Roustom, Kareem

Commissioned for the Providence, R.I. based Community MusicWorks Chamber Players and students, and the Kronos Quartet, by Community MusicWorks and FirstWorks.

A Voice Exclaiming takes its title from the opening lines of "The Quatrains" of Omar Al-Khayaam, a celebrated 12th century Persian poet. I knew Al-Khayaam's text best in the form of a song from the late nineteen-forties by Egyptian composer Riyad Al-Sunbati that he composed for the great Egyptian singer Umm Kulthum. This song, titled Rybaiyaat Al-Khayaam, begins with the following lines:

I heard a voice exclaiming out in the darkest hours of the night,
calling from the unknown, to those in the deepest sleep.

"Arise! And fill the cup of hope,
before the hand of fate fills the cup of life."

Al-Khayaam's deeply contemplative poem opens with language that urges the reader to wake up and actively seize the moment before life passes by. The voice in the text can perhaps be associated with the divine, but it could also be a calling to seek in life something greater than the mundane, deep sleep being a metaphor for blind acceptance or willful ignorance of greater things. However one chooses to interpret the text, it says to me that this is an urgent call and one that must be heeded. This is the inspiration that I sought to bring to this work -- the rejection of ignorance and the mundane, and the passionate seeking out of deeper meaning.

I. Divisions - This movement resulted from a challenge that I posed to myself to combine two languages, Near Eastern Arabic music and Western concert music, into a cohesive and balanced musical work that avoids clich

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