Where Everything is Music

ENSEMBLE KABOUL

KHALED ARMAN RUBAB

SIAR HASHIMI VOCALS/TABLA/PERCUSSION

MASUD HASHIMI ZERBAGHALI/PERCUSSION

 

VAN DIEMEN’S BAND

JULIA FREDERSDORFF ARTISTIC DIRECTOR/BAROQUE VIOLIN

LUKE PLUMB MANDOLIN

RACHEL MEYERS VIOLA

LAURA VAUGHAN VIOLA DA GAMBA/VIOLONE

MARTIN PENICKA VIOLONCELLO

DONALD NICOLSON HARPSICHORD

‘Where everything is music…’ (Rumi, 13th century)

Van Diemen’s Band’s latest project – created for MONA FOMA 2023 and now touring nationally in 2025 – is a cross-cultural collaboration with members of the legendary Ensemble Kaboul. Theirs is a practice of both advocacy and preservation, using performance to keep alive a musical culture that Afghanistan’s current regime is attempting to extinguish.

What emerged during the initial collaboration was a stunning composite of two distinct musical worlds, mixing the caramel sounds of VDB’s gut strings with traditional Eastern instruments, and the melismas of Afghan singing with the quixotic late nineteenth-century piano music of Erik Satie. Persian music has been arranged and developed for this unusual (but entirely harmonious) combination, and Western music has been chosen for its fluid and indistinct style, providing a vehicle to unite the oriental sound world with occidental traditions. 

Khaled Arman has made the arrangements of the Afghan songs in the program. Composer and singer Fazel Ahmad Zekrya, also known as ‘Naynawaz’ (“The Reed Player’) wrote Ay naynawâ fifty years ago to a poem by the famous Sufi mystic known as ‘Rumi’. It describes the ney’s (or reed-flute’s) longing to return to its reed bed as an analogous reference to the pain of separation from one's native realm and the maturation of a human being. 

Ba tu del Dâdam is a popular love song that Afghans sing during festivals; in what will become a typical cross-generic gesture in this program, Khaled’s version makes a detour towards seventeenth-century French music in the middle of the piece. He does the same in his arrangement of the late twentieth-century Persian instrumental melody Naghma-e Kabouli, whose Shur (Phrygian) modal setting invites a juxtaposition with one of the gavottes from J.S. Bach’s Third Suite for lute.

The legendary Naynawaz (who was assassinated in 1979 by the occupying Soviet forces in Afghanistan) also supplies the final song, again in a Khaled arrangement. Dar dâman-e saharâ depicts the mystic wandering in the desert, unaware of the world and whispering the ‘song of existence’:

One who is not attached to earthly things
likes the song of love and spiritual love.

VDB harpsichordist and musicologist Donald Nicolson bends the West towards the East in his arrangements that exploit the capabilities of Ensemble Kaboul’s master musicians, especially improvisation. The melodic line of Erik Satie’s Gnossienne No 1, first published in 1893, suggests to Nicolson “…the sounds of the mystical East '' and serves as the starting point for a vocal reimagining by Siar.  By contrast, the voices of Hildegard of Bingen’s medieval nuns are removed from her plainchant O Virtus Sapentie, and its formerly free line nailed down by driving Eastern rhythms in a purely instrumental rendition coloured by ornamental devices from Byzantine and Turkish music, creating a hypnotic effect.

Like many seventeenth-century French writers, Antoine Boesset (1586-1643) was drawn to timelessness and the ephemeral nature of existence. In the song Nos esprits libres (Our free spirits), Nicolson liberates the lilting eight-bar chordal progression from the original text and allows a blurring between the sounds of an early Baroque lute consort and a certain eccentric Frenchman who we’ve already heard, courtesy of improvisation.

VDB violist Rachel Meyers draws on both her Jewish heritage and her musicological research into Renaissance music in an arrangement of the ancient Ladino song Yo m’enamori d’un aire. The lyrics sing of falling in love with a beautiful woman, and its melody has crossed many areas of the Mediterranean basin, making it a perfect fit for the diverse instruments in the ensemble. 

Mandolinist and composer Luke Plumb, whose musical CV embraces classical, traditional folk and a long stint with famed Scottish band Shooglenifty, contributes his original composition More than Memory to the program. He writes:

‘More than Memory is from The Ten Titles Project (2009) – ten titles to serve as inspiration for creative expression in any field, taken from shared human experience. More than Memory combines nostalgia for childhood innocence, recollections that become jumbled and disjointed over time and the acknowledgment of formative moments in character building.’

Finally, our esteemed Afghan guests needed a chance to return exclusively to their patch in an improvisational conversation between Siar’s tablā, Masud’s zerbaghali and Khaled’s rubab that takes as its starting point a popular melody called Ya rassul allah. Unlike the soloistic basis of improvisation in Western jazz, the Afghan version is based on a three-way exchange that rapidly escalates in intensity and dexterity.  

© Christopher Lawrence 2025

Don’t worry about saving these songs!

And if one of our instruments breaks,

it doesn’t matter.

We have fallen into the place

where everything is music.

The strumming and the flute notes

rise into the atmosphere,

and even if the whole world’s harp

should burn up, there will still be

hidden instruments playing.

So the candle flickers and goes out.

We have a piece of flint, and a spark.

This singing art is sea foam.

The graceful movements come from a pearl

somewhere on the ocean floor.

Poems reach up like spindrift and the edge

of driftwood along the beach, wanting!

They derive

from a slow and powerful root

that we can’t see.

Stop the words now.

Open the window in the center of your chest,

and let the spirit fly in and out.

Translation: Coleman Barks

AY NAYNAWÂ

Lyrics: Maulana Jalal-Al din Bakhi 

Listen to this reed how it complains,

It tells the tale of separations and pains.

Since from the reed-bed they cut me free,

Men and women have lamented through me.

I long for a heart torn piece by piece from separation,

So that I may explain the pain of desire and aspiration.

Whoever remains distant from their own origin,

Seeks again the time of reunion with it.

In every gathering I became sorrowful,

I joined both the sorrowful and the joyful.

Everyone became my companion according to their own understanding,

Yet none sought the secrets hidden within me.

My secret is not far from my wail,

But eyes and ears lack the light to perceive it.

The body is not hidden from the soul, nor the soul from the body,

Yet no one has the vision of the soul granted.

This sound of the reed is fire, not mere wind,

Whoever lacks this fire, let them vanish.

 

YO M’ENAMORI D’UN AIRE

Lyrics: Traditional Ladino 

Yo me enamoré de un ayre;

de un ayre de una mujer.

De una mujer muy hermoza

linda de mi corazón.

Yo me enamoré de noche,

y la luna me engañó.

Si otra vez yo me enamoro,

sea de día y con sol.

I fell in love with a breeze;

A breeze of a woman.

Of a woman so beautiful,

Dear one of my heart.

I fell in love at night,

And the moon deceived me.

If I fall in love again

It would be by the sunlight of day.

 

DAR DÂMAN-E SAHAR    

In the embrace of the desert, unaware of the world,

I heard the melody of existence calling. 

He whose heart is not bound by the patterns of time,

Finds the tune of love and the breeze of the heart’s desire.

This celestial tune, whom shall I tell if you do not know,

The secret of eternal love. 

In the embrace of the desert, unaware of the world,

I heard the melody of existence calling.

From your innocence, I am drowned in sin,

Thirsting for your pain, I seek the melody of existence.

He whose heart is not bound by the patterns of time,

Finds the tune of love and the breeze of the heart’s desire. 

This celestial tune, whom shall I tell if you do not know,

The secret of eternal love.c

The Ensemble Kaboul explores the Persian music of Afghanistan, an unrecognised or even forgotten repertoire. In this country, rich with several musical cultures, the traditional and sacred Persian heritage testifies to a remote past and of a particular poetry.

To bring this repertoire back to life, the Ensemble Kaboul needs to work like archeologists in order to rediscover the buried musical themes, the missing ornaments and the lost motifs of a formerly flourishing musical corpus. To make this desert soil bloom again, the fragmentary melodies are completed and the instrumentations and compositions are developed.

To renovate these buried mosaïcs, the Ensemble Kaboul calls to musicians who belong to a large Persian musical family spread over numerous countries. Persian cultural influence can be experienced from Lahore to Budapest, from Erevan to Cordoba.

This approach is made possible thanks to the extraordinary musical abilities of all the members of the group, who are each endowed with both non-European and European musical culture.

Brian Ritchie & the team at Mona Foma

Luke Plumb

Renee Millard / Travel Managers

Frying Pan Studios