ŠAMAŠ ITIMA (DARK SUN)
20′ – 2017
for mixed choir 32 voices a cappella & electronics
ŠamaŠ / Shamash Itima (Dark Sun)
La pièce musicale ŠamaŠ Itima (Dark Sun), The musical piece ŠamaŠ Itima (Obscure Sun), an integral part of the ŠamaŠ installation for the Lebanon Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, is the seventh piece inspired by ancient languages. After Baal for orchestra, Anath for instrumental ensemble, Leipsano for orchestra and three choirs. ŠamaŠ Itima for 32 singers borrows his text from the hymn to the Sumerian god of justice, and draws from Akkadian lexicon words mutilated, amputated as after a blast of a missile fell in the middle of the language.
While the human and terrestrial voices are struggling to evolve in a muddy material that traps the sounds, a celestial song hovers above the heads, a strange melody emanating from a bomber reactor dating back to the 1950s. In this tragedy that hits the Middle East, ŠamaŠ is thus singing violence.
“Questioning the musical imagination of a remote or even archaic time is not a mere speculation of the composer, it is above all the quest for an old energy, a space anchored in beliefs linking the destiny of the man with something that goes beyond appearances, a space buried today under the rubble of a terribly superficial world. Far from any historical reconstruction, it is a question of finding the ruins of a salutary archaism, allowing to refocus on an interior, violated by an overflow of the apparent.”
Zad Moultaka
Sumerian Hymn to the Sun
Singing language: Akkadian
composed for the Lebanese Pavilion
57th Venice Biennale of Art May-November 2017
May 11, 2017 premiere, Tese 100, Arsenal Novissimo, Venise
Lebanon Pavilion – Venice Biennale 2017
by the Choir of Antonine University-Lebanon
direction Toufik Maatouk
© ŠamaŠ éditions musicales 2017
