SIWAN

Oh! my chosen one among all beings ...my star ...my moon!

Oh! a willow branch when she moves

Oh! the look of a gazelle in her gaze

Oh! perfumed scent of the garden stirred by the breeze of dawn

Oh mistress of this languishing look which enslaves me

For you i shall give my sight and my hearing

When shall i recover from this lovesickness

يا صفوتي من البشر

شعر المعتمد بن عباد

يا صفوتي من البشـر ..... يا كوكبا بل يـا قَمـر

أيا غصنـا إذا مشـى ...... يـا رشـا إذا نظـر

يا نفس الروضة قـد ..... هبت لها ريح سحـر

يا ربة اللحـظ الـذي ..... شـد وثاقـا إذ فتـر

متى أداوي يـا فـداك ..... السمع مني والبصر

ما بفؤادي من جـوى ..... بما بفيك من خصـر

The focus of Siwan is not one of strict musical scholarship, but rather the imagining of what music would have sounded like at a certain place and time lost to antiquity. That time and place is medieval Andalusia, the southern most region of Spain, where Muslim, Christian, and Jewish intellectual cultures mingled unmolested before the Spanish Inquisition. Balke's studies of the history and writings of the region revealed a thematic universality among the Sufi poets and the Catholic and Sephardic mystics, a fact clearly evident in the texts chosen for this special recital: literary works as seemingly diverse as the martyred Moor Al- Aallaj's "Thualthiayat" and San Juan de la Cruz's (St. John of the Cross), ecstatic "Todo ciencia trascendiendo" ("Rising Beyond All Science").