Ravinia 2023 Issue 1

previously held notion that harmony and mu- sic theory originated in ancient Greece (a dis- covery that one musicologist at the time said “revolutionized the whole concept of the ori- gin of Western music”). At the time that Mon- teverdi was living in Venice, the city was in active cultural exchange with the Syrian musi- cal capital of Aleppo. e guitar has a similar peripatetic history, with incarnations as the Arabic oud (a word whose own roots are in the Arabic for “wood”) and Spanish lute (the etymology for which also goes back to “oud”). ese cameos across time and space serve as an added link to the works Sulayman and Shibe have corded to- gether. e works don’t move in a linear fash- ion, but instead create ring a er ring around one another as they fold in on themselves. e th-century works for voice and lute by John Dowland ( – ) nd resonance in the ballad “Li Beirut” by legendary Leb- anese singer Fairuz (b. ) —which in turn derives its melody from a cornerstone of clas- sical guitar repertoire, Concierto de Aranjuez by Spanish composer Joaquín Rodrigo ( – ). It’s an equal and opposite reaction to Monteverdi’s borrowing of Middle Eastern modalities. Similar threads are found in Giulio Caccini Possible portrait of John Dowland connections between traditional Sephardic and Arab-Andalusian melodies and the early th-century work of Egyptian singer-com- poser (and Rodrigo contemporary) Sayed Darwish ( – ) . “I was trying to create something that had a unifying idiom to some extent,” says Shibe, who arranged and, with Sulayman, co-ar- ranged several of these melodies for tenor and guitar. He notes the ahistorical folk-mu- sic connections that he drew out between Dowland and Fairuz—an approach that, he admits wryly, would make his lute teacher pull out his hair in frustration, but one that he also sees as “not dogmatically adhering to something, but rather reframing it.” If Shibe keeps going back to folk elements in his ar- rangements, that too is a bit of home for him as it was the music that lled his childhood. e kind of music, he adds, that his father would o en sing. “It’s kind of inescapable,” says Shibe. “But in a way, that kind of bi- ographical element is quite pleasing.” ese biographical elements culminate and collide in the duo’s folkish arrangement of “Li Beirut.” For Shibe, it’s one of the most folkish pieces on the album. For Sulayman, it’s a re- minder of his own father (who died in the Sayed Darwish Fairuz summer of ). “To see how my parents never not wanted to be in Lebanon … a song like ‘Li Beirut’ becomes very heartbreaking to me,” he says. “You don’t know if you’re American or Lebanese, but her music at least centers your emotions around it.” A similar feeling is at the heart of Chaker’s “A Butter y in New York,” whose narrator is transport- ed to his childhood of chasing butter ies in Baghdad when one of the creatures lands on his shoulder, years and , miles later in New York. (“Why now?” the narrator won- ders. “Does it know that I no longer run a er butter ies?”) A bit of the two musicians’ shared biography also comes together on Broken Branches with Britten’s Songs from the Chinese , a work which also serves as a good example of Orientalism and that nebulous spectrum between good- and bad-faith cultural sampling. e fault doesn’t lie with the setting by Benjamin Brit- ten ( – ) . Written originally for tenor Peter Pears and guitarist Julian Bream, the cycle avoids gilded exoticism in favor of a sparsely luminous tone—somewhere be- tween John Dowland and Peter Grimes . e texts themselves, however, were way- wardly translated from Chinese by Arthur Waley, who was self-taught in the language and never ventured to east Asia. It’s the sort of armchair expertise that Said rallied against, but it also makes for a work worth exploring because of—rather than in spite of—its aws. Which is exactly what Sulayman and Shibe did when they rst met, years ago, as stu- dents at the Marlboro Music Festival assigned to work on the piece together. In studying both the beauty and the aws of the Britten cycle, the duo also found that their own lack of one set cultural home became an asset rather than a de cit. Despite a love for the music itself, they were able to hold it at a distance with a combina- tion of generosity and detachment: What does hearing a work that could be charitably described as “of its time” tell us about our own time? And how might that guide us towards Benjamin Britten by Kenneth Green (1944) the future? And how much of these chrono- logical elements are—much like the sub-sur- face root systems of trees—interlocked, inter- twined, and even inseparable? –Program notes © Olivia Giovetti, used with kind permission of Pentatone Music BV Jonathan Harvey (1939–2012) Henry Purcell (1659–1695) 7ăUX 7DNePLWVX ȁ RAVINIA MAGAZINE • JUNE 6 – JULY 2, 2023