Updating the practice of ecstasy, trance and enchantment

03 September 2011

BEIRUT: Casting a casual eye over the way art is made and enjoyed nowadays, it seems separation and exclusivity are major themes in contemporary practice.

Appreciation of “high art” is seen to be restricted to the cognoscenti (or else the artists’ friends and family) as opposed to the commercially lucrative “mass market.” Depending on the form in question (and the artist) a similar gulf can separate different practices.

The relationship among different forms of music can be an ambivalent one. Purists in various forms (Western classical music, say, and country’n’western) can completely ignore (or deride) one another. Others work toward a sort of “fusion,” which can be superb (vocalist Rima Khcheich’s work with jazz contrabassist Tony Overwater, for instance) or facile.

At no point does Tarek Atoui call his “Visiting Tarab” project “fusion.” It is obvious, though, that the Lebanese electronic musician does aspire to a new type of dialogue among musical practices, one that fosters a more profound relationship among musics.

“Visiting Tarab” has two components. The first is Kamal Kassar’s extensive private archive of tarab and Arabic classical music. Kassar’s collection is described as being comprised of 78 rpm discs and studio tapes recorded between 1903 and 1950, with around 5,500 discs and more than 6,500 hours of tape recordings, including Arabic music uninfluenced by Western instrumentation, arrangements and scales.

The project’s other component are 17 contemporary musicians. Six of these – DJ Spooky (aka Paul Miller), improv and contemporary music composer Lukas Ligeti, master improv multi-instrumentalist Elliott Sharp, improv vocalist and synthesizer Lichens (aka Robert Lowe), drummer and electronic music composer Uriel Barthélémi and percussionist extraordinaire Susie Ibarra – were able to visit Lebanon in August for field research and performance.

“‘Visiting Tarab,’” Atoui says, “gives carte blanche to these musicians to revisit the collection … according to their techniques and previous work. Not only to have commissions and pieces composed out of this collection but also to build up a five-hour performance, in which all the invited artists would come and play their compositions.

“The performative aspect of this project is very important,” he continues, “because the people I chose and selected are known not only for their sampling techniques and their work with found recordings. All have a strong presence on stage and all have skills that made what they do interesting and dynamic in one way or another.

“What I find exciting is revisiting classical Arabic music as a form, to re-visit tarab as a performative aspect, as it relates to these notions of ecstasy, trance and enchantment that happened in these old music salons.

“The idea is to recreate a performance that is as long as these sessions but where these notions of trance and enchantment and the relations between the performer and the audience are re-visited in relation to today’s societies and today’s changes.”

It is in part because of “Visiting Tarab” that this August – ordinarily a sleepy month when it comes to arts events – was festooned with performances involving some world class international and local artists.

Between Aug. 11 and 28, these international musicians visited Kassar’s collection to be guided through the principles of classical Arabic music, its origins and history and introduced to the notions of tarab, trance and ecstasy, to research and to listen to the music.

They left Lebanon committed to develop a piece for a pair of performances – in New York on Nov. 5, as part of Performa, the city’s performance art biennial, and again on March 19, 2012, in Sharjah.

“My role,” Atoui continues, “will be one of these musicians. It is also to orchestrate these 17-18 musicians and to build up this performance in accordance to the principles that we’re discovering at the moment on these research trips.”

Atoui says various forces have lured “Visiting Tarab” to the surface. Most immediately it came from an invitation from Performa to develop “an ambitious project, something that would have value to me that I couldn’t do in other contexts.”

At that point Atoui’s own work had let him to an work with “micro-samples.” Based, as he says, “on working with very small samples, chunks of samples – not loops and repetitive cycles but on the contrary to cut sound to a very small scale, using sounds that are between 40 and 500 milliseconds in length.”

The project also grew out of his own musical curiosity. “For quite a while now, I’ve realised that there was a breech in my understanding of the music of this region,” he says. “I knew very little about classical Arabic music: no references, no idea of what this was, no understanding of why we are at the moment listening to what we are listening to in the Arab world. Where is this Arabic pop music coming from? What brought us to this situation?

“I was always a little ironical about this whole idea of tarab – George Wassouf, Sultan al-Tarab and so on. We knew that this was not really tarab but I didn’t know what was the real tarab was … I was uneasy about this.

For someone who had studied music in France and knew all the rules and principles of Western music, I felt that I should also know a little bit about Arab music.”

It was at this point that he contemplated basing an entire project on Kassar’s archive.

“I thought it’d be great to see if he’d be willing to open his collection to people coming from different musical practices … pop, hip hop, electronic music, experimental music, contemporary music, improvised music, and see how each artist would deal with a heritage and an archive of this kind.”

Atoui has found several local collaborators in his project, nodding specifically to improv guitarist and Irtijal co-founder Sharif Sehnaoui, Hadi Saleh of Acousmatic Sound System and Ruptured Sessions founder Ziad Nawfal.

Nawfal himself is cautiously optimistic about the project’s tremendous potential for long term artistic dialogue.

“I’m curious about the way the foreign musicians – those who have come here and those who are working on the music from afar – will integrate and react to the music,” he muses, “and if they will involve it in their own practice and how. Will there be CD releases involving this material and, if so, who will be involved in them?

“There is a chance these musicians won’t really integrate the music into their own practice and just leave it to one side. There’s a real chance they’ll just choose to mix an element of this music into their practice. There are chances that it’ll leave them cold, just as there are chances that there’ll be full-blown participation.

“In a sense also it’ll be interesting to see how the local musicians who’ve come across the music – these really young guys who organize these harsh electronic events – how they will react and if they’ll be able to bring this into whatever they do.

“I’m not saying that the Holy Grail of traditional Arab music has suddenly come upon us. It’s very difficult music, it’s difficult to apprehend and difficult to get into. This is what I find interesting. Right now you have lots of ‘fusions’ – electronic and improv and jazz with oriental touches. Some of it’s good, some not. This proposes a new approach. It really gets into the core of the subject and tries to integrate it into whatever you do.”

The November show, Nawfal says, is, “I would say, the first step toward the realization of the project. Right now it’s a building process. The point is to go beyond the usual audiences … We’re trying to move away from the closed ‘this is only for art-oriented people’ approach. And the people Tarek’s invited are very open.”

“What I see around the Arab world in terms of alternative musics – whether hip hop improvised, electronic – is a lot of production based on duplication, stuff that already exists elsewhere,” Atoui says. “I believe that if we really knew about the history of the region and our musical heritage, that wouldn’t have happened in that often simplistic way.

“Hip hop in the Arab world can be something totally different from what you find in the United States or in Europe – in its structures and its texts, the way they’re cut up and the way the rhythms are developed, the way the metrics are done.

“We had hip hop in a way in the ancient improvised poetic forms such as zajal.

“It’s not just about taking oriental samples, cutting them and pasting them and collaging them with other things. It’s about rethinking composition. Durations can change. Even in improvisation this can happen.

“We have a lot to learn from Arabic music, I think, in improvisational music, in terms of how we can build improvisation and structure it.”