Once Upon A Time

Once upon a time — it is a beginning, the opening line of stories and fairytales. Once upon a time there were an oud and a violin, two instruments from opposite ends of the universe, each as if born to beauty, each carrying a cultural charge of centuries and an interesting tale to tell. Over the years each wandered among different lands, and now two of their descendants live here in Israel, in peace and in love.

Instruments have no borders — they have traditions, the traditions of those who play them; but traditions mix with one another the world over, and all the more so in a place like ours. When one listens to traditional Jewish music one often finds much in common with traditional Arabic music — perhaps because the Jews always drew from the regions in which they lived, or perhaps because there is something universal in folk music in general: the same motifs that sound to our ears as “Jewish” can also be heard in the Gypsy music of Brahms, in many “nationalist” compositions of the nineteenth century, and in the Russian music of Shostakovich. The more deeply I looked, the more I found in common between Arabic music (Egyptian above all) and Baroque music — Vivaldi, for instance: a similar melodic character, the extensive use of sequences and refrains, the role of the soloist against the orchestra. Another element I found fascinating is improvisation — a cornerstone of Arabic music, yet also quite common in European classical music of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (especially in the cadenzas of concertos). And yet, against so much shared ground, it seemed to me just as interesting to bring out the different and the clashing — because in music, unlike in life, clashes that carry spiritual content give birth only to something new and refreshing, with no real danger. Out of these meetings — where each brings their own world, shares it, but also wants to receive, to listen, to respond — a many-voiced conversation arises, and then a new voice: no longer a mixture but something whole in itself, grown out of the different traditions. My role here is to give that whole a body and breathe a soul into it, and to let the players tell their own story, in the ancient tradition of the concerto.

To the violin and oud this work adds a string orchestra. I can hardly think of an ensemble more unified in tone, yet more flexible and many-sided; there seems to be no kind of music, from across the whole range of traditions and periods, that a string orchestra has not played. Here its role is that of the “Greek chorus” — the collective set against the soloists, the drama and the rhythm against the personal story.

This work is dedicated, with much love, to two people who in many ways changed my life — to Samir and to Eyal.

Premiere: Eyal Shiloach (violin), Sameer Makhoul (oud), Waterloo Soloists Orchestra.

Sameer Makhoul and Eyal Shiloach — "dedicated with much love to Samir and Eyal, who in many ways changed my life"

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