By Thorne Anderson
(From
the Saudi Aramco World magazine July/August 2001 issue. Reproduced by courtesy
of Aramco World Magazine)
Al-Andalus.
Even without an appreciation of the region’s place in history, it’s a beautiful
word, an evocative word. In Tunisia, mere mention of the name stirs potent
nostalgia for a time, now five centuries lost, when the artistic creativity of
Al-Andalus – Muslim Spirit – nourished tastes so refined that the mere memories
of them drive creative arts today and shape present-day Tunisia’s national
identity. And nothing conjures up this nostalgia more powerfully and
mysteriously than the musical offspring of Al-Andalus, the Tunisian maluf.
Bouncing in the back seat of a taxi driving fast from the airport into the heart
of Tunis, historical memories of Al-Andalus seem far from the chaotic currents
of the present. It’s a warm late-December day, but the car’s faulty heater
continues to blast from the dashboard, making open windows a necessity. A
medallion spins from the rear-view mirror in the swirling streams of competing
gusts. The car’s stereo speaker buzz under the stress of Europop dance music
turned all the way up.
But
the taxi driver’s face brightens when I mention maluf. “Of course I listen
to the maluf,” he chimes as he slides in a cassette tape of the Rashidiyya
Orchestra, the premier performers and preservers of the art. “We are
Tunisians. We must love the maluf. There are the stories of our people,
stories of love, everything is there. Maluf is sweet music,” he says, and
we roll up the windows and endure the heat in order to hear better. “We
Tunisian may be tough on the outside,” he says, “But you scratch our skin
and the maluf is there.”
Maluf
(pronounced mah-LOOF) survives today in public and private performances and at
weddings and circumcision ceremonies because of a determined effort of
preservation on the part of the Tunisian government, private patrons and
dedicated musicians young and old. Although but a small part of a much larger,
evolving contemporary musical-arts scene – indeed, it can be difficult to find
maluf recordings except in specialized music shops – the history of the maluf is
so enmeshed with that of Tunisia that maluf has become a sort of emblem of
national identity, and its influence is ever-present and fiercely guarded.
Amjed
Kilifi, a carpet dealer in Tunis, is all business and he doesn’t appear to be
the kink of guy to take “high culture” too seriously, He says he rarely listens
to maluf, but it’s clear he holds the music in the highest esteem nonetheless.
“Those who like the maluf tend to be more intellectual,” he says. “Most
people don’t prefer maluf these days, but it was born with us and we’ll never
let it go.”
“Young
people really do love maluf,” says Latifa Fkiri, a journalist and actor, “but
they don’t listen to it often. Maluf really takes patience, but those with
patience will discover that the maluf is in our blood, our pulse, our breath.”
“We
must sing the maluf,” insists Rim Fehri, a voice student at the Institut
Superieur, Tunis’s leading music school. “We must love the maluf; we are the
maluf.”
Maluf,
which means “familiar” or “customary,” bears the auditory traces of music
brought to North Africa by Muslims fleeing the Christian reconquista of Spain
and Portugal between the 12th and 15th centuries. In
Morocco, this genre is known as Andalusi or ala music; in Algeria it is gharnata.
In Libya, as in Tunisia, it is maluf, with the Libyan maluf distinguished mostly
by dialect differences in the lyrics. More subtly, these Maghrebian, or North
African, genres also differ in the tuning of melodic modes and the articulation
of rhythmic patterns. Those differences, at times scarcely perceptible to an
outsider, are the musical equivalents of dialects.
The
maluf idiom comprises all forms of Tunisian classical singing, which themselves
are based on the classical Arabic poetry form known as the qasidah, or ode. The
maluf forms include muwashshah, a “post-classical” form not rigidly governed by
the qasidah; zajal, a newer poetic genre using special dialectical forms; and
shgul, a traditional singing which is “elaborate,” as the Arabic name implies.
But the most important form, the structural heart of maluf, is the nuba.
A nuba
might be described as a two-movement “musical suite” in a single mode or maqam,
an Arab system of pitch organization by quarter-tones that allows for the
construction of melodies and improvisation within a scale. Each nuba lasts
about an hour, and contains varied instrumental and a dozen or so vocal pieces
in a traditional sequence. The rhythmic patterns (iqaat) of each nuba are
complex, but they are similar from one nuba to the next, and they generally
progress from slower to faster rhythms within each movement. The first movement
of a nuba is dominated by binary, or bac-2, rhythms while the second is
dominated by bace-3 rhythms.
Legend
holds that there was once a different nuba for every day, every major event and
every holiday of the year, hundreds of nubat in all. About two-thirds of the
way through a nuba, one improvisational section would be played in the maqam of
the nuba of the following evening. “Its beautiful to think about,” says
Jamel Abid, and instructor at the Institut Superieur. “So fine were the
listeners’ ears that they needed tuning for the upcoming evening.”
Only
13 nubat remain in the traditional repertory, each in a different maqam. But if
they are few in number, they are epic in scope, addressing the natural and the
divine, love and loss, joy and regret, simultaneously at home and in exile. The
breadth of experience covered by the music is immense.
“Maluf
touches the center of the identity of all Tunisians; it is the vessel of the
maqamat, the modes that define us as a people,” says Becher Soussi, director
of the annual International Festival of Arab Music in Testour, Tunisia. “If
a Tunisian really listens to a fine performance of the maluf then he or she will
feel something like ecstasy – the experience of tarab,” he says. “Tarab
is the relationship between the performers and the audience. To understand it
you must experience it. It’s not concrete. It’s connected with the emotions.
It’s the binding force that connects people with music.”
The
birth of the maluf may be traced back to Ziryab, a court musician whose
expulsion from Baghdad in 830 sent him westward on a journey that became notable
for discovery and artistic innovation. Across the Maghreb he stopped in
Kairouan, in the heart of the region then called Ifriqiyya, now Tunisia.
Kairouan, the first major Islamic city in Africa, had been founded 150 years
earlier by the Arab leader 'Uqba bin Nafi' al-Fihi, some 50 years before the
Arab conquest of Al-Andalus on the Iberian Peninsula. At the time of Ziryab’s
visit, Kairouan was the capital of the powerful Aghlabite dynasty and the heart
of Maghrebian culture.
Ziryab
collected the melodies and rhythms of the Maghreb as he traveled on to Cordoba.
He arrived at the beginning of a brilliant cultural flowering in Al-Andalus that
drew nourishment from all its distant roots and the diversity of its polyglot
inhabitants. In this climate, Ziryab, newly re-established as a court musician,
combined his Middle Eastern musical education with the influences of the Maghreb
to create a distinctively Andalusian type of music. Ziryab’s rhythms, modes and
melodies marked out the boundaries of new genre which, like most Arab music, was
highly improvisational in structure and spiritual in temperament. “Improvisation
is the offspring of your felling and a reflection of your soul,” says
Rashidiyya Orchestra ‘ud player Mohammed Nabid Saied. “If your soul is good
and clean, so will be your music.”
In the
13th century, Tunis saw its first wave of 8,000 refugees from the
Christian reconquista. This influx peaked at the end of the 15th
century, when Granada fell to Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand. Andalusian
music took root in the urban centers of the Maghreb, the, through centuries of
transmission, repetition, memorization and adaptation, acquired its unique
melodic, rhythmic, and dialectic character wherever it grew. “Maluf became a
distinctly Tunisian pocket of culture,” says Lassad Gria, directory of the
Tunisian National Center of Music and Popular Arts. “Tunisians are, of
course, open to the world’s influences, but an Egyptian person, for example,
can’t really sing maluf.”
Tunisian (and Libyan) maluf was further distinguished from the music of the
western Maghreb by the sway of the Ottoman Empire, which took Tunisia as a
colony in 1574, ushering in new influences from its vibrant musical centers:
Aleppo, Damascus, Cairo, and, of course, Istanbul. In the mid-18th
century Tunisia’s Ottoman governor, Muhammad al-Rashid, a virtuoso musician,
fixed the structure of the nuba, adding Turkish-inspired instrumental pieces of
his own compositions. In the absence of a written notation system, his melodies
passed from instrument to ear to instrument, through generations, so that the
composition of most instrumental parts of the nubat as they exist today may be
attributed to him. Al-Rashid ultimately abdicated his political post to devote
himself entirely to music, and today the Rashidiyya Institute the center of
maluf preservation, bears his name.
When
the Ottoman Empire crumbled, France established a “protectorate” in Tunisia
based on her claim at the 1878 Congress of Berlin, and the maluf, then in
decline, underwent a dramatic transformation. In an effort to save it from
extinction, the French-naturalized Baron Rudolfe d’Erlanger, an amateur musician
of Bavarian birth who had settled near Tunis, commissioned Ali al-Darwish of
Aleppo to produce the first collection of this ancient repertory in written
musical notation, a 20-year project. Together, d’Erlanger and Darwish undertook
one of the first academic studies of Arab music theory and assembled Tunisia’s
presentation at the ground-breaking 1932 International Congress of Arabic Music,
hosted in Cairo by King Faud I. Hungarian composer Béla Bartók, one of the many
renowned participants, supervised the Gramophone company in recording 360
performances by the musician delegations; most of the recordings have survived
in the National Sound Archives of Paris, and some are available to the public on
compact disk.
D’Erlanger died a few months after the Cairo congress, but the momentum of the
event helped inspire the founding of the Rashidiyya Institute in 1934 for the
reservation of the maluf through radio performance, musical training programs
and public concerts.
The
institute immediately introduced radical alterations with the goal of promoting
popularity and raising prestige: Lyrics considered “profane” were revised, and
two spectacular rehearsal and performance spaces were constructed in the heart
of the walled madina, or old city, of Tunis.
The
music itself was also changed. Earlier, the maluf had been performed in small
folk ensembles with simple instrumentation: usually an ‘ud ‘arbi (four-stringed
lute) and a rabab (two-stringed fiddle) accompanied by a bandir (frame drum),
tar (tambourine), darbukka (goblet-shaped drum) and naqqarat (small kettle drums.
Lyrics were sung by soloists or in small groups. Through the efforts of the
Rashidiyya, however, hybrids of Western symphony orchestras and Egyptian
ensembles arose that performed maluf in a hybrid of traditional and modern
musical styles using mixed traditional and modern musical styles using mixed
traditional and modern instrumentation.
Led by
the cosmopolitan Tunisian violinist Muhammad Triki, the Rashidiyya Orchestra
arranged the nuba for a large, seated chorus and orchestra including the ‘ud
sharqi (six-string lute), nay (bamboo flute), and qanun (zither). Most of the
rest of the orchestra comprised Western string sections: violin, cello and
contrabass. (Western stringed instruments are adaptable to the Arab maqamat
because they are fretless and can thus easily render the characteristic
fractional tones, though the Rashidiyya sometimes included even fixed-pitch
instruments like the piano or mandolin.)
Equally – perhaps even more – radical was the orchestra’s adherence to written
musical notation and the comprehensive Arab music theory introduced by the
Rashidiyya Institute under the leadership of Salah el-Mahdi, Triki’s successor.
All 13 of the surviving nubat were painstakingly collected and distilled from
the various, often quite divergent, interpretations of the Tunisian masters of
the time. The orchestra chose to use western musical notation, modified to
record the Arab maqamat. The difficulty of printing right-to-left Arabic lyrics
on left-to-right musical staffs was overcome by printing lyrics left-to-right,
word by word or syllable by syllable.
The
use of notation brought fundamental changes in the formerly improvisational
character of maluf. Whereas the unnotated maluf of the past had involved
improvisation throughout a performance in reaction to audience responses, the
Rashidiyya’s notated maluf left only one instrumental section of each nuba open
to extensive improvisation. But times were changing in other ways, too: The
popularization of the phonograph record miliated against the spontaneity of
improvisation and favored an agree-upon performance standard – a demand
addressed in part by adherence to musical notation.
The
Rashidiyya’s transformation of the maluf, though frowned at by some, did succeed
in elevating the maluf to the prestigious level of “art music” and
repopularizing the genre by broadcasting it beyond the urban centers. Moreover,
the Rashidiyya simultaneously became the most important musical training center
in the country, due in large part to el-Mahdi’s Arab music theory and curriculum.
“The
Rashidiyya is the mother of all musical arts in Tunisia,” says Youssef
Malouche, administrative director and professor of the qanun at the still-lively
Rashidiyya Institute. “Even if a musician hasn’t studied here, his teacher
has studied here.”
It’s
easy to get lost looking for the Rashidiyya Institute, tucked away deep in the
Tunis medina. Narrow alleyways not much wider than a donkey-cart wind in the
organic, millennium-old patterns. There are black-and-white checkered arches,
passageways covered by vaulted ceilings and a jumble of densely crowded suqs,
interrupted from time to time by the calm of mosque entrances.
The
metal-studded blue door of the Rashidiyya is set inconspicuously in the cracked
plaster wall of a quiet street just around the corner from nothing in
particular. Inside, the building opens to a large sky-lit performance, hall
covered floor to ceiling in Andalusian tile. Five days a week, the walls ring
with the sounds of the Rashidiyya chorus rehearsing. In a nod to tradition, the
vocal chorus, unlike the instrumentalists, rehearses without written music,
following the lead of a maluf master, Tahar Gharsa, on ‘ud. Apprentice
musicians sit on a rehearsals for as long as two years before they are allowed
to join the chorus.
Vocalist Chakri Hannachi, known throughout the Arab world for his recordings Ba
Younek (1993) and La La Wallah (1994), studied for 10 years at the Rashidiyya
and sang in the chorus. Though he is more likely to be heard singing
international Arab classical music, he locates the source of his art close to
home. “The maluf is the source for all Tunisian artists,” he says. “And
the Rashidiyya provided the basis of my art.”
The
impact of the Rashidiyya has gone far beyond simple preservation of the maluf.
In the period surrounding Tunisian independence in 1957, the nation was eagerly
searching for symbols of common identity. Habib Bourguiba, Tunisia’s recently
deceased first president, recognized the unifying potential of the maluf and was
quick to support and expand the work of the Rashidiyya.
Salah
el-Mahdi, by then director of the Rashidiyya Orchestra, was selected to compose
the Tunisian national anthem. El-Mahdi’s music theory likewise became the
cornerstone of the curriculum of the newly formed national conservatory as well
as its successor, the Institut Superieur, which is now part of the national
university. For 18 years el-Mahdi also lead a department of music and popular
arts in the fledgling Ministry of Cultural Affairs, which featured programs to
spread the teaching of the maluf through an extensive network of youth centers,
cultural centers, and popular-arts schools. And professional musicians were –
and still are – required to obtain an “qualifying card,” which in turn requires
a test of the musicians’ knowledge of maluf.
The
card does not, however, require that musicians feature or incorporate maluf into
their own work. On the contrary, most musicians these days are drawn to popular
forms from elsewhere in the Arab world – especially Egypt. And when the maluf
surfaces, it may differ greatly from the “official” maluf of the Rashidiyya.
On a
cool evening during Ramadan, most of the Tunis madina is transformed as the
festival-like daytime crush of people slows to an erratic trickle of residents
making solitary darts from one door to the next. But from the Hatters’ Market,
come the sounds of a party, and there are waiters in round, flat red hats and
stripped, collarless shirts pick their way through a dense crowd of people at
round tables who are smoking fruit tobacco from water pipes and drinking tea
laced with almonds or pine nuts. At the far end, hemmed in by a crowd of
dancing men, the group Al Jazira floats the sound of an urgent violin on a
turbulent current of tar, darbukka and bandir pulsing in double-time. The
dancers close their eyes, open their arms, and enter the current. “I believe
this is still the real maluf,” says Habib Bouallegue, the violin player of
the group, all of whom have studied at the Rashidiyya. “We play right out of
the 13 nubat,” he says. "We bring people the classical Tunisian songs in
a way that brings them to their feet.”
Salah
el-Mahdi might frown on identifying such performances with the maluf. Still,
though he’s now retired from all official positions, he remains focused on his
lifelong mission to expand and popularize the maluf. In addition to maintaining
a busy private teaching schedule with more than 20 students in his own
conservatory, el-Mahdi stays in close contact with governmental as well as art
and intellectual circles, and his message is undiluted. “We’re at a low
point in maluf preservation now,” el-Mahdi insists as he shuffles through
stacks of paper, music, and appointment books on the desk in his studio office,
searching for a lost note. The walls are crammed with awards, honors, and an
international collection of photographs showing him with presidents, prime
ministers and kings. “If we care for the survival of the maluf, then we must
create musical troupes in our high schools.” To this end, el-Mahdi has
proposed to the Ministry of Education that four hours a week be set aside each
Friday for compulsory maluf education in the schools. “We must not
underestimate the importance of this,” he says, pausing in his paper shuffle
to make eye contact. “If maluf survives, then we Tunisians will remain
Tunisians.”
As a
legacy, el-Mahdi has composed four modern nubat, each a monumental undertaking,
to add to the traditional repertory of 13. Each year in July he attends the
International Festival of Arab Music in Testour, where he urges composers to
continue to add to the repertory – but to date, only two others have tackled the
tasks of composing a complete nuba. “Many have tried and failed,” he
says, “but it is essential to the life of the tradition that we keep trying.”
These
days most of Tunisia’s classical musicians use the maluf as a stepping stone to
the exploration of the wider world of Arab or western music, but it remains a
solid, universal first step. The cultural centers and schools of popular arts
all also teach other forms of Arab classical music now, but the curricula still
begin with a foundation in the maluf, beginning with singing the maqamat,
progressing to playing the iqaat on the tar, and finally learning excerpts from
the maluf on stringed instruments. Amateur classical-music clubs, like the
Farabi Club and the all-woman Taqasim Orchestra, abound, and they tour to
festivals around the world, playing maluf as a small part of a much wider Arab
repertoire.
“I
like maluf. I teach maluf. I understand maluf. When I play with the
Rashidiyya I have a feeling of national pride – but my interest are much broader,”
says Khadija El Afrit, a star qanun student at the Institut Superieur and a
member of the Taqasim Ensemble and the Rashidiyya Orchestra. “There are not
so many new things for me to discover there. The maluf must grow. It needs
new compositions and interpretations. Part of the problem is the small audience
for maluf.”
El
Afrit is a serious musician. When not distracted by teaching or rehearsing she
devotes up to eight hours of the day to her instrument. Like many of her peers
at the Institut, El Afrit looks to the Sorbonne as her next educational step.
She says she is intrigued by what’s new in maluf, such as the experimental
compositions of Nassar Samoud, who composes in the Tunisian maqamat but include
pop iqaat along with the traditional, orthodox ones.
On the
street, young people echo the desire for innovation. “The problems with the
maluf is that it hasn’t kept up with modern life,” says Muhammad Laribi, a
student from Tozeur in southern Tunisia. “Modern life is complicated. All
life’s rhythms are changing – our environments, our clothes, our hairstyles. I
like the rhythms of the maluf. It’s calm. But young people are looking for
musical rhythms that keep up with the beat of modern times.”
Rabiaa
Zammouri, a graduate of the Institut Superieur, in a young composer for
television, radio, and stage who works to bring traditional music into modern
times. Seated at a large wooden desk in his home studio, Zammouri, surrounded
by a museum-like collection of string and percussion instruments, moves back and
forth between the key-boards of his Intel 75 PC and his Korg X5 synthesizer.
The two are connected in a haphazard-looking crisscross of wires through an
Ensoniq ASR 10 Sampler, some microphone, and a large Roland amplifier at his
feet. “And this still isn’t enough to make the music in my mind,” he
says.
Zammouri has the slow-burning fire of the rebel in his eyes as he dims the
lights and plays one of his compositions. It’s the soundtrack for a promotional
television piece for the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), one of
Zammouri’s clients. He turns up the volume, Out of the silence rises the beat
of a darbukka in the btaihi iqa. It’s joined a few seconds later by a solo
violin in the sika maqam. A few moments later the pair is confronted with a
percussive piano in counterpoint to both the rhythm and the mode. The effect is
seamless, innovative, and decidedly modern – distinctly Tunisian, traditional,
and, at the same time, cosmopolitan.
“Those
who understand the maluf know that it is very rich,” Zammouri says. “But
the classical maluf is related to a special period in history when people could
only play the maluf; now we must open up to other forms of music. We cannot
confine our inspiration to the past.” The benefits, he says, go both ways.
“I extract from the maluf that which blends with western music. In this way
I think I can bring innovation to the West through my music.”
Another of Zammouri’s maluf-inspired compositions was commissioned by Sihem
Belkhoja, Tunis’s premier modern-dance choreographer. Belkhoja used the
composition piece called “Iqa,” which she says was intended to “touch the
underlying rhythms of our Arab culture, and maluf is a faithful language of
translation for our Arab culture.”
Dance
is not traditionally associated with maluf, so any choreography represents a
startling innovation in the genre. “Our Muslim arts are rooted in music,
architecture and poetry,” Belkhoja says. “The concept of dance doesn’t fit into
old Arab traditions. For a strong foundation for dance, as a modern art, we
must turn to music.”
Belkhoja’s dancers are carefully costumed and lit. They jump, turn, roll, crawl
and stomp their way around the stage in the international freeform style of
modern dance. It’s a long way from the Rashidiyya. “I use maluf because a
contemporary art must reach into tradition for a faithful approach to modern
society,” Belkhoja says. Artistic growth begins at the roots, but the ultimate
survival of the art depends on the growth. “Music and dance,” she says, “these
are living arts. Innovation is preservation.”
That is the
lifelong story of the maluf, evolving through centuries of migration and
cultural influences into a nation’s binding musical vocabulary. In the early
years of independence, when the freshly notated nubat were at last gathered for
publication, Salah el-Mahdi wrote that, in the maluf, “we see to what extent
Tunisia has been a crossroads of cultures and of schools, retaining and
incorporating into her venerable heritage that which suits the disposition of
her people, and enriching that heritage by what her sons produce. Thus here is
a beneficial give and take, and this is the way of God with creation.”
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