The Heart's Ear

Liza LIM
Born 1966, Perth, Australia

The Heart's Ear (1997)

flute/piccolo, clarinet, violin I, violin II, viola, violoncello
Commissioned by Australia Ensemble
Published by Ricordi, catalogue 137810

The Heart's Ear for flute/piccolo, clarinet and string quartet was commissioned by the Australia Ensemble and has its roots in Arabic or Turkish Islamic music. Both the title of the work and the musical influences reflect a long-standing personal interest that I have in Sufi poetry and in particular, that of 13th-century mystic poet Jelaluddin Rumi.

Rumi's poetry is suffused with images of ecstatic communion with the divine. The poems often contain musical references, particularly the image of the relationship between a musician and their musical instrument as a metaphor for how human beings are vehicles through which spirit moves. He often describes the intimacy that a musician has with their instrument as an erotic relationship -- a lover's relationship of many subtle touches, breaths and a dancing of the body.

For instance:

God picks up the reed-flute world and blows
each note is a need coming through one of us
a passion, a longing pain.

A recurrent theme in Rumi's poetry is the theme of `Silence´ -- not a state of absence but a kind of alertness, a state of listening with `the heart's ear´ that opens up to the potential of any moment.

The Heart's Ear begins with a very brief fragment of a Sufi melody as way of evoking that gift-like quality of attention. To quote from another of Rumi's poems, the melody is `like birdsong beginning inside an egg´ -- a beautiful image of something nascent, about to open out into a larger world. I've thought of the piece as music that grows organically from this initial melody (the interior quality of a melody singing to itself) which `pecks´ its way out into a succession of musical spaces.

Programme note © 1997 Liza LIM