Hâl: Ballades Amoureuses
Bâman Sanamâ (B. & M. Chemirani, K.Seddiki, arr. K. Chemirani) [5:09]
Lord Baker (Trad. Irish, arr. K. Chemirani) [4:57]
Seven Fishes (K. Chemirani, arr. K. & B. Chemirani [6:05]
An Indian Way (K. Chemirani) [11:14]
138 (B. & K. Chemirani, arr. K. Chemirani) [6:13]
Miraqsan (B. Chemirani, arr. B. & K. Chemirani) [3:33]
Berceuse Pour Maël (B. Chemirani, arr. M., B. & K. Chemirani) [3:25]
Irish Suite: Emmet’s Hedgehog (N.Vallely), The Kish’s Jig (S. Barou, arr. Barrou & K. Chemirani) [3:20]
The Limerick Rake (Trad. Irish, arr. K. Chemirani & S. Barrou) [3:26]
The Chemirani Ensemble
rec. Studio Babel, Montreuil, France. No date given.
ALPHA 754 [47:30]
Keyvan, Maryam and Bijan Chemirani are all children of Dhamchid Chemirani, an Iranian master of the zarb (a goblet drum which is the major percussion instrument in Iranian music), who left Iran in 1961, to study mathematics in France, while continuing to play, record and write music (including film scores) as well as teach at the Centre d’Études de Musique Orientale, part of the Sorbonne’s Institut de Musicologie. His son Keyvan (born in 1968) has, like his father, a degree in mathematics and also plays the zarb (as well as a number of other instruments). He and his brother Bijan have worked collaboratively with performers from many other musical traditions. Keyvan, for example, has played on several recordings of Early Music by the Gilles Binchois Ensemnle, such as École de Notre Dame de Paris, 1163-1245 (Harmonic Records H/CD 8611); in the jazz field he was the percussionist on an outstanding album by the French avant-garde clarinettist Louis Sclavis, Silk and Salt Melodies (ECM 2402) and was a member (along with the remarkable British bassist Barry Guy) of a trio led by the Lebanese player of the oud, Mahmoud Turkmani on Fayka (ENJA ENJ-9447 2). Chemirani has also worked regularly with a number of Celtic musicians and given concerts in a trio (‘The Jasmin Toccata Proect’) with the harpsichord player Jean Rondeau and lutenist Thomas Dunford, improvising on music by, inter alia, Purcell, Kapsberger and Robert de Visée.
A passage from an online ‘interview’ is worth quotation: “Keyvan sees many parallels between the classical music of India, Turkey and Iran and Western Baroque music. ‘They were all created to be played for princes and kings and to a small audience. The music is spiritual and deep and designed for a small room – chamber music. The sound of the instruments is not very powerful, but warm and delicate, and part of the art is to develop skill in ornamentation, often to support the voice of a singer and the lyrics’”. What we hear on this present disc wasn’t all written for “princes and kings”, but it is all played and recorded as though “designed for a small room – chamber music” and warmth and delicacy, in both voice and instruments are valued more than power and volume.
Unsurprisingly, given the Chemiranis’ frequent involvement with transcultural musical activities, the repertoire on this disc is very diverse. Some tracks, such as ‘Bâman Sanamâ’ and ‘Berceuse Pour Maël’, are settings (in Farsi) of Sufi poems (or, at any rate, poems which can be interpreted sufistically) by, respectively, Hafiz and Saadi. Two tracks, ‘An Indian Way’ and ‘Miraqsan’, are purely instrumental; others have Irish origins, including ‘Irish Suite’ (an instrumental), ‘Lord Baker’ (which also incorporates a ghazal by Hafiz) and ‘The Limerick Rake’. All the vocal tracks are greatly enhanced by the intimate warmth and rich humanity of Maryam Chemirani’s voice.
At this point it might be useful to gloss the album’s title and sub-title. The Arabic word ‘Hâl’ or ‘Haal’ denotes several of the spiritual states experienced during a Sufi’s approach to the Divine including, for example, experiences of alert attention, states in which the presence of God is felt close by, of ecstasy or of divine intimacy – when the presence of the divine fills the heart. Bertrand Dicale’s booklet notes define ‘Hâl’ thus, “the state of consciousness in which one entirely forgets the self: a spiritual intoxication intertwining external perception with the sense of one’s inner path – a sort of internal trance that the ancient Persian authors claimed to be the ideal state for every musician and every listener”. He qualifies this by quoting Keyvan Chemirani: “I am not offering hâl, it is simply a lighthouse, a goal”. A brilliant essay by one of the great Iranian Islamic scholars of our own time, Seyyed Hossein Nasr (‘The Influence of Sufism on Traditional Persian Music’, in his book Islamic Art and Spirituality, Golgonooza Press, 1987) contains (p.168) the observation that “The spiritual profundity of present-day traditional Persian music,… which pulls man away from the material world and plunges the roots of the tree of his existence into the world of the Spirit, is due to the fact that the men who have composed and performed this music have themselves reached the stage of detachment and possess spiritual states (hāl) in the truly gnostic (‘irfānī) meaning of the term.”
On the other hand, the French phrase ‘ballades amoureuses’ (ballads of love) clearly makes primary reference to human romantic love. But the distinction between ‘divine’ love and ‘romantic love’ is by no means an absolute one. Many poems by Hafiz and Saadi can be read as expressing the poet’s love for another human being and/or his love of the divine. Or, if a Western example is preferred, it is surely clear that across the body of his work Dante’s ‘relationship’ with Beatrice is to be understood both as an experience of romantic love and a path “towards the inGodding of man” (Charles Williams, The Figure of Beatrice, 1943).
This interplay, or perhaps one should say the ‘simultaneity’, of the sacred and the profane unifies this CD which, after one has considered the individual tracks, rewards being heard ‘whole’ as a kind of suite.
But, of course, more than a few of the individual pieces reward the attentive listener. For me, the highlights include ‘Seven Fishes’, and ‘Miraqsan’. ‘Seven Fishes’, composed by Keyvan Chemirani, is built on a poem (‘Ka’be’) by a modern Persian poet, Bijan Taraghi (1930-2009). The poem’s speaker compares himself to ‘Malnun’ – a reference to the tragic love story of ‘Layla and Majnun’. This story has recorded origins in Arabic in the Seventh Century and was later retold in just about all the languages of the Islamic world and India (there have been several Indian films retelling the story too). The essence of the story concerns a young poet called Qays who becomes obsessed by the beautiful Layla (his cousin in many versions), while the two are still schoolchildren; his obsession is such that he starts to behave very wildly and is soon known by the epithet majnun (insane/madman). Layla’s parents forbid her to have any contact with Qays/Majnun, and soon marry her off (against her will) to a rich man. When he hears of this, Majnun leaves society and wanders the desert wilderness. Increasingly unhappy, Layla pines away and dies. Majnun is subsequently found dead near her grave. So far, so thoroughly ‘romantic’. But, in Nizami’s poem, after the two are dead, one of their friends (Zaid) – in the words of A.J. Arberry (Classical Persian Literature, London, 1958, p.124) – “realizes in a dream the mystical import of their immortal love”. Once again, the romantic and the spiritual/mystic are seen as inseparable.
While it would be absurd to claim that the unprepared listener would hear all of that in the 6 minutes of ‘Seven Fishes’, some basic knowledge of the kind outlined above does, I believe, deepen one’s sense of the piece’s significance. The richness of sound – including Maryam Chemirani’s voice, pipes of various kinds, the hammered sounds of the santur, the plucked strings of the saz, the bowed strings of the lyra and the hand percussion of the zarb – takes on a significance and substance which is more than purely ‘musical’. The result is a work both subtly resonant and powerful.
‘Miraqsan’ is more easily accessible, being wholly unprogrammatic – though it may be useful (even if not essential) to understand its title. In both Arabic and Farsi, ‘Raqs’ means ‘dance’ and the whole of the title might – my Persian wife tells me – mean, dependent on context (which in this case can only be the music itself) something like ‘I am making life dance’. Certainly, this urgent piece, in septuple metre, seems to demand some sort of movement from the listener. The CD booklet describes it as “a zarb duo”, but it begins with a brief introduction in which other instruments are heard, including the santur of Keyvan Chemirani and possibly the lyra of Sokratis Sinopoulos. It then turns into a dialogue between Keyvan Chemirani and Bijan Chemirani, each playing the zarb. I suspect that a good deal of this ‘conversation’ is improvised by the two brothers. The intricate momentum they generate is irresistible.
I am conscious that I have so far made little mention of the Celtic (predominantly Irish) material on the disc. But in a ‘suite’ which considers and gives expression to the range of emotions we might understand by the word ‘love’, their very ‘down to earth’ quality, quite without the slightest hint of the mystical, has its place too. The protagonist of ‘The Limerick Rake’ declares “In Newcastle West I spent many a night / With Kitty and Judy and Mary / My parents rebuked me for being such a rake / And for spending my time in such frolicsome ways”. In a variant of the lyrics, he ‘confesses’ (which hardly sounds the right word) “my heart, it was stolen by a pair of brown thighs”. This is ‘love’ at its most sensual – the complete antithesis of Majnun’s love for Layla (which went unconsummated). However, another of the traditional Irish songs performed here clearly suggested a rather different possibility to Keyvan Chemirani. ‘Lord Baker’ tells the story of an Irish Lord who sails away to see the world. During his travels he lands in Turkey, where he is imprisoned by the ruler. The ruler’s beautiful daughter falls in love with Lord Baker and surreptitiously frees him on his promise that he will not marry for a period of fourteen years while she tries to make her way to his homeland. There are further verses to the song, but in this arrangement ‘Lord Baker’ at this point segues into a setting, in the original Farsi, of some lines by Hafiz, quoted thus in the CD booklet:
Oh my dearly beloved, how can I bear the pain of loving you,
How long will this sadness make me weep through the night?
My maddened heart begins to pay heed to well-meant advice
Though it stays enchained to every hair of your head.
To most western readers these lines might seem simply to express the unhappiness of the Turkish princess while separated from her beloved; but to a Persian reader of the original they might readily be understood as also expressing the human soul’s pain at its separation from God.
Hāl is an impressive illustration of what is possible when the respectful meeting of different cultures nourishes artistic vision. In doing this it creates a beautiful overview of several versions of human ‘love’. For its beauty and its sensitive intelligence, this disc is enthusiastically recommended.
Glyn Pursglove
Performers
Keyvan Chemirani (zarb, drum kit, daf, santur, konokol, artistic director), Maryan Chemirani (voice), Sylvain Barou (wooden traverso flute, bansuri, duduk, uilleann-pipes, neyanban), Bijan Chemirani (zarb, saz), Sokratis Sinopoulos (lyra).
