Bahraini composer, saxophonist, and educator Majeed Marhoon (1945-2010) is considered as being the father of classical Western music in Bahrain. His story is particularly unique in that he taught himself to compose while serving a life-sentence between 1969 and 1990 for his involvement in the independence movement in Bahrain. Over his 22 years in incarceration, he began studying, composing (and smuggling!) works to orchestras in different parts of the world and started developing his very unique music encyclopedia, which remains the only one of its kind available in the Arabic language. The bulk of his works remain unplayed and unknown to the world as a whole.

Since 2016 , Hasan Hujairi has been working on highlighting the works of Majeed Marhoon while also relating aspects of his works to other research interests through concerts, documentary films, performances, media art, installation works, and public lectures. As a composer himself, Hasan Hujairi believes it is important for him to engage in his own musical genealogy, with Majeed Marhoon being one of those seminal figures in forming Hujairi’s early understanding of the role of a composer from Bahrain.

The first of the projects in this series, Symphonies of the Self, was a 2-night concert and documentary screening held in Bahrain in April 2016. The concert included performances by Hasan Hujairi, Bahrain National Orchestra (conducted by Khalifa Zaiman), Henrik Schwarz, Bugge Wesseltoft, Ahmed Al Ghanem, and Salman Zaiman of Ajraas Band. The screened documentary was made by Saleh Nass. The premise of the concert included the last letter written by Majeed Marhoon to his copyist saying that he believes that young composers in the Arab world need to understand the potential computers have in classical music composition. The concert that evening started with Hasan Hujairi exploring this notion while also manipulating aspects of the first known recorded composition of Marhoon entitled Hanīn (or ‘Nostalgia’), which was recorded in East Berlin in 1980 after the smuggled score reached one of the radio orchestras there. Hujairi also embedded a reading from Marhoon’s encyclopedia by using readings from the entries on ‘avant garde’ and ‘computer music’.

The second project in the series was a media art/performance project shown in Venice in May 2019 as part of Bahrain’s collateral exhibition at the Venice Biennale. The work, entitled Hanīn and the Concorde, juxtaposed the legacy of Majeed Marhoon with the pearl diving music tradition of Bahrain and the Gulf region known as fijiri with stories Hasan Hujairi had collected from those still practicing that music form in connection to the Concorde supersonic passenger jet. The story goes that the main community practicing that form of music lived by the then newly built Bahrain International Airport. When the Concorde jet was introduced to Bahrain International Airport, the sonic booms it made rattled the homes in which fijiri music was practiced. Many of the folk musicians living near the airport saw that moment as catastrophic because they found the sonic booms of the Concorde as being too overbearing and that it would ultimately result in a desensitization to their own music. The worked included a screening of a film montage by Hasan Hujairi, and a collaborative performance with elements of sound provided by Hasan Hujairi and Bahraini theatrical director Hashim Al-Alawi and contemporary dance by actor Ahmed Saeed.

In January 2020, Hasan Hujairi presented the third work in this series: Ambivalences (Or: Music Composition Number ∞ for Majeed Marhoon). The installation piece included four elements: A fragment of Majeed Marhoon’s meticulously handwritten music encyclopedia; a video of Hasan Hujairi performing in 2016 a solo composition (Hanīn and the Encyclopedia) addressing Marhoon’s music encyclopedia and the piece Hanīn; a letter-music score written over 40 pages in which Hasan Hujairi intimates to Majeed Marhoon his concerns and observations as a composer in Bahrain and his observations of Marhoon’s approach to composition, and; the voice of Hasan Hujairi (in English) giving a tour across the contents of every page he had written in his letter-music score to Majeed Marhoon while also sharing the backstory behind the references used. Hasan Hujairi also held a public talk while the work was shown at Al Riwaq Art Space’s pavilion at the Bahrain National Museum as part of the 2020 Bahrain Annual Art Exhibition. The public entailed him talking about the installation piece, but also about his personal research and findings on the music and legacy of Majeed Marhoon.