Aruah

Aruah, or “souls” in Arabic, is an exploration of breath and its repeated gestures of inhalation and exhalation that inevitably lead to its final iteration before becoming a “spirit.” The title of the work suggests a programmatic and narrative element, which guided me throughout its composition. The impact of the 2020 pandemic and its aftermath that we are living in has much to do with the conception of this work. Aruah opens with a melody played in quasi-unison across the octet, which transforms into a series of chords that embody these breaths. These held chords eventually break out into a music that flows in a seemingly perpetual motion, with repeated gestures overlapping each other all throughout the ensemble, signifying the sheer volume of breath that encompasses even as few as eight people on stage. At times, literal inhalation and exhalation sounds make up the sound profile, most poignantly in the middle of the work, where the winds literally breathe in the background while the strings take up the harmonic material. The language itself is my most overt mixture thus far between the microtonally inflected maqamat, or Arab modes, just intonation, and the triadic-based harmonies employed by the late twentieth-century minimalists.