Layali Beirut

This piece was commissioned by Versoi Ensemble with support from the United States Embassy in Finland.

I first got ideas for this piece on a train ride from DC to NYC as I was thinking about the compositional possibilities of Arabic maqam. At the time, I was exploring ways to create effective counterpoint in a maqam without sacrificing its microtonal intonation. In that train ride, I had a revelation on how to handle the B and E microtones, and eagerly started sketching ideas for this piece. Later during my trip, I went to a hookah lounge for lunch, and in that loud atmosphere surrounded by smoke, food, laughter, and Arabic, I took out my notebook and started a fugue in Rahat al-Arwah, a maqam with a B half-flat tonic. To my knowledge, this is the first time someone has composed a fugue in a maqam's authentic tuning. Making the counterpoint work was not easy. I had to question what makes harmonies consonant or dissonant when placed outside a tonal context, and relied on a combination of semiotics, maqam theory, Western medieval polyphony, the harmonic series, and more math than I would like to create a system in which the counterpoint works note-by-note.

The piece, while it certainly does evoke the spirit of Beirut, is also named after the Hookah Lounge in New York, where I wrote the majority of it.

This piece was recorded live in concert in Helsinki, Finland.