06 October 2007

INTERVIEW

BEIRUT: It's a weekday afternoon at Ta Marbouta, Hamra's young, leftist hangout of choice, and the stereo is bashing out some tunes by Egypt's oud-based Ensemble Fisfuz. "This thing we're listening to," says Mustafa Said, gesturing vaguely to the passing notes. "It isn't oud. He's playing his instrument like an electric guitar."

Said doesn't think much of Tunisian oud virtuoso Anouar Brahem either. After his early work with the oud repertoire of Andalusia, he says, Brahem Westernized his technique.

"Whatever instrument he's playing these days, it's not oud," he says. "An instrument isn't just its shape. Each instrument has its own acoustics."

Said's opinions may be surprising for some but he comes by them honestly. An oud virtuoso himself, in Egypt he and the musicians of his Asil Ensemble have been working to develop oriental music within its own terms of reference. Now based in Lebanon, Said is working on a graduate degree in musicology at Antonine University in Baabda, where he teaches the oud, improvisation and ensemble performance.

He will present a selection of Asil's wares during a Sunday evening concert at the Sunflower Theater in Tayyouneh. The concert will feature himself on oud along with qanun, violin and a vocalist. The program will be wide-ranging. Some pieces have their origins in the Abbasid period, others date from the 19th and early 20th centuries, and there will be a few samples of his own work as well.

"The new work is based on older forms but the development is from inside, not outside," Said says. "Asil is an idea  or a concept more than a fixed group. I formed it when I started this project and found no one else was interested in doing the same thing.

"We'll be playing a selection of music in the wasala form," he adds. "It's common throughout the oriental part of the Mediterranean, though you could find it in the West as well. It's a modal form of music, an order of pieces that follow the same mode in the pattern of thesis-antithesis-synthesis. You begin with a fixed piece that you can ornament but not really improvise on. That's followed by a piece that's completely taqsim, improvisation. The final piece is the synthesis, which mixes both."

The 24-year-old Said doesn't look much like a traditionalist. Indeed, as he describes his work it sounds more like a post-colonial cultural project than retrogressive conservatism.

He says he understands that musicians like Anouar Brahem want to broaden their instrument's repertoire and make it accessible to a wider audience. The problem with these artists, he believes, is that they "have simply absorbed the attitude of their former colonizers. They think this is globalization.

"There's nothing wrong with developing an instrument's repertoire," he continues. "But there are ways of developing that repertoire from within the existing tradition." He recalls one trenchant case in point. "An oud teacher and composer I know, who taught me a lot about the instrument, once told me: 'Everything I've ever done in 30 years isn't equal to one sonata of Franz Liszt.'"

The Westernization of oriental music, Said says, is an early 20th-century development. "In Arabic classical music," he says, "the ensemble is a small group of solo musicians. One of the symptoms of this Westernization was the swelling of the ensemble - these huge orchestras you see playing alongside vocalists like Umm Kulthoum.

"People listen to Umm Kulthoum's music and they assume it's Arabic tradition. Nothing could be further from the truth. You know, ultimately, the idea of the jazz big band failed. There's no reason the practice should linger in the Middle East."

Said says his musical education began when he was three or four years old, during summer visits to the village of Tanta on the Nile Delta. He spent five or six summers learning classical music from a sheikh of the Khalwatiya sufi order. "I learned musical settings for parts of the Koran and some Sufi poems. From this, I leaned the arts of maqam and improvisation. I stopped going to Tanta when my sheikh died."

Said says he has nothing against Western music. In fact, he was introduced to Western music theory when he was in kindergarten, from an Irish tutor. He and his older brother Mohammad Antar - who is, like Said, blind - pursued studies in Western classical music and both played piano.

Both boys studied Turkish and Persian music as well and Mohammad Antar has be-

come a noted musician of the Turkish ney and leader of the Ensemble Munajah.

"We're not against having musicians of different traditions play together," Said says, "simply that the authentic forms should not be abandoned. These authentic Arabic forms - marked by longer phrasings - didn't die. They're still used in religious music and its non-religious forms are still performed in some of the smaller Egyptian towns.

"I have no problem with performing with other musicians," he repeats. "It's just a shame that people feel they need to imitate because they have a colonial complex. I enjoy listening to all kinds of Western music, but why should I copy and paste the Western tradition into my own? Whatever comes out of it will never be as good as the original."

Though both he and his brother are accomplished musicians, Said says he doesn't come from a musical family. He recalls his grandfather had a fine collection of records but his father didn't approve of music. "I was isolated in my studies," he says. "And I didn't like the strict environment.

"Actually I was rejected from the Cairo Conservatory of Music because I'm blind. But I'm happy about that," he says after a pause. "The breadth of musical experience I've had is much greater than it would be if I'd followed that path."

Mustafa Said and his Ensemble Asil will perform at the Sunflower Theater in Tayyouneh on October 7 at 8:30 p.m. For more information, please call +961 1 381 290