As part of our live chats at lunch series, Daniel Calvert speaks to Maya Youssef about her new album, Finding Home, released on 25 March.
Maya Youssef is a Syrian musician and composer based in the United Kingdom who plays the qanun: the 78-stringed Middle Eastern plucked zither. Amongst other places, she has performed on the BBC Proms and WOMAD.
The story of how she came to the qanun is a curious one. One day when she was nine years old, Maya Youssef was on her way to the music institute in her hometown of Damascus. She was studying the violin, but she heard a beautiful sound drifting through the air from a nearby taxi, and it stopped her in the tracks – it was the sound of the qanun. She was transfixed by it, but when she told the taxi driver that she was determined to play the instrument, he laughed: ‘Girls don’t play qanun.’
Fast forward several years, Maya Youssef is hailed as ‘queen of the qanun,’. Her music is rooted in the Arabic classical tradition but also finds connections with jazz, Western classical and Latin styles. She sees the act of playing music as the opposite of death and destruction: a talisman, for her, against the worst that the world has to offer.
Her debut album Syrian Dreams, led to performances at the BBC Proms and WOMAD. Her latest album, Finding Home, explores her loss and grief in leaving Syria, and explores the idea of finding calm and a sense of home, even when we are far from the place of our birth.