Mohammed Fairouz, Composer HARDtalk

Now on BBC News it's time for HARDtalk.

Mohammed Fairouz, a youthful artist who has spent much

of his creative life defying boundaries and stereotypes.

His work ranges from symphonies to opera, to unique fusions

He's an Arab educated and resident in the West,

an outspoken advocate for creative freedom who nonetheless rails

against western cultural imperialism.

His aim is to foster cultural crossover rather than confrontation,

but can this artist avoid taking sides?

Mohammed Fairouz, welcome to heart talk. It is great to be here. Arab

parents, but schooling and residential life a lot of it in the

US and some in the UK. In terms of the tradition which is the bedrock

of your music, would you say it is Western or Arab? The truthful answer

is that it is much more of a mess than that. Music has no respect for

borders, sound has no respect for walls. You go to Jerusalem and you

hear the bells from the Hollis -- wholly support intermingle with the

mask. Put it this way, people who speak many languages, they talk

about the language they are dreaming. Do you have a musical

language which is your instinctive first language? That is where music

is particularly special. It bypasses all of that because you cannot have

figurative... I cannot paint a fork in music, it gets passed that and

goes to the things that are truly universal about human beings, the

beating of the heart, the human voice, it is energy say you cannot

have a monopoly on energy or sound. They have mixed for thousands of

years so if I am to be honest and genuine in answering that question,

because of what I know, I know how much of a mess it is. It is a very

frank answer but you have been to some very formalised musical

schools, you have done the conservatory school in the US and

also worked with classical Arabic musicians. When you say to them I am

a fusion kid, do they say you cannot do that because you are not respect

think the integrity of our tradition? When I went to the

conservatory, what was really fascinating was walking into music

history calls and you sort of start with the Greeks and then you skip

over, there is a blind spot and then you are in the Middle Ages and you

do not touch on any nonwestern using. You literally have are book

called following Western music but when you go to Aleppo, what you

discover all of the stuff from Hildegard, Mozart, Bach, came from

another civilisation and vice-versa. You find people saying more often,

wow, we recognise that. That is one of our lullabies. That is one of the

things we much people off the wall, to serenade our loved ones. You have

written symphonies and operas, works we serve associate with traditional

music. I am alive. I am not a classical composer. Most at was a

classical composer, 18th century period. I am not that old. You said

I could get off the plane and here put Java in music and they get to a

club and listen to Beyonce and then a band in Beirut and if I still

sounded like Mozart after all of that, it would be kind of weird. How

far it you take this fusion approach? I think as far as it has

always been taken. I think people have been exchanging ideas

creatively for centuries, millennia and every Renaissance has been

refined by the breaking down of boundaries and walls, sharing ideas,

discovering what people have in common and amplifying each other's

strengths. To give an idea of how you do this, let's play a clip. This

is a fascinating performance by an Indian dancer using your music.

It is beautiful to look at. I wonder how much collaboration there is,

when you work with the beautiful dancer, you have worked with famous

poets, how deep is the collaboration. I have to admit, this

was found well before we imagined Donald Trump would ever be our

president but it was proposed to be in a reality TV fashion that made me

very suspicious. When the BBC said they wanted to do this, they said

you have five days. From scratch. I said, that is impossible. I have

never met the woman. She has never been to New York. And not only was

there this Bollywood dance tradition that have thousands of years of

baggage and history that I did not know much about, there was also

David cracker, the clarinettist, was bringing a Jewish tradition of...

You can hear it... Where you go to those Eastern European villages were

those people are no longer there, the Holocaust, they left the

country, whatever, they left the country, they are dead, or they were

killed by the ideas were not dead. You still here the sound. It is

impossible to kill that energy, impossible to kill an idea even

though you can kill people. There was the classical stodgy thing of

the quartet as well coming together and what is magical is that it

worked. It worked. It is like we could have not spoken the same

language and yet the fluidity of the human body, the universality of what

she was doing, she understood the reason. There were things that were

just be on the need to try to translate and it worked and we did

it in five days and I think that is sort of like a controlled

experiment. It is really interesting. Let's switch focus, you

talk with such passion about finding common ground with an artist like

her, here you have never met before, purely in artistic terms but a lot

of your work, the recent work, has had a real world political edge to

it. To what extent these days are you as an Arab American feel that

you need to use your art to explore politics? Well, I think an interest

in statecraft and politics has been something that has defined by work.

For many years. I think that when a politician comes on the show, they

are basically coming to sell something and they are asking people

to give them something - power. And an artist is doing something that is

very different from that. They are offering ideas and insight into the

internal human condition and societies are human beings

multiplied... Offering ideas all delivering polemics and various

specific critiques. Just looking at recent things, the dictator 's wife,

which you put on a Washington, DC just before the Trump in duration

seem to be a direct message about authoritarian corruption that might

be taken as a your feeling, Warwick, about Donald Trump coming to the

White House. Of course but I think that the thing about this, Kennedy

had a great way of putting this, if Donald Trump was in the White House

during the Cuban missile crisis I probably will never have been born.

The temperance, the idea of understanding that power has its

limitations, that wilting power has its limitations and indeed it

Kennedy did say where power corrupts poetry cleanses. There is a special

accountability that artists can hold people in power too. Your

consciousness is very much affected by being an Arab American in an era,

as we know, Donald Trump in particular with his travel ban on

certain Muslim countries, appears to associate Muslims... These are my

words not his... Muslims from particular countries with terrorism.

As an American citizen, how does that make you feel? I would like to

emphasise that I do not really think... I think Donald Trump

represents something that is an outgrowth of at least 60 years of

decline in one of our political parties in our country that has

refused to participate in our democratic process, the Republican

Party and as far as his views on the Muslims are concerned, I think this

cut to the heart of what we would call a clash of civilisations. This

is the reason why a clash of civilisations is not happening.

Sadiq Khan was marching in pride, the Mayor of London, and he probably

shares a lot of use with Angela Merkel, treating people with

dignity, being inclusive is, it these are global cities. Insisting

that someone is your enemy... I am going to stop you. I think it is

useful to have a representation in Sound and vision. In the Netherlands

you put on a show, the new prince, which played with images of US

politics including a character appearing to be based on Donald

Trump. Let's have a quick look at that now. (MUSIC PLAYING). .

You have tried preventing us from living. You have tried preventing us

from living. Chains and irons. Chains and irons.

Pounding of locks. Keys and bars. Keys and bars. So many arresting

images that I don't know where to begin almost. One thing strikes me.

You have put on different forms of music, particular lay operas, which

clearly carry a critique of power, especially Western exercise of that

power. But one thing you have in your career is anything that really,

clearly takes on, confronts, and criticises, the Arab world, you

don't talk about that. Why is that? I criticise political power around

the world. I wrote several articles criticising several Arab

governments. I have been vocal in my critique. What I do think is that

the West and the Arab world can help each other if they approach each

other in a more genuine way. I think there is this sense that we are

going to criticise imperialism coming from the West and the West is

going to take 40-year-old critiques of the Arab world rather than other

things we can solve together. There are universal values we have

together. You are a publicly out gay man and an artist and frankly, you

would find life in many parts of the Arabian Gulf, Saudi Arabia, the

Emirates, where your parents are from, you would find life there in

possible, not least because being gay, being actively gay, is a

criminal offence that is severely punishable in Saudi Arabia,

potentially by death itself. But you don't speak out about that at all. I

have spoken out about sexual repression in Middle Eastern

countries and Western countries. If I may enter up, you have criticised

Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, for you the hour mark

what you regard as culturally inappropriate analysis. -- for what

you. You say they are using a completely Western and non-nuanced

understanding of homosexuality in the Arab world, but I don't

understand that. They are approaching it with a noninclusive

point of view that does not take into consideration... I mean, you

define me as a gay man which I don't identify with in that way... What do

you mean by that? There are really no Arabic words for "Gay" or

"Straight." And I Axley find the idea of being "straight" kind of

strange. There is a tradition and it is quite different. We are coming to

a point, I think, in the Western world, where we are talking about

non- binary definitions of sexuality. OK? We are talking about

fluidity in sexuality. The Arab world, go back, thousands of years

of tradition in this form. There are a lot of people in the Arab world

who would like to identify with the tradition that they belong to and

enjoy equal rights with their fellow citizens. I believe that all Arab

nations must guarantee equal protection is for all citizens of.

Would your work, could it be put on in your country of heritage, the

United Arab Emirates, or Saudi, Kuwait, Bahrain, is there any

ability for you to do this in the Arab world itself? My song cycle,

called Songs From Ibin Havesh, based on his same-sex love poetry. They

have been done in the United Arab Emirates. I have another song with

baritones and male singers in the West who have identified and seen

this. And it has been done over there. And they are not only done,

they are taught and memorised by people over there. I will ask you

before we end about something very current and relevant for you being

in the UK. You put on a performance at a big Manchester Arts Festival, a

musical performance. You are doing it only weeks after a man of Libyan

origin, a young man, a militant, appearing to be loyal in his own way

to so-called Islamic State, he put a bomb inside an Ariana Grande

concert, killing women and children. Do you believe your music and your

message about the bridge building and the cultural cross-fertilisation

that can happen through music, do you think about, right now, can make

a difference to the thinking of people in a city like Manchester?

Not why itself. I mean, it has been said you must love one another or

die. He meant it. We have two options. We have a serious issue

with violence erupting throughout the world. Some of it is linked to

extremist thought and to radicalisation. I would urge an

uncoupling of what is, as a matter of fact, a small number of people

from the second-largest civilisation in human history. That gives them

legitimacy that they crave. It gives them association they do not need to

have... But they are Muslims and they are coming out of a very small

number of mosques inspired by a very small number of militant imams and

other leaders, and... Absolutely. Absolutely. You cannot deny the

Muslim origin of this problem. Absolutely not. But what you can say

and understand are once again fact. You know, we have had zero suicide

attacks in most countries. The Netherlands, UAE, we have just had

under 3000 people die of suicide attacks between 1982 and 2015 in the

United States. We have had, in the United States, at least 30,000

people die as a result of gun violence every year since 1982 at

least. I see the crosses, the KKK, I see they have them and burn them. I

do not associate them with such a mainstream movement as Christianity,

because the majority of people, Christians, have nothing to do with

that. What you need is people who believe in civilisation, believing

perversity, who believe in inclusion, people from all

backgrounds, Sadiq Khan, Angela Merkel, from the UAE, to come

together and oppose people who incite hate. They need to do that in

the US, especially against people like Donald Trump. Your music is a

part of that? It is forced to be a part of it because I am living in

this age. Mohammed Fairouz, we have the end it there. But thank you so

much for being on HARDtalk thank you. Thank you.

Plenty going on with our weather in the next few days.

Ups and downs to come during the week ahead.

If you like sunshine, the weekend ended on a high note