One of Chatham College's projects this year to open Western eyes to the Islamic world is "A Tent for the Sun," a free concert today that features works by Reza Vali, a world-renowned Squirrel Hill composer and Carnegie Mellon University music professor.
Vali, born in Iran, has built a reputation for giving Persian folk melodies new life through Western classical music. Much of his work, which has been commissioned by the Kronos Quartet, the Boston Modern Orchestra Project and the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble, is analogous to what Bela Bartok did for eastern European folk music early in the 20th century.
The melodies might seem alien to any American who has grown up listening to blues, jazz or bluegrass. But listen closer: behind the complex time signatures, Vali says, it's still folk music.
"Like waters of the world, they're all connected," he says. "With any folk music, you can say, 'Oh, it reminds me of this folk music.' Say if you had a pentatonic scale (five notes, such as the black keys of a piano), and it reminds you of a Chinese pentatonic, or Irish pentatonic — because they also have it — or an African pentatonic."
Persian folk songs fascinated Vali as a young teen. Vali lived in Iran until age 17, when he left the Conservatory of Music in Teheran to study composition and music education at the prestigious Academy of Music in Vienna, Austria, from which he graduated summa cum laude.
Even in Iran, Vali says, he was surrounded by Western classical music. But his hobby was recording and writing down indigenous songs he heard. He rekindled his interest in folk music years later as a Modernist composer looking for inspiration. He wrote his first set of Persian-inspired songs in 1978.
"(The folk song) is a raw material that is very flexible," he says. "You can put it into modernist meaning, you can put it in romantic meaning, minimalist meaning. You can fit it into them all."
Vali spent years melding simple folk melodies with Western instruments and complex musical counterpoint. "Folk Songs (Set No. 9)," written for flute and cello in 1991, is one of 15 sets he has created. The composer, who joined Carnegie Mellon's faculty in 1988, has since turned his interest on the incredibly complex systems of Persian classical music, which shares many similarities with Indian classical music. He is starting to record those works.
In his work on folk music, Vali has had not only the challenge Bartok faced to capture complex, odd-meter rhythms, but also reconciling the basic tonal differences between Western and Persian styles.
Some notes in Persian music scales possess pitches that, by Western standards, aren't quite sharp and aren't quite flat. They're incredibly difficult to finger correctly on the cello, even harder to achieve on the flute and nonexistent on a regularly tuned piano, which Vali has written into another composition in today's program, played by Luz Manriquez.
Today, flutist Alberto Almarza and Pittsburgh Opera principal cellist Kathleen Caballero will perform "Folk Songs (Set No. 9)" during the first half of the performance. Joan Wagman, a Chatham dance instructor, has choreographed the piece for 10 dancers, but they will perform to a recorded version of it during the second half of the show.
"The reason we did that is, when you are working in dance, the concert is visual, not aural. This piece is very involved with different instruments," Vali says.
Almarza will switch between piccolo and concert, alto and bass flutes. He also will have to simultaneously sing and blow across the flute to imitate the timbre of the ney, a Persian flute.
Caballero will have to play crystal glasses and, at times, multitask by bowing the cello with one hand and beating tom-tom drums with the other, or whistling.
Vali says he doesn't want to distract from the duo's demanding performance.
Wagman has choreographed all eight movements of the piece. The modern interpretation has a few subtle references to folk dancing, she says. The odd rhythmic meters in Vali's music — 11/8, for example — are somewhat similar to those in Greek and Bulgarian folk dances, a major focus for a dance company in which Wagman used to perform.
She also had to account for the sudden, almost violent changes between movements. Three separate times in the 18-minute "Folk Songs," the tempo — and the resulting mood — fluctuates wildly as an allegro movement follows one that is largo or adagio.
"It was definitely a challenge," she says.
| 'A Tent for the Sun: Reflections of the Near East' |
