When the composer Joanna Marsh moved to Dubai, she found her whole perspective shifting towards life, music and more. She has just written a new piece to mark the 100th anniversary of women's suffrage in Britain, with a libretto by David Pountney - Pearl of Freedom, being premiered at St John's Smith Square tomorrow - and I was keen to get her to tell us a bit more about writing on a feminist topic from the Middle East. Here's our e-interview.
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| Joanna Marsh in Dubai. Both photos from joannamarsh.co.uk |
JD: What prompted
you to write a piece about Emily Davison in particular? And how did this
opportunity come your way?
JM: Emily Davison was actually part of the brief. Rupert
Gough, (the current Director of Choral Music Royal Holloway, University of
London) came to a performance of mine last May and mentioned that they were
planning to commission a piece to coincide with the anniversary of the
Representation of the People Act as Emily Davison was an alumna of the college.
He asked whether I was interested.
JD: Your librettist
is David Pountney - what was it like to work with him? Please could you
describe the collaborative process?
JM: This is the second piece I’ve worked on with David and
it felt completely different to the last one. We had a few conversations
about which were the best research materials were, I sent him a book or two that
I had come across and we looked through various films and bits of footage
footage. He came up with the idea of using the extracts of diaries, news reports
and anecdotes to recount the events leading up to the Epsom Derby of 1913 with
very little, if anything, invented. There was a huge amount of material to
choose from. Most of our discussions were about what could be cut without great
loss. It was all very calm and considered.
Not so the piece before which was the first time
I worked with David, on My Beautiful Camel. This was a wacky comedy set in
Dubai; a story I had devised with the new Dubai Opera house in mind. His
libretto was a triumph of wit and humour and his experience of a lifetime in
opera meant that the structure was great and did all the right things. (That
has been a great bonus of working with David actually; he is brilliant on what
will and won’t work dramatically). However there was quite a lot of toing and froing
over the characters and their behaviour; what they would or wouldn’t be likely
to do or say in the UAE etc. And there were a few really rude words that I kept
trying to edge out but he wanted to keep in. He did eventually agree to dial down
some of the sweariness but I felt weirdly square having those conversations. Swearing
wasn’t really an issue with the Emily Davison piece!
JD: Musically, how
have you approached the project? What were the biggest challenges in it for
you? And has it developed/extended/changed the way you compose at all, and if
so, how?
JM: From conversations I have had with colleagues I think most,
if not all, composers sit there at the beginning of the composition process trying
to remember how to begin. The process feels oddly unfamiliar every time. I find
it very similar to a chess game. You start with an opening gambit and a rough
idea of what might follow but you can’t see all that far ahead. The landscape
can change in an instant as you realize you need to follow up on certain ideas
and leave aside others you had thought might work. But having eight episodes of
text in front of me was helpful with Pearl of Wisdom. It was visible on hard
copy where the moments of greatest intensity needed to be, where the momentum
had to build or relax. The conundrum was how to create a piece that felt
musically balanced.
Every piece provides its own learning process: you are
saying something you have not said before, it is always new terrain.
JD: How does the work
fit in to your output in general - for instance, are feminist topics recurrent
for you, or is this the first time you’ve tackled one?
JM: I haven’t worked on a piece with a specifically feminist
topic before. The only piece I have written with political overtones was The
Tower, for choir and brass, which was about the Burj Khalifa. I had just
arrived in Dubai and felt ambivalent towards the place at that time. The Burj
was only half constructed and something about its vast, monolithic hulk drew to
mind the former greatest tower of the Arab world, the Tower of Babel.
For the text I made an amalgamation of different sources
that recounted the construction of Tower of Babel by slaves in their thousands.
Some of the texts were rather hard hitting, for instance one spoke of a woman
having to give birth and keep on working at the same time.
JM: I wasn’t keen to move to Dubai. When my husband was
approached for a job out there I thought that visiting might be good
‘interview’ practice’, i.e. I was up for a trip with him to look round. But
when he was offered the job I was a bit shocked. Terribly naïve of me! On top
of that, many friends were suggesting it was not an advisable move for a
composer. But I bit the bullet and tagged along, telling myself it would only
be for a few years, maybe three, max.
But out in Dubai life immediately felt quieter and less
internally pressurizing, as if I was away the ‘rat race’. There was a sudden
expansion of my world, both geographically and internally. From a distance I
felt like an onlooker on classical music scene and realized how profoundly I
was grateful for it. I was no longer concerned about how I might fit into it,
any preoccupations like that were removed as irrelevant. I just focused on my
writing and that was freeing.
JD: What perspective
does Middle East life give you on societal attitudes towards women and
especially towards women in music?
JM: Everything shifted in my head when I learned Arabic. Up to that point I felt that Arab culture was an exotic side-show that
friends who came to visit might be interested in seeing. I felt very detached
from it. But the language is completely tied up in the culture and by learning
it you turn the handle of the door and walk in to people’s lives rather than
tapping on the window and waving from the outside. I found a real appetite for
learning and threw myself into situations which I would formerly have found a
bit disconcerting. I remember one day getting really frustrated by my speed of
learning and went off banging on all the doors of our road to find someone willing
to let me practice on them. I found Rula (from Jordan) now one of my best friends.
Our conversations swing around between Arabic and English, full of the usual
neighbourly gossip and life plans.
The majority of older Arab women across the Middle
East are beholden to the males in their family, fathers or husbands with expectations
that to us look like something out of the 1950s. But interestingly, there is a
new generation in the Gulf who have been educated in the West, particularly in
America and Britain. They retain their respect for their society’s traditions
but have a broader perspective. Young Emirati women in particular have real
drive and aspiration, and the city supports them with programmes designed to
accelerate their career development. They are demographic that is moving
forward with the greatest momentum. I am sure we will see significant social
change in the Gulf over the next 10 years because of this.
Arguably the two most influential Middle Eastern
artists of all time are women, Umm Kalthoum (Egypt) and Fayrouz (Lebanon). They
are loved and respected over the whole of the Arab world. The language of
Middle Eastern music interests me increasingly. I haven’t used it in my own
music before as it felt like cultural appropriation but I am toying with the
idea of borrowing a few idioms for a piece I am writing later this year.
JD: Do you think
Dubai will become a more important centre for musical life in the years ahead?
JM: Now that there is a venue, the Dubai Opera, Dubai has
a presence in the classical touring scene. That has already changed the
perception of the place with a strong message that the programming now caters
for an aware and educated public, (for example bringing BBC Proms to the Middle
East). There has been classical programming in the UAE before, for example at
the Abu Dhabi festival which is only an hour’s drive from Dubai, but Dubai has
not generally reflected the programming you might find in a major Western concert
hall. An iconic venue sends out a strong message but the fact that 1000 people
will attend a concert in Dubai given by the BBC Singers suggests that there is
a hunger for quality.
JD: The issue of
gender equality in art music has become gigantic these past few years. Do you
think we’re seeing a sea-change in the climate at last?
JM: It looks that way and that certainly gladdens my
heart. I have noticed a lot of noise on
social media and I have been seeing posts on this from friends in the music
business. But I only tend to fly back to England for premieres and spend some
time during the summer when schools are on holiday so it’s difficult to get the
true temperature on this issue.
My own issues with working as a composer over the last
ten years have been specific to the difficulty of being a composer based in a
country with no classical music tradition. The fact that I am a woman is
incidental and actually hasn’t really made any difference to my work in Dubai.
JD: Any other forthcoming events you'd like to mention?
JM: I have a residency at Sidney Sussex Cambridge and the
college choir is recording some of my choral music in March for release in
October 2018 on Resonus. The disk will include pieces for Fretwork who are
accompanying a few of the choral works.
