Soosan Lolavar is a British-Iranian composer. Born in the UK, Lolavar has described that during her childhood she seemed to satisfy neither the expectations of her British friends nor of the Iranian community at home. This dual identity, “peculiar” as she puts it, has inspired her to write music that tackles what it means to live in between these two cultures. Rather than thinking in terms of “fusion”, however, the unifying of two apparently different cultures, Lolavar is more interested in investigating what it means to live between these two worlds. Rather than subsuming one into the other, she draws on the influences of both from this third position in the diaspora.

 

Girl grapples with these ideas head-on. At its foundation lies an Iranian/Lori folk melody, ‘dokhtare boyer ahmadi’, which means ‘the girl from the town of Boyer Ahmad’. In the song, the lyrics describe a boy who, having met this girl, wishes to know her name. Girl is cast in three sections, and it is in the central section where this melody is most prominent, played by the cello. By isolating the melody so obviously (the cello’s rendition of this melody is the first time we hear any instrument playing solo in the piece) Lolavar establishes it as akin to an object, something that is very obviously independent from the music that surrounds it. Nonetheless, the composer describes all the material in Girl as ultimately deriving from this folk melody. The first section presents fragments of this melody: the pitches give rise to the harmonies, presented both as isolated chords and whirling repetitive textures. Lolavar sees this as something of a cubist approach where we consider something from multiple perspectives simultaneously; meanwhile, the final section is more pointillist. Though the whole ensemble share the melody, the vast majority of notes have been removed, such that the music just hints at the melody, recalling scraps of memory.

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Joshua Ballance