also keeps me in the scholarly milieu, so it just feels like the portion of society where I should be most at home, although I haven’t associated with a US university in decades, really.
To see the universities motivating against their own students and faculty, in the service of ideologues, deflates the residual hope. It’s not all universities, of course, but I’m not going to dig through the newsfeeds pulling out names of who is punishing, expelling, and allowing doxxing of pro-Palestinian activists and who is being more supportive of freedom of thought and expression. At the moment Columbia is in the spotlight for the former, and what matters is the general trend.
Here’s a thoughtful conversation about it, at least. And here is a written statement from Mahmoud Khalil, from his unlawful detention, including the sentence, “I have always believed that my duty is not only to liberate myself from the oppressor, but also to liberate my oppressors from their hatred and fear.”
Clouds, from where I live, telling me about ‘erbauendes Spiel.’
May we keep expanding our minds and hearts, and keep developing the skill and fluency to allow our improvisations to rise up and edify one another.
