language year

I finished the revisions for To Sing You To Sleep and have moved on to the next commission for the year in the guise of a choir/oboe piece for Flower Mound High School in Texas. After a long chat with Abbie about languages (she has set Farsi, German, Norwegian, Latin, ancient Greek, Gaelic and is currently working on a piece in Chinese) I decided to go out of my comfort zone, "broaden my palette" a little and write exclusively out of my native language this year. That's what dialogue between colleagues is supposed to do, right?

In college I had a brilliant roommate, Moid Alwy, who happened to hail from Pakistan and, not wanting to waste the resource, I found some great poetry by Mirza Ghalib that he was kind enough to pronounce into a microphone for me. When I decided to "go foreign" on the poetry these recordings were the first things I looked at and, I'm happy to say, they're great poetry.

In Dr. Mark Rohwher I'm lucky to have carte blanche in what I want to do and, frankly, it's wonderful to have a conductor tell you, "Do something that will challenge us." That being said, he didn't bat an eye when I suggested having his high school students sing in the national language of Pakistan (called Urdu). How about that!

So I've been studying Ghalib, ordering an Urdu-to-English dictionary and listening over and over to Moid speaking the texts from 6 years ago. Add to that the incredible recordings of the oboe that a friend gave me (check out Ennio Morricone's score for The Mission, the Vaughn Williams concerto for oboe and strings and Britten's Six Metamorphoses After Ovid for starters) and you've got a nerdfully good time. It's awesome and should expand my BODY of knowledge a whole bunch.










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