SATB div. choir, SATB soloists, violin, cello, mandolin, harp, and 2 percussionists
This is the full score. Parts are sold separately. There is no separate choral score.
To listen to a full recording, request a link from Jocelyn Hagen.
Movements:
Processional (full ensemble)
II. I Call (mezzo-soprano solo, SATB a cappella)
III. Tassel on Your Drum (SSAA, mandolin, percussion)
IV. I’m in love! (SATB, violin, cello)
V. Load Poems Like Guns (SATB, percussion)
VI. These Bleeding Tulips (3 female speakers, 3 basses, percussion)
VII. Daughter (SA, cello, harp, 5 female speakers)
VIII. Protest (SATB a cappella)
IX. Smoke-Bloom (mezzo-soprano solo, SATB double choir)
X. Blisters (soprano & tenor duet, SATB, violin, cello, daireh & doumbek)
XI. Sisters (SA, mandolin, harp, percussion)
XII. And the Word Null (3 female speakers, percussion)
XIII. Ode to My Earrings (SSA, harp)
XIV. Drones (SATB, cello, mandolin)
XV. Separation (SATB, violin, cello)
XVI. My Sleeping Heart (soprano & tenor duet, SATB, violin, cello, percussion)
XVII. These Days (female speaker, SATB, harp)
XVIII. You’re Stone (SATB, violin, cello)
XIX. The Moon’s Shadow (tenor solo, TB a cappella)
XX. Ghazal (mezzo-soprano solo, SA, violin, cello, harp, mandolin, percussion)
XXI. Farewell (mezzo-soprano solo, mandolin)
XXII. For Nadia (SATB a cappella)
XXIV. It Is Not Finished (SSA, percussion)
XXV. I’m gone (full ensemble)
All recordings and video performed by Conspirare, under the direction of Craig Hella Johnson.
“Can you imagine living in a world where you question your own existence? Much of the poetry included in this piece contemplates this very idea, and it is for this reason that composing Songs for Muska was the most challenging project I’ve ever had to complete. How could I possibly relate to these women, and was it even appropriate for me to share their story and write music inspired by their musical traditions? I wrestled with this for a long time, and in the end, I decided that it would be a greater sin not to share their stories. If they are questioning their own existence, and their value and worth to the world, then I feel compelled to tell the world, far and wide, that they, in fact, do exist. Their stories are worth sharing, and we owe it to them to acknowledge their lives and their hardships. We cannot forget about them.”
~ Jocelyn Hagen (2023)
I. Processional
II. I Call
I call. You’re stone.
One day you’ll look and find I’m gone.
-Traditional Landay
III. Tassel on Your Drum
If you hide me from the Taliban,
I’ll become a tassel on your drum.
-Traditional Landay
IV. I’m in love!
I’m in love! I won’t deny it, even if
you gouge out my green tattoos with a knife.
How much simpler can love be?
Let’s get engaged now. Text me.
-Traditional Landays
V. Load Poems Like Guns
Load poems like guns —
war’s geography calls you
to arms.
The enemy has no signs,
counter-signs,
colors
signals
symbols!
Load poems like guns —
each moment is loaded
with bombs
bullets
blasts
death-sounds —
death and war
don’t follow rules
you can make your pages into white flags
a thousand times
but swallow your words, say no more.
Load your poems —
your body —
your thoughts —
like guns.
The schoolhouses of war rise up
within you.
Maybe you
are next.
-Somaia Ramish, translated by Farzana Marie
VI. These Bleeding Tulips
They gave no quarter in those freezing nights,
only darkness, filled with laments.
First they crushed the heart’s defenses,
then tore limb from every limb of tree and leaf
and gardens blooming tulips in the spring:
they marked them all for summary destruction
(amazingly in the commotion a bird broke free).
As the locust-army marched en masse on rows of wheat
without cause except for ignorance
and blind to the horizon of their history,
they filled their laps with slaughtered innocents.
Don’t speak of the zeal of those bleeding tulips;
their destroyers’ slogans were all Islam and liberation
but they came in anything but peace.
And now the world thinks it knows us
by the famous “valor” of the Afghan nation.
-Roya Sharifi, translated by Farzana Marie
VII. Daughter
Listen, friends, and share my despair.
My cruel father is selling me to an old goat.
God, you gave me eyes to see
but this cruel white-bearded goat is blinding me.
You sold me to an old man, father.
May God destroy your home; I was your daughter.
-Traditional Landays
VIII. Protest
My fingers tap the table
seven thousand seven hundred and seventy-seven times —
my sign of protest.
When the neighbor’s kid continues
to learn “b” for battlefield
and “j” for jihad,
how will we be able to breathe
through the gunpowder?
What can we do?
Our days are spun from night
and we are woven dark, everyone groping
for someone’s hand.
-Elaha Sahel, translated by Farzana Marie
IX. Smoke-Bloom
I’m full of the feeling of emptiness,
full.
An abundant famine
boils me in my soul’s fevered fields,
and this strange waterless boiling
startles the image in my poem
to life.
I watch the new-living picture,
a peerless rose
blush across the page!
But barely has she first breathed,
when streaks of smoke begin
to obscure her face and fumes
consume her perfumed skin.
-Nadia Anjuman, translated by Farzana Marie
X. Blisters
Come, let’s lie here thigh to thigh
If you climb on, I won’t cry
Bright moon, for the love of God tonight
Don’t blind two lovers with such naked light.
Our secret love has been discovered.
You run one way and I’ll flee the other.
Because my love’s American,
blisters blossom on my heart.
-Traditional Landays
XI. Sisters
When sisters sit together,
they always praise their brothers.
When brothers sit together,
they sell their sisters to others.
-Traditional Landay
XII. And the Word Null
You said write
You said, tell me of the miracle of
words, you said
I became a stream of speech
for you of words from the beginning
That in the beginning was the word and the word was
the beginning.
But I knew nothing
of the end
of becoming nothing
of being nothing.
I said, how can I write your non-existence?
I spit myself onto a page
a painting that sent
the alphabet to its death.
In this way a thousand-and-nothing ancestors
of a generation of nothing-becomes
face ruin.
Your scandal
or mine?
And existence is everything that from the beginning
was my likeness the painting
was the likeness of my painting
that wrote nothing more.
And the word null
and the word dust
and the word superfluous.
-Somaia Ramish, translated by Farzana Marie
XIII. Ode to My Earrings
This is for you who continually
tremble
whirl
shimmy
you who are green at heart
with a slender frame —
I’ve reserved a place for you
on my shoulders
where you can live,
where, hey!
you can dance to every wind,
move to every tune
here on my shoulders
and sing a melody for the others.
Happiness is the color yellow —
it shines
it spins
even if it is night —
even if the wind is silent
and anxiety’s lamp is ignited.
-Elaha Sahel, translated by Farzana Marie
XIV. Drones
Leave your sword and fetch your gun.
Away to the mountains, Americans have come.
If the Taliban weren’t here for the world to see,
these foreigners would be free to occupy every sacred country.
The drones have come to the Afghan sky.
The mouths of our rockets will sound in reply.
May God destroy your tank and your drone,
you who’ve destroyed my village, my home.
May God destroy the Taliban and end their wars.
They’ve made Afghan women into widows and whores.
-Traditional Landays
XV. Separation
Separation, you set fire
in the heart and home of every lover.
In Policharki Prison, I’ve nothing of my own,
except my heart’s heart lives between its walls of stone.
Separation brought this kind of grief:
it made itself a mullah (tyrant) and me the village thief.
Separation followed me with an axe.
Wherever I laid love’s foundation, the axe smashed it.
-Traditional Landays
XVI. My Sleeping Heart
Of water I can’t have even a taste.
My lover’s name, written on my heart, would be erased.
May God make you into a riverbank flower
so I may smell you when I go to gather water.
If you couldn’t love me from the start,
then why did you awake my sleeping heart?
-Traditional Landays
XVII. These Days
These days, their plagues oppress us
with tyranny, toil, and why?
No sign of kindness, mercy,
or compassion appears to us.
Time tears down the heart’s
love-carved roof beams, exposes us
to naked sky, the overseer
of these midnight doubts and sighs.
The age has left a souvenir for us
(even as it conjures new sufferings):
a sickly body and pain without remedy.
The world’s vicious riptide leaves us
no hope of this night-journey ever reaching morning:
a ship broken, the captain intact.
It is impossible for us
to straighten our backs when our legacy
is a chest-full of regrets. We were crushed,
and time’s best advice for us?
Get used to my cruelty, it burns but you can learn
to tolerate the burning, it said to us.
So we buried our cries in our hearts, buried our voices
in tombs of tired throats. What’s left for us
but to imagine the dreams that might have come true for us?
The sea overwhelms Sahel, whose cries resound;
as footsteps fade, she left her tears to us.
-Fereshta Nilab Sahel Noorzayi, translated by Farzana Marie
XVIII. You’re Stone
I call. You’re stone.
One day you’ll look and find I’m gone.
-Traditional Landay
XIX. The Moon’s Shadow
Can you recall where
I lost you
or where
in the soil my fingerprints
were?
Or perhaps those weren’t prints, just
a remnant
of the moon’s shadow.
-Fariba Haidari, translated by Farzana Marie
XX. Ghazal
I am tired of repeat, repeat, and again repeat:
lay head on wall’s shoulder…repeat —
life, love and comfort leave a bad taste
so suffer this stubborn sting alone…repeat.
Torment grips me all the way down to the deep
as the death-dagger-blood-reel continually repeats.
Hear the ailing narrator of this bitter tale,
the story life builds breath by breath…repeat.
Believe just for one, how bad it hurts —
don’t leave beside me an empty seat.
-Nilufar Niksear, translated by Farzana Marie
XXI. Farewell
I want to leave this “home” and go
to the grasslands, pack up and go
to a place I imagine soaked in the scent of peace —
no? If that land does not exist I will go
to the dust-scented desert, go
no matter how many times they bind
my feet, the ties will rot and I will go
in search of a country of lovely souls.
These colorful clothes did no good, I will go
now robed in white. The lovers call: come!
The time of farewells has come and I must go!
-Fereshta Nilab Sahel Noorzayi, translated by Farzana Marie
XXII. For Nadia
The sky died
for the wind that split open its chest
We all died for you
though fate’s sleight of hand snuck you from us
And you smiled from the sky
for us
and for the moments we carry away
from our memories.
-Somaia Ramish, translated by Farzana Marie
XXIII. A Gamble
Whatever we had or didn’t have, we inevitable lost —
all that a life amasses, in one turn, lost.
Despite the warning shout of the garden’s guard we lost
the tall date palm to axe-carrying man
and where can we carry this shame? — we lost
our simpler selves to the dollar, the dinar
and from the height of valor we never actually had, we lost
our bearings, fell by accident into getting and having.
We return to the matter of the lantern, having lost
the sun again in shadows on the wall.
And woe to us, who lost the words just
as we were about to testify. Don’t give us
another speech about recovering what we lost:
we are blurred with we were when we gambled and lost
the future in the replay in the present of the past.
-Roya Sharifi, translated by Farzana Marie
XXIV. It Is Not Finished
And whether or not I exist,
it is not finished,
not yet finished.
-Eleha Sahel, translated by Farzana Marie
XXV. I’m gone
I call. You’re stone.
One day you’ll look and find I’m gone.
-Traditional Landay
In May of 2014, Craig Hella Johnson recommended that I read a newly-released book of poetry: I am the Beggar of the World: Landays from Contemporary Afghanistan, translated by journalist Eliza Griswold. A landay is a folk couplet - an oral and often anonymous scrap of song created by and for mostly illiterate people: the more than 20 million Pashtun women who span the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan. I was instantly drawn in by the beauty, efficiency, and hard truths packed into these dense statements about their lives. Because of restrictions made by the Taliban, these women weren’t allowed to read or write, let alone show ownership of any kind of creative free speech. These landays have traditionally belonged to no single Pashtun woman, and, therefore, belonged to all of them.
In the forward to I am the Beggar of the World, Griswold sites a landay written by a teenage poet who called herself Rahila Muska.
“I call. You’re stone.
One day you’ll look and find I’m gone.”
Muska, like many young and rural Afghan women, wasn’t allowed to leave her home. Her father removed her from school in the fifth grade, as educating girls was seen as dishonorable and dangerous. She learned poetry at home, from other women and from the radio. (In the beginning, landays were often shared around a fire. These kinds of gatherings are now rare because of the 40 years of chaos and conflict this area of the world has endured. Now people share landays virtually via the Internet, Facebook, text messages, and the radio.) Muska was a rising literary talent, and as a young teenager she often phoned in to the radio to share the landays she had written. When her brothers discovered this in the spring of 2010, they beat her badly for exercising her creativity and free will. She responded by burning herself in protest, and died soon after.
When composing this work, I wanted to weave the spirit of these women and their culture into the music. You will notice that there is a lot of repetition in the words, and that these words are often passed between different women in the ensemble. This compositional technique honors the way in which these landays are shared: spoken, woman to woman. I have studied the folk music of Afghanistan and incorporated specific drum patterns and scales. I even ordered a traditional daireh drum and had it shipped to me from Istanbul.
I am a folk singer at heart, and the combination of my own singing experiences and the elements of Afghan musical traditions mingle in different ways throughout the work. I stretched myself to push my folk-inspired melodies into the weighted scales of their traditional folk music. I have a deep affection for popular music and was inspired to include rhythmic speech after learning about Paradise Sorouri, Afghanistan’s first female rapper.
In my research I also found another book of poetry, published in 2015, called Load Poems Like Guns, which became extremely influential in the creation of Songs for Muska. Poet Farzana Marie spent years in Afghanistan as a civilian volunteer, Air Force officer, and scholar. In this book of poetry she translates the poems of eight leading women poets from Herat, Afghanistan, a seat of culture and arts for that region of the world. She translated these poems from Persian Dari, and in the introduction to the book she tells the story of one of the featured poets, Nadia Anjuman, and her painful struggle to gain artistic recognition as a leading female poet, her forced unhappy marriage, and her tragic death at the hands of her husband.
It is important to note that these two books of poems feature poetry from women of two different regions of Afghanistan. Women in Herat are attending the University and getting their poetry published, yet many rural women remain illiterate and uneducated. Their world is slowly changing, but there is still a lot of work to do. According to an article in The Washington Post from November of 2017, Afghanistan is ranked in last place among the countries of the world, tied with Syria, for the way their society treats their women when it comes to inclusion, justice, and security.
This performance is a gift to Muska, and Nadia, and to all the women of Afghanistan who dare to record their experiences through poetry - written down or not. As an outsider to their culture and way of life, I cannot speak for them. As an artist I am drawn to the female experience, from across the globe and across time. The stories of these women’s lives should be shared. This music is simply a window into their complicated world and, like Eliza Griswold has done, a chance to enlighten a broader community. While their lives are drastically different than the ones we lead, commonalities are found in the truths so eloquently delivered in these poems that resonate with our basic human emotions: love, grief, frustration, humor, and belonging.
-Jocelyn Hagen
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1: (Easy) No divisi in voice parts, accompaniment doubles or supports vocal parts, diatonic, symmetrical phrases, textures mostly homophonic, simple rhythms, stepwise voice leading (conjunct), moderate ranges, no extended techniques, and limited sustained singing.
2: (Medium Easy) Limited divisi, voices somewhat independent from accompaniment, some chromatics, phrases may be longer or more fragmented, mostly homophonic, moderate rhythmic complexity, some difficult intervals (disjunct motion), moderate ranges, extended techniques are simple, limited sustained singing.
3. (Medium) Limited divisi, unaccompanied, or with independent accompaniment (voice parts not doubled), many chromatics, phrases of varying lengths, more contrapuntal textures, moderately complex rhythms, some difficult intervals (disjunct motion), moderately difficult/challenging ranges, extended techniques are potentially challenging, and some sustained singing.
4. (Medium Difficult) Abundant divisi, unaccompanied, or accompanying instruments are fully independent from voice parts, many chromatics and/or key changes, long and/or broken phrases, potentially little homophony, complex rhythms, many difficult intervals (disjunct motion), difficult/challenging ranges, potentially difficult extended techniques, and a demand for sustained singing.
5. (Difficult) Adundant divis, unaccompanied, or accompanying instruments are fully independent from voice parts, many chromatics and/or key changes, long and/or broken phrases, potentially little homophony, complex rhythms, extreme ranges, use of challenging or unusual extended vocal techniques, abundant sustained singing.
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