Mubadele/Antallage (The Exchange): Remembering a Human Catastrophe through Music.

Abstract

Mubadele/Antallage is a fifty-minute cantata for large ensemble of 14 players, two singers and a narrator. The piece is based on real life stories of an Orthodox Christian and a Muslim woman who were subjected to forced migration with the enactment of the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923: an agreement, following the 1919-1922 Greco-Turkish war, that decreed the compulsory exchange of religious minority populations in Greece and Turkey. As a result, almost a million and a half Orthodox Christians residing in Turkey and half a million Muslims residing in Greece were uprooted from the lands on which they lived for generations, forcefully sent to the opposite country, and rendered as refugees. The agreement not only caused a radical shift in the entire demographics of Near East, homogenizing and ethnically cleansing the region, but also marked a milestone in the nationalization and modernization processes of the two countries, thus reshaping the nationalist discourses, as well as the cultural and national identities of Greeks and Turks. In this musical composition I have constructed a libretto that displays the stories of these two women - reflecting their personal accounts, traumas and reactions to the political turmoil that revolves around them, whereas the music mediates the cultural and linguistic differences, thus transcending this divergence and working as a site of cultural convergence where these two women meet. The piece unfolds in two formal sections: Arias and narrations. The narration parts, accompanied by little or no music, are English-spoken sections that depict the stories of the two characters. The arias, sung in Greek and Turkish, are emotionally focused movements. This linguistically shaped formal scheme coupled with a Western musical medium seeks to manipulate not only the interplay between the folkloric materials from Greece and Turkey but also explore the possibilities of interaction, fusion, and synthesis of Western/non-Western and modern/traditional musical and narrative elements.