Preview
DOHNAVA
January 31 and February 1
Dancers’ Studio West Theatre
Magical things happen when musicians from around the world gather for a residency at The Banff Centre. Chance meetings in parking lots lead to all-night jam sessions, and new ideas and collaborations take flight. To experience moments like these is what musicians and music lovers live for. The question is, can these moments flourish beyond the walls of an isolated studio in the mountains?
Amir Amiri and Linling Hsu believe that with their "phat cubic" blend of eastern and western musical traditions and a lot of hard work, the answer is yes. Their concert, called Dohnava, will take their collaboration outside the confines of the residency for the first time.
"You learn so much in Banff," Amiri says. "It’s fantastic career development, (and it’s) extremely isolated, which helps in the beginning, but at some point it’s better to fire it up and out."
Amiri speaks from experience. Since arriving in Canada six years ago, the Iranian-born santour player has participated in numerous residencies at The Banff Centre, studying western music through collaborations with an international array of musicians, while continuing to practice his own eastern musical tradition.
American classical violinist Linling Hsu was a newcomer to "the Banff experience" when she arrived at the Centre last September. Although she came with a cellist whom she intended to work with as a duo, Hsu was sidetracked when she met Amiri and his santour, a 72-stringed hammer dulcimer.
"I’d never heard of it," she says with a laugh. "I didn’t know what it looked like – I didn’t know what it sounded like."
Amiri suggested they get together and play, and Hsu was struck by the contrast of their instruments.
"I can sustain notes, whereas he’s just hitting," Hsu explains. "(The santour) is more percussive than a stringed instrument. I loved the way our instruments sounded together."
Amiri, who studied traditional Persian music with masters like Iran’s Parviz Meshkatiyan and India’s Ravi Shankar, began teaching Hsu licks of melody.
"The whole system of working is different," says Hsu, whose timely meeting with Amiri fuelled her expanding interest in ethnomusicology. "I’m not learning music from a page. I’m learning just by hearing. He was teaching me, and the next thing I knew it was Wednesday, he was supposed to play in the Friday night concert, and he was asking me if I wanted to play."
Amiri had dreamed of combining eastern and western musical traditions for years, but his efforts to do so had never moved beyond Banff’s hallowed walls. With Hsu’s eagerness to learn about eastern music and her ability to improvise and harmonize with Amiri’s melodies, Amiri knew that this collaboration had the potential to flourish beyond Banff.
"Dohnava" is a Persian word meaning "two separate voices" – "doh" means two and "nava" means "a divine voice." Each voice exists in relationship to the other.
The complementary voices provide the hypnotic quality found in eastern music. Yet Amiri says that living in western society for a while has taught him something enormous – that you can always voice your opinion and you’re allowed to have disagreement between voices.
Harmonically, Amiri says, "eastern music is deep like an ocean and wide as a one-foot narrow well, while western music is wide like an ocean and only one foot deep."
Hsu adds that eastern melodies are basically in one key because they are composed in a modal system.
"However, within that one key, it’s really deep because you have time to explore," Amiri continues. "You only have eight notes. In western music there’s 88 of them."
The first half of Dohnava’s 90-minute program begins with the most basic melody, Amir’s "home," and grows increasingly complex as harmonies are added. Hsu will introduce her "home" in the second half, and the duo will be joined at various times by a special guest artist, Ziya Tabassian, on the tombak drum. |
