Qasim Naqvi
God Docks at Death Harbor

Pakistani-American composer Qasim Naqvi follows up last year’s album, Endling, with its intended sequel, the orchestral work God Docks at Death Harbor. The work is performed by the BBC Concert Orchestra; it stands as the composer’s first orchestral release.

Over the past 12 years, Naqvi has explored electronic music primarily using a Minimoog, an ARP Odyssey, and an ever-expanding modular synthesizer system. One morning, Naqvi’s wife woke up from a dream with the phrase in her mind — “God Docks at Death Harbor”. 

“It was a very powerful and evocative phrase that spoke volumes to me,” he recalls. 

“I was just starting this piece for the BBC and from that moment on, the music I was composing took a programmatic turn, and a futuristic narrative took shape. Through her words, I began to think about our planet, hundreds of years into the future, where the human race no longer exists. With the world peacefully restoring itself, realigning to its natural order, in the absence of us all. This became a central tenet of the work. It felt like a scenic mural of sorts — this world in a state of regeneration. I would look at it in my mind for inspiration. Though the piece is about our end, the tone is one of hope, for our world getting a second chance.”

Growing up as a jazz musician, Qasim had an equal love for orchestral and chamber music. Acoustic instrumental music has always been the source, even within synthesis, the power of resonating acoustic bodies, and achieving the same feeling in the amplified world, has been tantamount.

“At the time when I was thinking about God Docks, I was listening to a work for voice and orchestra by Richard Strauss titled Four Last Songs (Vier letzte Lieder),” he says. Composed a year before Strauss’s death, the piece is widely understood as his farewell to both the Romantic era and to his wife, Pauline. “I was especially drawn to the final song, Im Abendrot. The introduction alone was a revelation in orchestration for me, with this massive opening E-flat major chord spread extremely wide across the orchestra. There’s this beautiful and natural observance of the overtone series.” Building on this idea, Strauss’s approach to instrumental doublings in different combinations felt to Naqvi like a form of synthesis—a beautiful study in creating composite instrumental sounds. It reminded Naqvi of a fundamental truth: the orchestra was the first synthesizer. “Once this clicked for me, the path forward felt clear.”

Qasim’s love for synthesizers is an infatuation, with their setup altering the way he composes – slowing down the act of listening, and bringing an appreciation of timbre into focus on a more atomic level. “There is a kinship between these machines and the world of God Docks – an idea of world-building, of creating an environment from the ground up, one with its own behavior and flow of energy, keeping things moving.”

Though God Docks at Death Harbor marks his first attempt at creating a tone poem, it also marks a union between certain ideas of electronic music synthesis and acoustic music. Long sustained textures, where one can get inside the fabric of a tone. Hearing sine waves moving in and out of phase, aligning and untethering. Saturated loops, expanding and contracting as they orbit each other. A multichannel sequencer building and reducing harmonies, piece by piece, over a fixed subdivision of time. These are ideas that can be heard in God Docks, transmuted from the world of the electric into the acoustic. 

The modular synthesizer continues to feel like a step forward, treating his voltage-controlled instrument like an ensemble, comprised of unusual “instruments”, or modules that he composes for. “I can offer material to this machine organism, and through the attenuation of voltage, shape and orchestrate it live like an improviser” he adds. And like an ensemble, this machine’s interpretation is always different, generating sonorities and patterns that exceed the original vision.

God Docks at Death Harbor premiered at London’s Southbank Centre on May 19, 2023. The 18-minute piece was performed by the BBC Concert Orchestra, conducted by André de Ridder, and recorded live for BBC Radio 3; presented by Elizabeth Alker as part of Unclassified Live.

“For me, this was a time unlike the one we’re in now, which feels perilous and cruel. Though this work was initially about the end of the human race and the beginning of something new, over time I have felt its sentiment flip – that this music is now about us surviving, being compassionate, and fighting against these tyrannical forces which feel insurmountable. It’s been interesting to see the meaning of this piece change and adapt to the times.”