#1074 — The great lady’s zither 果园女神之筝

Happy Monday everyone,

I hope you all had a restful weekend. This four-voice counterpoint guzheng piece was composed and recorded yesterday, inspired by the ancient Hurrian Hymn No. 6, from the area that is now Syria and Turkey (where there is currently a terrible war happening). The final notes of the piece are from a chirping bird outside my window.

It is the earliest known song to be recorded in writing, dating to around 1400 BCE. The Hurrians built cities and kingdoms from the Mediterranean Sea to Mesopotamia from about 3000 BCE to 1400 BCE, and wrote texts and music using cuneiform on clay tablets.

The lyrics of the Hymn No. 6 are about fertility, and refer to the making of offerings to the moon goddess, Nikkal.

In music theory, counterpoint is the relationship of two or more simultaneous musical lines (also called voices) that are harmonically interdependent yet independent in rhythm and melodic contour. The term originates from the Latin punctus contra punctum meaning "point against point", i.e. "note against note".

American composer and theorist John Rahn describes counterpoint as follows:

It is hard to write a beautiful song. It is harder to write several individually beautiful songs that, when sung simultaneously, sound as a more beautiful polyphonic whole. The internal structures that create each of the voices separately must contribute to the emergent structure of the polyphony, which in turn must reinforce and comment on the structures of the individual voices. The way that is accomplished in detail is ... 'counterpoint'.

Hope this piece brings you a sweet dream.

Wu Fei 吴非

You can buy my album Yuan from Tzadik records or from Amazon. My albums A Distant Youth and Pluck are available for purchase on Bandcamp.

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Nikkal (second from the left) on the Yazılıkaya procession relief, the capital city of the Hittite Empire, today in the Çorum Province, Turkey. Source from Wikipedia.