The Forgetful Girl

About The Forgetful Girl

I met Souhayl Guesmi in the summer of 2011 when he was 18 years old, at Atlas Music Academy in Tunisia.  Atlas Music Academy brought its faculty, annually, from the United States through cooperation with the American NGO, Cultures in Harmony, who had first invited me to Tunisia in 2007, the first of eight consecutive summers where I would visit Tunisia as a volunteer piano teacher.

When Souhayl began to play for me, he played without a score and, unlike the other piano students, he had no scores with him and played only from memory.  When he began to play for me for the first time, he performed a rhapsodic and virtuosic, 8 minute original composition. Indeed, he grew up in Jendouba, in Northwestern Tunisia and had  listened to much of the output of Chopin, Liszt, Ravel, and Scriabin. He had not received much formal training, and the teachers he had had, did not encourage his compositions.  I was, on the other hand, thrilled to encourage such a remarkable talent.

I commissioned him to compose a solo piano piece, in a romantic piano style, based on a Tunisian folk melody.  It is in the tradition of romantic pianist-composers from the 19th century to take traditional popular melodies and incorporate them into a more elaborate piano work.  The Tunisian Fantasy was the result featuring the Tunisian melody Taht el Yasmina Fellil (Under the Jasmin Bush). After performing this around the world in the USA, Japan, Taiwan, Myanmar, and throughout Tunisia, I also commissioned Souhayl to compose a song cycle, a decidedly European format, in which he decided to feature Tunisian timbres, language, and poetic impulses. This work become Nasseya (The Forgetful Girl), a quartet for soprano, piano, saxophone and nay entitled The Forgetful Girl allows Western ears to absorb not only the sound of the Tunisian dialect but also the nay, the traditional Tunisian flute, all against a background of piano interspersed with moody and meditative saxophone melodies.

Sonata No. 1 is a Guesmi’s foray into a more dissonant style brought to life through music gestures emblematic of the romantic era.

Souhayl has shown a seriousness as an artist, absorbing a complicated mix of musical influences, in an era of political turmoil in Tunisia. In all his compositions he grapples with the central question of what it means to be a composer in modern day Tunisia.