Mystical Visitations is a collection of songs set mostly on my own lyrics invoking a number of vernacular musical genres and styles. For me, it is the natural next step in a process of musical emancipation that is gradually taking me away from the somewhat "agoraphobic" world of classical music and into kinds of music that can touch a larger number of listeners who are unfamiliar with classical music and its semantic and/or other conventions. They are not pop songs per se, for no matter what I do I cannot stop thinking from within a compositional core that encompasses all my accumulated compositional experience so far, the bulk of which is affiliated with classical contemporary concert music. However, the instrumentation, strophic structures, meters and vocal/instrumental styles of writing are more akin to world/cross-over music. Working with my own lyrics is also a natural next step in my evolution as a composer. I started using my own texts in earlier concert compositions of mine, like Sepulcher of Life, my choral symphony, and in an earlier aborted attempt in songwriting in my multimedia music theatre work Constantinople that eventually found its true home in Mystical Visitation, the final song of the collection. The subjects of these songs are invariably religious; the imagery and symbolism are often Christian, but their spirituality is universal: it transcends religious particulars. These texts and the music that accompanies them are the traces of my own attempt to understand in a non-conscious manner the nature and quiet intensity of the divine spark within each one of us and to share this understanding with my performing colleagues and my listeners. Since this collection of songs was written for the incredible, haunting voice of Maryem Hassan-Tollar, the texts are always an exploration of the female psyche, assuming different personas at different times: the divine lover, the divine mother or the universal, eternal feminine. In performance it is the vocal soloist revealing her world to the audience, not a composer speaking to his listeners through a singer. As the title suggests, the subject of the entire cycle is the inner world of a woman visited by the divine.
