Intimately tucked within Sundin Music Hall, the audience watched two performers silently take their places on the stage, select their instruments and begin playing the focused sound of strings. With only the sound of the first strains of their music “The Music of the Levant Old & New Pulse” performance began, featuring Issa Boulos and Wavees Zarour.

The performance on Friday evening, Mar. 11, was the second portion of a two-part “Music of the Levant” event which started with a lecture demonstration the day before.

The events, hosted by Hamline’s Music Department, featured two Palestinian men dedicated to Middle Eastern music. Issa Boulos, an award-winning multi-instrument artist, was born in Jerusalem where he began to study many instruments: piano, ‘ud and his voice. Later in the United States, he studied the composition of music. His work features a variety of commissions for many orchestras and theatrical productions while he experiments with more traditional instruments, using them in unique and inventive ways.

Joining him in concert was Wanees Zarour, who was born in Palestine and began studying music at the  age of seven. He focused, much like Boulos, on using  traditional instruments in different ways. One of his focuses, gaining him acclaim and notice which he featured a glimpse of during Friday’s concert, was his work based on the poetry of Hussayn Ibn Mansur al-Hallaj who wrote Sufi writings and suffered execution for it.
The concert, just as it began, remained intimate throughout the entire show. The moods of each piece varied greatly from simpler pieces to more emotional themes. Early on, they shared melodic imagery of Zarour’s hometown with soothing, long sounds of the violin building in a more lively pace so one imagined how this painted the image of a town.

Later, they shared lyrical pieces with translated lyrics for greater understanding on topics of sadness, loss and love. Along with the lyrics provided, Zarour paused often to explain the meaning behind the poetic pieces.

Zarour grew solemn when discussing the piece “al- Safih”, explaining the meaning of the mournful, somber poem he sang about the pain and effect of losing people to various causes.

“At some point, it kept my mind critical of people who leave until they become numbers. This song pays tribute,” he said.

Other songs were void of explanation, left only to the melodies shared like the final piece of the show—aside from an encore— that described a storyteller,“Hawati” and some of the nostalgia in that lost profession.

“A storyteller used to carry a big box into the middle of town with puppets… You’d pay a quarter to hear a story, and if a group of us paid a dollar, you’d hear more stories… When TV started earlier first— it didn’t start till six o’ clock, then people just watch soap operas [sic],” Zarour said.

With the music, the two musicians tuned their instruments side-by-side and chatted with the audience, inviting everyone to engage. One piece, featuring the sound of a chanting drone, called the entire audience to provide a background noise to fill the room with a buzz through the air. Through their entire show, the room filled with the simplistic but intricate melodies of their music woven between only two instruments at a time, but shared with an entire room.