Mural is a collaborative composition for solo flute. The project is devised by myself and developed in collaboration with Lebanese flautist and composer, Wissam Boustany.
This project continues my ongoing exploration of 'Music as Method', which seeks to explore relations between musical forms (from classical musical forms to free improvisation) and socio-political events. Works in this series include Fugue, Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, A Beautiful Living Thing, Flattening the Curve, Audi Altera Partem. These projects investigate the ways in which musical modalities - counterpoint, duet, harmony, dissonance - offer metaphors and models for socio-political morphologies, and underpin a radical democratic politics of listening.
Mural is the title of a long poem by Mahmoud Darwish, but the composition for flute itself is based upon the transposition of a line from a different poem by Darwish, the poem ‘I Belong There’: ‘I have learned to dismantle all the words in order to draw from them a single word: Home.’ Following Darwish, the line from the poem itself has been ‘dismantled’ in that individual letters are transposed into musical notation to develop an initial phrase (or potential refrain),
Mural is developed in collaboration with Lebanese flautist and composer, Wissam Boustany. Boustany is an established musician and teacher who teaches according to A Method Called Love. Boustany will respond to the initial phrase and develop an extended composition for flute which we will discuss and shape together as rehearsals progress towards a planned public recital in Rome in late Spring 2025.
The public recital of Mural performed by Wissam Boustany took place on 27 May 2025 at the site of Love: Dante Desire Line Poetry Path by Birrell and Harding, commissioned for Lavinia exhibition at Loggia dei Vini, the Villa Borghese Gardens, Rome 2025-2026.
