Thinking about the subject, the questions that seem the most urgent to answer are not about the Arab avantgarde music movement itself just yet, but rather questions about how to have a discussion about Arab avantgarde music. In fact, the questions touch on some of the vague aspects of the term not necessarily in relation to Arab avantgarde.

To begin with, how do we distinguish between avantgarde and innovation that is a natural product of evolution over time of any cultural activity?

When does the avantgarde status of something expire?

And then what happens to it?

Why do we still use the term avantgarde to describe music that was so in the fifties, but can now be learned in universities? Doesn’t the possibility of getting a degree in an art form from a respectable accredited university mean that that art form can no longer be considered avantgarde?

In retrospect, can impressionism in painting considered to have been avantgarde? How about photography, when first introduced into the world of visual arts, was it considered avantgarde then? Should it have been? If not, when is a new art form considered avantgarde and not just simply, a new art form? When should a new way to practice an existing art be considered avantgarde?

Now more specifically to the subject at hand. Arab avantgarde is not the same as Arabic avantgarde music. Which discussion should we have? Arab avantgarde music discusses avantgarde music made by people of Arab ethnicity. Arabic avantgarde music, means, I suppose, avantgarde music made by practitioners of Arabic music, as departure from more traditional Arabic music. So in that respect, Arab avantgarde musicians have to be of Arab ethnicity but they don’t have to know anything about Arabic music nor be able to play any Arabic musical instruments. On the other hand, Arabic avantgarde music practitioners don’t have to be Arab but have to be trained in Arabic music.

We haven’t even begun to discuss geography.

In this new post series I will try to answer some of the questions above and, with some luck, find a way to discuss Arab and Arabic avantgarde music.

]]> http://saedmuhssin.com/blog/archives/76/feed 1 http://saedmuhssin.com/blog/archives/60 http://saedmuhssin.com/blog/archives/60#comments Thu, 13 Mar 2008 21:39:36 +0000 http://saedmuhssin.com/blog/archives/60 Some thousands of years ago someone hit a stick against a piece of wood, deliberately, not for the purpose of making a tool or for hunting or farming. S/He did it for the purpose of hearing the sound of it. Music was born.

How did music start? Why do we play music? What was the first music like? Was it invented by a child or an adult? Was it invented in daytime or nighttime? Was it improvised or composed? Why do we still improvise? Where is music going? Why are there so many different kinds of music?

I am not sure information is available for anyone to answer most, if any, of these questions. The process of thinking about the answers, however, is interesting. This is a mental exercise..

I suggest we call the birthday of music the day when someone decided to make a sound for the sake of hearing that sound. It is quite possible that sound may have been used before then for the purpose of repelling predators, or serve some other practical function. But I would like to consider that the moment that the switch was made to making sound without any practical end in mind as the birth moment of music.

Was it a child or a grownup that invented music? We can’t really tell, but we can take a guess. I would guess that it was a child. Perhaps it because grownups were too busy trying to hunt and gather, make and maintain shelter, and defend the group. More importantly, however. Children seem to have always had more of a license to play than adults. Was it invented in the daytime or nighttime? If we accept the guess that children invented it, then my guess for this question is daytime. Why? That’s probably when children played and grownups did grownup things like gather berries, and kill animals.

It may, on the face of it, seem simple to answer whether the first music was composed or improvised. One is tempted to answer that it was improvised because before there was music there certainly were no composers. Or were there? What if the child was imitating the sound of something else, like the rhythmic sound of someone crushing something. What if the first music wasn’t hitting wood against wood, but was dragging a branch on the ground. What if it was trying to imitate the sound of the wind or a creak. What if the first music was the creak? A child sat daily by the creak and listened to the sound of water against pebbles. It was music to his ears. What if the first musician was also a composer and it was water?

I now regret writing in my master’s thesis that the first music was improvised, because if there was no music before it then there certainly couldn’t have been composers. Did I leave that in the thesis or did I take it out? It could still be true. We’re only guessing.

If the first music was not played, but heard, and the first musician was not man but nature, and it was the second musician who was human. What was the first human music like? An imitation? How soon before the human musicians switched from trying to imitate to trying to produce new music? Was that some sort of a stone age avantgarde? Was it in the stone age or before? Or after? Was there a continuity in the musical heritage? When was the first musicologist born? Did people do concerts or was all music participatory in the beginning?

And what was the purpose of playing music? When and why did it turn from child’s play to something that eventually lead to Wagner, Umm Kulthoum and the Beatles?

Luckily, I have a guess here. At some point, a child or group of children were making sounds and some grownup was moved by it. That was the decisive moment. Someone was so moved by music, in fact, that they wanted to be able to experience it again.

But what happened next? Did the first music appreciator want to become a musician herself or did she just want to listen? Chopin etudes and two digit over two digit polyrhythms did not exist then, and it couldn’t have been that hard to get into conservatories. Everyone could have become a musician, but did they? Were there any music detractors? People who thought it a silly waste of time and perfectly good firewood. Was music invented before fire or after it?

When was the first orchestrator born. You know, the person who decided what the wood blocks would do, and what the branches would do, and what the shouters would do? Shouters? When did the human voice become an instrument and were the first singers difficult to deal with? When was the first diva born? When was the first time someone decided to stand before a performing crowd and waive his hand expecting that everyone would follow his directions? Did they follow his directions? Did they make fun of him? Did they hold rehearsals where he got mad and kicked people out of the his orchestra? Did he work with composers? Was he a composer himself? Did they all have fun? Who had more fun the musicians or the audience? Was there an audience or was everyone in the tribe performing?

These are serious questions. Useless. But serious. When was the first useless question about music asked? Was asked by a musicologist, a critic, or a philosopher? When was the first un-appreciated composer born? You know, the first one who was a genius but no body knew it? Did they know it after his death, or did he compose and die without anyone taking notice?

Before music paid enough, did all musicians have a day job?

Finally, a question I can answer. The answer, of course, is maybe. Maybe some of them where married to someone else who put the food on the table.

When was the first composition commissioned? What for? Who was the first person to become rich from music?

If we are to ever be able to tell the true and complete story of music we have to answer all those questions, and the questions that I haven’t thought of, and the questions that will arise from the answers, and the questions that will arise from those, etc..

But why is it important to know? Does it matter what music sounded like ten thousand years ago? Fifty?

What if it was great music? Better than anything we now know. Someone is going to roll their eyes at this one: Better than those magnificent orchestra hits? Better than the voice of Umm Kulthoum turning intervals into heartbeats. Better than the John Coltrane’s anguished saxophone prayers? Who knows? Maybe there was something better. It’s not as if the music of humanity only becomes better with time. One only needs to listen to Arabic pop music to exclaim that what was, arguably, the greatest century in the history of Arabic music was immediately followed by what is, arguably, the worst.

Was that really the greatest century in the history of Arabic music? And when was it that people started thinking of music against the passing of time? Time is always part of music. That’s rhythm. But does music have rhythm? Not within a composition, but bigger, higher rhythm. The rhythm of the life of music. Is music a living thing?

More on preconceptions

“Preconceptions” is not a neutral word. It implies prior knowledge that is not necessarily accurate, and the prefex “pre” somehow implies that the “post” might be different. Philosophically, one can argue that all knowledge is preconceptions waiting to be refined as we become more educated, isn’t that why universities never go out of business?

In my view, it is very important to know the musician(s) you are going to collaborate with and try to find out as much as you can about their idiom, the specifics such as their prior work and their influences, listen to recordings, and, if possible, educate yourself about the context and history of their idiom(s). Returning to the example in part 2, if none of the musicians knew about the music of the others, the decisions that helped in making it successful, time signature and modality, would not have been made. The performers would have spent a large part of the presentation discovering the parameters of the music of the other (which may be an interesting process in itself).

A note about free-improvisation: Brilliant musicians and thinkers in the free improvisation idiom question the necessity of prior knowledge and some go as far as seeing it as a possible handicap. There is merit to this thinking within the idiom of free improv. But free improvisation is an idiom in and of itself. It is not fusion. Considerations in the free-improv idiom are not necessarily applicable to other idioms, including fusion. Some are, of course, like the idea of listening to the other musicians and to the overall sonic result and making that an important factor in your musical decisions. But in the case of preconceptions and prior education, free improvisation is fundamentally different from fusion..

In addition to knowledge, the three other necessary components in a successful fusion type collaboration are: listening, being open minded to revise your assumptions and preconceptions, and intending from the beginning that the sonic result has to be a new music that is not within any of the original idioms, is not about any one performer’s ego, and is not possible to predict ahead of time. Those three components will be examined in part 4.

For today, I will end with a few words on ego. The great musicians that I had the pleasure to meet, and if I was lucky also study with, were always open-minded and well educated about the music of idioms outside their own. Perhaps the best lesson I have learned from them is that a confident musician is always open minded. Rumi’s words come to mind, that violence is the other side of impotence. Closed-mindedness, after all, is a form of intellectual violence.

In my view, a series of decisions, mostly not musical, taken by each person early on, in the first seconds of the meeting or even before it, determine the outcome. The question is, how do we make fusion that works?

Before attempting to answer, I will just say that of my many attempts at fusion, the vast majority were not music I wanted to hear again. Some were fairly successful but, eh, not exactly great music. But there were a few, a really small number perhaps five or less, that were so rewarding that they kept my interest in fusion, both as a listener and as a player, alive.

What is fusion?

Fusion is combining elements from different musical idioms to create a new music that cannot be regarded as belonging to any of the original idioms, nor a natural extension of any of them. Fusion can be improvised or jointly composed by participants from the different idioms. Fusion is not a composer writing a part for a foreign instrument, then to be played by a performer that did not have say in the composition process. Fusion is not a composer taking elements from different idioms and including them in her composition (have any of those ever taken off from the ground of clichés?).

In this respect, fusion is not an idiom in the same way that, say, blues, Hindustani, or Arabic music is. If a rock electric guitar player and a native Australian digiridu player create music together, the sonic result is fundamentally different from the fusion music created a Hindustani sarod player and an Arab qanun player.

In my view, it is even superficial to call the first music, rock-Aborigine fusion and the other Hindustani-Arabic fusion. Why? Because the sonic result of the fusion depends not only on the original idioms, but also on the musical vision, knowledge, and the personalities of the players. In other words, a different rock guitarist and a different Aborigine dijiridu player would produce a different sounding idiom even though the original idioms are the same.

One may argue that no two rock guitarists sound the same either, and yet we do find it useful to talk of the rock idiom as an idiom. There is merit to the argument but, in my view, that merit is limited because practice tells us that there are different sub-idioms within rock because the sound can be so different between different rock pieces. Those differences are even more stark in fusion. So much so that the sonic result doesn’t justify making sweeping combinations such as Arabic-Hindustani or Rock-Aborigine fusion.

All those philosophical points aside, the question is, how can a rock guitarist and a Hindustani sarodist make good fusion music together? What should they do in preparation for the performance, and what should they do in the performance to make deep new music that is beautiful and transcendent?

Part 2 of this post discusses the necessary elements in a successful fusion.