NOTE

In the months leading up to the composition of this piece, I became enraptured by the poetry of the great Sufi mystic Shams-ud-din Muhammad (c. 1320-1389), more commonly known as Hafiz. The word “hafiz” refers to one who has memorized and mastered the Quran, and fittingly enough, the poetry of the enormously influential poet Hafiz has been traditionally used as a sort of holy text or guide. Whatever the malady or dilemma, flip open to a poem and receive wisdom. Stunned by the seeming modernity and irreverence of the poems, I looked more into a wider variety of translations, and discovered that my particular volume (the recent collection translated by Daniel Ladinsky) takes significantly more liberties with the text than some scholars are comfortable with, especially in his willingness to “update” topical allusions and freely break the traditional couplet scheme of the ghazals. I realized that, short of mastering medieval Persian, I would be forever distanced from the “real” Hafiz, left only to “triangulate” on the author through competing translations, biographical sketches, and my own imaginative fancy. But hermeneutical issues be damned, I could not resist the cheeky allure of Ladinsky’s translation. Fully Hafiz or not, these English poems are real, and the joy and inspiration they bring about in me cannot be denied. In a sense, then, my decision to set the poems into music has two aims: to create anew from innocent inspiration, and to further complicate the already-murky waters of authorship. Who are we to own, to label, to prescribe? Quoting Hafiz—er, Ladinsky’s Hafiz: “I could not say anything / You could not / Tell me. / Then, / What was the use of this story? / O, / I just felt like / Talking.”

These four miniatures can be performed in any combination or subset.