MusicSpoke | Artist Owned Sheet Music™

About the Score

In five movements, duration 20 mins (Individual movements may be excerpted for performance).

We don’t often think of poetry as rebellion, but the women of Afghanistan have built a tradition out of artistic defiance, of speaking in rhyme words they are forbidden in prose. In the Pashtun culture from the mountainous regions near Pakistan, girls and women share, compose and speak landays – an oral tradition of short poems by and for women, passed down for generations from woman to woman and tribe to tribe. The anonymous nature of these poems allows them to speak the unspeakable – to talk frankly of sensual love and desire, of yearning to make choices, of girls wanting to be more than an adjunct to their fathers, brothers and husbands. In a society where young girls are bartered to old men, where to choose where to love is to risk death, where girls are forbidden from education, the landays tell women’s stories in their own words, unfiltered and unchecked by the men’s voices that surround them. The texts chosen for this song cycle are only the tiniest smattering of a powerful tradition, but were chosen to highlight recurrent themes that appear in landays – love and desire, grief, exile, war, and yearning. While set for classical soprano with western instruments, the music pays homage to the origins of the poetry by calling for each musician to use a variety of timbres, modes and ornamentation that come from this style.

The vocal techniques in this work draw on Hindustani and Afghan folk traditions. Please email the composer at juhibansalcomposer@gmail.com if interested in workshopping these before performance.

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