Capping this Thursday morning’s broadcast on WPRB will be a special visit from Saad Haddad, Composer, whose fascinating work, “Manarah,” was heard on a concert of the Princeton Symphony Orchestra this past weekend. Haddad will share more of his music, which similarly employs electronics to expand the palette of Western acoustic instruments, to evoke the microtones and glissandi characteristic of the Middle East.
Haddad found his distinctive voice while transferring video tapes for his mother. “My mom had all these VHS tapes that she wanted me to convert to a digital format so that we could save them on a hard drive,” he says. “When you’re watching these tapes, it’s not like burning a CD, where it’s very quick. You have to watch the whole video for it to convert. So I started noticing my uncles, my aunts. They were my age about 20 years ago. I’m watching them, and I hear some music, the way that they speak, the rhythm of their voices.”
He also noted the singing of a congregation at the Melkite Catholic church where he and his brothers were baptized. The prolonged exposure to these images and sounds of his past inspired him to turn to Arabic inflections as the basis of his original compositions.
Tune in to sample for yourself. Saad Haddad joins me tomorrow morning at 10:00 EST, on WPRB 103.3 FM and at wprb.com. I’ll be there at 6, on Classic Ross Amico.