The sape has a body like a canoe, hollowed from a single piece of wood, its long neck carved with spirals that trace back centuries before anyone thought to write down what they meant. I have carried this instrument through a great many rooms that were never built with it in mind, but Villa Wolkonsky may be the room furthest from where the sape was born. Gilded frames. Diplomatic tapestries. Ceilings high enough to hold a different century entirely. And underneath all of it, five musicians sitting close together on the floor, playing as though the room's grandeur had nothing to do with what was actually happening between us.
We had gathered for an event connected to climate and cultural dialogue, though by the time the first notes sounded, the occasion itself had mostly receded into the background, the way a reason for a gathering often does once the gathering becomes its own reason. What remained was simpler. Tabla. Oud. Electric guitar. Saxophone. A sape held across my lap, its carved patterns catching the afternoon light coming through the tall windows behind us.
I keep returning to those carvings when I think about that afternoon. The sape is older than any nation currently drawing borders through the forest it came from. It has outlasted colonial administrations, logging concessions, entire languages. To bring it into a room built to represent one country's presence in another felt, if I am honest, like introducing two very different kinds of memory to each other and hoping they would recognise something in common.
They did. That is the part I did not expect.
The saxophone player and I had never performed together before that afternoon. Usually we have a multi instrumentalist playing the Armenian duduk, clarinet and soprano saxophone. I have played with the tabla player on many occasions, oftentimes travelling to Morocco to perform in festivals, but none really like this. Each of us arrived carrying an entirely different musical inheritance, different scales, different relationships to rhythm, different assumptions about where a phrase should end. On paper it should have taken effort to make those inheritances sit comfortably in the same room. It did not, or at least it did not take the kind of effort I expected. What it took instead was listening. More listening than playing, if I am honest about the ratio. Virtuosity would have made the piece impressive. Listening was what made it true.
I noticed how naturally we arranged ourselves into a circle without anyone suggesting it, the way musicians often do when the music itself is the only authority in the room. Tabla to my left, oud and guitar across from me, saxophone standing at the circle's edge, leaning in rather than performing outward toward an audience. There was an audience, of course, gathered around the formal edges of the room, but for long stretches it felt as though we were playing for each other rather than for them, checking in with a glance, following a phrase somewhere unplanned and trusting that the others would follow it too.
Instruments are a kind of memory that does not require translation. A sape does not need to be explained to be understood, not fully, not in the way a language needs a dictionary before it can carry meaning. Something in its sound reaches a listener directly, the way certain colours or certain silences do. I have come to believe that music crosses borders more easily than almost anything else humans have made, more easily than people, more easily than policy, certainly more easily than the language used to negotiate either. A room full of diplomats can spend an afternoon discussing how difficult it is for nations to understand one another, and then five musicians who had barely met can sit down on the floor of that same room and demonstrate, without meaning to make a point of it, that understanding was possible all along. It simply required a different instrument.
I do not think the event needed us to resolve anything. Climate dialogue is slow work, necessarily so, built from documents and negotiations far more durable than a single afternoon of music. But I think something did happen in that room that the documents cannot quite hold. For perhaps forty minutes, a Bornean lute, a set of Indian hand drums, an Arabic oud, a saxophone, and a guitar built for entirely different music all agreed, without discussion, on where the silence should fall.
The most meaningful performances are not always the largest ones. Sometimes they are simply the ones in which a room, however grand, however unlikely, briefly becomes a place where different histories learn to breathe together.
Related Entries
