Listen To music and Declaim
Poem of N. Khosravi
Music: Saltarello (Performed by constantinople ens.)
Saltarello:
The saltarello was a lively, merry dance that developed from the galliard in Naples during the 13th century. It was danced in triple meter and named for its peculiar leaping step, after the Italian verb saltare ("to jump"). The saltarello enjoyed great popularity in the courts of medieval and Renaissance Europe and later became a favorite tradition of the Carnival festivities in Rome. After witnessing the Roman Carnival of 1831, the German composer Felix Mendelssohn incorporated the dance into the finale of one of his masterpieces, the Italian Symphony.
Constantinopole:
Since its inception in 1998, Constantinople has endeavoured to find a unique mode of expression and a new, creative approach to interpreting the music of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. To do so, the group juxtaposes a careful study of historical manuscripts with a pursuit of the living oral tradition of the Near and Middle East—more specifically, the classical Persian tradition.
The ensemble uses early European instruments such as the lute, vihuela, medieval harp, viola da gamba, vielle, recorder, cornetto and shawm, alongside instruments from the Middle East such as the setar (a plucked stringed instrument from Persia), the tombak, daf and dayereh (Persian percussion instruments), and the oud (one of the most ancient instruments of the Middle East and the Mediterranean, and the ancestor of the European lute).
Constantinople, under the artistic direction of Kiya Tabassian, explores the music from the cultural sphere of the Mediterranean in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. The group cultivates a unique form of expression that gives free rein to creativity and improvisation, yet respects the basic forms of the music it seeks to reinterpret.
Kiya Tabassian
setar, artistic director
Born in Tehran in 1976, Kiya Tabassian received his initial training in Persian music from Mehrdad Torabi at the Bahârlou Institute in Tehran, from Reza Ghassemi in Paris and Kayhan Kalhor in Montreal. He has since continued to develop his instrumental skills independently. He has also studied composition at the Conservatoire de Musique de Montréal with Gilles Tremblay and Michel Gonneville.
Guy Ross
lute, oud, medieval harp
Guy Ross earned a B.A. in lute performance at Université Laval. Since then, he has specialized in vocal and instrumental music of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Serious research led him to develop a technique based on the study of treatises and other repertoires from the 15th to the 17th centuries. As well, he has honed his skills as a performer of vocal and instrumental music of the Middle Ages through work with Benjamin Bagby and Barbara Thornton of the group Sequentia.
Ziya Tabassian
tombak, daf, def, dayereh, percussion
Ziya Tabassian started playing the tombak (a Persian percussion) at the age of 11. From 1994 to 2001 he studied classical percussion with Julien Grgoire in Montreal, and has completed a Bachelor degree in percussion interpretation at the Universit de Montral. During winter 2002, with the help of Quebec Art Council, Ziya went back to Iran for a tombak training with M. Bahman Rajabi. Recently, he completed a residency at the Banff Centre for the arts, where he explored the contemporary music on the Persian percussions.
Matthew Jennejohn
recorders, cornetto
Born in British Columbia, Matthew Jennejohn pursues an active performing career on the cornetto, recorder , and baroque oboe. A specialist in music of the renaissance, baroque and middle ages, he has performed with many of the leading early music ensembles in North America including Ensemble Constantinople, the Studio de Musique Ancienne de Montral, Les Borades, Ensemble Arion, Tafelmusik, Les Voix Baroques, Tempesta di Mare, Les Ides Heureuses, The Trinity Consort, La Nouvelle Sinfonie and Les Violons du Roy.
Elin Söderström
viola da gamba, vielle
A young musician of enviable experience, the Montreal-based viola da gamba player Elin Söderström is active on both sides of the Atlantic. After studying at McGill University, she travelled to the Netherlands to perfect her art with Wieland Kuijken. Rapidly assimilated into Dutch musical scene, Elin is invited to join the Dutch viol consort The Spirit of Gambo with which she is regularly heard throughout Northern Europe.
بيا که جشن بهار است
آسمان بی بهانه می گريد
آفتاب بر سرشک ابر می خندد
خروس خواند پگاه
دميد مهر
نماز برد نگاه
شکسته جادوی خاکستر دروج نهاد
بمرده خواب سياه
بخفته مرگ سپيد
بيا که تازه و آبی شده ست بام سپهر
بيا که سرد زمستان تارروز سپيد
برفت و هاوين آمد، پرنيان شب بدريد
هاوين بر گيسوان تو تاج شکوفه می بندد
هاوين بر رخ تو گل می کند
هاوين دوشيزه ای ست چون تو گرامی
سبزی درختان اش
به سرخی چهر
سرخی دو پستان اش
به رنگ اميد
بيا که جشن بهار است
بيا به ديدن هاوين رويم
Come thou, it’s the ceremony of printemps
Caelis is crying, causeless
Sol is laughing to lacrimes of nue
Bird of morning sang,
Mithra rise
Prayed voir
Talisman of lying mort has been broken,
Died, the black sleep
Slept, the blanc mort.
Come thou, the caelis became blue et frais
Come thou,
The dark-day cold white winter Is gone,
And Aestate came, lacerated the silk of nuit.
Aestate will tie the crown of flowers to thy hair
Aestate will blossom to thy face
Aestate is sweet as th’art honey
Verdant with its trees
Is as redness of face
Et redness of its nipples
Is as color of the hope
Come thou, it’s the ceremony of printemps
Come thou, to meet Aestate.
بيا که جشن بهار است
بيا که تا به چراغ درخت
شکوفه ای بزنيم
به سير راز گل و آفتاب و ريشه و خاک
به سوی هم بدويم
بيا که در تن سبز زمين
به خنده های چمن نگاه کنيم
لبان سرخ بر لبان هم فشريم
بيا که دست در دست يکدگر برويم
سيب آشتی بخوريم
بيا که پاک و برهنه ز آفتاب بلند شرمگين بشويم
بيا که جشن بهار است
بيا گناه کنيم
Come thou, it’s the ceremony of printemps
Come thou, to bloom the chandelier of tree
Some blossom
By excursion of flower et sol and root et dust
Hasten to each other
Come thou, to look at laughs of grass
In the green body of terra
And kiss each other’s rouge lips
Come thou, to walk hand in hand
And eat the apple of pacifier
Come thou, to become ashamed, pur et nue, from high soleil.
Come thou, it’s the ceremony of printemps
Come thou, to sin.
بيا که جشن بهار است
بيا که روشنی پر فروغ باشه ی مهر
به خانه ی ببک شب کشيده بفشانيم
بيا که تا لب کوه بلند
با دست خوِيش رنگين کمان دوستی بزنيم
بيخ مهر بنشانيم
به راستی دوست بداريم
به مستی در تن يکديگر روان بشويم
به اندرون پر از دانه های زنده ی تو
به اندرون پر از آب های پر تب من
و زندگی را در نبرد با زندگی بکوشانيم
بيا که جاويدان پيوند دوستی بنديم
بيا که جشن بهار است
بيا به بستر آغوش گل بجوشانيم
Come thou, it’s the ceremony of printemps
Come thou, to sprinkle the shining lux of eagle of Mithra
To the house of sleepless oeil
Come thou, to make rainbow of love
With our hands
And plant the Love
Love truly
Flow in each other’s bodies, drunken
To thy interior, full of seeds of vitae
To my interior, full of ecstatic waters
And make to fight the vitae, against the vitae
Come thou, to make pact of endless friendship
Come thou, it’s the ceremony of printemps
Come thou, to boil roses in the bed of hugging.
When I completed the poem, Hamed Toosipanah, one of my best friends, helped me in it’s translation to the English. http://othello.multiply.com/ is his multiply page. I asked him to post the entire poem to his site.
Also Arash Shiravani, another my dear friend, corrected my first translation.
I should thank both of them, especially because none of them are here, in Tehran. Arash is now living in the Canada, and Hamed is gone to “Shomal”!
Hamed recommended to me, to take footnotes for some words, I used in the translation. Because I used some Latin-France words in the English text. But for Persian speakers, if I take such a note, it would be longer than this one, because the Persian text is full of old-Persian, Pahlavi and Avestan words, and surely, no Arabic.
1. Printemp (Fr. for Spring)
2. Caelis (Lat. for Sky, Heaven)
3. sol (Lat. For Sun)
4. Lacrime (Lat. For teardrop)
5. Nue (Fr. both for Cloud and Nude)
6. Voir (Fr. for Looking)
7. Mort (Fr. Also Lat. For Death)
8. Blanc (Fr. for White)
9. Et (Lat. Also Fr. For And, in fact we use it in English as the symbol of the “And”. I mean the “&” symbol, originally derived from “et”!)
10. Frais (Fr. for Fresh)
11. Aestate (Lat. for Summer, it became été in Fr. But the Lat. word, is better to imply a personage, as I used the Plv. also Kurdish/Baluchi word “Havin” in the Persian text, instead of “Tabistan”, first because in the Plv. texts, it means only warm season, not summer, and then, because I create a feminine personage named “Havin”, and it should have an odd name rather than a common season name.)
12. Nuit (Fr. For Night)
13. Terra (Lat. for Earth)
14. Rouge (Fr. for Red)
15. Pur (Fr. for Pure)
16. Soleil (Fr. for Sunlight)
17. Lux (Lat. for Light)
18. Oeil (Fr. for Eye)
19. Mithra (Among the gods of eastern origin who in the decline of the ancient world competed against each other for the allegiance of the West was the Old Persian deity Mithra.
(http://www.bartleby.com/196/84.html) I think it’s a common Aryan deity, and I used here the O.I.E. word, that is also used in the Lat. Lit..
20. Vitae (Lat. for Life)
دست شما درد نكنه.... ما كه خونديم و استفاده كرديم...
