Score

“In composing this soundtrack, I intended to draw upon palettes and textures of Sufi music and exploit the emotional content of Arabic maqam music, while simultaneously pushing the music to look forwards. After all, AYAT does not take place in the souq of 11th century Baghdad or 16th century Istanbul, but in the present-day USA.

Rather than employing a cheesy, Orientalist impression of maqam music that we have grown accustomed to hearing in Western movies that portray a Muslim experience, I inverted the process. Normally, these employ heavy orchestral synths, incorporate a distant female voice drenched in reverb saying nonsensical utterings, and exotic scales that bear no resemblance to the actual practices of the musics they attempt to imitate. I rejected this fast food imitation completely and I achieved this by starting from a base in Maqam theory and then using these melodies experimentally and with electronic manipulation.

The instrumentation heavily features nay, oud, buzuq, and hand percussion. Not only are most of these traditional components of the Arabic takht, but they bear heavy symbolic importance.

For example, nay is an end-blown flute made from the Giant Mediterranean Reed which has been employed extensively in Sufi music, especially in Rumi's Mawlawiya Tariqa and is the subject of many legends and poems. The nay speaks the secrets of creation as it reenacts the initial breathing of the soul into the human body at its creation at the Tree of Immortality, and its 9 holes being like those of the body as well. But furthermore, its breathy voice also recalls the songs of birds, who are central to the film's plot.

In Medieval Islamic philosophy, the fretless lute, the oud, was the primary theoretical instrument like the piano in the West. In addition, its historical stringing represented a complete reflection of Classical celestial cosmology, proportions, humors, etc.

One afternoon, huge swarms of swallows were circling and audibly singing to each other over the interior courtyard of the house in which I was staying in the Medina of Tunis. I instantly recalled the birds in AYAT and I ran inside to grab my oud and field recorder. I recorded an improvisation in my selected maqam recalling how I felt watching the film's plot unfold. In doing so, I sought to encapsulate all the imagery, emotional range, and mysticism into a single spontaneous composition that was born and died in the same moment.

With this, I hope that the film and its soundtrack moves you to see your own world in a different way, to experience something mystic in your daily life, and towards your own moment of realization and truth in our self-alienating digital age.”

-Marwan Kamel, Composer

@thedailymaqam