Love, Loss, and Exile (Women’s Poems from Afghanistan) Movement I: Love

(Movement I: 0:00-5:15)

Score Video: https://youtu.be/SLu-3bQMcxI?si=a5Iq4x-VcrTz6mRa 

Arpeggio / Text Painting: The piano performs upward arpeggios that mimic the motion of water / waves.

Non-Metric: As seen in the score video, this movement does not have measures. The cello is playing figures that are noted in boxes (often called “cell notation”), for the notated duration. There are vertical arrows placed in the score to signify when the performers should coordinate their entrances.

Phrase: There are several types of musical phrases that take place throughout this movement. Firstly, the short sixteenth note figures in the piano. Secondly, the soprano’s vocal lines (separated by a comma or a period of rest), and thirdly the cello’s improvisatory trilled phrases that swell in response to the soprano.

Timbre: Each instrument has distinct musical material. The soprano has the melody, the cello has harmonic trills, and the piano has upward arpeggios and chordal figures. Listen for each of these throughout the movement.

Program Note: "We don’t often think of poetry as rebellion, but the women of Afghanistan have built a tradition out of artistic defiance, of speaking in rhyme words they are forbidden in prose. 

In the Pashtun culture from the mountainous regions near Pakistan, girls and women share, compose and speak landays – an oral tradition of short poems by and for women, passed down for generations from woman to woman and tribe to tribe. The anonymous nature of these poems allows them to speak the unspeakable – to talk frankly of love and desire, of yearning to make choices, of girls wanting to be more than an adjunct to their fathers, brothers and husbands. 

In a society where young girls are bartered to old men, where to choose where to love is to risk death, where girls are forbidden from education, the landays tell women’s stories in their own words, unfiltered and unchecked by the men’s voices that surround them. The texts chosen for this song cycle are only the tiniest smattering of a powerful tradition, but were chosen to highlight recurrent themes that appear in landays - love and desire, grief, exile, war, and yearning. 

While set for classical soprano with western instruments, the music pays homage to the origins of the poetry by calling for each musician to use a variety of timbres, modes and ornamentation that come from this style." - Juhi Bansal. Detailed Program Note found here

Lyrics: I. Love 
Your love is like water, like fire; 
The waves engulf me, the flames consume me.

Other Featured Movements:
Movement III. Grief
Movement IV. Exile