Tongue of the Invisible is an hour-long song cycle by the Australian composer Liza Lim, written in 2010-11 for improvising pianist, baritone and 16 musicians. It sets the poetry of the Sufi poet Hafiz, and its form is a story of "fixed" and "open" things: precisely notated textures alternate and coexist with guided improvisation. The whole work fills this disc of the Edition Musikfabrik.
Lim was born in Perth in 1966. The text was compiled and adapted from Hafiz by Jonathan Holmes. The work was commissioned by the Kunststiftung NRW, Ensemble Musikfabrik and the Holland Festival, and premiered on 8 June 2011 at the Bimhuis in Amsterdam. The same performers play here: the pianist Uri Caine, the baritone Omar Ebrahim and the ensemble under André de Ridder. The recording is a production of Westdeutscher Rundfunk and comes from a live performance at the ensemble's twentieth-anniversary concert at the WDR in Cologne.
The cycle has eight movements. Five long songs, with titles such as "At dawn I heard the tongue of the invisible" and "This door is the mouth of love", are separated by three interludes called "Between the pages of the world". In the track credits the last interlude belongs to Caine alone, and the fifth movement to the ensemble without the singer. The scoring is unusual: besides strings and winds it includes alto and baritone saxophone, a double-bell trumpet, euphonium, cimbalom and a lupophone, and the pianist doubles on melodica. The dialogue between improvised and composed material is carried by Caine, Ebrahim and the soloists of the ensemble together.
Lim has spoken of Hafiz's verses as "unbelievably ecstatic and intimate, yet also very fleeting", and of how his shifting levels of meaning produce indeterminable states of mind. Her programme note imagines the concert hall as a tavern, "a meeting-place between world and other", and the musicians as listeners "drunk with desire". The making of the work was also studied by Eric Clarke and Mark Doffman with the composer, in an article in Music and Letters on distributed creative processes in preparing and performing a new piece.
CD, Wergo WER 6859 2, released in 2013 in the Edition Musikfabrik (54'07").
