Layale Chaker

“SINEKEMĀN”

”Sinekemān”, commissioned and written for violinist Johnny Gandelsman, is a study on solitude. 

As I had wished to depict one's relationship with solitude, the ultimate condition of being faced with incomprehension, and an ongoing flux of moments of self-sufficiency and struggle, lucidity and confusion, power and dispair, already depicted by the aloneness of a solo instrument, I wished to embody it by invoking the sinekemān, an Ottoman ancestor of the violin, characterized by its’ seven sympathetic strings; creating a contrast between the wholeness of the sound and the sustained resonance of these strings, and the fragility of the textures of its’ gut strings. —Layale Chaker

“Then stirs the feeling infinite, so felt

In solitude, where we are least alone;

A truth, which through our being then doth melt,

And purifies from self: it is a tone,

The soul and source of music, which makes known

Eternal harmony, and sheds a charm

Like to the fabled Cytherea’s zone,

Binding all things with beauty;—’t would disarm

The spectre Death, had he substantial power to harm.”

—Lord Byron (1788-1824), from Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: Night and Tempest

”Sinekeman” was generously commissioned by the Portland Chamber Music Festival (Portland, ME)