TU N’AS RIEN VU À OUGARIT
20′ – 2016
for choir
Tu n’as rien vu à Ougarit
You have not seen anything in Ugarit is a lament that comes around a text originally written in Ugaritic.
Ugarit is an ancient kingdom between Antioch and Gaza. It owes its name to its capital, a powerful city located in present-day Syria, near Latakia (on the Neolithic site of Ras Shamra, “the hill of fennel”, invested since the eighth millennium). At its peak, in the second millennium BC, Ugarit is a thriving, agricultural city, a commercial hub, a major cultural hub.
It perfectly illustrates the rise of the Canaanite civilization with its cuneiform alphabet, its “technological” innovations, its artistic, literary and artisanal productions …
Baal, god of the storm and the rain, is the most eminent of the Ugaritic pantheon, he delivers an annual fight with Môt, personifying the drought, the famine and the hereafter. These agrarian rites endure over time through the moulting of civilizations.
The many texts engraved in the clay that have come down to us are damaged, broken, into scattered pieces, full of gaps and absences. They immediately evoke the disappearance, the destruction, strange echo with painful actuality.
Zad Moultaka reconstructs here a kind of ritual in which the singers participate, accompanied by a double bass giving the voices a chthonian depth and a zurkhaneh, a kind of large bass zarb, rich in subtle and varied sounds.
You did not see anything at Ugarit closing a monographic concert imagined by Emmanuèle Dubost and Zad Moultaka. Between each piece are texts evoking the flourishing era of the city of Aleppo, with a background sound soundtrack woven from “sounds of war”, rumors, distant and strange presence.
The entire program thus conceived acts as a great secular ceremony. We can hear
1- Fragment B118 (version for electronic bass and percussions)
2 – poem
3 – Ikhtifa
4 – poem
5 – Then thèlo
6 – Intimate singing for chorus
7 – poem
8 – Tu n’as rien vu à Ougarit (premiere)
Premiere: June 2, 2016
Venue: Center Paul B, as part of the call for projects launched by the city of Massy around the culture of the Arab world
By: Choir on Stage, direction Emmanuèle Dubost, Jean-Pierre Robert, doublebass and Joss Turnbull, zurkhanee
October 6, 7, 8, 2016 – Anis Gras, le lieu de l’autre, Arcueil (94) by Chœur en scène, Arnaud Cuisinier, doublebass & Joss Turnbull, zourkhaneh
October 9, 2016 – Eglise réformée de Palaiseau (91) by Chœur en scène, Arnaud Cuisinier, contrebasse & Joss Turnbull, zourkhaneh
January 20, 2017 – Auditorium Henri Dutilleux CRD de Bourg-la-Reine /Sceaux, 11 avenue Carnot Bourg-la-Reine by Chœur en scène, Jean-Pierre Drouet, percussions, Marine Clermont, double bass& Gilles de Obaldia, reciting
© ŠamaŠ musical editions 2013
Translation of text
© Ugaritic Texts, Volume II Religious Texts and Rituals
Introduction, translation and comments by André Caqot
