Zaid Jabri: Two Songs from Mihyâr of Damascus

Zaid Jabri left his home town of Damascus as a young man to take the path of the composer. This took him to Poland, where he has long been artistically rooted and takes part in shaping the New Music scene.
The distance from his native country made possible by his chosen artistic home is something he shares with the Syrian poet Adonis, one of the most important writers of the Arab world, who has lived in Parisian exile for many years. He is a firm advocate of laicism, and hence freedom, a position he shares with many Arab intellectuals. He takes a decidedly pessimistic view of the Arab Spring, the conflicts in the Arab world, and the Syrian situation in particular. There can be no democracy, he argues, if political systems are built on a religious foundation. »Only the declaration of human rights can presume that, and only a constitution can ensure my freedom. We can only achieve democracy in Arab society on the basis of civil, secular state powers, on the basis of equal civil rights and laicism.«
With this stance, and also under the impression of discovering Nietzsche’s work for himself, Adonis began Mihyâr of Damascus: His Songs, an Arabic hymn to freedom and the civil universality of poetry, as early as 1958. The cycle of poems expresses hopes, wishes and dreams that put the Arab world in uproar upon its publication in 1961. »Mihyar of Damascus tried, like Zarathustra, to provoke something I call benevolent destruction: tear everything down and build it anew.«
»The songs have remained contemporary to this day,« says Zaid Jabri, who deliberately chose these two contrasting poems for Mediterranean Voices, »and even look into the future and beyond the limits of time and space. Thus they became a mirror of the reality of our world today. Mihyâr, the hero of the cycle, is an unreal figure born from Adonis’s spirit. Sometimes we see him as a king, sometimes as a philosopher, or even as mad and evil.« In his Two Songs from Mihyâr of Damascus, he draws on a classical compositional approach to text-setting and places the text’s message at the centre of his work. He uses all the possibilities of vocal expression to underline its dramatic character, ranging from extreme registers, microtonal sharpness and frictions via homophonic directness to polyphonically interwoven, otherworldly sounds. Thunder tubes, used by all five singers, underline the dramatic content and extend the acoustic space into ethereal worlds. »I find it hard to write about my music because I express myself in sounds, not in words. One can feel Mihyâr’s face, which is a fire at the start of the first song, and the sound of his breathing during the dream in the second song. One can also hear the boundless expanse of the sky at the end of the second song, where Mihyâr’s sky begins at the point where the one we know ends…«