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

(Movement IV: 14:36-16:55, the piece continues into Movement V without pause)

Score Video: https://youtu.be/SLu-3bQMcxI?si=F9dEw0Spy_jCu69K&t=864 

Non-Metric: Use the Score Video above to see how this movement's music has no bar lines! Look out for these three indicators of how the music pushes forward and pulls back, without a time signature:
     1. Phrase Markings
     2. Breath Marks (Apostrophes)
     3. Fermatas

Oblique Motion: The soprano sings her melody over one sustained pitch played by the cello. Listen as she starts in unison with the cello, both sustaining the note "G", and then her voice moves in oblique motion ascending and descending away from the note "G".

Ornamentation: The soprano’s melody includes many upper and lower neighbor tones.

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: IV. Exile
I hold a fading flower in my hand 
I don’t know who to give it to in this strange land.

Other Featured Movements:
Movement I. Love
Movement III. Grief