Music at Dumbarton Oaks: Maeve Gilchrist and Layale Chaker

Imagining the threads that stitch together our inherited worlds—the whispers of old tales passed down by grandmothers, the shadowed weight of mythologies and superstitions, scattered across time and distance, harpist Maeve Gilchrist and violinist Layale Chaker draw from the musical vocabularies of their respective lineages—Celtic and Levantine. This new duo traces melodic and rhythmic contours shaped by centuries of oral memory, searching for places where their stories overlap. This is not a reimagining of the past, but an exploration of a shared present that flows through us unseen. This suite of music, titled “Smoke Veins,” invites the audience to step into a newly formed world, rooted in the past but written for the present day. Gilchrist is the Spring 2026 Musician-in-Residence and Chaker was the Fall 2021 Early-Career Musician Resident at Dumbarton Oaks.

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