Wolfgang von Schweinitz: Plainsound Duo, ‘My Persia’, op.66 (world premiere)
Improvisations on selected dastgāhs of the radif of traditional Persian music
Helge Slaatto (violin)
Frank Reinecke (double bass)
Majeed Qadianie (tār, setār)
Niloufar Mohseni (tombak)
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| Image: ©Fabian Schellhorn / Berliner Festspiele |
My attendance at Musikfest Berlin concerts this year proved more curtailed than I had hoped or expected. Whilst, however, I deeply regretted having to withdraw from no fewer than three Mahler performances, an Alpine Symphony, and so on (I hasten to add, as an audience member!) perhaps it was ultimately more valuable for me to step out, as they say, of my comfort zone, and to stretch my ears, as Charles Ives’s father instructed his son, in order to hear the fascinating music-making of Majeed Qadianie on tār and setār and Niloufar Mohseni on tombak.
This was the second half of what I suppose we should call a chamber music concert. It certainly took place in the Berlin Philharmonie’s Kammermusiksaal. I am anxious, though, not to impose Western categories unduly on something that doubtless has points of contact, but equally many points of difference. For that reason, I shall keep this short; I should rather admit my ignorance up front than visit an unedifying display of orientalist ignorance upon the music by writing too much and making a fool of myself. Qadianie and Mohseni, both as soloists and as a duo, invited us in to listen and seemed remarkably successful at having us shed a few of our musical preconceptions, not least those founded on the guiding presence of harmony: less important, it seems, for Persian music as indeed for many non-Western musics. Taking us through various dastgāhs – to my understanding, each of seven basic notes, plus others that enable melodic ornamentation and modulation – from the overarching collection (radif) of Persian music, they showed us, not through lecturing or writing, but simply (not always quite so simply) through their music-making, a personal and cooperative process of playing and listening that both respects tradition and extends it. There was no question that this was a dialogue, nor was there any question that it moved in ways different from how ‘ours’ might. Improvisation on melodic material, in particular contexts (no doubt including the room and the audience), imparted a sense of something not so entirely distinct from what we might call ‘developing variation’, albeit with very different guiding principles. Above all, though, it was an opportunity to listen, to learn, and to enjoy. For an eagerly demanded encore, Qadianie sang too, all the time not only underpinned but also propelled by the subtle path of Mohseni’s drumbeat, as well as that of his own instrumental line.
The first half had given us the premiere of
Wolfgang von Schweinitz’s Plainsound Duo ‘My Persia’, written in 2020
and extended in 2023, a commission from the Berliner Festspiele/Musikfest
berlin and Bavarian Radio’s musica viva. It is described as ‘bitonal harmonic
counterpoint in traditional Persian modes for violin and double bass in quarter-tone
scordatura’. And that, I think, is very much what we heard in a series of
movements taking their leave from Persian melodies and varying them. As the
work progressed, so did a sense of newly exploring our ‘own’ traditional instruments
via a different musical language. Harmonic motion, where one found it, seemed
not unreasonably founded on Western practices, yet also indicated a willingness
to break away from it, indeed, as Schweinitz put it in the programme, now to emancipate
not Schoenberg’s dissonance but rather consonance, in this case via quarter-tones
and non-tempered ‘just intonation’. That can often sound strange to our ears;
it certainly often does to mine. Again, though, there is much to learn, not
only through the stretching of our ears but through openly approaching the
results.
