BY STEPHANIE ESLAKE
Your eyes aren’t eyes,
They’re bees.
I can find no cure
For their sting.
This is one of the folk poems inside I Am the Beggar of the World: Landays from Contemporary Afghanistan. The book is a collection of poetry composed by Afghan women and translated by Eliza Griswold. As in this poem, the words represent the human experiences of oppression, love, and war that these women face.
It’s a concept that moved Gemma Peacocke to compose a new musical work.
This New Zealand-born and New Jersey-based composer wrote her Waves + Lines song cycle in 2017. It was premiered in Brooklyn. Now, it’ll be presented by Rubiks Ensemble at the Metropolis New Music Festival on 20 April. Gemma tells us why this piece of music is one worth listening to.
Gemma, tell us about the concept of Waves + Lines.
Waves + Lines is adapted from poems collected and translated by writer and poet Eliza Griswold in her astounding book I Am the Beggar of the World: Landays from Contemporary Afghanistan. Landays are folk poems created and shared almost exclusively by Afghan women. There is a taboo against women writing poetry, so landays are often written and shared in secret.
Each landay is a single rhyming couplet and they are most often about subjects like love, sex, home, separation, grief, and war. They are both a collective and a very individual form of poetry, and they capture the passion, desperation, and humour of the authors.
The song cycle is for soprano and chamber ensemble, and it incorporates fixed electronics and beautiful stylised projections by Thai-Australian designer Anchuli Felicia King. It premiered in New York last year with Australian director Benita de Wit, and I’m delighted that such a talented and sensitive ensemble as Rubiks is premiering it in Australia as part of the Metropolis Festival.
Why did you want to write a work that confronts these themes?
When I read I Am the Beggar of the World, I was struck by how intense and spare the poems are. I was drawn to their extraordinary beauty, wit, and wrenching sadness; and I began to sing some of my favourite poems to myself. As it turned out, Eliza Griswold lived around the corner from where I was living in New York at the time and so I sent her an email out of the blue and she was incredibly generous in letting me set some of the poems to music.
The ultraconservative regime of the Taliban as well as long-standing societal and tribal strictures have meant that the lives of Afghan women are largely invisible to the outside world, and the verses offer a surprising and vivid glimpse into this closed world. The individual landays are “luminous details” of a society wrought by the interwoven complications of political, religious, tribal, and intergenerational power struggles. My setting of them attempts to amplify the individual voices of the authors, which are so tangible in their first-person rendering, and the collective experience of women.
How did you choose to compose the music to this work in a way that complements the themes of the poetry?
I was very cognizant of not wanting to create a work that is unrelentingly painful and heavy, so I chose poems with a range of subjects and emotional states. I started with my favourite landay and sang the lines over and over to myself – in the shower, on the subway, and at home – until I knew what the voice part should be.
I wanted a way to draw people into an immersive world so I used electronics and extended instrumental techniques to create a grainy, atmospheric sound world which shifts for each of the songs. In the electronics for one of the songs I convolved a field recording of an air raid warning siren from a US military base in Afghanistan with recordings I made of soprano Eliza Bagg. In War, the double bass player has to play low, upward glissandi against the tape part in which the bass glissandi bend downward. The bass player is very exposed in the opening and has to do most of the work in creating a deeply menacing sound, which intensifies in the electronics with the thud-thud-thud-thud of Apache helicopters.
The voice part requires an enormous range and is pretty taxing on the singer; they have to use a dusky alto chest voice as well as being able to perform with a straight tone in the high soprano range. I incorporated some elements of folk-style singing like glottal breaks and portamenti with a minimal folk-pop vibrato. I also chose percussion instruments that would give me a wide range of expression.
There is a lot of heavy drum set writing, but there are also really delicate vibraphone passages, and the whole song cycle opens with the haunting sound of a pūrerehua (which is a Māori bullroarer).
What is the most moving poem that you’ve set to music here, and what’s it about?
So many of the poems are so deeply moving. One of the most jarring landays from the book is:
You sold me to an old man, father.
May God destroy your home; I was your daughter.
The longer I worked with the poem, the more I considered not just the depth of the anger of the author but also the soul-crushing despair of the past-tense in the phrase; ‘I was your daughter’. It is a distressing experience to read the poem and to fully realise that it is about real, contemporary lives. I set it for a song which I called Father.
I chose to finish the song cycle with a landay that at first reads as less dramatic, but that in its bittersweetness became for me one of the most poignant poems in the collection:
Without the Taliban
Afghanistan would be London.
How do you feel music like this can help to serve the representation of Afghan women – as opposed to victimise them, or perpetuate typical representations of these women as oppressed or powerless?
Women in Afghanistan are surviving a form of gender apartheid. They continue to face extraordinary oppression, violence, and the denial of fundamental human rights, 17 years after the fall of the Taliban regime. Despite the extraordinary conditions in which they live, Afghan women are like women everywhere else; they are ordinary people who have hopes and dreams and who care about their friends, their families, and their futures. Along with heroic women like Zainab Fayez (the sole female prosecutor in the conservative Kandahar province) who risk their lives to do the work they do, I try to keep in mind the many millions of ordinary women and girls whose basic human rights are completely suppressed, and whose names and lives we will never encounter, except for perhaps in these poems.
I have tried to set the words in such a way that the depth of thought and emotion that underpins the lines is brought to the fore; sometimes the words are stuttered, often repeated, held and drawn out, and sometimes dissolved into the sound world of the song, and yet they remain paramount throughout the work. The embodiment of the poems is a really powerful thing to see and hear, and this is how I’ve tried to amplify the voices of the women.
What do you hope will be the message that resonates with Australian audiences – about these women, their rights, their lives?
From the early stages of writing Waves + Lines I worked with my friend and collaborator, the Australian director Benita de Wit, to develop the song cycle into a semi-staged work incorporating a narrative arc, staging, and design. As two relatively privileged Antipodean women, we have tried to remain mindful of presenting the words of the authors (as translated by Eliza Griswold) without distorting them. We figured out that the most honest way we could do this was in fact to avoid any kind of representation of Afghan women. Through the poems, we can get closer to the women in these cities and towns and villages and refugee camps, but we are not them and we do not have ownership over their lived experiences.
Our way into the work, and the way we found to serve the poets, was to focus on the universality of so much of the inner lives of the women, and for me to respond musically to the sometimes exceptional and sometimes prosaic experiences laid out in the poems.
One of the striking things about landays is how funny and bawdy many of them are. As repressive as many elements of Afghan society are, the women and girls who create these poems and who write them in secret notebooks, share them in text messages, over a Kabul radio station, in formal meetings, and sing them to each other are the same as people anywhere; we all have hopes and dreams for our lives, and we all long for love and intimacy.
In your other work, you’ve launched Kinds of Kings – a female composer collective.
Kinds of Kings is a collective of some of my favourite composers! They are all incredibly talented, hard-working and entrepreneurial composers, and fierce advocates for the music of other wonderful composers and performers. We’re all from different parts of the world, and I feel so lucky to be in this tribe of fierce and fiercely talented people. We are a diverse bunch with different compositional styles, education backgrounds, ethnicities and nationalities.
Rubiks had already worked with two of us before we launched earlier this year, and we have big plans for future collaborations – Rubiks is one of our favourite ensembles!
Why is it important to you personally to do what you can to help promote the valuable work of women in music around the world?
Being in a collective means that we get noticed more and that we can advocate for each other, share opportunities, and combine administrative, programming, and marketing resources. People tend to notice first that we happen to be women despite the numerous collectives like Sleeping Giant rarely – if ever – being described as all-male collectives. It’s hard to make it as a composer, and it is especially difficult to do so in a female body; our implicit biases cause us to trust women less than men and to judge women more harshly. It’s also hard for some people to accept that the reason the ‘canon’ skews white and male is not because of a lack of talented women and people of colour, but because of centuries of patriarchal, Euro-centric norms.
I think our idea of the ‘canon’ creates stereotyped expectations of what a composer should look like, and makes it more complicated to objectively see and encourage talent and creativity in non-cis-male composers. The women who make it as composers despite all of the extra-special lady hurdles tend to be both very talented and to have a lot of grit, and so to me it feels completely natural to want their work to be noticed and to give audiences the opportunity to hear their music.
There has been a lot of pushback against the idea that all concerts should have a 50/50 gender split, or that we should at least stop programming concerts in which all the music is written by men. People are concerned that opportunities are being denied to talented men in favour of some kind of tokenistic inclusion of lesser-talented women. I, on the other hand, can’t stop imagining all of the extraordinary music that will never be written because women and people of colour face incredible barriers to entry to music education and music careers before we ever get to the point of being commissioned.
Imagine what the world would sound like if our industry were a little more reflective in its makeup of the world at large – if all the weird kids with music running through their heads who live in poor communities, refugee camps, on farms and in factories were given the kinds of opportunities my colleagues and I have had.
There may be fewer commissions for me, and I would be glad to see them go to other people if it meant that audiences got to hear music by people who look and talk like them, and whose music speaks to them.
Anything else you’d like to add?
Kaylie Melville, Rubiks’ percussionist, recently recommended that I read Liza Lim’s address on the fallacy of luck (‘Luck, Grief, Hospitality – re-routing power relationships in music’), and since doing so I’ve sent it to as many people as I can! I so agree with her premise that we are afforded opportunities through privilege, and I think privilege indicates whether we are trusted to succeed and given permission to try and fail. Artists need to be allowed to fail without it derailing future work. Even the most accomplished and regularly commissioned composers write a clunker from time to time, and that’s okay! Maybe they tried something out and it didn’t quite work. Maybe they ran into an impossible deadline. Maybe they just had a less-than-stellar idea. To make space for the most arresting and innovative work – for those few works of art that change the way we think about the world or even the direction of our lives – we have to accept failure as part of the creative process.
I hope that we begin to trust women more to take risks and to write enormous, powerful compositions so that we no longer have to grieve for the absence of the existence of this music.
See Rubiks (pictured below) perform Gemma Peacocke’s Waves + Lines at the Metropolis New Music Festival, 6pm April 20 at the Melbourne Recital Centre.
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