Troy Savings Bank Music Hall Presenting Amir ElSaffar’s Rivers of Sound Orchestra April 23rd

Troy Savings Bank Music Hall recently announced the new performance of Amir ElSaffar’s Rivers of Sound Orchestra is scheduled to perform April 23rd at the historic hall.

The multicultural show could not have visited the Capital Region at a more politically charged and sensitive time in the world, and uses music to bridge cultures.

The orchestra features seventeen musicians from a broad spectrum of traditions playing the Middle Eastern oud, buzuq, santur (hammered dulcimer), jowza (spike fiddle), and percussion, arrayed with the piano, bass and drums of the American jazz tradition, along with trumpet, saxophones, oboe, strings, and voice. The modal language of the maqam combines with the aesthetics of contemporary music and jazz to create a new musical vocabulary.

The highest ideal in maqam music is to reach a state of tarab, or “musical ecstasy,” which results from the melting away of borders between a notion of self and other, as performers and audience revel together in the music.

Tickets are on sale now at Troy Savings Bank Music Hall’s website.