Fantasia for Strings

I’ve always wondered—what if our well-established composers from the European classical tradition had known about Arabic musical techniques? That kind of thought experiment excites me as a composer, and Fantasia for Strings is one such exploration. This piece, in particular, draws inspiration from British composer Ralph Vaughan Williams’s “Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis,” told through the lens of an Arab-American living in a world about a century past Vaughan Williams, on a completely different hemisphere.

The structure of this piece is simple: a binary form in which the four principal players of the orchestra form a string quartet that plays microtonal adaptations of a small passage from Vaughan Williams, as if he had grown up in a place like Cairo or Beirut. The full string ensemble then responds with a lush, tonal passage in his style. As the piece unfolds, I use traditional modulations, but with microtonal pitches, creating the façade of familiar Western keys like G major or A minor—without fully settling into them. The quartet and orchestra gradually merge, intertwining these two sound worlds into an acoustic tapestry richer than either one on its own.

I love the limitations of writing for strings. They’re the only instrumental family that can cover the full range of a piano while maintaining a unified timbre. By incorporating only the microtonality of Arabic music—without other stylistic markers—I hope that I’m creating something that doesn’t immediately give away its influences through its sound alone. It’s not just an Arabic folk song, nor is it strictly Western classical music. The ambiguity between these two worlds is what I hope draws you, the listener, in to hear something familiar in a completely new way.