The title, Ka Spoojmai Shwa Poh Hāla Ke, is a line from a poem written by the medieval Pashtun Sufi poet Abdul Hamid Baba. The line roughly translates as ‘like the halo around the moon’, and in the context of the poem is a simile the narrator uses to describe the newly grown beard stubble framing the face of her lover—a sign of their love’s maturity as reflected in nature. This piece falls in a line of recent projects that have been in service of uncovering, deconstructing, and reinventing my relationship with my cultural heritage as a queer Afghan-American man. Musically, the piece seeks comfort and cadence in the boundaries of the unknown, finds beauty in the shadows of the sound and the rub between sonorities, rather than in the rhetoric of the sonorities themselves. The piece is night music or a nocturne in that sense, not with a sense of fear and trepidation, but rather acceptance and discovery of the darkness, halo, and fog. Pursuing perhaps in an effort informed by the notion Édouard Glissant notes as the “right to opacity for everyone.”
Clara Iannotta you crawl over seas of granite (2019/20)
