Bilocation—being in two places at the same time—might be the stuff of science fiction. But a new recording by Israeli mandolinist Avi Avital has the feel of transporting us here and there all at once.
In Song of the Birds (Deutsche Grammophon), Avital and his collaborators—the Between Worlds ensemble, Ensemble Rustavi and vocalists Alessia Tondo and Marina Heredia—blend classical music and traditional music from cultures around the Mediterranean and Black Sea regions into a true feast for the ears.
The driving question behind the recording is one the globetrotting Avital has grappled with his entire career.
“How do we present these folk traditions in the context of the concert hall?” Avital said. “This is the question that I’ve asked every collaborator on this program.”
Avital’s approach is directly informed by his personal background. At home with his Moroccan parents, he was surrounded by north African music. At conservatory, Avital soaked in classical music and jazz. And the universality of his instrument—mandolin—has led him to explore musical traditions everywhere.
“I grew up not having anyone to tell me, ‘This is classical music, that is a different kind of music,’” Avital said. “None of my teachers learning classical music told me I should only play this genre. I wasn’t aware that there was a separation between the genres. They are, for me, dialects of the same language.”
In this recent interview, Avital talks about what he describes as the “two edges”—classical music and traditional music—that he connects in his work as a musician.
INTERVIEW VIDEO GOES HERE
Song of the Birds reflects Avital’s global musical expeditions in tracks of dazzling originality. With his mandolin as a passport between musical cultures, Avital tours Italy, Sicily, Greece, Georgia, Turkey and Spain, whose Sephardic and Catalan traditions are especially well represented on the recording.
Antonis Sousamoglou’s arrangement of the traditional Greek Raiko is a high-octane romp in ever-changing meters and meandering melodies. Cante jondo meets klezmer in Jonathan Keren’s passionate arrangements of Ladino songs. The Mingrelian Songs of 20th-century Georgian composer Otar Taktakishvili in David Bruce’s arrangements are enticing windows into a musical culture that for many is terra incognita.
And Song of the Birds offers musical vistas into plenty of other realms. In fact, the recording’s most significant achievement is how it potentially makes us see—and hear—the world. Its joining of the traditional and the classical brings us into encounters with cultures we might not have been able to experience through travel alone—all within the comfort zone of some really fun tunes.
And if anything can help us find unity in diversity, fun and good tunes can.
“On one hand, we are living in a small world. We need to get along and to have shared values with a larger amount of people, but we don’t lose the nuances, the richness of the cultures across the globe,” Avital said. “But also, we don’t want these cultures, these nuances, this diversity to be a separator factor. We don’t want this to be a reason to separate ourselves from others or to put political borders between these cultures.”
Transcript of interview:
Jennifer Hambrick: In the notes Thomas May wrote for your recording, he describes your Between World’s vision as—and this is a quote—“a space where historical memory, living tradition, and artistic innovation converge.”Let’s start there. Tell us more about your vision for your Between Worlds Ensemble and also for this recording on which they and you perform.
Avi Avital: I think there are two edges where musically I connect very much. On one side, is classical music. It’s how I’ve formed myself as a musician. The ceremonial tradition of it, but the complexity of the harmony and melody and counterpoint and structure and so on Art music, abstract, composed. On the other hand, there is traditional music. And usually when we think of a traditional melody. It’s sometimes eight bars or sixteen bars that sort of survived the natural selection of music for 500 years. That means that it is a cell of music content so powerful that within eight or 16 bars can transmit so much emotion in such a condensed and powerful way. How do we present these folk traditions in the context of the concert hall? This is the question that I’ve asked every collaborator on this program, and we have very different answers, musical answers to that.
Jennifer Hambrick: Sure, sure. And also in the notes to this recording, you are quoted as saying from the moment you conceived this project, that you have felt it as a calling. Talk a little bit about that. Why so, or how so have you felt this project as a calling?
Avi Avital: I think, I mean, it has a personal element to it and maybe slightly broader. I’ll start with the personal. I grew up not having anyone to tell me, “This is classical music, that is a different kind of music.” None of my teachers learning classical music told me I should only play this genre. I wasn’t aware that there was a separation between the genres. They are, for me, dialects of the same language. Each musical genre has a different mechanism to do the same thing. And I lived in a society that celebrates, at least in my generation celebrates, diversity. My parents come from Morocco. I heard a lot of North African music at home. But outside of my neighbors, I heard all kids of different music. Going to the conservatory, classical music. There was a lot of jazz around me. And so, I was always attracted to different kinds of music. And also, the instrument that I play, the mandolin, lends itself very easily to play classical music—that’s the definition of the mandolin, 18th-century Italian classical music instrument. But of course, we know it from so many different kinds of music—in North America, of course, bluegrass music, or Brazilian choro, Irish music. But also, really, every culture in the world has a plucked string instrument similar in sound to the one of the mandolin or part of a bigger family that are really the sound of their culture. So, with me it’s a bit the chicken and the egg—did I choose the mandolin because I’m like that, or did I become this type of musician because I play the mandolin? I don’t know. This is one element of it which I feel very authentically at home in this project, in this vision that I had. On one hand, we are living in a small world. We need to get along and to have shared values with a larger amount of people, but we don’t lose the nuances, the richness of the cultures across the globe. But also, we don’t want these cultures, these nuances, this diversity to be a separator factor. We don’t want this to be a reason to separate ourselves from others or to put political borders between these cultures. So this is globalism or pluralism with roots is how I would describe it at the end.
Jennifer Hambrick: So, mixing of traditions. So there’s a lot going on in this recording. And in a video trailer for the recording, you say that “the Between Worlds Ensemble is the contrast between something that is very traditional and orally preserved and something that a composer sat and wrote,” again, as you mentioned. Mixing of traditions. So if you were to point out maybe a few of the tracks on this recording, which has quite a number of tracks and each of them very, very distinctive sounding. If you were to point out maybe a few of the tracks on this recording assort of samples, if you will, that would give listeners a good sense of the recording, which tracks would those be? Which tracks would you point us to?
Avi Avital: The first track that comes in my mind is Virrinedda, it’s a Sicilian song. It’s in a Sicilian old dialect. And I gave the task to arrange it to David Bruce, a British comspoer, has no knowledge in Italian let alone Sicilian dialect, let alone an antique version of it. And so, the text was foreign to him. Nd he asked me, actually, for a translation; and before I managed to produce such a translation for him, he already kind of gathered from all kinds of translators online what it is about. And I think his reflection was, okay, no one is going to understand—or not many people are going to understand—this song because it is in a language that not many people speak. So I’m going to tell this story through the music. And in the arrangement you can hear—I mean, it’s a love song, so obviously there is nostalgia, there’s a broken heart involved. But in the verses there is this story told from the perspective of the one who is in love desperately. And I feel that this arrangement, one of my favorites from David, really tells the story without you needing to understand the text. I think another example that stands as a symbol, as a pillar for the whole project is Song of the Birds. This is also the title of the album and the last track on it. Song of the Birds, is a traditional Catalan Christmas song that we wouldn’t have known unless Pablo Casals, the classical cellist, had made it famous all around the world. And Pablo Casals, from Catalunia, had to leave his homeland under the Franco regime and live in exile. And throughout his life in exile, he made it a point to end each one of his concerts with this song from his homeland, with Song of the Birds. And it made me reflect a lot, while doing the project, about universalism and cultural identity, national identity—how does it play a role in an artist’s life? And especially this action of bringing a piece of your heritage, of your culture into a context of a classical concert hall. All of these elements together are very much deep in the music that I make in almost all my projects and very much so in this project.
Jennifer Hambrick: You touched on this earlier in our conversation. You know, in the West, at least, music has always been very boxed in by genre or style designations—we have classical music, and jazz, and hip-hop, and rap, and “world music” which is a vast category that is broken down into subgenres of traditional music from around the world. But your work with the Between Worlds Ensemble and certainly the recording we’ve been discussing, Song of the Birds, and other projects steered by other artists make me wonder if the world might just be ready to call music of any type simply “music,” drop the designations of style and subgenre, and just really live into the universality, to use your word,that music offers all people all the time.Your further thoughts on this point?
Avi Avital: I love this. I would sign up for it. I think music happens, and then somebody needs to name it. That’s the process. And it’s okay. I mean, we need to name things, so we know what we’re talking about, and sometimes it’s really just too complex to confine it to a name. This is barriers of the language. So, the importance is not to feel, not to surrender to the term and judge music by what is it called. That’s, I think, wrong. Now finding a name to it, that’s up to you, I guess, journalists, to name it and to find the right beautiful, poetic terms to it. But I think what we’re doing Between Worlds Ensemble is really lay all this music—we have classical music that we left almost as is, and folk music that we left almost as is. And I love the contrast, also, between these two feelings in the context of the album or in our concerts. Let’s say a crossover would be something that puts classical music and folk music one on top of the other. Or hip-hop rhythm with Beethoven’s Fifth. And there are better projects of crossover music. But that’s not the point that we wanted to make in this album. We wanted to lay all this spectrum of ways to interpret different kinds of music and to let also the contrast be the driving force in the listening experience.
