There is a significant problem of notating repertoire based in an oral tradition: it never becomes fully clear what to notate and what to leave out, what makes part of the composition, what makes part of the ‚interpretation‘ and ornamentation, which thought belongs to the player, which to the composition - they merge in the moment the music sounds. It seems to me, that playing - let’s focus on one Samai for simplicities sake - a piece of music over time is continuously learning about it and getting to know it better. Hearing many different versions of it becomes a process of constantly revising your idea and impression of it, discovering the essence/concept of it, the individual&collective understanding about it and the tension and sensitive balance resulting from the unspoken field between both points. Playing (what we tend to call) Arabic Music becomes an active dialogue naturally. There is a part, which is ‚reproductive‘, ‚repetitive‘ and ‚reliable‘, but there are elements, just as important, if not primarily, which are constantly changing, explorative, ‚inspired‘ and creative - a constant negotiation about what the melody is and can be. (The way my brain structures music I learn by ear, I oftentimes become quite surprised when at some point I see it written out on paper: it never looks like the composition I know! Even though I have a lifelong experience with notated music and the history of music notation and its historical forms too.)
One could maybe say the same about Jazz, even Western Classical Music (I exclude contemporary classical music for the moment) - where the balance between both points weighs differently. The liberty (and the obligation of it) of a Jazz musician seems wider, than of a Classical violinist playing a sonata, the expressive measures a musician can take to organise an individual concept of a piece (an ‚interpretation‘) are different ones too, though they can overlap, since both are music. Even musician focused on historical informed practice will play Bach differently, than a romantic violinist. There are general musical tools, and the ones specific to a style, a school and a genre, a player too.
One could maybe say, very broadly of course, while in Jazz ‚the liberty‘ is emphasised, it is ‚sticking as much to the original‘ (WHICH original though?! There is ‚notation‘ and notation in itself is flawed!) as possible which is valued and the norm in Western Classical Music. If a musician in Jazz plays the piece strictly as written, he is ‚wrong‘ in his own tradition, he plays out of style. But if a classical musician plays only one different note, than written in the score, he made a mistake, he is wrong in his own musical environment - of TODAY. Both approaches relate to notation as a concept of a piece. Jazz apparently says: what is written is just a sketch, and essence of the concept, what is NOT written is MORE. Best is, to throw away the score, it’s been but a crutch to communicate ideas. Classical Music defines the scores as THE music. BUT: as recent as in 19th century, things really weren’t the same already. Singers and virtuosos were judged based on how skilful and elaborated their ornamentations were and even more with how much taste they were applied. A violinists skills were shown in how thrilling he could improvise a complex cadenza implementing the compositions main ideas into it. Today even the cadenza is precomposed and reproduced. Liszt was an improviser as well, not just Bach. Which so called Classical Concert pianist nowadays is?
Back to Arabic Music (which has no clear definitions really, we don’t truthfully deal with ‚Arabic Music‘... what I mostly refer to, is the central Arabic school of Compositions, Improvisations and Oud playing as developed and established in the Levant region in mid-twentieths century recordings - much to people’s disbelieve and surprise: a fairly recent and contemporary ‚tradition‘) : the exact point between a ‚fixed‘ composition (the concept of the composition) and the individual and stylistic ‚liberties‘ (and ‚obligations‘ really!) is EXACTLY what attracted me from the get go intuitively and highly to the Arabic Style in playing the Oud. I find the point between the composition and the execution of it in an almost perfect balance, if executed well and skilfully with understanding.
To the Arabic Music Repertoire belongs also a big number of originally Ottoman Samai, here you can clearly hear the difference in playing style and approach between today’s Turkish aesthetics and Arabic expressions. There is actual politics and history as to why and how things came to be and developed to be played in a certain way. Different people trying to claim culture for political agendas - but this is another conversation, I’d like to present and elaborate at a later point. Only such: the Turkish way of playing a Samai is way more repetitive and habituated, leaving the musician less freedom of individual expression, so are the comma’ notes, than the Arabic one. The Turks reacted to colonial powers differently, than Arabic countries did at the time, thus the European influence on regional music shows itself differently, while originally being encapsulated in the same political entity.
I found the diversity and freedom for individual expression in Arabic approach and interpretations way more attractive and captivating, thus early on my decision was to learn Arabic Oud, not Turkish Oud - two differing playing styles. The decision had as a consequence, that I was left very much to myself in me trying to approach it, because learning Arabic Music is less systematised, than Turkish styles were and there is little strict or clear guidance on what one has to do. Experiencing and entrancing oneself within the music and its culture becomes an essential tool, but is unscripted and to some degree unprecedented, especially for someone coming from outside the tradition/region. The process naturally becomes one of discovery and exploration.
Coming from a western classical perspective I struggle much more with the liberties of expressions, the variations, one can take in playing a piece of music, but similarly these are very attractive to me: I need them to breathe, to feel myself a human, not a machine. Based on my musical history though and my personality as well, I do need a certain restriction to hold unto. The mix of both in Arabic music is just perfectly finetuned to my personal needs: the right amount of direction, the right amount of freedom. And a constant negotiation, a constant exploration. There is no rest in ‚knowing‘. Perfect for a restless and creative mind. Exploring Arabic Music already IS a path and a journey of ‚not knowing‘.
I have a colleague, whom I interviewed once for my Bachelor research. He used to be a classically trained guitar player of German descent, now Oudplayer. He approaches all his learning very thoroughly and systematically, he does his homework well and is technically reliable - which on the Oud itself, a capricious, delicate and sensitive instrument (with its own mind and will it sometimes would appear!), is not easy to be, but also not always serves the musics aesthetics either. There are very ‚messy sounding‘ Oud players, who can enchant and thrill an audience at their core.
A big example would be the use of ‚diminutions‘, where a note or a phrase is exchanged for a group of notes with shorter time value. The diminutions were based on implicit stylistic rules, but also on the musicians skill set, education and taste. Here are some examples of the same bits of music repeated with diminutions. (see video above)
In the 16th century musicians like Diego Ortiz and Silvestro Ganassi published collections of Ornamentation and Diminutions techniques of their time for different instruments, meticulously categorising each possibility for the aspiring musician and music lover to be practiced and applied. They show specific cadenzas, different intervalic movements of the melody with different time values and how to ornament each of them in various ways. These are rich collections of examples of how a melody was truthfully seen and executed by practicing musicians at that time and how much liberty the player had. However, it is important to state, that the practice already was in place when the collections were published. The language and vocabulary existed already within musical speech of its time and grew over several centuries, adapting through region, time and individual taste.
I asked myself, how these publications changed the learning environment and implementation, as well as use of such techniques, which formerly made part of a larger expressive non-written practice of the music? Did Coltrane have Coltrane solo transcriptions at his disposal to practice his licks? How did the expression of music changed by categorising and notating it?
My question in learning Arabic musical idioms is also always closely related to questions of authenticity, identity and my specific position and perspective on it, which is largely based on my former experiences and background. There is no ‚Ortiz‘ for Arabic music lovers to be studied and applied - but even if there was, what effect would it have on the way I implemented it in my playing? Once something is analysed, categorised, intellectualised and memorised, how does it change something, which before might have been absorbed and replicated unreflected like speech?
I often wonder when music becomes truthfully music and not a reproduction of a reproduction of a copy. Like a photo of a copy of a photo of a real scene from a specific view. It’s a difficult conversation and thought process to have, not without its traps. I wonder about things like embodiment, expression and lived experience. What is it, that I do NOT KNOW about the music, the thing, I can’t see, smell, perceive fully from where I come from and where I stand?
Being part of any system, it is easy to be blind to one’s own ‚unknowing‘ - to the blind spot in ones perspective and perception of things. To judge things outside of one’s scope of understanding by the system’s criteria one belongs to and identifies with. It is a constant dilemma and conflict I am faced with playing Arabic Oud in a European context and within academia too. Many of the terminology, descriptions, expectations and judgments are based on what the given person (a teacher, a professor, a colleague) takes for granted and what stands out as ‚unique‘ to them in that moment.
For many the first thing to stand out is the difference in the tonal system. To have intervals and sounds one’s ears are not used to hear, and which make no part of the notes of the piano becomes the main point of focus. I am confronted with this continuously: I have had professors imposing this perspective on me to make it my centre of research interest. But coming from Early Music, I already was accustomed to different tuning systems and unequal intervals. Pythagorean tuning having two different sets of small and big thirds for instance, my ears already were sensitised to receive different sounds or as much as perceiving the same intervals as consonant or dissonant, depending on their time and context. I personally find the questions of flexibility and instability of tuning as a general, more interesting. Or the fact, that today I hardly even perceive ‚quartertones‘ in the way I did when starting the journey - their tension and qualities truly attracted me. But the way I listen today is profoundly different, than when I was not as accustomed to hearing them. For me the question of how my own perception of things, even physically and acoustically, changed over time, is so much more thrilling. How my experience of the same music changed, how I change with it, what it means to me and why. I am back to square one I was at when applying for my Masters: how does one’s identity and position change by exposing oneself to the unknown. By exploring what lies behind one’s system of imagination, scope and thought. How did my musical criteria change and adapt?
The categories, criteria and terminologies we developed do not simply apply to everything we look at. Learning about medieval and renaissance culture and philosophy, dealing with a very common blind spot in our own understanding of history, shed a very different light for me at everything, which came after that. How much of our own culture can be credited and is inherited and adapted from the Arabic world, which was the centre of trade, education and knowledge back then. Many of the myths of ‚Dark Ages‘, ‚New Man‘, western sickness of hubris and a sense of superiority can be traced back to those early renaissance times. Our fear of the Muslims, the Moors, the concepts of ‚the other‘, of an unknown enemy created then too. The mental division between interdependent, symbiotic even really, entities. There’s them, here is us. I never could understand them, for it is my love and interest for my own cultural heritage, which naturally led me to the Oud and different Worlds of Modality.
Historically informed music practice is the attempt at trying to decipher and understand the music in its own context and not by imposing contemporary criteria unto it. The sounds resulting form that approach can never be exactly the same, as they used to be in their own time. It is easy to understand already by the fact, that the experiences and expectations of today’s audiences never can be the same, so in either way, the music will be experienced differently. But by approaching music in such a way, we can create and discover and uncover sounds, we formerly were not aware of their possibility and existence. We can find different criteria to apply to timbre, expression and sound. We can develop completely diverse aesthetic values, than the ones we inherited prior. Emotion and expressivity are something else, and expressed differently during romanticism and during baroque. Each music has its own context, milieu and criteria. We can not apply the idea of what ‚folk music‘ is, based on a 19th century understanding of culture and society unto medieval monodic music. Most of the music notated was music of the courts, otherwise they would not survived. The aesthetic pleasure from listening to a very long seemingly repetitive trouvere poem set to a melody in a small chamber was not similar to that of listening to a symphony in a concert hall. My experience with Early Music is an advantage I carry when learning to play and about Arabic Music, context and styles. I hesitate to assume understanding, sometimes with the simplest of things. Sometimes this too slows down my journey immensely, because I inspect every aspect I can sense of it, I search for things, where there might be nothing to find, because I am painfully aware of my own ignorance, of my not knowing. I hold in sometimes for a while and revise and question everything, I try to look at everything, especially the space between the things which appear to me, the matter where we expect to find nothing, because these might be my fields of not knowing, and I did not even know. Maybe I make it a little ‚complicated‘, but I know I make it honest too. For what I find, I can not find, if I do not find it within myself too. It is more than words can tell. It is watching me being moved by the things I look at in my position towards, in relation to those things, in slow motion over years. It is a strange and fascinating place.
I defy a cartesian approach. I defy dissecting ultimately. I defy separation based on a biased perception. I move my perception towards things I truly don’t know and can not even know of their existence either. I am in the process of moving myself really. I look at things differently, maybe.
Position and Perspective MATTER immensely, they change the world we view and live in profoundly. They change our sensual, physical, psychoacoustic perception of the world, which is not separated from us. And I am back to the Rhizom of Gilles Deleuze: not the content of things, but how they are interconnected in endless and various ways. I am back to a non static, but dynamic understanding of music and life.
My teacher, Ahmad Al Khatib responded to me something of the kind: „Oh, really? In my head I always do the exact same thing“ - an answer very revealing of the existence of a concept of a piece in a musicians mind and expression and variation being a natural byproduct of ones context, education, experience and moment in time. When I wish to say and express an idea or a thought, I can say it - naturally - in many different ways and I will not say it in exact the same way in any given moment in time, but rather the way I express myself will adapt to my conversation partner, my mood, my tiredness and more, but yet, I will still be expressing more or less the same thought - more and sometimes less accurately.
My teacher doesn’t calculate the elements which make his version different, it is not even known to him beforehand how the version will sound, even to the degree, where he might not really be aware of the constant ornamentations and changes he implements, they just happen - based on his embodied musical experience and situative differences. Furthermore, these do not have to be conscious and known for the audience to receive their uniqueness and sound and experience their value and meaning.
If I replicate every ornament, every note, every beat in a groove, accurately put my finger in the right place for the ‚correct‘ (?) intonation: WHAT IS then MISSING in my playing? What is it, that is not there?
I am so cautious and scared to lose or miss some essence of things underway while learning, that I willingly delay my road only to watch out for it while I learn and walk. I know, that the not known is my blessing. I am ready to breathe it and embrace it while playing.
Aquila Altera, Jacopo de Bologna performed by Ensemble Organum/ Marcel Peres, in „Siècle de l'Ars Nova“, Harmonia Mundi, 2005.
Aquila Altera, in Codex Faenza, performed by Corina Marti, in „I dilettosi fiori“, Ramee, 2013. Bornemark, J. (2018), "The Limits of Ratio: An Analysis of NPM in Sweden Using Nicholas of Cusa’s Understanding of Reason", Ajana, B.(Ed.) Metric Culture, Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 235-253.
Alta Danza, La Spagna, Francesco de La Torre in Cancionero Musical de Palacio performed by Dominika Bonk, Concert Basel, 2008.
Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. A thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia. London: Athlone, 1988.
Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and repetition. London: Athlone, 1994.
Farraj, Johnny and Sami Abu Schumays. Inside Arabic Music. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019.
Harnoncourt, Nikolaus. Baroque music today: music as speech: ways to a new understanding of music. Pauly Reinhard G. (Ed.). Amadeus Press, Portland, Oregon, 1988.
Muort Oramai, Francesco Landini, performed by Dominika Bonk, Concert Basel, 2008.
A point I’d like to emphasise is, that a skilled musician of the time knowing the tune well enough could have produced potentially an endless number of diminutions over it, thus creating many different versions of the piece. The one we find in said manuscript is exactly one potential version of the piece, not unlike today’s notated versions of elaborated Coltrane soli, studied by musicians worldwide. The question of concepts of a composition dilute further, where famous tenors become their own baselines for different musical settings and improvisations, as happened with ‚La Spagna‘ for instance. Setting and iprovising melodies over 'La Spagna' was a practice stretched over three centuries. (video above, to the right)
The practice of diminutions became so widespread, that extensive diminutions were played on tenor lines of popular ‚tunes‘ of the time. Here is a 14th century madrigal by Jacopo de Bologna (1340 - ca.1386) titled ‚Aquila Altera‘.
And an elaborated version of keyboard diminutions over it from 15th century keyboard manuscript ‚Codex Faenza‘. (videos to the left)
„Sense perception is multifaceted, but just as when many people speak to you at one time, you only understand the voice which your attention is drawn towards. This directionality is the light of ratio, which thereby seperates and ties together.“ (J.Bornemark on N. de Cusa 1445)
It reminds me of the relations I was learning about and discovering while studying Early Music, focusing on late medieval and renaissance repertoire, society and philosophy. I was less focused personally on polyphony itself, though it is a thrilling field and I had many questions how modality changed into harmony. I was very interested in monody and the role and origin of instruments in that time - first time encountering the Oud during my research as a footnote mentioning an Arabic Manuscript. I was wondering how the music might have really sounded then. The concept of REPETITION and VARIATION, or QUIDDITAS (Essence, Whatness) and DIFFERENCE/ UNIQUENESS is one, I learned about then and how this principle determined architecture and art of the time. Unfortunately the living tradition of the music is gone, though I’m sure it can still be traced back to some degree in certain musical expressions of European Cultural Periphery. It would be interesting to know, how monody really sounded, given it is but a ‚little line‘ of black dots in a manuscript, and how it was heard and experienced by a contemporary listener then. But also in polyphony one can find the interaction between a concept and its variation, an organic entity of which there exists a structure of, but the outline happens in the moment.
And an elaborated version of keyboard diminutions over it from 15th century keyboard manuscript ‚Codex Faenza‘.
I once approached my teacher Ahmad Al Khatib about how difficult it becomes to follow his details, the ornaments, the quality of expression at different moments in time. My knowledge about a piece of music, a maybe apparently simple melodic line, is questioned and revised every single time I hear him play it again, and again and again and again. I told him, that I not once have heard him play the same piece in the same way and oftentimes to a point where I have been surprised, doubting myself, if it really still is the same piece of music I hear - which quite obviously it is, but the difference in expression (based maybe on the mood of the day, the physical constitution, tiredness, direction, intention and many other?) appeared so striking to me, that the ‚difference‘ is what I heard and focused on, receiving the music very differently each time.
A friend of mine, a Syrian Oud player and enthusiast, whose approach to music I admire and respect, told me in a conversation recently about said German Oudplayer colleague of ours: „he wasn’t understanding the music, the liberty in it... he played every note in the right order and time... fascinating technique but without a soul... very calculated playing all the time“ and told me the story of a workshop they both participated in. Our German Oudplayer colleague asked a renowned Turkish Oud master how to approach a specific ornament and when, where and how to play it. The Oud master said: „It is good to play it in that way, but much better to play it from here (pointing at his heart)“. My friend told me how the small group of them afterwards would mock our colleague amicably about his reaction to this sentence: they could see his expression in his eyes scanning for understanding, searching for a point to hold unto, calculating, not understanding.