RECORDINGS; Journeying Into a World Of Arab Music
By ROBERT PALMER; Robert Palmer, the former chief pop music critic of The Times, is writing a book about the origins of rock-and-roll.
Published: December 17, 1989
Link:
http://www.nytimes.com/1989/12/17/arts/recordings-journeying-into-a-world-of-arab-music.html?module=Search&mabReward=relbias:r,{&pagewanted=1
Any listener whose interest in Western classical music extends beyond superficial ''music appreciation'' to a concern with origins, formal principles and stylistic evolution must sooner or later come to grips with the rich musical heritage of the Arab world.
During the 9th and 10th centuries, Europe was in its dark ages. Christian plainchant, troubador ballads and dance music were dominant; art music was in its infancy. But in the great cities of the Islamic world, from Spain and North Africa to India, composers and instrumentalists who enjoyed royal patronage were already creating orchestral compositions of symphonic complexity.
Forms such as the nouba of Andalusia (Moslem Spain) and the Syrian wasla left room for improvisation but were rigorously structured and preserved through a form of alphabetic notation. A single nouba or wasla consisted of five or more highly organized, distinct movements. These compositions were performed by orchestras of stringed and wind instruments, percussion and voices.
This music would be of interest to students of Western classical music if only because so many of the instruments of the European orchestra were derived from Arab models. As Jean Jenkins remarks, in liner notes for the exemplary six-record series ''Music in the World of Islam,'' issued some years ago, ''Our oboes, trumpets, viols, violins, lutes and guitars, harps, dulcimer and psaltery, kettledrums, tambourines, castanets and triangles all originated in Islamic instruments.
But the Arab influence on European music extends far beyond instrumentation, as some recently released and reissued recordings make clear. The concept of long-form orchestral compositions, designed not as ritual or incidental music but as art music for serious listening, seems to have passed into European culture from the Arabs during the eight centuries of Moorish rule in Spain. The organizing principles of this early Arab classical music were also influential.
Paul Bowles, the American author and composer who recorded the double LP collection ''Music of Morocco'' some years ago (Library of Congress Archive of Folksong L63-L64), believes he has found in certain Moroccan traditions the roots of the sonata form. And certainly the early Arab composers were adept at the development of melodic material through theme-and-variation techniques. It seems likely that without the impact of Arabic musical thought and practice, European classical music as we now know it simply would not exist.
The term ''Arab'' in this context is somewhat misleading. The music that emerged from the o
pulent courts of Baghdad, Damascus, Aleppo, Cairo, Cordoba and other urban centers between the 9th and 13th centuries mixed traditions from the Arabian peninsula with influences originating in Persia, Syria, Byzantium and Central Asia. In addition, Arab rulers instituted ambitious translation projects, giving their court musicians and composers access to ancient musical treatises. {link: http://www.dust-digital.com/morocco/}
But what did this early Arab classical music actually sound like? Although many early works have been preserved and are studied and performed in musical conservatories throughout the Islamic world, they have remained the province of a select group of scholars and devotees, and have rarely been recorded.
Even the examples that have been issued on record, such as the splendid excerpt from an Andalusian nouba in ''Music of Morocco,'' have been fragmentary. One could get a sense of the sound of the music and of performing styles. But the ''anthology'' approach common to album releases of ethnomusicological field recordings tends to mix classical, folk and popular selections on one disk; it was impossible to hear an Andalus nouba or a Syrian wasla in its entirety.
Recently, with the advent of the compact disk and the dedication of a small group of French scholars, this situation has been changing. In 1985, the French Ocora label issued a recording of two complete Andalusian noubas on CD, performed by the orchestra of Abdelkrim Rais of Fez, Morocco (''Maroc: Musique Classique Andalou-Maghrebine,'' Ocora C559016). This disk, enchanting as it is, documents Andalusian music as it is performed today, almost 500 years after its transplantation to North Africa following the Christian reconquest of Spain.
A new companion CD, ''Ustad Massano Tazi: Musique Classique on Andalouse de Fes'' (Ocora C559035) is a recording of a different sort. Here, a group of performers who are also Sufi mystics and have preserved early musical traditions for metaphysical as well as esthetic reasons, set out to re-create as accurately as possible the sound and performing style of Ciryab, the celebrated court musician who left Baghdad in the ninth century to found the first Spanish musical conservatory, at Granada.
Ciryab's musical theories were linked with alchemical studies; the balance of timbres within the orchestra was thought to be crucial to the music's spiritual effect. Mr. Tazi and his ensemble here perform two complete noubas (one runs almost 53 minutes) on copies of instruments in use in Ciryab's time, with the gut strings of that era replacing the steel strings introduced into the music during the 18th century. This is an endlessly fascinating recording, with frequent shifts in rhythm and complex routines alternating solo and group vocals with perpetually shifting groupings of stringed and percussion instruments.
”Wasla D’Alep: Chants Traditionnels de Syrie,” by Sabri Moudallal and the Traditional Music Ensemble of Aleppo (Inedit MCM 26007; CD only) again presents a complete performance of a long-form orchestral composition from Arab music’s golden age, a wasla being roughly equivalent to the Andalus nouba in terms of both antiquity and formal structure. These nouba and wasla recordings are a singular event in modern musical scholarship. For the first time, nonspecialist Western listeners can hear complete performances of highly developed orchestral – one is tempted to say symphonic – compositions from the Arab world of 1,000 years ago.
”Archives de la Musique Arabe, Vol. 1” (Ocora 558678; CD only) is the first release in a new series in which some of the earliest recordings of Arabic music are being reissued. The selections on this disk were transferred from cylinders recorded between 1908 and 1920; some of the performers were already professional musicians as early as the 1870’s. Because cylinders did not impose time strictures quite as stringent as the later 78-rpm disk, some of these performances run as long as 15 minutes.
The performers include Sufi sheiks, former muezzins (religious cantors) who left their mosques to go on the road with secular theater troupes; and a remarkable dervish flutist whose angular phrasing and novel tonal effects suggest that in the Arab world as in the West there were idiosyncratic progressives as well as traditionalists. Considering the age of the recordings, they are astonishingly clear, with only minimal distortion.
There is no better introductory sampler to the classical, folk and popular idioms of the Islamic world than ”Music in the World of Islam,” a series of six LP’s devoted, respectively, to ”The Human Voice,” ”Lutes,” ”Strings,” ”Flutes and Trumpets,” ”Reeds and Bagpipes” and ”Drums and Rhythms” (Tangent TGS 131 through 136; LP only). Another welcome event for students of non-Western music is the recent reissue of many of the original UNESCO World Music recordings compiled by Alain Danielou in the 1960’s.
The outstanding ”Turkey I” (Barenreiter Musicaphon No. BM 30L2019; LP only) is devoted to the ritual music of the Mezlevi or whirling dervishes, the Sufi order founded by the poet Rumi. Additional volumes relating to Arab music are devoted to Turkey and other parts of the Islamic world. In addition, several of the later UNESCO recordings that were originally issued by EMI/Odeon are beginning to be reissued on CD by the French Auvidis label. Among the highlights of these CD/cassette reissues are ”North Yemen” (Auvidis D8004) and ”Syria: Islamic Ritual Zikr in Aleppo” (D8013).
Two reliable mail-order sources for these and other recordings of non-Western music are the World Music Institute (109 West 27th Street, New York, N.Y. 10001) and Down Home Music (10341 San Pablo Avenue, El Cerrito, Calif. 94530). Robert Browning of the World Music Institute has edited and published ”Maqam: Music of the Islamic World and Its Influences,” a collection of essays by various authorities that includes both broad historical surveys and specialized studies of local traditions. ”Maqam” is available for $10, plus $2 postage, from the World Music Institute.
The cover illustration of an album titled ”Turkey II” shows a player of the instrument called the ney, one of many that traveled to the West.
