Kawthar
In the summer of 2001 I embarked on a road trip across the United States with two friends, with the purpose of documenting the relationship between people and the element of water. Equipped with cameras and a minidisc recorder, our journey took us from Boston harbor through Kentucky and Iowa to the Colorado River. From its source in the Rocky Mountains, we then followed the course of the Colorado through the canyons of Utah, the huge dams and diverting canals of Arizona and Nevada to the river’s delta in Mexico, which is now dry. As a result of water usage by America’s cities of the Southwest, the river is mostly gone before it crosses the border and no longer reaches the Gulf of California.
At the end of our journey, I put together a sequence from some of the recorded water sounds I had gathered along the way. This collage became the basis for my composition “Kawthar”, for 2 clarinets, 2 bass clarinets and cd. The political and sociological aspects of our documentation project as a whole cannot be conveyed in the purely musical form of this piece on its own. Instead, the music is written as a meditation on the spiritual and biological significance of water as a life-giving element. As I was composing the music I found myself trying to convey the feeling of the actual physical spaces where I had recorded the sounds, as well as drawing inspiration from texts which evoke water as a metaphor for a spiritual reality. The title “Kawthar” is an Arabic word which refers to mythical river in Paradise which is the source of all other rivers. It also has the meaning of “Abundance” which proceeds from God. Each section of the piece also carries the name of one of the lunar seas, purely imaginary bodies of water on a celestial body that is so intimately connected with the actual element of water on the earth:
The Sea of Fertility, The Sea of Nectar, The Sea of Vapors, The Sea of Serenity, The Marsh of Sleep, The Lake of Dreams, The Sea of Rains, Seething Bay, The Marsh of Decay, The Sea of Clouds.
- E.S.
