Globally renowned composer and musician Maya Youssef brings her Finding Home tour to the Howard Assembly Room on Thursday 20 June for a very special World Refugee Day celebration. The concert forms part of Opera North’s ongoing work to ensure refugees and those seeking sanctuary in Leeds feel included, valued and celebrated through increased accessibility to the arts. In recognition of this commitment, Opera North was awarded Theatre of Sanctuary status in 2018 – it remains the only opera company to hold the award.
Born in Damascus, Maya Youssef left Syria because of war in 2012 and settled in the UK. Her ground-breaking work with the qanun (an Arabic instrument traditionally played only by men) has since seen her perform at venues from the Royal Albert Hall to WOMAD festival and collaborate with musicians including Damon Albarn (Gorillaz, Blur) and classical guitarist Craig Ogden.
We caught up with Maya ahead of the concert to learn about her journey as a musician which, she explains, began “at a very young age. I thought one day it would be nice to write, but then the war started and I had to write, because I was losing my sanity. I was seeing the people that I loved dying, seeing some of the places I grew up visiting being destroyed and dealing with the thought that I will never see my loved ones or home again.”
In the face of so much trauma, Maya has called making music ‘a life and hope affirming act’. She describes it as “my spiritual practice. It’s a sacred thing to do for me because I pray before I write or play anything. So this is how I relate to music and I believe it’s very powerful, because in this mad, mad world we’re living in we need to soften, we need to do a lot of softening, my goodness. And music has this ability to go straight into the heart and part all the barriers, to make us feel connected without words, which is very powerful and very needed at this time.”
As an internationally acclaimed, female qanunist – ‘queen of the qanun’, as she’s also known – Maya is blazing multiple trails. The qanun, she explains: “is a 78-stringed, plucked zither that originates from the Arab world. It’s an ancient instrument – the earliest form of it found is from the 4th Century BC – that sits at the heart of Arabic music. And even though it originates from that region and that ancient tradition that goes back thousands and thousands of years, I use it in new ways. I like to think of myself as a tree, with my roots deep into the earth of a tradition that goes back thousands of years. But my branches are free to explore different musical possibilities. So, it’s both rooted and exploratory at the same time.”
But the story of her introduction to the instrument highlights how far she has come and the societal expectations she’s defied along the way. She recalls how, aged eight “I was heading to the music institute with my mum in the back seat of a taxi. The taxi driver turned on the radio and there came the sound of the qanun and I think I’d heard it before, but never in isolation. It spoke immediately to my heart and I asked “what is this instrument? This is an instrument I want to play!” And the taxi driver cracked a loud laugh, saying “you’re a girl! This instrument is for men, that will never happen!””
Far from letting this put an end to her newly born dream, that same evening Maya learned that the music institute where she was studying had introduced a qanun class and signed up immediately. “I was the only girl, but I was lucky because my parents were so incredibly supportive. If I hadn’t had them, I would probably have given up.”
Her appreciation of this support is something Maya channelled into her outreach work with refugee children during the launch tour of Finding Home. She states “as a young person, if somebody hadn’t believed in me or invested time in me, nurtured me musically… I wouldn’t be here. And I’m just a random girl from Syria and it’s important for these children to see that, to see anything is possible. To me it’s a matter of me trying to tell them my story, how I was told I couldn’t even dream of what I wanted to do, yet here I am today.”
Maya Youssef: Finding Home comes to the Howard Assembly Room on Thursday 20 June at 7.45pm.
Maya is supported by Thandanani (Thanda) Gumede, an award-winning vocalist and multi-disciplinary artist from Durban, South Africa.
Tickets for the concert are selling on a Pay What You Can basis, with refugees and asylum seekers invited to attend free of charge. To book, please CLICK HERE or call Box Office on 0113 223 3600.
Header Image: Sarah Ginn
