I wrote The Tower having spent six months living in the centre of Dubai watching the construction of the Burj Dubai, a one kilometre high tower, from the building opposite. It had a kind of megalithic quality in contrast to the shiny skyscrapers nearby. Through the Burj Dubai, the city will win back for the Middle East the prize of having the highest building in the world. The highest since it had the Tower of Babel (Burj Babil), thought to be Etemenanki, the ziggurat to Marduk, by Nabopolassar (610s BC) at Babylon.
The sources of Tower of Babel reveal a diversity of tales with a few common themes and some very interesting differences. In many versions the people are punished for attempting to threaten or overcome God through building the tower. The Jewish historian Flavius Josephus, in his Antiquities of the Jews (c94 A.D.) tells us that Nimrod, the founder of Babylon, ordered the building of the tower for political purposes and later tells of God causing a tumult and “creating diverse languages”. This seemed a good central narrative for the story so I decided to give this material the greatest prominence with the baritone soloist in sections 2 and 4 and in the choir’s final section and then aimed to create a structure for the story which, like the tower, with a rising motif grows to a high climax.
Joanna Marsh