In Cabrillo, a composer retells the Arabian Nights in a song

Composer Karim Al-Zand likes to call himself a “Middle Eastern Midwesterner.” His parents — an Iraqi father and a Minnesotan mother — met in college in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area and moved to Ottawa, and Al-Zand was educated at McGill University and Harvard University, after which he began teaching composition and music theory at the Shepherd School of Music at Rice University in Houston.

As a composer, Al-Zand, 54, has explored a wide range of forms and influences, with his solo, chamber, vocal and orchestral works drawing inspiration from graphic art, fable, world music, film, spoken word, jazz and his own Middle Eastern heritage. He is a founding member of Musiqa, Houston’s premier contemporary music group, and his honors include an Arts and Letters Award in Music from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Al-Zand was a natural choice for the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music. His first assignment there, The prisoner (based on letters from a Guantanamo Bay prisoner), was part of the 2017 season, the first for Music Director Cristian Măcelaru, who had studied composition with Al-Zand at the Shepherd School. Cabrillo’s opening night program this year, “Parade,” on August 2 at the Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium, will feature the world premiere of Al-Zand’s Al-Hakawati (The Narrator), excerpts from an opera in performance entitled The book of stories.

The composer spoke with SF Classical Voice from his office in Houston about his work and sources of inspiration.

What is Houston like in terms of the kind of music you make?

It’s opened up a lot of opportunities. When (my wife and I) first came here (in 2000), there wasn’t a whole lot. But my colleagues at the Shepherd School have started a lot of new projects in the city, and Musiqa is thriving. Houston has a very, very vibrant and well-known contemporary art scene, so my colleagues thought, “Why not contemporary music?” We ended up doing a couple of concerts at the Rothko Chapel, and that was the first time they had music there.

The publicity for your opera in progress refers to inspiration from the One Thousand and One Nights, the collection of folk tales also known as the Arabian Nights.

I’ve always lived with those stories, it seems — whether it’s the Disney version or the Richard Burton (translation) or whatever. But the real inspiration for me was this character that I didn’t know about, Hanna Diyab. The first Western version of the Arabian Nights was translated from the original by a Frenchman named Antoine Galland, and it was published around 1709 and started this whole orientalist fascination. Galland was the antiquarian to the royal court of Louis XIV, and his (version) included some of the most famous stories, “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves” and Aladdin and things like that. His diaries mention meeting someone he called “Hanna of Aleppo” who told him stories, but no one knew who this was.

So the source of the stories was unknown.

Then, I think sometime in 1993 or so, an ancient handwritten Arabic manuscript was discovered in the Vatican Library. It was essentially a travel memoir by a man named Hanna Diyab, who was 75 at the time. He told the story of how he left Aleppo (in modern-day Syria) and met a man named Paul Lucas, a shady Indiana Jones type of figure, and (Diyab) became (Lucas’) translator and ended up in France.

And Diyab’s true story appealed to you?

Because it was a wonderful connection between modern times and the 18th century and the “fantastic” world of Arabia. It occurred to me that it would be a wonderful idea for an opera to connect storytellers from different eras. And the characters that Diyab meets are wonderful: Louis XIV, Paul Lucas, Antoine Galland — and Scheherazade, of course.

For Cabrillo you put three female characters in the spotlight.

I composed four scenes, one purely for orchestra, three of them sung by Miriam Khalil, a soprano who is also from Ottawa. (She) was part of the Ensemble Studio of the Canadian Opera Company and is a professor at the University of Alberta. There is some Arabic in the lyrics of the songs, and her Arabic is much better than mine. The (libretto) is inspired by the Arabian Nightsbut it was written by me.

Is Scheherazade or any of the other female characters in the play portrayed as feminist icons?

One of the things that struck me in the Arabian Nights is that the female characters are more intelligent, witty, and cunning. The male characters often don’t do so well; they’re often very villainous or stupid or both.

The text takes us through time. Is there time travel in the music?

I’m not sure if time travel is my thing, but I do use a few instruments that aren’t normally heard in an orchestral setting and are more associated with Arabic music. There’s the riqq, which is basically a tambourine with more subtlety and nuance, and a doumbek, which is a larger drum that sits on the knee.

To what extent did you feel connected to your father’s ethnicity when you were growing up in Canada?

He spoke Arabic, but not in the house. My father played Arabic music all the time and we ate Arabic food. I know Arabic music (when I hear it), but I don’t know it as a practitioner knows it. My musical training is about as Western as you can imagine, so it’s probably Arabic themes, stories, and culture that I’m most interested in. A stronger influence – and this may seem strange to you – is jazz, which is right up my alley in terms of what I listened to and played as a child. In fact, my master’s thesis was on (jazz saxophonist) Cannonball Adderley. There is an “Arabic connection” that occurs in jazz; you only have to think of “A Night in Tunisia” and “Caravan.”

There’s an interesting comment in your biography about how you connect jazz and 18th century improvised music.

Well, I teach a class at Rice called “The Cadenza” about that period and form of improvisation, ad libitum expression. It’s a kind of theory class masquerading as a performance-practice class — or the other way around. We talk about figured bass and embellishment. So there’s a definite connection to jazz in terms of the spontaneous generation of ideas.

I see that there will soon be performances of your opera in Cologne and Paris.

The piece is co-commissioned by Cabrillo, the WDR Sinfonieorchester Köln and the Orchestre National de France. So those three groups will perform the piece and Cristian will conduct all three orchestras. This is a kind of proof-of-concept, where I can offer it.

And there’s my next project. … It’s a commission from the Houston Symphony, which I’m working hard on now for the upcoming season, for March 2025. It’s a one-movement piece called The ingenious clocks of Al-Jazaribased on a 12th century Muslim scholar who is considered the father of modern robotics. He had all sorts of clocks, including those powered by dripping candles and hydraulic clocks. People are demanding more and more stories, and there are stories within stories within stories.