Ein Garten Singender Dinge

What does a magnetic field generator sound like? What does the last cigarette lighter say? Whose hands are there, coming towards us, and what is the secret behind the star chart?

Elshan Ghasimi’s concept album Elies Miniatures I – Ein Garten singender Dinge combines classical Persian music with the demands of contemporary conceptual art and the processing of an archive.

With the utmost sensitivity in musical expression, the world-class soloist leads us into a new musical universe on the tar. As a composer, she interlaces different modal scales of the Radīf*, combines them with influences and elements of minimal music and interweaves poetry by Omar Chayyām, Hossein Gol-e-Golab, Hatef Esfahani and her own texts. On this album, Ghasimi appears in various roles as composer, soloist, singer and reciter.

This results in 19 highly divergent musical miniatures based on 19 objects from the estate of the forgotten Moroccan mathematician, poet and mystic El Arbi Bouqdib. A medley of stories and memories within a garden of singing things.

Every single composition on the first album is a delight of direct experience and critical reflection. They are playful and serious, tragically alive. In a tour d’horizon, they recount fragments from the life of this unknown researcher and his existence between poetry, religion, magic, family and science.

The melodies are object interpretations and subjective memory monads, formulated in the (virtually unknown to us) language of classical Persian music. It is not insignificant that Ghasimi, as an Iranian musician, honours and sings the praises of a man from Morocco with Arabic as one of his mother tongues. She firmly understands this as a gesture of conciliatory communication.

As album, concert and exhibition cycle, Elies Miniatures is an ongoing narrative, as well as a novel form of merging music, concert, visual art, exhibition and biographical narration, thereby creating a visible, audible and imaginable experience. Ein Garten singender Dinge is thus the beginning of a journey to somebody unknown undertaken by different artists in various art forms.

Both narration and concept, i.e. idea, arrangement and naming of the objects from the El Arbi Bouqdib Archive, founded in 2016, have been developed by JMH Schindele. Through his photographic object interpretation, the Polish- Chinese conceptual artist Michal Martychowiec breathes further dimensions of playful individuality into the artefacts. Both artists and archive are part of Thesaurós (Greek, treasure house), a platform within the Bublitz network.

* The Radīf (English, order, ranking) is a melody repertoire of classical Persian music and a collection of hundreds of melodic figures, so-called Guschehs. These tunes are organised within twelve sound systems, called Dastgāh and Awaz.

Archivblumen

The concept album Elies Miniatures II – Archivblumen is the second chapter of the concert and exhibition cycle Elies Miniatures by the Persian tar virtuoso Elshan Ghasimi.

In contrast to the first album, Ein Garten singender Dinge, which interweaves several modal sound systems from the Radīf*, Ghasimi has used a single Dastgāh* in this album, thus making Elies Miniatures II a classical work in the tradition of Persian art music. Her musical narration, within the Dastgāh-e Navā, is based on a late performance by the tar master Morteżā Ney-Dāwud (1900–1990).

With her usual measured ease, Ghasimi moves from melody to melody and creates a sonorous Gesamtkunstwerk on the unusual subject of 19 diskettes. These objects from the estate of the largely unknown Moroccan mathematician, poet and mystic El Arbi Bouqdib, can be metaphorically understood as memory bearers and almost archetypal storage media. Today they have already served their purpose. In the context of the overall concept of Elies Miniatures, they stand for the function of the archive as a memory institution in general.

As album, concert and exhibition cycle, Elies Miniatures is an ongoing narrative as well as a novel form of merging music, concert, visual art, exhibition and biographical narration, thereby creating a visible, audible and imaginable experience. Classical Persian music is combined with the demands of contemporary conceptual art and the processing of an archive.

* The Radīf (English order, ranking ) is the melody repertoire of classical Persian music and a collection of hundreds of melodic figures, so-called Guschehs. These tunes are organised within twelve sound systems, called Dastgāh and Awaz.