Flowing Down the Widening Rings of Being (2024)
13th-century poet, scholar, and mystic Rumi (unattributed); 19th-20th century Austrian poet and novelist Rainer Maria Rilke (painting by Leonid Pasternak)
For tenor, clarinet, string quartet, harp, and piano
Duration: 20 minutes
Commissioned by Israeli Chamber Project for tenor Karim Sulayman
Review of the World Premiere:
“This is a staggeringly beautiful piece of music: the texts, drawn from Rilke and Rumi, were sung with compelling ardor and grace by Mr. Sulayman, and the blending of the players' individual timbres creating an incandescent sound-world. I was often reminded of Britten, but this music has a deeper spirituality... and a dizzying feeling of rapture.”
Karim Sulayman, Gity Razaz, and Israeli Chamber Project pianist and executive director Assaff Weisman after the world premiere at Merkin Concert Hall in New York (photo: Alex Ambrose)
“Razaz is an American composer of Iranian origin, and her exciting work, Flowing Down the Widening Rings of Being, was rightly the evening’s centerpiece. It is a song cycle that she wrote with Sulayman in mind, and the multiple sections respond to poems by Rilke and Rumi. Razaz strives to use music as the connection between inner and outer worlds, and each song resonated as both wild and communicative. At the same time, her compositional toolkit of styles was stitched together with a variety of textures that created a sensitive, ponderous quality with mesmerizing content. Throughout, one could hear the bittersweet dichotomies play out from the poets’ words via her musical settings.”
— Seen and Heard International
Program Note:
The song cycle Flowing Down the Widening Rings of Being is the setting of poetry by Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke and Sufi mystic Rumi.
Rumi and Rilke lived about 800 years apart and on nearly opposite sides of the earth, yet their perspective on some of the most existential topics in the history of mankind is eerily similar. One of the most apparent differences between the two poets (essentially both mystics) is felt in how they expressed their beliefs: Rilke is an introspective poet, his writings display the depth of his quest but also a gentle, relatable vulnerability. Rumi is almost the other extreme altogether, as he writes from a place of ecstasy and unearthly exultation, as if in the midst of an out-of-body experience. Sometimes in the attempt to translate his poem's euphoria however, we lose sight of the subtlety and nuance of the original language. In their own ways, both Rilke and Rumi's poems therefore allow great opportunities for musical settings.