Dániel Péter Biró: Al Ken Kara

»In this project I can combine the things I most like doing: reading the Torah and composing«, Dániel Péter Biró says of Mediterranean Voices; in fact, this engagement with Jewish liturgy and culture informs many of his works.
Dániel Péter Biró is the only one among the twelve composers who does not originate from the Mediterranean. His roots are in the Jewish diaspora; born to Hungarian/American parents, he grew up in a multilingual, multicultural environment and has lived in the most diverse countries–in Romania, the USA, Hungary, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Israel, and now Canada. For him, interculturality–»a fractured hybrid culture«–is the normal condition.
The topic chosen by Biró for Al Ken Kara (»Therefore One Calls Her Name«) is the myth of the Tower of Babel, about a formerly unified oral culture that fell apart over time.
He sees his composition as an »investigation of the hermeneutical relationships between the place of the original historical event, the religious myth and the interpretation of this myth throughout history until modernity.
«The composition begins with singing in an imaginary »primal language« whose phonetic structure results in overtones that form the piece’s harmonic framework. At the same time, different foreign languages enter the composition: each singer goes on a linguistic »journey« either into the countries of the Mediterranean or »outside«–to East Asia, Central Africa and elsewhere.
‘My trip to Tunisia last November [with the film team of Mediterranean Voices] and my encounter with the Jewish and Islamic recitation traditions there inspired the tonal structure of the composition. Djerba is very important in Jewish history, as it’s the oldest Jewish community in the diaspora, having been continuously inhabited for 2,500 years. In this context, the relationship between Islam and Judaism gains a special meaning.’
Through fragmentation, deconstruction and omission, a language of musical abstraction develops from the recited texts in the course of the piece. In this context the Torah text becomes not only a riddle for the piece, but also an archaeological excavation, »like the ruins of history being revealed, deciphered, explained and made to sound. The text on the disaster of misunderstanding can thus be also be read in musical terms as the utopian origin of linguistic and religion diversity.« (D.P.B.)