Connecting Hearts – The Joy of Making Music Together

As a companion piece to Victoria’s O Vos Omnes, Esmail uses the beautiful text from The Gift by the 14C Persian poet Hafiz. Reena says, “The text is asking, simply, to be seen in a moment of sorrow — to be beheld through suffering and darkness. And Hafiz’s text responds in such a beautiful way — it moves through that darkness and begins to let those very first slivers of light in. This piece is about that first moment of trust, of softening. About the most inward moments of the human experience, of realizing that ‘breakthroughs’ often don’t have the hard edge, the burst of energy that the word implies, but that they can be about finding tender, warm, deeply resonant spaces within ourselves as well.”

When
The violin
Can forgive the past

It starts singing.

When the violin can stop worrying
About the future

You will become
Such a drunk laughing nuisance

That God
Will then lean down
And start combing you into
Her
Hair.

When the violin can forgive
Every wound caused by
Others

The heart starts
Singing.

— Hafiz, The Gift (tr. Daniel Ladinsky)

“She Will Transform You is centered around a beautiful poem by Indian-American author Neelanjana Banerjee. She speaks about the beautiful relationship of an immigrant and her child to their country of origin, and the significant role a child from both cultures has in bridging the divide between them. The piece moves in and out of a Hindustani raga called Rageshree — which has such a lush resonance about it, and is also harmonically grounded in an unusual way (with the 4th instead of the more common 5th, which makes our ear feel like it’s never quite ‘home’) – so it has both a sense of belonging and distance. It’s those two feelings – of belonging and distance – and the journey between them, that I wanted to explore in this work.”

“Nadiya means ‘rivers’ in Hindi. In this work, I imagine two different streams intersecting — pushing and pulling against one another, tripping over each other, flowing into each other to create mellifluous, cascading melodies. The piece is a composite of two Hindustani raags: Jog and Vachaspati — both have a light and a dark side, and they intermingle to create a luminous surface texture that twists and turns as it finds new points of resonance.

In my experience, Hindustani melody has a much more horizontal feel about it than Western melody does. Hindustani musicians are almost always playing off an explicit percussion instrument, so their job is not to purvey the beat, but rather to provide a counterpoint to it. In this case, the two instruments play off one another. The phrases should feel like they interrupt one another, and that they overlap and intersect with the intuition of a deeply engaged conversation, rather than aligning specifically as they are written.

This piece requires a great deal of trust. It’s about how far you can push and pull the phrases with your partner. Often, different interpretations vary in length by 2-3 minutes — as they should. The piece is designed to be flexible and malleable as you explore a relationship that is constantly in flux.”

Esmail says, “I wrote TaReKiTa as a gift for a choir called Urban Voices Project. They are a choir of people who are currently or have recently experienced homelessness on Skid Row in Los Angeles. They are so dear to me, and one day I just decided to teach them about Indian rhythm. They enjoyed the lesson so much that I wanted to write them a piece that would use what I had taught them. The result was TaReKiTa – I literally wrote it in an hour, just in a single moment of inspiration, and recorded myself singing all the parts for them to learn. It has since become a staple of their repertoire, but it’s also been sung by so many choirs around the world. There is just something about the piece, perhaps borne out of my love for this choir, that just seems to resonate with people.

Practically speaking, this piece is based on sounds the Indian drum, the tabla, makes, called “bols” — they are onomatopoeic sounds that imitate the sound of the drum. The result is something like a scat would be in jazz – ecstatic, energetic, rhythmic music that feels good on the tongue.”

Esmail is pictured below working with members of Urban Voices Project.