I worked very hard on the selection of texts from the book of Lamentations. My selections of verses focus on the ouccpation itself, the violence the misuse of power that we recognize from occupations today. I excluded verses that mention a place or a people. This occupation took place 560 b.c. but it could as well be happening today.

I made up five headlines to order the lyrics:

1. I (me, my.. )
2. You
3. They (the suffering ones)
4. They (the guilty ones)
5. We

One theme that I get back to is the children

How to set music to these texts? To answer that question I asked myself another one: "who is the greatest singer in this region, the Middle East?" - Oum Kalthoum! I listened a lot to her music. I found especially three things that I have used:

• Short very marked phrase endings that creates an expression that I really like, more firm. Pain does not mean "feeling sorry for your self" but a more decisive reaction. In my Lamentations the expression moves during the piece from sorrow to anger.
• The typical middle east scales. I use them more and more as the work progresses.
• Unison. That was the hardest. In Oum Kalthoum's music they play basically in unison with the singer, and between sung phrases they do an instrumental response. No harmonization, no counterpoint. If a baroque ensemble plays like that it may very well sound banal if you don't manage to compensate the structural simplicity with something else: ornamentation. The 5th part "Us" was planned to be in unison, and the way I finally did it was to start every phrase in unison but end every phrase in canon, like composing with the big acoustics in churches into the musical structure.

There are more influence from Oum Kalhtoum in the piece, the opening phrase which is repeated and varied throughout the piece ( I think there are only two types of phrases in the piece) – up a fifth and then stepwise down – is a melodiv pattern from an Oum Kalhtoum song.

So that's some of the ideas behind my Lamentations. Elisabeth Holmertz sings beautifully and I love the way her expression changes from sorrow to anger and resistance.