One Breath, One Soul Featured on WHYY Newsworks

Diverse cultures share 'one breath, one soul'

April 14, 2016 | NewsWorks Tonight host Dave Heller

Hanna Khoury explains the roots of Takht ensemble music, "...the arab world is a very large geographic expanse...over time you have so many centuries of different frictions and civilizations...which created new forms of musical expressions in different locales, but Takht is a word in the Ottoman empire and Persian language that meant literally, 'musical platform,' the platform in which the musicians used to sit in. It's almost like chamber music...it can be up to five instrumentalists and was predominant in the late 18oo's and early 1900's in the Arab world."Kinan Abou-afach speaks of his musical inspirations for "One Breath, One Soul," "I'm most influenced with what I heard in my childhood--we had a lot of classical European repertoire but we also had a lot of Sufi music.  The first influences are the trace of what I heard as a child but now for me as a performer, a composer, and improviser it's the trick of how can I still sound like myself."

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