Ah Lord, spare thou this sinner (Ach Herr, mich armen Sunder)

SKU: PR.114419030

ISBN 9781491114124. UPC: 680160669851. 9 x 12 inches.

A fascination with polycultural synergy between diverse literary textsdrives the inspiration for much of Mohammed Fairouz’s prodigiouscreative output, including instrumental music as well as vocal. Inhis profound and extensive essay preceding the score, Fairouz shedslight on how Edgar Allen Poe’s “Israfel” relates to the prophetsand prophesies of the Quran, Old Testament, and New Testament.The eight-movement quartet may be heard as a dramatic galleryof portraits and of story-telling, flourishing in a post-traditionallanguage that is at once vernacular and spiritual, Middle Easternand Western. The complete set of score and parts is included in thispublication.
(See pages 2-3 of score for clear distinction of paragraphs, etc.)Prophesies, by Mohammed FairouzEdgar Allen Poe’s rendition of Israfel was the point of departure for the final movement of my previous stringquartet which is titled The Named Angels. At the opening of his poem, Poe evokes the Quran:“And the angel Israfel, whose heartstrings are a lute, and who has the sweetest voice of all God’s creatures.”This informs the first lines of the poem that, in turn, gave me the title for the final movement of The Named Angels,“Israfel’s Spell”:In Heaven a spirit doth dwell“Whose heartstrings are a lute”None sing so wildly wellAs the angel Israfel,And the giddy stars (so legends tell),Ceasing their hymns, attend the spellOf his voice, all mute.It is the end of that poem, however, that is the starting point for the current quartet, Prophesies, which concernsitself with mortal prophets rather than eternal Angelic spirits.If I could dwellWhere IsrafelHath dwelt, and he where I,He might not sing so wildly wellA mortal melody,While a bolder note than this might swellFrom my lyre within the sky.Islamic thought has asked us to look at the example of the prophets. That’s significant because of the fact thatJoseph and all the prophets were human beings with the flaws of human beings. No prophet was perfect, andIslamic tradition has never asked its followers to aspire to the example of the Angels, the perfected ones. Instead weare given the gift of our prophets. While The Named Angels drew on the motion and energy of everlasting spirits,Prophesies is a depiction of the movements within our own mortal coil.This quartet is a continuation of a long tradition of Muslim artists telling their stories and singing their songs.Many of these renditions are, in fact, figurative and (contrary to popular belief) the Quran contains no “Islamicedict” prohibiting figurative renditions of the figures described in the Old Testament, New Testament, or Quran.The majority of artists, however, have preferred eternal and abstract forms such as words and their calligraphicrepresentations, poems (Yusuf and Zuleikha or the Conference of Birds come immediately to mind), architecture,and many other non-figurative art forms to the representation of man. These cold, ancient, and everlasting shapesof unending time flourished, and the divine infinity of representing geometric forms gained favor over the placementof the explicit representation of mankind and our own likeness at the center of the universes.Adding the string quartet to these forms which express the recursive spheres of heavens and earth abstractly shouldexplain why I have chosen to render higher things through the use of music without the addition of words or anyother art-form. It is the abstract art of pure form, in which all is form and all is content, which compels me. Thisquartet should be seen as no more programmatic than the arches of the Great Mosque at Cordoba.The first movement, Yāqub (Jacob), is slow, quiet and prayerful. It evokes the patient sorrow of a slow choraledeveloping over time as it coaxes our pulse out of the ticking of a clock-like meter that defines our day-to-day livesand into a divine eternity.The second, Saleh, imagines the spirit of that desert-prophet through the use of a Liwa; the dance-sequence that hasbeen such a prevalent form of expression in the Arabian Peninsula for much of our recorded history.The third movement is titled Dawoōd, and it is emblematic of the beloved Prophet, King, and Psalmist, David.Though it has no lyrics, the movement functions as a dabkeh (an ancient dance native to the Levant) and also “sets”the opening of Psalm 100 (Make a joyful noise unto the Lord, all ye lands). This line is never set to music or sung inthe quartet but is evoked through the rhythmic shape of the violin part which imitates the phonology and rhythmof my speaking the opening line in the Hebrew and develops the contours of that line incessantly throughout themovement.3The fourth movement is an ode to Yousef (Joseph) and relates to the first movement in tempo and tone just as Josephrelates to Jacob, his father. Together, the first and fourth movements provide a sort of Lamentation and relief.Joseph had the appearance of a noble angel, but he was very much a human being. And the story of this particularprophet had tragic beginnings many years before he found himself in a position of power in Egypt. Back in his youth,still among the Israelites, Joseph experienced a series of revelations through his dreams that spoke of his impendingcareer in prophecy. He confided his dreams to his father, the Prophet Jacob, who told his son of the greatness thatawaited him in his future only to have his brothers throw him into a well and leave him for dead. Joseph eventuallyfound his way from Israel to Egypt and rose out of slavery into a position of power. Meanwhile, famine engulfs Israel.Forty years pass, and back in the land of Jacob and Rachel, of Joseph’s brothers and Abraham’s tribe, Israel wasnot spared the effects of the famine. They sorely lacked Joseph’s prophecy and his vision. The Qur’an then tells usthat Jacob, sensing Joseph, sends the other brothers to Egypt instructing them to come back with food and grain.Arriving in Egypt, they unwittingly appear before Joseph. They don’t recognize their little brother who has risen toa position of might, dressed in his Egyptian regalia. They ask for the food and the grain.After some conversation, Joseph is no longer able to contain his emotion. Overcome, he reveals himself to his nowterrified brothers. He embraces them. He asks them eagerly, “How is our father?” Joseph gives them the gift of thefood and the grain that they came in search of. He relieves them from hunger and alleviates their fear. He sendsthem back with proof that he is alive, and it is this joyful proof from the miraculous hands of a prophet that bringsback the ancient Jacob’s vision after 40 years of blindness.In this story, I am struck by the fact that Joseph may not have made the decision to forgive his brothers on thespot, but that something inside the prophet’s soul found forgiveness and peace for the brothers who had so gravelywronged him at some point along his journey. I would suspect this point to have been present at Joseph’s inception,even before he had ever been wronged.This is proof, if we needed it, that Joseph’s angel-like beauty was not only physical and external, but also internalas well: Joseph possessed a profound loveliness of spirit that bound his appearance and his soul. In Joseph, formand soul are one.Time is to musicians what light is to a painter. In this way, the story of Joseph also shows us that time can affectour perception of even the most tragic wounds. In fact, the most common Arabic word for “human being” is insaan,which shares its roots with the word insaa, “to forget.” While our ability to remember is essential to how we learnabout ourselves, our capacity to “forgive and forget” may also be one of our great gifts as human beings.The fifth movement follows my ode to Joseph with a structural memory of Mūsa (Moses). The movement consistsentirely of descending motifs which I constructed as an indication of Moses’ descending movement as he emergedto his people from the heights of Mt. Sinai. The music is constructed in five phrases which function as a formalreference to the five books of Moses, the Pentateuch. The movement is placed as the fifth of the quartet for the samereason.While Joseph is always evoked as supremely beautiful in the Books of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, Suleiman(Solomon) is described as surpassing in his quicksilver intelligence. This movement is composed of a seven-partriddle which passes by in an instant but can be caught by the attentive listener. From Solomon, we work our wayback to Yishak (Isaac) in a seventh movement that evokes Isaac’s literal meaning in Arabic and Hebrew: laughter.The eighth and final movement of this quartet is named for the Patriarch of the entire Book: Ibrahim (Abraham). Itrelates to Isaac just as Joseph relates to Jacob; they are father and son. The lines are prayerful and contemplative;the form of the music evolves from a fugue joining together many different forms of prayer into a single tapestry ofcounterpoint, to the cyclical form of this entire quartet which is rendered through the motion of pilgrims circling theKaaba (cube) in Mecca — a structure which was built by Abraham for Hagaar and their son Ismail.These are just some of the figures that are cherished by all three of the Middle Eastern monotheisms (Judaism,Christianity, and Islam) that the Qur’an refers to collectively as Ahl Al-Kitab. This Arabic phrase is most commonlytranslated as “The People of the Book,” but here the most common translation is a flawed one: the Arabic word“ahl” means “family” and not just “people.” A better translation would be “Family of the Book.” Each of the eightmovements of Prophesies grows from a single musical cell.This quartet is a family album.—Mohammed Fairouz (2018.