Maadan

Maadan would be a kind of metal liturgy that would feature eight voices – each singer embodying a mineral personality – and instruments, places of transformation.

A procession walks from iron to mercury. From degree to degree, transmutation occurs in the musical mystery. The Italian sung sounds like another language. We are thinking of Arabic, the cradle of the alchemical imaginary. The way of stretching the voice, of playing the elasticity of the song itself, of its density, makes the prosody disappear and the language disappears.

Each metal has its sound material, its time, its energy and its own movement.
1. Iron, hard metal, is solitary.
2. Copper represents beauty and sweetness.
3. Lead is the source of all spirituality, the place of becoming.
4. Tin, the symbol of justice and hierarchy.
5. Money is the image of the moon, bright and glittering. It embodies the feminine, the transparency, the soul and its inner worlds.
6. Gold is perfection, light, the masculine principle which, however, by a return to itself and a pilgrimage in solitude, joins the iron, its exact opposite in an intimate lament.
7. Mercury is here duo, double metal and fleeing. Associated with sulfur, it generates all the metals …
8. In the last movement, in tutti, all the bodies recover a form of original communion, become once again a single substance, first and saturated.
Here the musical treatment joins the main idea of Roger Bacon, the essential unit of matter. Zad Moultaka approaches and experiments in his way the sensitive matter, one of the three species distinguished by the philosopher for whom the reason can not do without the experimental confirmation.
A contemporary of Albert the Great, Roger Bacon is supposed to have invented lenses, glasses, small flying machines, a self-propelled spring carriage, many automatons, including a flying pigeon, a steel head capable of uttering sounds articulated and answer questions. Accused of magic, he who tirelessly sought to found rational truth, was censored and imprisoned for “suspicious novelties”.

But his contribution is really essential in the reorganization of knowledge in the thirteenth century, the development of the modern scientific method and the philosophy of language.

The composer borrows the description of metals from Chapter II of the Mirror of Alchemy, Natural Principles and the Generation of Metals, “Note first that the principles of metals are Mercury and Sulfur. These two principles have given birth to all metals and minerals, of which there are many different species. I also say that nature has always had a goal and strives constantly to reach perfection, to gold. But as a result of various accidents which hinder its progress, the metal varieties are born, as clearly stated by several philosophers. ”
Experimental mysticism, alchemy seeks the absolute and proposes to man to triumph over time; Maadan explores precisely this dimension and questions the demiurgic relationship of man to nature, referring to the danger playing with its laws. Roger Bacon had warned us: “Woe to you who want to surpass nature …”