Name: Van, Zandt Jack: Arebati
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Van, Zandt Jack: Arebati

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Arebati grew out of my fascination with the music of the Aka Pygmies of the Congo area of Central Africa, and especially the research of my friend, ethnomusicologist Simha Arom, who has spent a lifetime studying the subject, which he wrote about in his monumental book, African Polyphony and Polyrhythm. Arebati is the Aka Pygmy god of the moon and sky, and in some tribes is their supreme being. Addressed as afa, or “Father,” in their mythology, Arebati descended from the sky and created the first humans by fashioning them from clay that he covered with skin, filled with blood and brought to life.

The music of the Pygmies is built on the repetition of multiple polyrhythmic phrases in differing but related tempi (often played by “hocketing,” where a line is broken up and spread out among several instruments), and combined polyphonically into a very complex musical structure. They can be seen as related to other influences on my work in recent years from modern science, mathematics and art—especially fractals, strange loops, and tangled hierarchies; celestial mechanics; the artwork and theories of M.C. Escher and Paul Klee; and writings of Beckett, Borges, and Wittgenstein.

I structured my piece as a metaphor of the story of Arebati coming down to Earth and creating humans in the form of a simplified version of his own more complex self, then returning to the sky. Like much Pygmy music, Arebati is a ritual dance-like percussive work, built from the interaction of closely related “looping” structures, fixed in their individual segments of space and time.

Commissioned by and dedicated to the Cal Poly Pomona Piano Ensemble, Nadia Shpachenko, director.

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