Babele

In the summer of 2022 I received an email from Roma. A request by the Italian saxophonist Mario Ciaccio to participate in a new project he initiated based on the myth of the Tower of Babel; ‘Babele’ in Italian. His invitation to me was to write the title piece of his triple CD-project also called Babel. A piece for choir and saxophone, finally to be premiered in New York’s Carnegie Hall.
Coincidentally his message reached me just before I was to go to Valencia to attend the world premiere of my ‘Cinc Poemes’ for soprano saxophone and choir. These poems are dedicated to my friend saxophonist Carlos Gimenez Martinez, the ‘Orfeó Universitari de València’ and its conductor Francesc Valldecabres and part of a large collection of songs/poems called ‘The Iberian Treasure’ that I have been working on since 2017. Finally to become a series of 25 poems in Castillian, Catalan, Basque, Portuguese and Galician.
So very obviously I like to write for choir…. And I think the combination with soprano saxophone works really well.
Therefore it did not take me too long to accept Mario’s offer. I decided to base the text on the Jewish legend stating that the one and only language humankind spoke before building the Tower of Babel split into 70 different languages, God’s punishment of course.
The underlying text sung by the choir is simply the translation of the word ‘language’ in 70 different languages. Ancient languages like Sumerian (that was spoken at the place where legend has it the town of Babel was to be found) Akkadian, Luwian and Sanskrit, and many present languages big and small spoken around the planet.
A second textual layer is again a simple text sung by both the choir but mainly by two soloists from within the choir: ‘A Babele, Settanta lingue, Punizione o ricchezza?’ (In Babel, Seventy languages, Punishment or wealth?) And that is of course a rhetorical question; for me at least. Besides music I have many other passions; one of them languages. My native tongue is dutch (spoken in the Netherlands, Belgium, a very small region in France and on the former Dutch Antilles and in Surinam) and I speak a few other languages, can read a few more but I wish I would have more time to learn more languages. They carry culture and are a very genuine source of wealth to me.
So frankly in ‘Babele’ four great loves meet: music, language, the human voice and the saxophone…
Recordings were in Rome, Italy, January 2024!