38 2014 Program Notes, Book 4
Wednesday, July 2, 2014
DARKNESS IN THE ANCIENT VALLEY
FOR SOPRANO AND ORCHESTRA (2011)
Richard Danielpour (born in 1956)
Darkness in the Ancient Valley
is scored for three flutes, two
oboes, English horn, three clarinets, three bassoons, four horns,
three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion,
harp, piano, celesta and strings. The performance time is 30
minutes. This is the work’s first performance by the Grant Park
Orchestra.
Richard Danielpour, one of America’s most gifted performers, wrote
Darkness
in the Ancient Valley
as a heartfelt tribute to the long-suffering people of Iran. A
joint commission of the Nashville Symphony Orchestra and Pittsburgh Symphony
Orchestra, the work premiered with the Nashville Symphony Orchestra under the
direction of Giancarlo Guerrero.
Of the work Danielpour wrote, “
Darkness in the Ancient Valley
is a symphony in
five movements. The text for the fifth movement, which includes a soprano voice,
comes from an English translation of a Ru¯mi¯ poem (Divan 1559), and involves a woman
who refuses to retaliate against her husband, or lover, in spite of his abusive and cruel
behavior. The voice of this woman is for me a metaphor for the voice of the people of
Iran who have endured much, but who nonetheless refuse to retaliate with violence.
This thirty-minute work was inspired by recent events in Iran, in particular the way its
people, especially the women, have been brutalized. This is of particular interest to
me because my parents were born in Iran and my family lineage on both sides goes
back for well over twenty generations. Born in the United States, I spent a year in
Iran (1963–1964), and although I was just a child, I remember much about that year.
In addition to learning Farsi, that time laid the bedrock of my understanding about
the world that deepened as I matured. Sadly, the experience in Iran was for various
reasons an unpleasant one, and I had fallen in love with Western music and culture,
so as I grew into adulthood I kept my Persian heritage at a distance. In recent years,
however, I have become engrossed in this ancestral legacy and deeply interested
in the way the people of Iran and the whole of the Middle East are pleading to be
heard in the face of oppressive regimes. The work is in its way a kind of secular liturgy
(
Lamentation – Desecration – Benediction – Profanation – Consecration
), with much of
the music drawing on sources stemming from Persian folk melodies and Sufi rhythms.
I remember my mother listening to Persian records when I was little. I appropriated
my memory of that music when I wrote
Darkness
. It’s not an accurate, note-perfect
representation of the music I heard, but I think it’s more interesting because it is more
personal. While this is clearly the music of a 21st-century American composer, it is the
music of an American composer with a Middle Eastern memory.”
