{"id":111895,"date":"2017-06-19T12:20:37","date_gmt":"2017-06-19T16:20:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=111895"},"modified":"2017-06-22T13:57:07","modified_gmt":"2017-06-22T17:57:07","slug":"a-world-of-shared-ecstasy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/06\/19\/a-world-of-shared-ecstasy\/","title":{"rendered":"A World of Shared Ecstasy"},"content":{"rendered":"

A new\u00a0suite for string quartet weds\u00a0Western and Arabic music with intelligence, integrity, and feeling.<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/a>

Photo: captain.orange, via Flickr.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

Mathias \u00c9nard\u2019s novel\u00a0Compass<\/em>, which won the 2015 Prix Goncourt, has been hailed for its elegiac, meandering portrait of Western scholars of the Islamic world. Few critics have noticed that it\u2019s also a novel about European musicians and composers enchanted by the sounds of the Middle East and North Africa. The narrator, Franz Ritter, is an Austrian musicologist, or, in his words, \u201ca poor unsuccessful academic with a revolutionary thesis no one cares about.\u201d His thesis, which \u00c9nard obviously cares about, is that modern European concert music \u201cowed everything to the Orient\u201d:<\/p>\n

All over Europe the wind of alterity blows, all these great men use what comes to them from the Orient to modify the self, to bastardize it, for genius wants bastardy, the use of external procedures to undermine the dictatorship of church chant and harmony.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Ritter\u2019s compass invariably points east, and delirious exaggeration is his rhetorical signature, but the novel offers a suggestive account of Western music\u2019s encounter with its Eastern other. Beethoven, Mozart, and Liszt all wrote Turkish-style marches; Debussy, Bart\u00f3k, and Hindemith were fascinated by Arabic and Asian scales. The Polish composer Karol Szymanowski was so besotted by North Africa that he wrote \u201cSongs of an Infatuated Muezzin,\u201d whose lyrics at one point cry out \u201cAllah Akbar!\u201d Some Western musicians reinvented themselves as Arabic musicians, notably the late Swiss\u00a0qanun<\/em>\u00a0master (and Muslim convert) Julien Jalal Eddine Weiss. Music, \u00c9nard suggests, has proven a uniquely fertile ground for cross-cultural dialogue and exchange, \u201ca world of shared ecstasy, of a possibility for change, of participation in alterity.\u201d It has rejected the \u201cviolence of imposed identities\u201d in favor of \u201cthe dual, the ambiguous.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

As \u00c9nard somewhat grudgingly acknowledges, this faith in music\u2019s almost magical power was echoed, albeit in a more circumspect fashion, by Edward Said, whose accusatory specter haunts Compass<\/em>. Said, of course, had little respect for the Orientalists beloved of \u00c9nard; in\u00a0Orientalism<\/em>, his classic 1978 monograph, he excoriated them for producing static, essentialist images of the inhabitants of the East, thereby contributing to an imperial project. Nor did he share \u00c9nard\u2019s affection for the Western adventurers and travelers who dressed up in native clothes, or styled themselves as sheiks, seeing them as dilettantes at best. Ritter, I suspect, is speaking for \u00c9nard, a scholar of Persian, when he complains that Said overlooked the redeeming features of Orientalism, above all the way it introduced the West to the great cultural and intellectual traditions of the Middle East.\u00a0Orientalism<\/em>, he declares at one point, \u201ccompleted a posteriori the scenario of domination which Said\u2019s thinking meant to oppose.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yet Said, an accomplished amateur classical pianist and a discerning music critic, believed fervently that musical performance and education could create the conditions for equal creative exchange and collaboration between cultures divided by politics. In 1999, he joined forces with the conductor and pianist Daniel Barenboim to create the West-Eastern Divan, an Arab-Israeli youth orchestra, named after a cycle of poems that Goethe wrote under the spell of Hafez, a fourteenth-century Persian Sufi mystic. For Goethe, he said, art enabled \u201cthe voyage to \u2018the other,\u2019\u201d a means of leaving behind the self and seeing, or hearing, the world anew. By gathering young Arab and Israeli musicians in a common musical project, Said, who died in 2003, hoped to facilitate this voyage\u2014not for the sake of \u201cnormalizing\u201d relations between Israel and the Arab world (as its Arab critics would later charge) but rather to lay the groundwork for cooperation once Israel ended its occupation and Palestine achieved freedom. He described the Divan\u2014now based in Seville, in the heart of what was once Muslim Spain\u2014as \u201cthe most important thing I did in my life.\u201d<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Said, I think, would have appreciated John King\u2019s extraordinary suite for string quartet,\u00a0Free Palestine<\/a><\/em>, recently released on New World Records, and not only because King has dedicated it to the same cause that Said served as an unofficial spokesman. Seldom have the traditions of Western and Arabic music been fused with such intelligence, integrity, and feeling. King, an experimental New York composer born in 1953, discovered Arabic music late in life, but he has more than made up for lost time in his study of the\u00a0maqam\u2019at\u00a0<\/em>(melodic modes) and\u00a0iqa\u2019at<\/em>\u00a0(rhythmic units), the building blocks of the improvisatory form known as\u00a0taqsim<\/em>. Yet\u00a0Free Palestine <\/em>wears its diligence lightly. Although rigorous in its exploration of Arabic music, it is also playful, relaxed, and joyous, the work of a mature composer who has replenished himself thanks to a love affair with a new form. The freedom King\u2019s title invokes has as much to do with the liberation of sound as it does with the liberation of Palestine.<\/p>\n

The inspiration for\u00a0Free Palestine<\/em>\u00a0came from the Old City of Jerusalem, which King visited in 2011 while touring with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. He wandered into a Palestinian cafe, ordered a mint tea, and listened to the men around him. King does not speak Arabic, but in the conversation, and in its occasional silences, he heard \u201crhythm, intonation, and density.\u201d The sounds of the cafe haunted him, and\u00a0two years later, he began to teach himself the\u00a0oud<\/em>, the Arabic lute, using a website called Oud for Guitarists. He found a tutor\u2014Kinan Abou-Afach, a distinguished Syrian composer, cellist, and oud player based in Philadelphia\u2014and immersed himself in recordings by the instrument\u2019s lodestars.<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

In the\u00a0taqsim<\/em>, he discovered a kind of Arab jazz in which a soloist could improvise freely within a\u00a0maqam<\/em>, or modulate to other\u00a0maqam\u2019at<\/em>, provided she returned to the original one. (Maqam\u2019at<\/em>\u00a0are made up of seven notes that repeat at the octave.) He loved the \u201copenness of time,\u201d the\u00a0taqsim<\/em>\u2019s elastic way of moving between the rhythmic drive of the tune and improvisations rich in melodic embellishments, slides, and tremolos. Aspiring to recapture the sound and feel of the\u00a0taqsim<\/em> without simply reproducing it on Western instruments, King wondered how the\u00a0taqsim<\/em>\u00a0would sound if he combined it with the intricate harmonies, counterpoint, and canonic imitation of the string-quartet music he loved, as well as such extended techniques as as\u00a0col legno<\/em>, in which the string is struck by the stick or the wood of the bow. He began to write the music on\u00a0Free Palestine<\/em>\u00a0as a way of answering that question.<\/p>\n

Each of the fifteen pieces on the album has a split title. The first part refers to the predominant\u00a0maqam<\/em>\u00a0used; the second is the name of a Palestinian village or city that has been ravaged by war or literally erased from the map in 1948, when some four hundred Palestinian villages were razed by Israeli forces. While King was writing\u00a0Free Palestine<\/em>, the 2014 war in Gaza between Israel and Hamas broke out. More than two thousand Palestinians were killed, the vast majority of them civilians. (More than seventy Israelis were killed, too, all but seven of them soldiers.) King, who had been educating himself on the history of the conflict by reading Said, Mahmoud Darwish, and Hannah Arendt, says he felt moved to commemorate the \u201cde-populated\u201d villages of Palestine. These places, he writes in his composer\u2019s note, \u201care significant historically for what happened to the people who lived there as well as the ongoing conditions of apartheid, occupation and dispossession in both the 1948 and 1967 territories of historic Palestine.\u201d The music on\u00a0Free Palestine<\/em>, however, is neither programmatic nor didactic. It invites us to reflect on the destruction of pre-1948 Palestine, the Nakba<\/em>, or catastrophe, without telling us\u00a0how<\/em>\u00a0to think about it.<\/p>\n

The \u201cfree\u201d in\u00a0Free Palestine<\/em>\u00a0also extends to the score, which draws heavily on spontaneous improvisation and the chance procedures invented by John Cage, one of King\u2019s mentors. In the first piece, \u201cSultani Yakah\u2014Ijlil al-Qibliyya,\u201d a propulsive, invigorating minimalist work evocative of\u00a0Terry Riley\u2019s\u00a0In C<\/em>, each bar can be repeated any number of times, and the players move from bar to bar independently, while maintaining a strict, rapid eighth-note pulse. This could be a recipe for cacophony, but the remarkable players in the Secret Quartet\u2014the violinists Cornelius Dufallo and Jennifer Choi, the violist Ljova Zhurban, and the cellist Yves Dharamraj\u2014are attentive listeners, and they carry out King\u2019s instructions with verve, passion, and imagination. The result is music of impressive coherence and expressive range. There is the tormented drama of \u201cHamayun un-Nuris,\u201d which begins very slowly, with Duffalo playing baleful, twisting lines on violin over an otherworldly drone, until Dharamraj enters, with short, almost brutal staccato notes on cello, launching a series of contrapuntal dialogues. There is the sly, almost coquettish \u201cBayati Shuri\u2013Al Sarafand,\u201d a delicacy in 5\/8 of swirling, intersecting lines, flying just above a landing strip of pizzicato. (Each\u00a0maqam<\/em>\u00a0is said to evoke an emotion or quality, and the \u201cbayati\u201d represents vitality, joy, and femininity.) Even more astonishing, perhaps, is how\u00a0natural\u00a0<\/em>the music sounds: one never has the dispiriting feeling of listening to a contrived piece of \u201ccrossover\u201d music or pastiche. To my ears, King\u2019s use of\u00a0maqam<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0iqa\u2019at <\/em>stands firmly in the vernacular modernist tradition of Shostakovich, Janacek, and Bart\u00f3k, who drew on folk music in their string quartets. It\u2019s reminiscent, too, of\u00a0John Zorn\u2019s compositions based on Sephardic Jewish modes, which, of course, share an ancestral history with the\u00a0maqam<\/em>.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

In his effort to combine Western and Arabic music, King runs up against an old and still powerful set of prejudices. Pierre Boulez, the self-appointed guardian of modernist purity, poured scorn on Western composers who borrowed ideas from what he called \u201cOriental music,\u201d likening them to \u201ctourists setting off to visit a landscape that is about to vanish.\u201d Although he praised Eastern forms of music for their \u201cacuteness of listening,\u201d \u201cthis fineness of the horizontal interval disengaged from the thickness of polyphony,\u201d he asserted that any attempt to \u201ctransfer such elements\u201d to Western music \u201cis completely mistaken; it is the quest for the lost paradise,\u201d and could only result in kitsch. \u201cThe musical systems of East and West cannot have any bearing on one another, and this will be quickly realized by experienced composers of character,\u201d he declared, with his characteristic dogmatic certainty.<\/p>\n

Boulez made these remarks in 1967, when, indifferent to his strictures, a new school of advanced composition, later known as minimalism, was gathering force, drawing explicitly on non-Western musical traditions including Indian raga, Balinese gamelan, and West African drumming. Boulez\u2019s mandarin hostility to cross-pollination would not survive the challenge of minimalism and its offshoots. Yet the Arab East\u2019s impact on Western art music has been less pronounced than India\u2019s or Africa\u2019s, in large part for political, rather than aesthetic, reasons. Since 1967\u2014also the year that Israel began its now fifty-year-old occupation of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem\u2014the relationship between the West and the Arab world has been increasingly defined by wars, invasions, terrorism, refugee crises, and travel restrictions, none of which have nurtured mutual understanding, much less artistic exchange. John Adams made a noble attempt to address the Israeli-Palestinian tragedy in his 1991 opera The Death of Klinghoffer<\/em>, juxtaposing a Chorus of Exiled Jews and a Chorus of Exiled Palestinians, only to face charges of anti-Semitism and calls for censorship. When the opera was revived\u00a0after 9\/11, Richard Taruskin accused Adams of \u201cromantically idealizing\u201d the Palestinians who hijacked the\u00a0Achille Lauro<\/em>, and applauded the Boston Symphony for canceling its performance. What seemed to particularly infuriate the enemies of\u00a0Klinghoffer\u00a0<\/em>was that Adams had told the story of the\u00a0Nakba<\/em>, and, worse, set it to some of the most beautiful music in his opera.<\/p>\n

Free Palestine\u00a0<\/em>has ruffled feathers for similar reasons. Roulette, the Brooklyn performance space where the music was first performed in 2014, received a number of angry calls about the inclusion of a pro-Palestinian work on its program, moving them to publish a statement emphasizing that King\u2019s composition was not a defense of \u201cterrorism.\u201d (At the album\u2019s launch in early June at the Public Theatre, a team of fifteen policemen was enlisted as \u201cprotection.\u201d) But the objections to\u00a0Free Palestine<\/em>\u00a0are just as likely to come from opponents of cultural appropriation on the identity-politics left, who may ask what a white guy from Minneapolis is doing making Arabic-style music about Palestine. For these critics, the right to represent an oppressed group, to tell their story, to play their music, even to cook their food, belongs exclusively to that group. Almost any borrowing by a nonnative can be cast as an illegitimate act of exploitation.<\/p>\n

In a brilliant 1992 essay, the philosopher Linda Alcoff argued that such criticisms are rooted in an understandable opposition to \u201cdiscursive imperialism,\u201d or what Gilles Deleuze called the \u201cindignity of speaking for others.\u201d Perhaps the emblematic case of our times is Rachel Dolezal, a white woman who reinvented herself as a black civil-rights activist. But King is doing something very different in\u00a0Free Palestine.\u00a0<\/em>He is not so much presuming to \u201cspeak for\u201d Palestinians as\u2014to borrow Alcoff\u2019s useful distinction\u2014\u201cspeaking with\u201d them. King told me he conceives of the suite as \u201ca kind of dialogue\u201d between Arabic and Western music. In this conversation, both are transformed, merging into a new language.<\/p>\n

This mutually transformative dialogue is particularly suggestive in the album\u2019s longest track, \u201cAthar Kurd-Deir Yassin,\u201d which alludes to the village where more than a hundred Palestinian villagers were killed by Zionist paramilitaries in April 1948. It is a slow, dirge-like melody based on a\u00a010\/8\u00a0rhythm; seven of its pitches are performed simultaneously at one point, which raises its impact to almost unbearable intensity. Sometimes the\u00a0maqam<\/em>\u00a0is played softly, at others so violently that the quartet seems to be stabbing their instruments. \u201cAthar Kurd\u2014Deir Yassin\u201d combines the harmonic density of Western modernism and the visceral emotional \u201ccry\u201d of Arabic music. I was reminded of Bart\u00f3k\u2019s quartets, but King told me that he was inspired by the slow movement of Beethoven\u2019s Seventh Symphony, \u201cits shape and intensity,\u201d \u201cthat kind of slightly surreal but slightly uplifting thing.\u201d He wanted the piece to be \u201cjust as embedded with those things I felt from Beethoven, until I would sing the quartet and not know if I was in this world or in that world.\u201d<\/p>\n

In Islam, the feeling that King describes of being in an indeterminate space between two worlds\u2014whether this world and the afterlife, heaven and hell, or death and resurrection\u2014is known as\u00a0barzakh,\u00a0<\/em>the word in Arabic for barrier, veil, or curtain. For the Sufi scholar Ibn Arabi,\u00a0barzakh<\/em>\u00a0is an isthmus, located between the World of Corporeal Bodies and the World of Spirits.\u00a0Barzakh<\/em>\u00a0is not only their point of contact but the condition of their very existence. As in music, it is an interval: that which separates yet also connects.\u00a0Free Palestine\u00a0<\/em>was\u00a0<\/em>written by an American composer in New York, but it constructs a\u00a0barzakh<\/em>\u00a0of its own, a provisional republic of the imagination between the West and the Arab world. It looks beyond their cruel impasse into a possible future, as only music can.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Adam Shatz is a contributing editor at the\u00a0<\/em>London Review of Books\u00a0and a fellow in residence at the New York Institute for the Humanities.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The music on Free Palestine is neither programmatic nor didactic\u2014it invites us to reflect on Palestine without telling us how to think about 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