SEMA

Sema is the Ancient Greek word for a sign, a signifier – something to which we lend signification and, by extension, to which a number of significations can be lent. Case in point: sema is not the word after which Jacob Mühlrad named his clarinet concerto SEMA. In our alphabet, the Greek word is indistinguishable from the work’s actual inspiration, sema, a Turkish word that means ‘listening’ and is the name of the whirling ceremony tradition inaugurated by the scholar and mystic Rūmī (1207–1273), carried on by his disciplines of the Mewlewī Sufi Order. SEMA, however, is a clarinet concerto: something else entirely than a sema ceremony. We are reminded that words, like all sounds, can mean many things, and are invited to explore this ambivalence.

As a genre, the concerto relishes in such ambiguity: the literal pinnacle of ‘absolute’ concert music, it nevertheless presents the audience with situations, in the form of interactions between the soloist and the orchestral mass – sonic drama. SEMA, unfolding as a nearly 30-minute long sequence shot, embraces the age-old paradox of musical sema-ntics, telling a story that could the compression of a human life or, just as well, the history of our planet, the tribulations of a hunted deer, or simply an eventful session of music-making. None of these possible narratives is necessarily less accurate than the one that guided Jacob Mühlrad’s composition process: his personal symphonic imagination of a sema ceremony. As a matter of fact, the sema, and SEMA, contains them all: the ecstatic rotations of the whirling dervishes, after all, are meant as an experience of the coincidence of all movements of the universe, from atoms to planets, inviting us to dance along and remember we belong.

Mühlrad has sought to express this interpenetration by referencing maqam scales, that in the Middle East have circulated freely between all three monotheistic religions, and that individual listeners might, depending on their background, associate with the Sufi tradition or with rabbinic cantillation. It is no coincidence that in this piece the clarinet, only fairly recently adopted into the classical realm, is shaken by reminiscences of klezmer growl technique, as much as it carries the memory of the reed flute that opens the sema ceremony, telling the story of an instrument nostalgic of the wetland from which it was been harvested to be pierced and played – Rūmī’s most famous parable for the human torment of being separated from the cosmic whole.

SEMA is drenched in such ambivalent associations, and outgrows them: they are not meant to reference any given place and time or any one culture, but instead take us to a place that pre-exists them. All possible narratives boil down to a ritual without words. In short: from the noise of the world a singular voice, the clarinet, emerges. It gradually develops an individual melodic identity. Its self-affirmation is drowned out in a commotion of competing individual figures, until clarinet and orchestra learn to dance together. The balance, however, is ever fragile – wistful solos compete with loud masses that leave the individual struggling, broken. Heroically or desperately, the clarinet engages its counterparts in the orchestra, and other woodwinds, into a collective ostinato supported by the remaining players, a moment of ecstatic togetherness, until the ritual is brought to a brutal end. Was it all peaceful communion, or a cruel sacrificial dance? It was sema – its meaning open to endless, repeated reinvention.

Written by Aleksi Barriere