I love the idea that our ancient tales and archetypal characters are still a root source for many of the stories we tell and the music we make. As if the music itself is an ever-evolving vessel for carrying the wisdom through the ages, and the music maker merely a custodian of sacred truths. And if this is true in a very general sense of much music made today, consciously or otherwise, Songs of Desire is a very deliberate exploration of such an idea.
Conceived nearly twenty years ago, the idea was brought to life by musician and Pharaoh’s Daughter band leader Basya Schechter, who studied with scholar and musician Yosef Goldman, to explore, uncover and fully understand the deeper meanings of the texts known as The Song of Songs. This, in turn, enabled her and the band to create a sonic vision of what, for thousands of years, had been merely words captured on parchment, the dry and dusty world of academia and canon, thereby breathing new life and relevance into the stories. Once lifted off the page, this important collection of poems, dreams, and metaphors pulses with tales of romance, yearning, and forbidden love, carefully reworked into something sensual, seductive, human, relatable, and, most importantly, alive. And these stories in particular, and the themes in general, are found as a very human heartbeat in the sacred tomes and texts of faiths across the globe.
And just as this vibrant re-presentation of this important and much-discussed story moves through Spanish, French, Arabic, Yiddish, English, as well as the original Hebrew, it is the language itself that adds to the mystery and melody; musically, sounds are drawn from all over the musical map, across genres and geographies, and where language might be a barrier, it becomes music in its own right.
“Asleep” sets the scene: lovers meet for a secret nighttime tryst in the City of Peace, but it also introduces us to the exotic sounds that carry the story being replayed here. Anchored by a busy beat, the surrounding space is filled with the sounds of the traditional and the modern: Oud and guitars, flutes and violins.
As soon as the opening bars of “Yonati” drift in, a sonic picture is painted, this is not here, this is not now, at least it seems so to those of us in the modern West, this blend of Middle Eastern folk traditions, of music that came to the us by another path, of what would centuries after these stories were written be termed “arabesque” is almost an act of spiritual and sonic time travel. From: https://dancing-about-architecture.com/songs-of-desire-pharaohs-daughter-reviewed-by-dave-franklin/
