Later in the broadcast, you will hear music from an Arab American composer, Mohammed Fairouz, who’s writing a concerto about what happened in Cairo a year ago.

It’s called “Tahrir for Clarinet and Orchestra.”

It’s the first part of what Fairouz says will be a concerto in three movements.

Imagine a composer writing music as he watched the uprising on television — with the sound off.

That’s what Fairouz did, from his apartment in New York City.

What he saw happening on TV, thousands of miles away, inspired a piece he wrote for his friend, clarinetist David Krakauer.

Here’s how Fairouz puts it.

Fairouz says as a New Yorker, the events in Tahrir Square seemed far away, but he felt a personal connection, as an Arab American.

He says the confidence of the Egyptian protesters was inspiring. In Fairouz’s music, their voices are represented by the orchestra, while the clarinet expresses the voice of the individual protester.

There is a lot of tension and angst in the piece, as well as a restlessness and a dynamic sense that the protest movement is the only way forward.

Here’s a video of a performance of “Tahrir for Clarinet and Orchestra,” which premiered at Merkin Hall in New York in July 2011.

Mohammed Fairouz is only 26-years-old, but he is incredibly accomplished.

He began to write music at the age of 4.

He studied composition in Vienna with the late Hungarian composer, György Ligeti, at the New England Conservatory in Boston, and at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia.

He’s already composed symphonies, concertos and one opera.

But his “Tahrir for Clarinet and Orchestra” conveys the urgency of a breaking news story.

Tune in to our program to hear Mohammed Fairouz, in his own words, talk about his enthralling concerto-in-progress, “Tahrir for Clarinet and Orchestra.”

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• www.olofarnalds.com
• Roni Horn
• www.eileenmyles.com

I bought into Brand Iceland. I visited the art spots Reykjavik, Stykkiholmur, and Budir. I swam in a hot river and slept in a hotel where the walls were painted lichen-green. When I came back to New York, I was still seeing traces of Iceland everywhere. There was even a new Iceland-themed exhibit by the American artist Roni Horn. It’s going on at the Whitney Museum right now.

Icelandic singer Olof Arnalds played at the opening. Horn’s show starts right in the elevator, with aquatic sound art.

Horn’s show is full of pictures of Iceland: geothermal water, taxidermist birds, faces floating on the surface of hot springs. She’s drawn to the isolation, the communal atmosphere, and above all, the landscape.

Donna De Salvo curated Horn’s show. She sees the draw of Iceland like this:

“You know the extremes, where you have volcanic activity marching right down to the sea, and this collapse in a sense for us at when you live in an urban environment like NY to see this extreme range of terrain is just magical.

Iceland has long attracted other American artists. Call it Artland. Yoko Ono, Richard Serra, and the poet Anne Carson all came here looking for a muse. Same with Eileen Myles. She just wrote The Importance of Being Iceland.

“Iceland is really interesting because it just happened to be to the side in a way so certain things could continue to exist and certain people could have a self-effacing way of looking at their own culture.”

I love that Icelandic self-effacement. There’s that appeal of their music and literature. It’s all about stubborn iconoclasm. An experimental writer like Myles could seem odd in the world of American letters. But in Iceland, odd is perfectly normal.

Eileen Myles: “Icelandic artists are really proud of how many odd strange people who’ve lived in odd strange ways were part of their history American artist wouldn’t go for a folkish approach to who we are and really claim lineage to these oddballs, there’s a kind of funky pride.”

While Iceland was a dreamscape for artists, it was also floating by on a wildly inflated economy of credit. Iceland’s fishing culture had migrated into banking and boutique hotels. Then it all crashed. Now crushed by debt, their currency devalued; do the newly poor Icelanders still see themselves in the portraits American artists make of them? Philosopher Oddny Eir Evarsdottir says in a way they do. Icelanders depend on American artists’ view of their country. Just like American artists depend on Iceland.

“We are living inside it like inside the crisis situation we are like really hoping that inside Iceland’s economy we are heading toward this metaphor of an Iceland as a health and beautiful place where you can go way like an asylum and I really hope we will go there so at this moment, the guest’s eye, the metaphors of others, it’s so helpful.”

These metaphors may not help much in the end. But Iceland will still have its amazing, strange indie music to keep Artland alive. All those heated, water-logged dreams. For The World, this is Alissa Quart.

CD Information
Original Release Date: May 19, 2009
Format: Explicit Lyrics
Label: 7 Grand Records
ASIN: B001QBC2Z8