I composed the piano part of this as improvisation over some of the most powerful voicemails I had translated from speak2tweet during the start of the Jan25 revolution.   The rest of the material comes from my cousin's wedding in Cairo the weekend of April 22-24 and other field sounds taken from Tahrir Square that I recorded as well as Khan El Khalili and Naguib Mahfouz Cafe.  The zaffa at the end... hope for a new Egypt.  I love you Egypt.  The sounds here all come from voice mails from speak2tweet, Tahrir Square, Khan El Khalili and other Cairo noise.Piano improv by Donia Jarrar.


Tahrir Squares movement 1

Piano 1, Aya Yamamoto
Piano 2, Donia Jarrar

This piece was inspired by what began as a night -time drive with friends beneath the desert sky on the outskirts of Cairo, Egypt. We would drive out into the desert, with nothing but the moon and stars, the bedus lights, to guide our way. Leaving the heavily polluted city sky behind us, the stars would appear one by one as the curtain of pollution was slowly lifted. The constant whir of the car engine was like a steady pulse that put us to sleep.
In the morning when we returned to the city, the traffic and disorderly, overcrowded streets welcomed us. Driving in that city is a constant brush with death, with cars driving the wrong way down one-way streets as policemen yawn and turn their heads, horse and donkey-drawn carriages blocking the sides of the highways, children hopping rides on the backs of buses, women driving with their babies on their laps, three or four men on one motorcycle, and pedestrians getting injured on a daily basis. Drivers will not even stop or move out of the way for an ambulance.
Eventually we made it to Khan El-Khalili, Cairos famous bazaar and souk in the Islamic District. The souk is filled with coffee shops and hookah bars, where we spent the day. Its narrow alleys and cobblestoned streets are filled with beautiful Egyptian silver jewelry stands, gold, spices, perfumes, accessories, oils and dessert shops where lokmit aadi, deep fried doughnut holes, are made.
My friends and I ended the day with a visit to Cairo Jazz Club, one of the best venues for live music in the city. There was dancing, there were drinks, and then there was dawn. We walked along the Nile. There were no stars, only a reflection of the citys lights on the river water.

-Donia Jarrar 

Cairo, I Love You (for two pianos)

Recorded in January 2015 in the Palestinian city of Nablus for "Letters to Palestine," this piece began as an improvisation and jam session with friends in Ramallah after we had finished playing some Turkish and dance music.  We had been playing in the traditional Arabic Dawr Hindi rhythm of 7 (3 +2 +2), when the percussionist Ibrahim suddenly switched to the Turkish form (2+2+3).    I was inspired by his playing and by the traditional Arab maqam of Hijaz Kar Kurd (Hijaz-Hijaz), or in Western music what we know to be similar to the Spanish phrygian scale, or phrygian dominant, only in this case it is the top half of that scale twice over. 

The different Arabic maqams, or modes, are known to evoke different moods in the Middle East.  The maqam Hijaz Kar usually begins on C in traditional music, and has a mysterious and distant feel to it as a result of the two augmented intervals within it.  It is said to carry the listener away on a fantasy.  In this piece you will hear hijaz on E flat, followed by Hijaz on B flat.  My choice to begin on E flat was a result of my E flat minor blues improvisation that I'd previously incorporated into my playing.  My improvisation on this scale combined with Ibrahim's lively percussion playing carried me off into a dance-like fantasy and I immediately came up with the theme you will hear today.   This then evolves into different variations of the melody channeled through pop, jazz and classical forms.  

Though the piece is fully notated, much of it is based in improvisation, and there is room for the performer to improvise over the given harmonies and with the provided melodic motifs.  

For a video of Laurence performing this piece in Gaza (post-bombing of the music conservatory) with Iyad please visit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWiQmObbjCI

Perpetual Dance (Hijaz Kar Theme & Variations)

The Ann Arbor Sessions

1896, with Huda Asfour, from the "Seamstress" soundtrack

How does the body interpret the physical responses of trauma and violence imposed upon it by government imposed violence? In an attempt to express my frustration with Egyptian president Hosny Mubarak, I recorded myself figure skating on a pond and in a rink and this entire piece was generated from the sounds of my spinning, stopping and gliding, imagining the blades like a beehive of guillotines executing justice. 

the dictator balances on his inside edge

Donia Jarrar is an Arab and Muslim-American composer, pianist, and interdisciplinary artist. Born to a Palestinian father and an Egyptian mother, she grew up between Kuwait City, Alexandria, Ramallah, and New York. Her personal experiences have strongly shaped her compositional voice, leading her to explore themes of intergenerational memory, trauma, identity, exile, displacement, and cultural narrative in her work. 

Jarrar was recently awarded the 2019 Discovery Grant for Female Composers from the National Opera Center of America for her work Seamstress, a documentary multimedia opera based on oral history interviews conducted with Palestinian women and girls from her community. She is also currently the only woman to be awarded First Prize in the Marcel Khalife Competition for the Young Palestinian Composer (40 and Under) for her work Border Crossings, a programmatic piece for voice, spoken word and orchestra describing her family’s flight out of Kuwait as refugees of the Gulf War. She has been commissioned by the Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art and is a featured musician on the Emmy-award winning series Arab American Stories. Her film score credits include director Tchaiko Omawale's Five Times a Day.

Jarrar holds a Doctor of Musical Arts degree from the University of Michigan. She is based in Los Angeles.

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