Nähe (2012)
(for viola solo and mixed choir)

‘...because I have given up the claim of uniqueness given up
so as not to freeze in my own light’
SAID

I had been looking for suitable texts for a long time and, as a contemporary composer, I wanted to respond to my environment and Heinrich Schütz's psalm settings with contemporary texts.

By pure chance I read the psalms of SAID and immediately felt addressed and inspired.

SAID came to Munich as a student in 1965 at the age of seventeen. Here he studied political science. After the fall of the Shah in 1979, he briefly went to Iran. However, the new theocracy established there by the mullahs prompted him to return to exile in Germany. Here he now has German citizenship and writes poetry and prose in German, which he has mastered in all its nuances and sees as his ‘home’.

SAID's main themes are love and exile. He has been honoured several times for his literary work, but also for his commitment to politically persecuted people. From 1995 to 1996 he was Vice President and from 2000 to 2002 President of the German P.E.N. Centre, of which he was also a temporary representative for the Writers in Prison Committee (from 1995 to 1996).

SAID, who seeks and struggles for an unconventional and non-denominational spirituality, has been writing psalms for a long time. The biblical psalms, which characterise all spiritual poetry to this day, are modelled on ancient oriental literature, and who could feel more called than SAID, whose lyrical language always draws on the Persian tradition, to take up this ancient form of religious song and prayer in a contemporary way and fill it with new meaning?

Nothing in his psalms is self-evident, not even the relationship to the invoked God; everything is radically open and new. SAID's psalms leave no one cold, and they leave nothing out, not the catastrophes and conflicts of history, not the language of the present, not the hardships of everyday life, not the desire, the longing, the fear of death.

After the end of the great utopias, a global victory of the market and exposure to world powers and global corporations, quite a few people long for a meaning beyond consumption and the body, and many fall back on conventional traditions and rituals, including those of religion, even though they are highly contestable. With his psalms, SAID moves in a religious space that remains open to all the questions we have here, and he leaves none of these questions out.