Zad Moultaka: Hummus

Essentially, Zad Moultaka is always going somewhere. He spends his time between Beirut, where his family lives, and Paris, his working base, on concert tours or in personal Mediterranean places of longing in Italy or Southern France. Since choosing the profession of composer from several possible artistic paths 20 years ago, he has reflected intensely on how, if at all, elements of Arab music can be integrated into Western art music. In the meantime he has developed an artful mastery thereof, and he combines microtonal sonority and instrumental sensuality with energy and dramaturgical stringency (recently heard here in a concert by the ensemble L’Instant Donnée as part of our series). And now he is surprising us–and himself even more–with an entirely different work that came about under the impression of Mediterranean Voices and the visit to Beirut by the bass of the Neue Vocalsolisten. Hummus is the artistic processing of this trip, which also took Zad Moultaka back to his past and the war experiences of his youth–a direct, charged, almost ritual work, a miniature drama between deliberate comedy and blackest cynicism.
»This project on the subject of the Mediterranean opened up a completely unexpected new perspective at a time when my musical language was tending ever more towards a pronounced form of abstraction. The elements that form Hummus forced themselves on me in such an unambiguous way that I had no choice about which path to take.
«The topic of the piece is the massacre of Sabra and Shatila in Beirut. Carried out by Christians (the members of my faith) and Israelis in 1982, it was an example of extreme violence that showed once again what brutality humans are capable of. This appalling event haunted me for years, and for a long time these images silently inhabited me, like a devious poison that penetrates the body and the soul year by year. Some day, all of that had to return in one way or another; and it did, with Hummus.
»Why? Only the subconscious knows; the conscious mind asks questions. Is there a proximity between Germany’s dark history from the first half of the previous century and that of Lebanon? […] What came to light through writing this  piece was that the German and Arabic languages have a common energy. That may seem outlandish, but German can quite naturally take on an Arabic quality of form and rhythm that I took (always reluctantly) from the tradition of zajal: verbal duels and collections of poetry found in the mountains of Lebanon and in various Arab countries of the Mediterranean region. The musical language is likewise based on the zagal form; it is very rudimentary in melodic and musical terms and influenced by the nature of folk poetry, resulting in a form of childlike naïveté.
«I found this impossible to resist during the compositional process. Could it be that in the end, this battle was one by the young man I was in September 1982? There are many other questions that ultimately remain unanswered. This is connected to the role of the unconscious in my work on this piece. Perhaps it has a cathartic and liberating effect on me.
»The storyline: Andreas returns from a journey that took him to a country in wartime. He is unable to express what he felt or to speak of the violence he encountered. His friends insist on it, however, pushing him into a corner with their words. Mocking him and acting more and more diabolically, they finally turn him into a murderer who eliminates them one by one. But did all that really happen, or are these the ghosts and demons of his own soul?« (Z.M.)