ORNAMENT

Persian-German Music theatre, in cooperation with Klangwerkstatt Festival 2019 

Commissioned composers: Amen Feizabadi, Arne Sanders

Ensemble: Claudia van Hasselt, Mahboubeh Golzari, Reza Bahboudi, Valentina Bellanova, Adrienn Illés, Rouzbeh Motia, Farhang Moshtagh. Projection: Nicolas Wiese. Libretto: Amir Hasan Cheheltan, Michaela Vieser.

The evening focuses on the story of Zuleikha, a fascinating and dazzling figure rooted in both Persian and Western history. She inspired Persian and Western poets such as Hafez, Ferdowsi and Goethe. Zuleikha’s story is set to music in a contemporary composition that explores the musical phenomenon of the ornament. It plays an important role in both Persian and European music. It has often been mistakenly understood as not belonging to the „substance“ of music and has therefore hardly been appreciated artistically so far. In fact, it leads to the deep structures of music and is understood here as the DNA of both musical traditions. It reveals common roots and connections even between seemingly distant musical cosmos.
The compositions by Arne Sanders (Berlin) and Amen Feizabadi (Tehran) merges Persian and Western musical culture and thus creates spaces for a new musical language, far removed from any exoticism. The musical and vocal cultures are mixed in such a way that the tonal result makes a clear geographical location irrelevant, based on their ornamentation, in Persian music called tahrir. The ‚foreign‘ becomes the ‚own‘, the ‚own‘ becomes the ‚foreign‘.

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In cooperation with Klangwerkstatt Festival 2019 and the network Female Singers United
Funded by: initiative neue musik Berlin and Goethe Institut