Dervish

PROGRAM DESCRIPTION BY IDA HABBESTAD

For the love of this person there is no description

other than to say the same thing, that it comes. (...)

I dance, for from his difficult words

a hundred meanings come to each person.

Jalal al-Din Rumi’s 13th-century verses do not point toward a fixed, frozen text, but toward experience. In the rituals of the mystics, more than words alone are allowed to carry meaning. In dhikr, breath and sounds are repeated, the movement is circular, and a rhythmic insistence arises that takes over from thought. This embodiment of faith has often been mistrusted by those in power; what cannot be controlled through speech is perceived as dangerous.

When Béla Bartók made the first recording of such a dhikr al-hadra in Cairo in 1932, he captured not only a sound, but also a social and ritual practice. As a musical archaeologist, Bartók was not in search of exotic motifs for ornamentation; he sought underlying structures and linked the Hungarian countryside to the plains of Anatolia. His «Arabic Song» for two violins is an attempt to translate something unpolished into the stricter format of the score.

The traditions of the people can be read as a contrast to the bourgeois. Both Franz Liszt and Pablo de Sarasate cultivated the idea of «the free» and believed they found it in the expression of Romani musicians; in this concert they share the theme that Sarasate immortalised in Zigeunerweisen. Although Bartók would later correct Liszt’s notion of what constitutes “authentic” Hungarian music, he celebrated his predecessor’s artistic radicalism – the desire to step outside the rigid forms of the times.

In Johannes Brahms, too, one can find the friction between the polished and the more raw. In the second movement of the Clarinet Quintet, the singable outer sections are interrupted by a middle section in style hongrois; for a moment, Brahms allows the music to lose its sense of direction.

When Trygve Seim today sets Rumi’s poems to music, he continues such a conversation: between historical material, between improvised and composed elements, and an exploration of how breath and rhythm can still open spaces within us.