for tenor and piano, 2014, duration: 25 minutes.
1. Music And Silence
2. Wake And Walk Out
3. Entirely Jewels
4. A Line Of Clouds
5. The Music We Are
6. See Where It Comes From
“Six Rumi Songs” was composed for and is dedicated to Stephen Ng. The collection of songs was premiered by Stephen Ng and pianist, Andrew Hauze, on October 16, 2014 at West Chester University.
Persian Muslim poet, jurist, theologian, and Sufi mystic, Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rumi, known in the West simply as Rumi, was born on September 30, 1207 in Balkh Province, Afghanistan, then on the eastern edge of the Persian Empire.
In 1244, Rumi met Shams Tabriz, a dervish "God-man". Shams and Rumi were close friends and inspired each other for several years, until Shams mysteriously disappeared. Rumi's mourning for the loss of his friend led to the outpouring of more than 40,000 lyric verses, including odes, eulogies, quatrains, and other styles of Eastern-Islamic poetry. The resulting collection, Divan-e Shams-e Tabrizi or The Works of Shams Tabriz, is considered one of Rumi's masterpieces and one of the greatest works of Persian literature. Shams lives on in Rumi’s searching poems.
In his introduction to his translation of Rumi's The Shams, Coleman Barks has written: "Rumi is one of the great souls, and one of the great spiritual teachers. He shows us our glory. He wants us to be more alive, to wake up... He wants us to see our beauty, in the mirror and in each other.”
Here is a link to a youtube video of Stephen and Andrew performing Six Rumi Songs: