A PILGRIMAGE; OR, JOURNEY WITHOUT BORDERS
The life of Kryštof Harant of Polžice and Bezdružice came to an untimely end on 21 June 1621 on the scaffold in Prague’s Old Town Square. Yet his remarkable legacy has remained vital to the present day. Particularly noteworthy is Harant’s travelogue Journey from the Kingdom of Bohemia to Venice, From There to the Holy Land, Judea and to Egypt, Later to Mount Horeb, Sinai and Saint Catherine’s Monastery in Desert Arabia, capturing his adventure-packed journey to the Middle East.
The extraordinary book served as inspiration for our “musical travelogue”. The storyline proceeds in reverse order, beginning with Harant’s execution and declaration of faith. Then it describes his journey from Pecka Castle to Jerusalem. The musical masterpieces from the exotic lands of the Ottoman Empire, Syria, Palestine, Sinai and Persia, handed down orally from generation to generation, etch in the local atmosphere, as Harant himself may have experienced it during his travels. The Middle East’s multi-ethnicity, further enhanced by pilgrims, monks and wanderers, resulted in a highly variegated sonic mosaic. Final piece, Otce Buoha nebeskeho (Our Father, God in Heaven), concludes our pilgrimage in an intimate conjunction, combining a Czech sacred song from the milieu of literary brotherhoods, so typical of Bohemian Renaissance music, with a prayer to a text by the Persian poet Hafez.
I invited Kiya Tabassian, artistic director of the Constantinople Ensemble, to participate in the project. Due to his Persian roots, he is undoubtedly the right choice for an endeavour seeking a creative encounter between such different musical traditions. I believe that a harmonic interplay between these disparate universes, symbolically reflecting the erstwhile cultural exchange on the pilgrimage routes in the past, affords the listener a colourful and inspiring experience. Our project strove to bring together our ensembles from the opposite sides of the Bosporus, integrating their respective qualities into a joint work. Our geographic, historical and cultural pilgrimage has ultimately transformed into an inner journey, connected with discovering distant horizons.
BUILDING BRIDGES
Nowadays, we feel it is more important than ever to build and recreate bridges between civilizations, cultures and peoples. Bridges that encourage us to come together and to reconcile, bridges that call for dialogue and conversation, for a synergy of ideas and actions that help us to live a more peaceful present and to prepare a better future together. This is not just an ideal or a utopian vision of humanity, but a real and urgent need for the healing of our society.
As musician-inventors and musician-travellers, we like to explore the infinite territory of music and memories from civilisations and cultures, which sometimes seem distant, but whose lines we like to shift so that they converge.
In this context, the life and journey of Kryštof Harant seemed to me as an example of inspiration and an odyssey to celebrate. During this fruitful collaboration with heavenly beautiful voices of Cappella Mariana and the extraordinary musicians involved in the project, we dived into a musical journey where we had the impression of revitalising the musical memories of Harant and somehow to reveal his musical emotions. His compositions are in constant dialogue with sacred, mystical and court music of the lands where he passed by, re-drawing, in a musical shape, small and long bridges linking the cultures and the people from the Bohemian Land to the Holy Land.
The Eastern musical traditions, as rich and extremely divers they are in their genres and forms, from court music to sacred and folk traditions in different regions and realms of Middle East, are somehow all rooted in a common modal language, called maqam. The evolution of these rich repertoires through centuries is evident and could be traced in numerous musical manuscripts by musicians and theoreticians from 10th to 19th century, some textual and theoretical writings, and some collection of notations. Between those, the manuscripts of the Polish Ali Ufki – Wojciech Bobowski (1610–1675) stand along as they content in 17th century, a large number of musical pieces from various traditions and composers from the Ottoman court, Persia, Egypt, Greece, Jerusalem, etc. He notated his collections in an adapted Western stave notation (written from right to left in order to match with the poetry) and contributed to the preservation of a part of the repertoire, transmitted mainly orally.
Two of his manuscripts, Mecmūʿa-yı Sāz ü Söz (MSS, ca. 1640–1650) and Mezmûriyye (ca. 1665) served us as primary sources. These musical pieces were part of the court music and considered as either learned music or sacred music of the Ottoman court. Various vocal and instrumental forms seat beside each other in this rich repertoire, as Pishref and Semai, two instrumental forms, and Naqsh, Ilahi and Tasbih as vocal forms. In his manuscript, Mezmûriyye, Ali Ufki translated into Ottoman the first fourteen psalms of the so-called Genevan Psalter and adapted these psalms into the Ottoman text. We chose two psalms (mezmur) from his manuscript and performed these together with Paschal de l’Estocart’s version of Psalm 4. To complement the selected pieces from Ufki’s manuscripts, I also sing two poems of Hafez, the great Persian poet of 14th century, in response to Harant’s music.
The instrumentation of Constantinople ensemble for this project consists of the Persian long neck lute, setar, the Middle Eastern and Mediterranean psalterium, kanun, the Turkish fiddle, kemençe and the percussion family of hand drums, dayereh, bendir & def.
The historical informed practice is here enhanced by a creative approach and there has been an arrangement work on several pieces to adapt them for the vocal ensemble and to bring again these pieces into life in the context of this project. May the listener enjoy this musical pilgrimage with us.
