In 2020, I travelled to Budapest with four young composition students to work with the Greek musician Sofia Labropoulou.
Sofia plays the qanun: a microtonal string instrument with roots reaching back toward ancient Mesopotamia and a living tradition in Greece, Turkey and the Middle East. The point was not to treat the instrument as an exotic colour, but to let the students meet a real musician, a real technique and a musical logic outside the ordinary Western ensemble habits.
The participating students were Aske Tengberg, Oliver Tordendahl, Jonas Wiinblad Schmidt and Lukas Sixhøj. Each of them wrote a new work for qanun.
The project grew out of a simple pedagogical idea: young composers need to meet instruments physically and practically. They need to hear what works, what resists, what the player can show them, and what the notation does not explain by itself.