“We understand the principle that if a tree falls and no one’s there, it doesn’t make a sound — if music plays and no-one hears it, how is that a sound either? It needs to have an audience. Even if it’s an audience of one — even if you’re playing music for yourself — that can still count, but someone has to hear it.”
Sami Seif
Sami Seif (b. 1998) is a Lebanese composer and music theorist whose music is inspired by the aesthetics, philosophies, paradigms, and poetry of his Middle-Eastern heritage. His latest musical concerns centre around the phenomenology of time and of differing degrees of focus. A passionate and enthusiastic collaborator, Sami has worked with soloists and ensembles such as Carla Rees (British Flute Society), Josh Modney, Juan Riveros, TEMPO Ensemble, Ensemble 126, and Kalamazoo Symphony Orchestra, among others; he was a finalist in the Kaleidoscope Chamber Orchestra Call for Scores in 2019 and 2020. Originally from the small town of Ashkout in Mount Lebanon, Sami was raised in Abu Dhabi, and studied a BM in composition and music theory at the Cleveland Institute of Music. He is currently based in New York City, where he is a doctoral fellow in composition at the CUNY Graduate Center.
We caught up with Sami over Zoom, discussing his approach to collaboration, influence from Middle-Eastern poetry, durationality in language, the experience of musical time, and more…
–
Zyggy/PRXLUDES: Hi Sami! Thanks for joining me today. I understand you first started exploring music by playing Arabic keyboards — what kinds of genres and styles of music were around you growing up?
Sami Seif: I played all kinds of music on those keyboards. I actually grew up with a very wide range of music. My parents are music lovers; even if they weren’t super-serious about music themselves, playing instruments or anything, they still had a wide appreciation for music. Through them, I was exposed to all sorts of Arabic genres — besides the popular music, the traditional classical music — old classics. And Western music, as well — American pop is hard to avoid, I think, anywhere in the world — and also Western classical music: Beethoven, Mozart, Rachmaninoff. Even Scandinavian metal genres, hard rock. A very wide range here. Not saying that all of these were played every day, but these were all things I was exposed to.
Was there any particular moment where you first felt like you wanted to be a composer?
You know what, I don’t think I had a specific moment. I just always knew I wanted to work in something that involved creating music. I’m not sure there was a moment per se. But what spurred my interest into classical music: when I started learning Western music, a lot of the examples were Western classical music. I’d be exposed to a lot of things just through that. I started listening to Bach at maybe 15, or something.
It also seemed way more exciting, because I felt like I had figured out popular genres very quickly. As you know, popular music schematics [have been] more and more reduced to formulas as compared to before; that generalises globally, so it’s not just in Western music. So it seemed like something that had more to it that I could dig into. And then I figured out the Western schema, and now it’s not fun anymore. -laughs-
I get that. But every time you “figure out” a schema, so to speak, it becomes part of your musical language as you develop.
Absolutely, yes. And it’s hard to disentangle these things. It’s not like I had a version of myself that grew up in [the exact] same way, but just wasn’t exposed to metal music. I’m sure that all of these things have an influence.
To talk about how you first studied composition — I understand you were self-taught while growing up in Abu Dhabi, before moving out to the US?
The situation with being self-taught… This is how my parents viewed it: one day I told them I wanted to start learning the keyboard, and they assumed I’d give it up and [then] not take a big loss. But they thought that if they got a teacher and I gave it up, it would not be a worthwhile investment. When I asked them “can you buy me some textbooks?”, they said “yeah, this works for us”; and once they saw I was very serious, and I was progressing quickly — learned to play, read Western notation on my own — then they thought [I] would really benefit from a teacher. The next challenge was finding a long-term teacher. I started working with teachers, but it was often the case that they moved to other cities soon after I started studying with them — just odd luck there.
What was the musical environment in Abu Dhabi like for you — and how did your musical perspectives shift when you first moved to the States?
I grew up very much in parallel to the city of Abu Dhabi. When I was young, the city was small; it was almost like a big town. And as I aged, I saw the city get bigger and bigger — and when I was 15 or 16, I thought to myself: okay, that’s enough, stop growing, we don’t need more traffic. -laughs- They were always building roads and expanding them — so I was surrounded by construction. There was really a big rush effort to build the city. It’s a gorgeous city for sure, but the music scene was kind of behind; the music scene had a delay in its growth compared to a lot of the other things. So I was not able to have the opportunities that a lot of my colleagues had.
Before going to Cleveland [Cleveland Institute of Music], I spent two years in Canada — there, I found a very important teacher of mine, Roger Bergs. I remember when I got to Cleveland, a lot of the people I knew went to the same high schools, or went to the same camps — at least 20-30% of my incoming class went to the same high school, and already had friend groups established. It was a bit intimidating for me to enter that environment, not having had as much opportunity as the others had.
When I was in Abu Dhabi, I was composing basically in isolation, in my bedroom. I was really composing for myself. But once I got to Cleveland, I could form direct friendships with people — there [would be] an amazing harpist in the practice room, an incredible violist in the practice room. I became much more collaboration-oriented than I had been in the past. That’s one of the great things I benefitted from; these wonderful friendships and collaborations. Ultimately, that became the driving force behind the music that I write. I think that’s a very positive change — it became more outwardly-oriented than inwards. That, for me, is one of the big joys of music.
.
Let’s discuss a bit about your compositional process — where do you tend to start when writing a new piece?
At this point, it really starts with the collaborative process. Oftentimes, a performer will graciously approach me and ask if I can write them a piece — or sometimes I’ll ask in a conversation. These sorts of things are where it starts. That’s how, for example, my Harp Concerto happened; all the music I’m working on at the moment is geared towards the players, and often dedicated to those players. I tend to take up a lot of my players’ time, because I usually study their instruments thoroughly. I’ll quite often read whatever textbooks I have access to — in whatever language I can speak — and listen to a lot of repertoire, and quite often try a lot of things.
I often write sectional beginnings, and then write the transitions later. I haven’t fully figured this out — I’m still reading a lot about the neuroscience behind this — but I understand attention to be a sort of cyclical thing. That’s why I tend to write the music of what I think will be the attentional peaks [first], and then fill in the gaps in the middle. I’ll often write the ending of the piece way before I’m even close to finishing the piece, and work backwards [from] there. Maybe because I’m a native Arabic speaker — sometimes, right to left is easier than left to right. -laughs-
Of course. -laughs- A lot of the times, I’m aware I have an ending in mind already when I start composing — I’m often thinking about the audience’s experience of different sections…
Absolutely. That is one of the hardest things about music: in real-time, it’s a temporal experience, but it’s almost impossible to simulate that. So you need experience to get a sense for the temporal nature of music. When you’re spending weeks or months writing it, you’re so detached from the actual performance-time that it takes. If you think about the detachment — especially in an orchestral piece — you might be spending a million seconds to write a moment that might last one second.
Many of your conceptual inspirations lie in linguistics and language, in particular poetry from the Middle East; tell me what it is about poetry that inspires you?
I favour poetry above all other art forms besides music, because it’s the one I view to be the most musical — the one that’s often compared to music the most. So poetry being the closest thing to that, I feel like I can glean insights, and derive inspiration. But you know what, I’ve never set poetry, per se, to music; I feel like I would destroy what’s inherent[ly] important to the poem if I did it.
And music has specific qualities that are difficult to replicate, in my opinion, [in] other art forms. One of the things I bring up often to my students, usually in the first class of a beginners’ music [theory] class, is: “Tell me how often you’ve heard your favourite song, give me an estimate” — and they’ll often tell me hundreds of times, thousands of times. I say “good, now tell me how many times you’ve read your favourite poem” — they might tell me five times, ten times. “Now, what about your favourite book, or favourite movie?” — they might tell me once, twice, maybe three [times]. So, there’s something unique about music’s ability to generate novelty through repetition. People don’t tend to want to read the same book chapter twice. But we love returning to the same section in music.
Of course — and I’m sure there’s certain qualities of poetry that will then have a different effect when we use them in music, right?
I remember a specific insight from a specific poem I gleaned. I was just listening to how unique the material of the poem is — how original it is — and when [I] got to the end of the poem, there were some words that were extremely generic, [or] common, that a “lesser skilled” poet could easily have come up with. But the beginning, all the way through the middle, wasn’t like that. And the insight I gleaned from this wonderful poem was that putting generic material at the end is far different than putting it at the beginning. I found that the generic material was extremely powerful; it was approached so wonderfully, beautifully, and masterfully that it was extremely effective, and did not feel generic in that context.
I think of that, musically: that connects to how a lot of cadential gestures tend to be generic gestures. But opening gestures, medial gestures, not quite as much. One of the interesting things I read was [that] in Beethoven 5, the cadence could be a cadence to any other piece — but all of the beginning material is so characteristic of that piece. It’s just 5-1-5-1… lots of 5-1s. -laughs- But we don’t care that Beethoven does that every time, because of the other stuff. Being original is gonna undermine our sense of [material] being cadential.
.
On the subject of poetry — I understand that much of the material of your Harp Concerto was inspired by quotes from Khalil Gibran and Nassim Nicholas Taleb…
I was reading a lot of literature that was somewhat, somehow related to bravery and courage. One of those books is Skin in the Game by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. It’s actually a book that’s about economics, but he makes an interesting case: economics is also about courage, because it’s about risk, and calculation, and it involves trusting people — there has to be trust for economies to work. So that’s part of how it started. But I was also reading a lot of love poetry, listening to a lot of music about love. So these two things sort of coalesced into that Harp Concerto.
Of course, subtext to this is it all started as a collaboration with Juan Riveros — the harpist who I dedicated the piece to, and who gave really gorgeous performances of that piece. He’s actually performed it a few times; and I actually just finished a solo piece for him now. I’m very happy that this is a long-term collaboration process, working with him.
What was it about those two writers’ words that appealed to you, and how did they work together for you?
I think they fit well into the way I usually think. A lot of my music is oriented around contrast; I often try to integrate contrasting materials, especially toward the end of a piece. And one day, I made this realisation: why is composing so hard? And then I realised why — because I’m trying to synthesise two different materials. I’m starting with “okay, let’s have contrast”, and then “let’s undo the contrast”… There’s a sort of undoing your work involved here. -laughs-
I’d love to explore that relationship between poetry and language more widely. I’m reminded of your solo flute work, ‘Miniatures from Phoenicia’, that draws from the aesthetics of language…
In some ways, since all these pieces are instrumental pieces, I don’t seek to translate literally any poetry or anything of that sort. It really tends to be a thing I obsess with as I’m doing my work. I read these things out of curiosity, and a desire to grow as a person; it’s hard to tell the exact specific influence they tend to have.
‘Miniatures from Phoenicia’ is a bit of an exception to that. The music really is driven around phonetic sounds, in large part — at least, that’s one of the aspects of that piece. Quite often, it’s a similar process of studying the instruments, and listening to a lot of music. I remember, I specifically checked out every single solo flute piece in the library at my school. I came in with a suitcase — so I could put all the scores inside it — and then took that suitcase home. -laughs-
And so what is it about language that appeals to you?
I would say that I’m pretty much obsessed with literature. I probably didn’t realise a few years ago how important literature tends to be — but in hindsight, a lot of the music I write has a big literature inspiration behind it. I’m not sure I’ve figured out how to put into words the inspiration of language.
I guess one of the things I think about a lot is duration variance. Let’s take an example [of] melodic writing: what is the difference between the shortest note value and the longest note value. I’m sure you’ve seen the comparison between English-speaking composers and French-speaking composers — French-speaking composers tend to have a shorter duration variance as compared to English-speaking composers — and that relates to the language as well. There’s a mapping on to the linguistic parts of this.
Arabic actually has a very large duration variance, between short vowels and long vowels — and also double-consonants, and staccato consonants. There’s actually a symbol in the Arabic language (the sukun ْ ) that when applied to a consonant, means “staccato” — short consonant. And there’s symbols that extend sounds (like the shaddah ّ ). That already creates a duration variance; and that’s probably influenced my music a lot.
One of the things I remember researching was the theory textbooks in the Arabic language that were written a thousand years ago — and more recently. Looking at that history. I found a few notation systems they used for rhythm. I found that to be so fascinating and intriguing to reveal how they thought about rhythms at the time — versus now, it’s completely different.
Of course. I do wonder how easy it is to discern someone’s native language from their compositional language — if, for example, my English-ness is too obvious. -laughs-
I do think sometimes you can glean certain things from the language that a composer speaks. I’m sorry, but Elgar’s Cello Concerto feels very British to me. I don’t [see] that as a bad thing — it’s a beautiful thing about the world, in some ways. I don’t mean to shoehorn any composers — at the end of the day, Bach and Stockhausen are both German. Strauss and Stockhausen overlapped in their lifetimes, but it doesn’t mean they have to sound the same. Some composers’ music [are] more similar to traditional genres of music than others; and once you do that, I think there has to be some impact. It doesn’t mean everyone does the same thing with the same inspiration.
I get what you’re saying; I guess none of us write in a vacuum, right? We’re always going to be influenced by the environment around us, the people around us — and I guess that naturally includes language.
Absolutely. The other thing is that I grew up multilingual. As much as I can say Arabic is the language I spoke at home, I also usually spoke French at school. Sometimes people ask me “how did [you] learn English?” — and I tell them “you know, just from American cartoons.” And I remember I said that to one of my teachers, and they said: “That is the first time in history that American television does something positive in the world.” -laughs-
.
On a similar note — would you consider your compositional practice to be cross-cultural? Is that something that appeals to you?
Yes — absolutely. It’s not avoidable, the situation of being cross-cultural. There’s multiple levels to this: I’m Lebanese, but I grew up in Abu Dhabi, but traditional Lebanese music and traditional music in Abu Dhabi are different. They have a different intonation to their music, different maqams. And growing up with Western music… We understand the differences between French and German music, and we understand what that means stereotypically. In many ways, America is a child of British culture, and a child of European culture. But also one that’s questioned at times its own identity, and history — its place in Western music. I’m grateful I was exposed to so much, and I found that it’s enriched me in so many ways.
I actually very much appreciate — I can speak for America, because that’s what I have experience in — the way of cultivating an individual. One of the biggest advantages of America is that it’s so decentralised that there is no one aesthetic bias. I can tell you which neighbourhoods in New York very much favour minimalist music. But I can show you another neighbourhood where you’re gonna hear a lot more Jason Eckardt — and I can tell you neighbourhoods where you’re gonna hear a lot more neotonal music.
Speaking of America — you’re currently based in New York, pursuing a PhD at City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center. Tell me a bit about the research you’re currently undertaking in those ideas of duration and experientiality in music?
Some teacher had asked me: “Well, how do you know how long to continue this [material] for? Can you give me a number, [or] bars?” — and I said: “Keep doing it as long as it’s beautiful.” Take out all the beauty of it, and once we’ve reached the exact point of that, then that’s done. I can’t give you a number, it’s an experiential thing. I remember after a concert, one of my friends asked me “how long is that piece?” and I said “12 minutes” — [and] they said “it felt more like 9 minutes”. I know it felt that way — but why did it feel that way? That led me to a lot of wanting to explicitly research that; and that became what my undergrad music theory thesis was.
From there, I started my doctoral studies. And that’s kind of my area of research, broadly: it’s relating to the difference between experience-time and clock time. The experience of time. That, basically, has multiple branches to it: one of them is the philosophy branch, namely phenomenology. In fact, Edmund Husserl — who’s the founder of modern phenomenology — even talks about the difference between experienced time in music, when playing notes, versus silence (versus other experiences). There’s also a neuroscience aspect to this — there’s definitely studies relating to that — and there’s a sort of raw musical analysis side of this. So that’s already quite a bit of things to reconcile together; that’s the work I’m preparing for my thesis.
How are those facets of your research influencing the music you’re writing now?
To me, it’s not really that you can derive a technique, per se. It allows me to be mindful of these things. For example, one aspect that seems to have an impact is the density of information — that impacts how long something will feel like. It’s not that that tells me how to write music, but it makes me mindful that density is going to have an impact on how the music feels. Another thing is repetition; overt repetition is different to subliminal repetition. I tend to be more sensitive to these things knowing some of the science behind them, and knowing what some people have written about this.
I also think a lot about how music is conveyed. Given that a lot of this starts out as notation — and that’s kind of the final product before [the] premiere. The impact that notation is going to have on performance, and therefore [the] experience of the audience and the performers. Notation, frozen on paper — printed on paper — is very different from a temporal experience. Notation is laid out in front of you, whereas a temporal experience is realised in time; which will involve expectations to some extent, and then meeting them to some extent, or not meeting them. That really is a different medium. I think about that a lot — the extent to how I can have my notation match the ideas behind the music.
I guess this is what I find difficult about the score, or notation, being considered the “final” work — because it doesn’t convey the experience of the piece itself being performed.
And part of that is [that] every player plays things slightly different. No matter how detailed you are. How a violinist is gonna distribute the bow throughout a note; all sorts of subtle things. Of course, a piece cannot be complete as a score. You need an interpretation of it, you need someone to hear it. We understand the principle that if a tree falls and no one’s there, it doesn’t make a sound — if music plays and no-one hears it, how is that a sound either? It needs to have an audience. Even if it’s an audience of one — even if you’re playing music for yourself — that can still count, but someone has to hear it.
–
Learn more about Sami and his practice at:
- https://www.samiseif.com/
- https://soundcloud.com/samiseif
- https://www.instagram.com/samiseifcomposer
References/Links:
- Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Skin in the Game (2018)
- Edward Elgar – Cello Concerto (1919)
