While the arrival of Indian independence 75 years ago this August brought joy and happiness to central and southern regions of India, for Bengal and Punjab in the north, arbitrarily divided by religion (Hindu or Muslim) into Indian or Pakistani territory, it was a cataclysmic disaster. Forcing all Muslims to uproot and move to the newly created Muslim Pakistan, and all Hindus to move to Indian ruled territory, between 10 and 20 million poeple were displaced from their homes creating the biggest refugee crisis in history. Law and order broke down completely. Some estimates suggest that up to a million people may have lost their lives and it took generations for the the psychological damage to be repaired – many would say it never has been.
So it is not surprising that for those of Bengali heritage, such as our lovely sarod player and composer, Soumik Datta, celebrations around the 75th anniversary of the granting of independence, are bitter sweet.
His new work, Avaaz, premiered last night at the Barbican, very much reflects the fallout from partition. Scored for a small groups of singers, Soumik’s sarod and two Indian percussion players, the piece ‘explores the event, known as Partition, through the lens of the human voice. What if language was shattered into fragmented syllables? What if words and phrases were torn up like the lands of India and Pakistan? Could a libretto be made up of shards of words from Hindi, Urdu and Bengali? Stripped of meaning and identity, what emotion would this debris of sound carry?
‘Awaaz’, Soumik continues in the programme notes, ‘means ‘voice’ in Urdu. It can also mean sound or noise. I wonder could a piece of music start from the noise (disassociated syllables devoid of meaning) and slowly journey back towards language, conversation and song?’
In eight short movements, Awaaz does just that. Starting with birdsong and short, lonely sung phrases from individual voices, through a crackling recording of Jawaharlal Nehru’s ‘Tryst with Destiny’ speech, a midnight Raag, four more short movements (sarod and single voice; full choir and percussion; solists, choir, sarod and percussion) to the final Awaaz – an evocation of Sufi mystical music which uses hand clapping and chanting to reach a final all-enveloping apotheosis.
For me the spareness of the instrumentation – a small choir, four solo voices, the sarod, and the drums – worked so well: clear, pure sound yet capable of a pulsing beat and high intensity volume. The rest of the audience seems to have felt the same as the piece was given a standing ovation.
Available to listen to on BBC sounds
If you are wishing you had been there (which I hope you are) all is not lost as it was recorded for BBC3 and is available on BBC sounds for the next 29 days. Soumik’s Avaaz starts around 33 minutes in when you can also hear him talking about the piece.
But if you do decide to have a listen – try and make time for the whole concert which consisted of Bach’s Magnificat in D Major and American Indian composer Reena Esmail‘s This love between us, designed to be played alongside the Magnificat. Its seven movements juxtapose the words of seven major religious traditions of India, and specifically how each of these traditions approaches the topic of unity and kindness.
Soumik on tour
Soumik is a busy man these days as the premiere of Avaaz was fitted in between the dates of has current Hope Notes tour which has already covered Leicester and Bristol and is heading off up north very soon. (For the full tour dates see this post on his Instagram account.)
The tour programme is based around his work over the last year with refugees, some of whom appear in the songs; his tour partner is the refugee movement, Choose Love. We, at Salon Music, are hoping to get more involved with this work – so more to come in a future post.
Meanwhile, if that were not enough, Soumik has also just been awarded an Aga Khan Music Award which ‘recognises and supports exceptional creativity, promise, and enterprise in music performance, creation, education, preservation and revitalisation in societies across the world in which Muslims have a significant presence’ – and is off to Oman shortly to collect it.
Meanwhile do not forget…
To book up for our J.A.M modern jazz trio evening on November 3rd – no longer that far away….
And…..
Pencil in the 27th November for our next Highgate Society Bucks Fizz lunchtime concert. Lewis Kingsley Peart will be putting the Highgate Society’s piano through its paces with a rollicking programme taking us from Bach and Gounod to Billy Mayerl. Booking details to come very soon.
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