Firas Zreik is a Palestine-born, Brooklyn-based composer and kanun player at MacDowell for his first residency to work on an instrumental suite featuring the kanun – a multi-stringed instrument common to the Arabic world.

Zreik, a Berklee College of Music double major with degrees in performance and jazz composition, will take the stage May 5 at the Monadnock Center for History and Culture, 19 Grove St., Peterborough. Doors open for this third installment of MacDowell Downtown’s 2023 season at 7 p.m., with Zreik’s solo performance to begin at 7:30 p.m.

“I come from an Arabic music tradition steeped in maqam, the scale system of the Levantine, North African and Mediterranean regions that features elements such as microtonality, modal compositions, and improvisation,” he said, noting maqam lends itself to improvisation across musical styles.

Wherever he performs, Zreik’s love of jazz comes to life through the kanun, demonstrating a technique on his 78-stringed instrument capable of bridging genres from flamenco to Brazilian, and western classical to the blues. Traditionally plucked with just two index finger picks, Zriek and other contemporary kanun players broadened the instrument’s versatility by strumming and other picking techniques – a versatility that the composer has explored to great effect.

“A musician’s identity is reflected in what they listen to, on a subconscious level,” he said. “It gives you a musical vocabulary and the more you listen and the more you imitate, the more you create, widen, and enrich your own vocabulary.”

Zreik, who started his musical journey as a cello player as a child, has come to Peterborough to work on an instrumental suite that features the kanun as a the lead instrument in an orchestral setting. He plans to select complementary instrumentation to highlight the harp-like instrument’s microtonality in an orchestral context.

In addition to the suite, he’ll also be writing songs and work out the framework for a third album he’ll record with his octet. He has recently released a debut album, ‘Salute,” a full-length instrumental recording showcasing six original compositions that feature the kanun at the heart of the eight-piece band. Prior to “Salute,” Zreik released “Solo” – an EP that features four original kanun compositions in an intimate recording.

As a member of the National Arabic Orchestra and band leader, Zreik tours extensively and has started transforming the global perception of the kanun. More recently, he has been in demand as a collaborator, having collaborated with Pink Floyd co-founder Roger Waters, jazz trumpeter Amir ElSaffar, Israeli singer-songwriter David Broza and Amal Markus, a world-renowned singer and producer who happens to be his mother.

Such a breadth of experience means the composer feels at home both in heavily orchestrated and spontaneous performance settings, but Zreik points to his formative years as foundational in his desire to explore an amalgam of musical musical concepts and vocabularies.

“I grew up in a musical household,” said Zreik. “All of it, very international: Latin, European, jazz. It was musically rich and wide-ranging.”

Jonathan Gourlay is senior manager for external communications at MacDowell.

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