Mezwej

Mezwej is a set of individualities but also a global project, an approach (method of work and exploration), a state of mind of experimentation, research and creation through a questioning of Eastern and Western musical cultures, the specific tension of the writing, the friction between writing and orality.

A prospecting residency was held in Athens in February 2015 for the recruitment of the project 2017-2018, an opera on the text of Prometheus chained Aeschylus. In 2015, two new projects were created: Commedia with a singer and a percussionist on the theme of commedia dell’arte (premiere in Venice on June 4, 2015) and Traverser or The Passion of Adonis which brought together in a first phase the work of  the singer Amel Brahim-Djelloul, her violinist brother (both of Algerian origin, arrived in France about fifteen years ago), the Palestinian oudist Yousef Zayed and the Italian percussionist Claudio Bettinelli. The creation of this first phase took place at the Ile de France festival in Paris on October 10, 2015 pending the final creation in Marseille on March 11. In 2016, Mezwej launches again the project Passions associating with Passion of Adonis the Passion of Judas for a countertenor, images and projected sounds.

Mezwej, which is a working concept, has conducted extensive research with singular solo musicians from East and West whose list and biographies give an idea of the scale.
Throughout its career, Mezwej has generated new repertoire.

2007 – 2009 Fondation Royaumont Residence
2008 Déplacé
2008 Calvario
2009 L’Autre rive
2012 Diptyque
2013 Tous les hommes dansent
2015 La Passion d’Adonis
2015 Commedia (dell’arte)
2016 résidence à l’Arsenal de Metz
2017 Académie résidence à l’Arsenal de Metz
2018 Gilgamesh épopée

Contemporary Arab Music

Zad Moultaka starts from an observation: “Arab music is today at an impasse. Taken between an extremely powerful tradition and the emancipation of practice and musical thought in general, it is unable to regenerate itself without falling into a form of enslavement to the general soppiness that some music goes through “popular “, conferring on it a status of modernity and misleading evolution. Hence the urgent reflection that could be rooted on one hand in what Arab tradition has stronger and deeper, and on the other hand could draw on the legacy of a thousand years of Western musical history and the twentieth century, itself fed largely by Eastern and Far Eastern thoughts, allowing it to break the chains of the harmonic and polyphonic “hegemony” of the last three centuries. “

Through this profound interrogation of musical cultures and their limits, mentalities, East-West divides, writing / orality are emerging new artistic contours. The concrete, empirical experimentation of Western musical languages (composition, instrumentarium, semiology, notations, etc.) and Oriental (primacy of the voice, modality, heterophony, prohibited …) gives birth to a new repertoire and opens a space exchange and a questioning about the notion of modernity itself, whether it is Arab or Western.

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