With the weight of a tree at my back

This short, two-move­ment work came out of an ear­lier work for solo viola, Gaza Can­tos, which was writ­ten after the in­va­sion of the Gaza Strip by the Is­raeli De­fence Forces in De­cem­ber 2008. The title ref­er­ences Amir Nizar Zuabi’s play I am Yusuf and this is my brother, set be­fore and after ‘al Nakba’ in 1948. In one scene of this play, an old man stum­bles on stage bear­ing a tree on his back, strug­gling under the weight. Hav­ing planted the tree and watched it grow, he can­not bear to leave it be­hind as he flees Is­raeli at­tacks — a vis­ceral and po­etic image of the up­root­ing of lives by vi­o­lence. As with Gaza Can­tos, my in­ten­tion is not to cast judge­ment or even to crit­i­cise — be­liev­ing there is no such thing as in­trin­si­cally po­lit­i­cal music — rather to pro­voke con­tem­pla­tion and thought.

With the weight of a tree at my back was writ­ten for Jess Ar­gall who pre­miered it in Fal­mouth, May 2011.