The Lost Paradise

Andalusi Music in Urban North Africa

Jonathan Glasser

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780226327235, 9780226327068
• eBook ISBN: 9780226327372
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: African History

For more than a century, urban North Africans have sought to protect and revive Andalusi music, a prestigious Arabic-language performance tradition said to originate in the "lost paradise" of medieval Islamic Spain. Yet despite the Andalusi repertoire's enshrinement as the national classical music of postcolonial North Africa, its devotees continue to describe it as being in danger of disappearance. In The Lost Paradise, Jonathan Glasser explores the close connection between the paradox of patrimony and the questions of embodiment, genealogy, secrecy, and social class that have long been central to Andalusi musical practice.
           
Through a historical and ethnographic account of the Andalusi music of Algiers, Tlemcen, and their Algerian and Moroccan borderlands since the end of the nineteenth century, Glasser shows how anxiety about Andalusi music's disappearance has emerged from within the practice itself and come to be central to its ethos. The result is a sophisticated examination of musical survival and transformation that is also a meditation on temporality, labor, colonialism and nationalism, and the relationship of the living to the dead.

Part One

The People of al-Andalus

Prologue: An Istikhbār

The musicians sitting under the lights of the outdoor stage have hit upon a pause. Among the percussionists, the goblet-shaped darbūka has stopped its galloping, the tambourine, the ṭār, has dropped into its handler’s lap. The audience of a few hundred people, seated on folding chairs and separated from the stage by a small fountain and the sound crew and photographers, is attentive. A clearing has been reached, an open space in the middle of density, a pavilion of stasis amid movement.

The repose is mixed with suspense. A few of the violinists, their instruments perched on a knee, draw forth a quiet drone. An ‘ūd player gently, persistently provokes a low string on the instrument’s pear-shaped body. Out from this backdrop, a violist pulls forth a spare, unmetered melody from the instrument that resembles a small double of his upright posture. His gaze rests on the middle distance in serious concentration. The bow weaves its way through the austere progression, appearing to waver in space at the quiet height of the tension. When he closes the statement, the focus turns to the young woman sitting in the front arc of musicians. A kuwītra, like a smaller, elongated, more delicate ‘ūd, rests in her arms. She leans slightly forward so that her lips are at the microphone. Her forehead furrows into an expression of intense pathos. Slowly, starting on a fifth and meandering her way toward tonal home, she intones, in elevated, classical Arabic:

Yā ahla andalusin li-llāhi darrukum

O people of al-Andalus! How God did shower you . . .

A ripple of recognition runs through the crowd, as if she has addressed them directly or given voice to a deep, half-forgotten, collective desire. A mandolin traces the contour of the melody the singer just offered. The suspense persists, even though most everyone knows what will come next. The singer leans forward again, and repeats,

O people of al-Andalus!

A murmur from the instruments.

How God did shower you . . .

She takes her time. A few of the instrumentalists follow along the path she has marked, resuming their drone once they have caught up with her. The list builds on itself, one at a time:

. . . mā’un wa-ḍillun wa-ashjārun wa-anhārun

. . . with water . . . and shade . . . and trees . . . and rivers!

She falls silent. Affirmative murmurs rise from the audience—admiration, satisfaction, perhaps even relief. An ‘ūd elaborates on the melody, quietly reaching higher than did the singer, the long pick adding its distinctive click to the strings’ liquid tones, while the other instruments lay down their soft bed of sound and offer gentle responses to the soloist’s turns of phrase. When the ‘ūd-player has finished his exploration and the singer begins again, the stage is set for the height of intensity. She sets out from the top of her range:

The Garden of Paradise is nowhere . . .

Again, the instrumentalists’ murmured response to her call. And again she sets out from the top:

The Garden of Paradise is nowhere if not in your land.

An instrumental echo. Then, resolving the melody back to home:

Given the choice, I would have chosen it myself.

A banjo takes its turn, summarizing the two lines the singer has just sung. Like the other instruments, it is in no hurry; it calls the listener in rather than stepping out with a grand gesture. Finally:

After it, you would not be afraid . . .

An echo.

After it, you would not be afraid to enter Hell—

A murmur from the instruments.

After Paradise—

After Paradise, the fire does no harm.

Abruptly riding an open syllable, she sets off in a new direction, an adjacent set of colors. The instrumentalists seem ready to follow. But no sooner has she has marked out this alternate sonic space than she returns, her voice descending the well-worn spiral staircase with a flourish:

After Paradise, the fire does no harm.

More murmurs of approval, even applause here and there. The percussionists are poised, the instruments back in position. When the full ensemble takes launch again, the music seems triumphant, perhaps even joyful. The singer has returned to her kuwītra and blended back into the group. The musicians and listeners have come out from the clearing.

*

This moment of high formal drama—called an istikhbār, literally an inquiry into the character of a melodic mode—took place in the Moroccan border city of Oujda in the summer of 2006 during the performance of a nūba in the mode zīdān. Within the formal, metered structure of the nūba, the istikhbār is a contrasting moment of truth, when a singer might momentarily break free from the group to display her or his musical prowess while giving the percussionists a well-deserved rest. To an outsider it may sound like a free, meandering improvisation tossed back and forth between vocalist and instrumentalists, intricately embellished with spontaneous ornaments and occasionally punctuated by bursts of passion. But although a good performance is distinctive and fresh, the istikhbār in the context of a nūba is highly formalized with regard to many elements: the relationship between textual and melodic phrasing, the alternation of instrument and voice, the calculus of repetition, elaboration, and forward movement, the melodic motifs that should be drawn upon for a given mode at specific junctures, and more. As two veteran musicians explained in the context of another istikhbār rehearsal in which I participated six years later, one is “imprisoned,” required to stay “on the tracks.” It is this treacherous topography and its soloistic nature that make the istikhbār the keep of advanced performers, and an object of intense rehearsal and refinement behind the scenes. Likewise, it is the experienced, assiduous listener—the connaisseur, literally “one who knows,” the mélomane, the mūlū‘, the aficionado—who grasps what makes a good istikhbār.

Not all the groups that performed in this state-sponsored festival of nūba performances in the tradition of Tlemcen and Algiers—a genre that is often known in the Moroccan-Algerian border region as gharnāṭī or Granadan music—met the standards of the mélomanes. When I was not playing violin in the ensembles on the stage, I spent much of my time amidst a group of older men sitting nearby, close to the sound crew. During a performance by a group that played a harmonized nūba from scores perched on music stands, one seasoned aficionado leaned over to say to me, “This is not our gharnāṭī, the one that we know.” Since I was onstage for the nūba that featured the istikhbār on the words “O people of al-Andalus,” I did not know what this aficionado made of our performance: although we had played in the usual semi-unison, heterophonic style, without reference to a notated score, the performance had been an experimental fusion with an ensemble from Tetuan. But even if this attempt to erect a temporary bridge to a formally contrasting Maghribi-Andalusi musical practice teetered between fidelity and dangerous innovation, I like to think that in the istikhbār, the mélomanes could discern “their gharnāṭī”: the singer confidently followed the basic framework without ever seeming to imitate anyone in particular. What’s more, she hit the right note of restrained and sorrowful passion.

The choice of text, too, was pleasing, one of the best loved within the repertoire, an evocation of the abundance and ease associated with the lost paradise. Not only did these particular lines invoke al-Andalus, but they happened to originate there as well, from the pen of Ibn Khafāja, a famed poet born in the eleventh century near Valencia. It is one of a handful of canonical texts performed in the nūba tradition that has a known author (or, for that matter, that mentions al-Andalus), yet few performers or listeners are aware that Ibn Khafāja composed these lines. Instead, for most people, no doubt including the bulk of the festival audience and the musicians, the words, like the unwritten, authorless melodies to which they are sung, are examples of turāth or patrimoine—heritage, patrimony, a collective inheritance.1

For those who mobilize this powerfully resonant concept in their speech, patrimony hardly requires an explanation. In Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco, patrimoine and turāth are ubiquitous terms, used to talk about architecture, crafts, and literature, among other things, and they are especially prominent in Andalusi musical circles, including at festivals such as this one.2 The master of ceremonies repeatedly reminded the audience to guard this musical patrimony from loss, and such admonitions lurked backstage as well, including in the rehearsals during which the soloist prepared her istikhbār. During a run-through in the days before the festival, the head of the ensemble had interrupted the singer, worrying that she was embellishing too much and in the process straying too far from the basic form. “You need to guard the aṣāla [the authenticity or originality of it],” he counseled all of us by way of the singer. “This is turāth, and with turāth you can’t all go off and do your own thing. If I did my thing and you yours and him his, then it would go away, it couldn’t be passed on. It’s gotten here because people conserved it as it was, and now we need to do the same.” And with that, he instructed the singer to begin again.

With this in mind, we might hear the words of the istikhbār not only as an invocation and relic of a storied civilizational past but also as a paean to the concept of patrimony itself: something of great value given in the distant past and fragmentarily reconstituted in the present through the act of performed recollection. But in the process of invoking the image of an old gift, practitioners also invoke the intervening links in the chain—the people and places that are nearer at hand. In the instance of this particular performance, with its partial loyalty to the form and aesthetic of Algiers and Tlemcen, the musicians pointed east, toward the other side of the border, as well as westward toward Tetuan. The mélomanes seated in the audience in their turn could compare what they heard to what they knew from their own experience in the local associations, their regular tuning-in to the radio and old recordings, and the time they had passed in town during the soirées of the departed shuyūkh of their younger years. Individual shuyūkh were present in other ways as well. The association to which the soloist belonged is named in memory of Cheikh Salah, a renowned performer of Andalusi music in Oujda, Tlemcen, and Oran during the middle decades of the twentieth century, and father to the association’s president and musical director. And the biography of Cheikh Salah in turn could point to Cheikh Larbi Bensari of Tlemcen, the paragon of Andalusi music in the tradition of that city and of the region as a whole.

Thus for those in the know, the istikhbār could be heard as emerging from and speaking to a network of interconnected places, times, and concepts: al-Andalus, Maghribi cities, the medieval past, the living memory of young and old, and the capacious, high-prestige category of patrimony. We might even go so far as to suggest that “the people of al-Andalus” were not only past but included as well the mélomanes themselves, these local guardians of taste sitting in a modest municipal park, with its small fountain, clusters of date palms and cypress tress, and the illuminated outer walls of the old city in whose presence the evening’s performances unfolded.

The following three chapters attempt to elaborate this interpretation of “the people of al-Andalus” as a far-flung, cumulative, but finite network of passionate listeners and performers—one that embraces a chain of Algerian and Moroccan cities, linked together through devotion to a common genre configuration that is rooted in Algiers and Tlemcen and that includes the memory of earlier generations of practitioners. By drawing on contemporary practice and the threads of communal memory that are its fiber, these chapters work through questions of place, people, and genre. How exactly does this chain of places and generations work? What is its geographic and temporal shape and textur...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Transliteration
• Introduction
• PART 1 The People of al-Andalus
• PART 2 Revival
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index