Naalah, Joshua Shank | Santa Barbara Music Publishing, Inc.

Naalah [level: Medium]
Joshua Shank: Bio and other works

voicing: SATB | catalog number: SBMP 923 | duration: 6:50 | price: $2.45
accompaniment: oboe
DOWNLOAD: Naalah Spoken Text FREE Download
INSTRUMENT PART: Oboe part FREE Download

Composer Shank moves to India for inspiration, setting this piece to a text by Mirza Ghalib, one of the most popular and influential poets of the Urdu language. To be sung in the original language (a transliteration is in the score), this is a fascinating, colorful piece, closely woven with motifs that run throughout. An oboe adds authentic color.

performance by: Flower Mound HIgh School Chorale, Mark Rohwer, conductor [© all rights reserved]
recording available on promo CD for $2.00:

CLICK HERE: See and Hear the Complete Score or download a perusal copy: HERE

CLICK HERE: Read the Text or Poem

TRANSLATION

Kisi ko de ke dil koi
Why are you lost and depressed after giving your heart away?
When you don’t have a heart, why should you have a tongue.

Naalah
The stain in your heart is creating a stream of tears that do nothing for you as they fall. Those tiny drops could become a river.

Deeda-e-tar
Then—with wet eyes—I remembered that I want my heart to be healed.
Even the heartbreak didn’t take my life.
But then I remembered our life together.
I could have spent my life not knowing you.
But then I remembered my time spent with you.
Should I fight with the doorkeeper to heaven to get out of this emotion?
Then I remembered the house where we lived.
Looking at this emptiness reminds me that I’m not in our house with you.

English translations by Moid Alwy and Joshua Shank.

CLICK HERE: Joshua Shank performance notes

Note from the composer
The human experience doesn’t change much depending on where you live, what language you speak or what historical period your life unfolded in. People suffered from the experience of having their heart profoundly broken just as much now as when Ghalib first wrote these texts almost 150 years ago. Luckily, we all wish to be healed at some point and, ultimately, have the ability and opportunity to do so of our own accord every time we are faced with adversity of any kind; it’s simply a matter of calling on it. The end of the piece (which is actually the first stanza of the final poem) is meant to be this invocation.

Naalah (Cry of Grief) was commissioned by the Flower Mound High School Jaguar Chorale (Dr. Mark Rohwer, conductor) and is dedicated with gratitude to James Griesheimer, Dagan Hanson, Brian Lenz and Moid Alwy for their extensive help in all things oboe and Urdu.

This score is available in Printed or ePrint format at checkout (More Information)

Reviews | submit review

Featured on the following reading sessions
2011 | WA ACDA Summer Reading Session