We Want to Live in #Peace

We Want to Live in #Peace

“Hello I am #Muhammed_Najem from Eastern Gouta I am fifteen years old. And this is my cousin “Raghad” Hello I am #raghad I am thirteen years old I am a child under the siege on #Eastern_Gouta that’s enough. We want to live in #Peace”

– Teenage video blogger from Ghouta, Syria (2018)

This work was composed at the height of the Syrian war and ensuing refugee crisis in 2016-17. A vast chunk of humanity was forced to flee their homes and face further perils in the quest for safety. Bearing witness to this ‘human flow’ as the dissident Chinese dissident artist Ai Wei Wei called it, I found it challenging to write any music at all, living in a world of such unprecedented carnage and terror.

I chose not to be silent, but to start with something very remote, taking the music of the birds of New Zealand as a point of departure. New Zealand has always been a favourite country of mine, and I have visited it several times. In its landscape and habitat I found a parallel world of beauty and innocence, a world of nature, an unchanging natural world that somehow reminded me of transcendent possibilities, far removed from the terrible war raging in the Middle East. The string quartet responds to the bird music of this landscape in empathy and protest. Rage against the dying of the light?

Through the bird music, I hear the cry of our fellow human beings in desperation, seeking safety in war zones, craving compassion and recognition of their plight, and pleading for humanity.

They long to live in #Peace.