Insite

…hold me, neighbor, in this storm… (2007) 

By Aleksandra Vrebalov (b. 1970) 

 

Aleksandra Vrebalov, a native of the former Yugoslavia, left Serbia in 1995 and continued her education in the United States. About “…hold me, neighbor, in this storm…,” she writes: 

 

“The Balkans, with its multitude of cultural and religious identities, has had a troubled history of ethnic intolerance. For my generation of Tito’s pioneers and children of Communists, growing up in the former Yugoslavia meant learning about and carrying in our minds the battles and numberless ethnic and religious conflicts dating back half a millennium, and honoring ancestors who died in them. By then, that distant history had merged with the nearer past, so those we remember from World War II are our grandparents. Their stories we heard firsthand. After several devastating ethnic wars in the 1990s, we entered a new century, this time each of us knowing in person someone who perished. As I write this in November 2007, on YouTube a new generation of Albanians and Serbs post their war songs, bracing for another conflict, claiming their separate entitlements to the land and history, rather than a different kind of future, together. 

 

“Strangely, the cultural and religious differences that led to enmity in everyday life produced—after centuries of turbulently living together—most incredible fusions in music. It is almost as if what we weren’t able to achieve through words and deeds—to fuse, and mix, and become something better and richer together—our music so famously accomplished instead. 

 

“’…hold me, neighbor, in this storm…’ is inspired by folk and religious music from the region, whose insistent rhythms and harmonies create a sense of inevitability, a ritual trance with an obsessive, dark energy. Peaceful passages of the work grew out of the delicately curved, elusive, often microtonal melodies of prayers, as well as escapist tavern songs from the region, as my grandmother remembers them. 

 

“For me, ‘…hold me, neighbor…’ is a way to bring together the sounds of the church bells of Serbian orthodox monasteries and the Islamic calls for prayer. It is a way to connect histories and places by unifying one of the most civilized sounds of Western classical music—that of the string quartet—with ethnic Balkan instruments, the gusle [a bowed string instrument] and tapan [large double-headed drum]. It is a way to piece together our identities fractured by centuries of intolerance, and to reach out and celebrate the land so rich in its diversity, the land that would be ashen, empty, sallow, if any one of us, all so different, weren’t there.” 

 

Vrebalov holds a doctorate from the University of Michigan, where she studied with Evan Chambers and Michael Daugherty, and a master’s degree from the San Francisco Conservatory, where her teacher was Elinor Armer. She has participated in numerous master classes and workshops, such as the New York University Summer Composition Workshop; music courses in Darmstadt (Germany), Szombathely (Hungary), and Kazimierz Dolny (Poland) in collaboration with IRCAM; and the Cabrillo Festival in Santa Cruz, California. She now teaches at the City College of New York. 

 

Vrebalov’s works have been performed by the Kronos Quartet, the Cabrillo Festival Orchestra, Jorge Caballero, the Sausalito Quartet, Dusan Tynek Dance Company, Ijsbreker, and the Moravian Philharmonic, among others. Her music has been recorded for Nonesuch and Vienna Modern Masters. 

 

In 2005, Lila was premiered in Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall by violinist Ana Milosavljevic. The premiere of the orchestral work Orbits opened the 30th Novi Sad Music Festivities and was broadcast live on national television, on the NS Channel. The same channel produced a 30-minute television biography of Vrebalov. That year, she also worked on the score for Sleeping Beauty, an experimental film introduced at New York’s Anthology Film Archives. 

 

Kronos’ recording of Aleksandra Vrebalov’s “…hold me, neighbor, in this storm…” is available on Floodplain, released on Nonesuch Records. 

Note courtesy of the Kronos Quartet. 

 

 

Alap from “Raga Mishra Bhairavi 

By Ram Narayan (b. 1927) 

Arranged by Kronos Quartet, transcribed by Ljova 

 

Ram Narayan is one of the world’s most revered masters of the sarangi, the bowed string instrument from northern India renowned for its vocal expressiveness. Over the course of his long career, Narayan has been the person most responsible for bringing this ancient chordophone into the foreground of classical Hindustani music. Born in Udaipur, Rajasthan, Narayan grew up in a family of musicians and began playing the sarangi as a child under his father’s tutelage. He began his career as a music teacher in Udaipur at age 15, then moved to Delhi in 1947 to work as a staff player at All India Radio. Like most sarangi players of the era, he played as a vocal accompanist only; however, he soon realized the potential of the sarangi as a solo instrument and pushed to bring his performances into the spotlight—a practice that was unheard of at the time. 

 

He moved to Bombay two years later to play in the burgeoning film industry and slowly pave the way for a solo career. In the early 1950s his ragas were some of the first to be recorded on LPs produced in India, and by the end of the decade Narayan became widely acknowledged as a soloist. Since then, he has received numerous awards, including the Sangeet Natak Academy Award, the highest honor issued in India for dance, music, and theater. Many innovations made by Narayan to bowing and fingering techniques on the sarangi have now become standard. 

 

Narayan is known for his vivid interpretations of traditional Indian ragas. A specified combination of notes played and embellished within a parent framework called a thaat, each different raga has the power to evoke a unique emotional transcendence. This esthetic feeling was termed by music scholars as Rasavadhana: a mystic state completely unrelated to desire, which is purely compounded of joy and consciousness. This arrangement of “Raga Mishra Bhairavi” is based on a performance by Narayan, recorded in 1989. 

 

Ljova (Lev Zhurbin) is a composer, arranger, and violist. Born in Moscow, he now works out of New York. Ljova’s arrangements have been performed by the Kronos Quartet, Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Project, Lara St. John, and many others. He has composed more than 70 works, including compositions for orchestras, chamber ensembles, jazz and Latin bands, as well as over a dozen scores for film and theater projects. Recent commissions include orchestral works for the Staten Island Symphony, the Wild Ginger Philharmonic, and the New York Symphonic Arts Ensemble, as well as a chamber music commission from the American Composers Forum. 

 

Kronos’ recording of “Raga Mishra Bhairavi” by Ram Narayan is available on Floodplain, released on Nonesuch Records. 

Note courtesy of the Kronos Quartet. 

 

 

Smyrneiko Minore

Traditional (as sung by Marika Papagika)

Arranged by Jacob Garchik (b. 1976) 

 

This arrangement of “Smyrneiko Minore” is inspired by a 1918 recording by Greek singer Marika Papagika. Of the many immigrant groups arriving in America via Ellis Island to begin new lives, the Greek community was one of the more persistent and enduring. By the mid-1920s, when the major explosion of ethnic recording was taking place in the United States, the Greek catalogues already boasted over a decade’s worth of comprehensive input. The breeding ground of Greek-American music was often the “café Amans,” atmospheric gathering places filled with cultural reassurance, Greek newspapaers, home-cooked food, ouzo, strong coffee, and always music. One of the most popular was a New York-based operation run by the husband and wife team of Kostas and Marika Papagika. 

 

Marika Papagika was born on the island of Kos in 1890. Her family moved to Egypt, probably settling in Alexandria, when she was a teenager and it was there that she began her singing career. She and her husband arrived in New York in 1915, on board the Themistocles, a ship that had sailed from the Greek port of Piraeus, and by 1925 they had moved to 215 West 34th Street, where they owned and operated their own club. She became a noted exponent of the Smyrnaic Greek style of the rebetiko tragoudi, the freshly reinvented and garrulous music that had first emerged in Smyrna, and was then tempered by the tragic events of the 1922 Turkish expulsions that transplanted the Greek community into the ramshackle world of Piraeus. 

 

By this time Papagika was also an established recording artist, having initially signed with Victor in 1918, and she was one of the first to commit rembetika to wax in the new world. Interestingly, as well as Greek songs, operetta, influences from French café music, and an adventurous utilizing of unusual combinations of instruments, her repertoire also included a few Turkish songs. This willingness to perform both Turkish and Greek works at a time of strained relations between the two countries points, perhaps, to the immigrant’s differing perspective of events. She saw herself, it seems, at least as much as a product of the crumbling Ottoman Empire as of her culturally Greek background. 

 

Papagika’s first four-song session for Victor took place in New York in 1918 and included the celebrated “Smyrneiko Minore.” [This recording has been re-released on Black Mirror: Reflections in Global Musics (1918-1954), complied by Ian Nagoski for Dust-to-Digital Records.] Among the song’s lyrics is the stanza, “If you love me and it’s a dream / May I never wake up / In the sweet dawn / God lets me take my soul away.” Between that first session and 1929, she cut 232 performances. The Papagikas fell victims to the Wall Street Crash of 1929, and in the subsequent economic collapse they lost the business sometime in 1930. Her recording career ended with only one further session in 1937, and she died in her Long Island home in 1943. 

 

Program note by Paul Vernon, adapted from the article “Seeking Marika,” which appeared in the world music magazine fRoots. Reprinted with permission.