Telegraph (http://www.telegraph.co.uk)
Al-Farabi, Arab composers, Classical music, Middle East , 15 October 2008
by Ivan Hewett
How does a developing country show it’s ready to abandon its old ways and join the modern world? One way, believe it or not, is by embracing classical music. For us classical music is bound up with the past, but outside the West setting up orchestras and conservatoires is all part of the great adventure of ‘being modern’. Japan set the trend back in 1872, when Western music was first installed in the curriculum. The Japanese fervour for this alien import was amazing. In 1884, the writer Shoichi Toyama argued that Christianity should be adopted partly because it would speed up the business of music education (it sounds crazy, but he has a point; there’snothing like a good sturdy hymn for teaching four-part harmony).
Top-drawer: the London Sinfonietta play at Al Farabi
Other parts of the world soon followed. In Latin America in the 1920s, creating an ‘indigenous’ classical music was part of a big effort to create national identity. In the same decade China set up its first orchestra, in Shanghai. After the hiatus of Communism and the Cultural Revolution, classical music is now booming there, and Chinese performers and composers now jostle for front rank in concert halls world-wide. Globalisation is spreading classical music still further. Malaysia now has its own orchestra and swanky new concert hall.
But there’s a large portion of the globe where classical music barely registers. It stretches from Turkey right down the Arab peninsula, and across Iraq and Iran. Here and there in this vast area you find little pockets of activity. There are long-standing orchestras in Cairo and Beirut and Tehran, and conservatoires in Beirut and Syria. But they’re delicate flowers, starved of resources, and liable to be condemned at any moment as ‘corrupt’ by hard-line Muslim clerics. Even in Turkey, where Western music was encouraged by the founder of the modern secular state, there have been calls to ban Western music – pop and classical.
In this climate, it’s hardly surprising Arab composers of Western music are somewhat thin on the ground. Most music-lovers would be amazed to hear such a thing exists at all. But that may change, thanks to a new concert series which presents new music by composers from all over the Arab world. Named 'Al Farabi’, after the great 9th century Arab philosopher and music theorist, it was launched last June at Cadogan Hall and continues until next March. It’s handsomely sponsored by the Saudi-based BMG Foundation, and includes top-drawer performers such as the London Sinfonietta, the Dutch Nieuw Ensemble and the English Chamber Orchestra, which is giving the 2nd concert in the series tonight.
So, what might you be in for at these concerts? I imagined ‘Arab classical music’ might be something like the Japanese version of the 1920s, perched somewhat uneasily between Romanticism and European ‘modern music’, with a intriguing foreign accent whose source was hard to pin down. In fact it’s remarkably various. The Moroccan composer Ahmed Essayed harks back to the expressionist style of Vienna in the period before the First World War, but with a tinge of post-war modernism. The Syrian Ria Succari has a gift for sinuously ornamental melody which strikes a more overtly ‘Middle-Eastern’ note.
The best-known of these composers is the Jordanian Saed Haddad, whose delicately beautiful music was featured in the first concert. He’s settled in Germany, which has been a good career move, but it’s left him feeling culturally dislocated. ‘Being a Christian Arab and a Western contemporary music composer’, he says on his web-site, ‘I identify myself as an ‘Other’ in the Western cultural context. However, I find also myself as an ‘other’ within my own cultural heritage’. When I read this I was reminded of something a great Jewish composer once said. Gustav Mahler said he was ‘thrice homeless, as a Bohemian in Austria, an Austrian among Germans, and a Jew throughout the world’.
That statement reminds us why Mahler’s symphonies speak so urgently to us. They reflect a very modern anxiety about the difficulty of finding a sense of belonging. It’s part of our condition, and there’s something melancholy in that. But these Arab composers remind us that there’s a good side to it too. It brings an awareness of other ways of seeing the world. And with awareness comes tolerance. In a region of the world that’s so full of threatening certainties uttered at shouting pitch, the quiet, self-critical voices of these composers comes as a welcome change.
The English Chamber Orchestra plays tonight at the Cadogan Hall in London 0845 890 2435 For the Al-Farabi series, see www.musicstage.com and www.bmgfoundation.com.
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