"Mishwar" (2024), for orchestra, commissioned by the California Symphony.

This is a DEMO Recording made through Dorico and NotePerformer.

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📖 PROGRAM NOTE:

Throughout my childhood, my family and I made frequent trips up the coast of California, from the San Fernando Valley up to the Bay Area. Awaiting us there was the paternal, Jordanian side of my rambunctious, extended family, who we always looked forward to seeing again. Near the five-hour mark of each trip, like clockwork, a waft of garlic would whisk itself into our car, signaling both the impending arrival to our final destination, San Jose, and the start of what my two younger brothers and I would infamously call “the Arabic game.”

Once we made our way through Gilroy, my dad, on cue, liked to see who retained the most out of the Arabic language among the three of us, who were all born in the U.S.: “What color is that car?”; “Who can count to 20?”; “How do you say ‘sky’?”; and so on. None of us were quite good at this game, though the moments when one of us would remember a word or phrase would always bring joy for my dad.

This short, energetic piece, Mishwar (مشوار), or “trip” in Arabic, is a marker of those formative memories for me. Musically, the work is centered around the brass section, which plays chords influenced by the maqamat, the melodic framework used in the Middle East that to our Western ears consist of pitches outside the scope of our daily aural consumption. Mishwar is a conversation, albeit quite a loud one, between both my identities: a coastal American trained in Western classical music, and the son of Jordanian and Lebanese immigrants attempting to retain the culture they themselves grew up in.