Jim Berenholtz

Woodwind Quartet with female voices, or instrumental only Flute, Oboe (or English Horn), Clarinet, Bassoon, voices

Composer's Note:

"Song of Marawa" is inspired by a deeply spiritual experience I had in late 1997 when I visited the ancient city of Meroe in Sudan, and slept out under the stars and a full moon surrounded by the beautiful pyramids and temples there. At that time there was no tourism infrastructure there - it was like visiting this site as it has long been, abandoned for nearly two millennia. I was traveling with an archaeology team"¦.. The Meroitic language has 23 letters but it has never been deciphered.

When I was there I saw many stone stelae inscribed with their writing and wondered what this language might have sounded like. No doubt it had some affinities with ancient Egyptian, as Egypt had a strong influence on this culture and civilization. But my decades of study with an Oromo elder from Ethiopia, who traced the origins of his people to Meroe (which he called Marawa), also revealed other possibilities of how this civilization influenced sub-Saharan cultures that (according to my teacher) were descended from it. Specifically, these cultures are the Oromo in Ethiopia and the Dogon in Mali. And beyond Africa, it is known by historians that Meroe had very active links with other ancient cultures in the eastern Mediterranean region, the Near East and South Asia. From all of these influences I imagined a text that borrows words from the ancient Egyptian, Hebrew, Oromo and Dogon languages.