Introduction
A song-podcast follows a simple principle: dedicating one podcast to a unique recording from the Cairo congress. Contemporary artists, researchers and experts choose a recording and explain the reasons for their choice, followed by the original piece in its entirety.
Abderraouf Ouertani, artist and researcher, opted for a muwashah (a form of sung poetry) entitled Ya la qawmi dhayaouni (“Who are these people who have confused me?”). It was performed in Cairo in 1932 by Mohamed Ghanim’s Maluf ensemble from Tunisia.
Armed only with his lute and his voice, Abderraouf patiently and skillfully does everything he can to bring out the nuances of the versions of a song that he learned at school and which inspired one of his compositions. We met on 4 April 2024, in Paris.
Interview
Note: It is recommended to listen in parallel to the original podcast in French to better understand Abderraouf’s explanations based on his vocal and musical explorations.
AO: I chose Ya la qawmi dhayaouni, recorded by the Tunisian artists sent by Baron d’Erlanger to Cairo. I chose it simply because it is the only piece, the only song that I really know, and which is part of the Cairo recordings. It seems to me that it is the oldest recording of this song, or the oldest version we have of it. So why do I know it? It’s because I learned it when I was a child at a music school in Tunis, in a different version from the one I learned later.
In other words, I encountered two different versions, knowing that the piece is based on the scale of the mode in Tunisian taba’ (maqam in the Middle East) called taba inqileb al asbain, which corresponds to maqam hijazqar in the Middle East. For a Western musician, it’s more or less a major scale, but with a minor ninth and a minor sixth. So if I play it on Do, it sounds like this… (Here, I sing it with a Middle Eastern inflection).
Then, there’s a whole story about the integration of this mode (maqam) into the families of Arabic maqams. We think it’s quite late and that we can see influences from the encounter with Western tempered-system music, probably from the Balkans, through the Ottoman Empire (…) so there’s that, and there’s also tempered-system music (directly from the West). So, I think there are two centres of gravity beyond the Arab world.
The song starts with the octave. Strangely, the first version starts with a major ninth, whereas in the mode, the ninth is minor. So, it goes Ya la qawmi dhayaouni, Ya la… Do Re… Do Re bekar (natural), whereas normally it descends by a flat Re. That’s how I learned it the first time. Then I moved to another school, another class, and I encountered another version, which is more simplified.
It starts immediately with the minor ninth, which is the one at the bottom. So it goes like this: (sings) Ya la qawmi dhayaouni. I naively thought that the first teacher had made a mistake. That said, I liked the sparkle of “Ya la”, which creates a kind of surprise because, in fact, it descends with a minor ninth, but it starts with a major ninth: Ya la qawmi dhayaouni.
That said (sorry for the non-musicians), I’m talking in Western terms, but if we analyse it in maqam terms, we can say it expresses a Nahawand on the octave. And then, when we go down, we have a Hijaz on the tonic. We have two different tetrachords, with two different colours, one on the (upper) octave and the other on the tonic.
And that is a specificity of the maqam musical system, or taba’. In fact, it’s a combination of several, let’s say, pieces of the scale. In fact, it’s quite common to find a different tetrachord on the octave, or even below the tonic. We’re not really in a scale logic, where it means a note that doesn’t move, as in Indian raga, for example.
So, one day, I came across the recordings of the Cairo Congress in the digitised version. I was happy to find this song. I listened to it, and I found that it was the first version I knew. And the singer sang Ya la qawmi dhayaouni well. Then I realised that I had judged the teacher too quickly, that he was right. He was right, except that in teaching (I don’t want to judge all teachers), but we don’t talk much about historical elements or supporting evidence, we don’t really listen to old pieces. And that’s normal, because contrary to what we think, we’re in a culture that isn’t really (stuck) in the past. We’re not living in museums.
We don’t really care about museums or what happened in the past. Of course, when I say “we”, I’m speaking as an Arab, as a Maghrebi Arab. And so, as things change, we pick up the latest version. And besides, it’s a bit like the logic of oral traditions, which are updated without always having a written reference. I think that’s it, we also find things that come from this oral tradition, even though music has been written in the Arab world for a very long time, at least in the spheres of classical music, so-called classical and institutionalised music.
But this piece is also part of my practice as a musician and composer, since I came to France, studied jazz and played with quite a few musicians playing Western instruments. So I also had to work on classical and jazz harmony, because it’s still tonal music. It’s the same principle harmonically, and I composed a piece precisely because many of my pieces are actually case studies, they’re composition exercises really, or at least they start out as exercises, and I composed something in that mode.
And there, I played with this ambiguity found in both versions. So, I’ll play an excerpt from my own piece. This is a duet for oud and piano. It’s from my latest album: “Conte d’un retour au pays imaginaire”, and it’s from the second suite for oud and piano, called Déterritorialisation, which is movement number one.
That was the introduction… It starts now, in fact, it was at the beginning…
So that’s the theme I composed, which is in the mode mentioned earlier…
This is the mode… That’s the tonic… and that’s the octave… normally involving the minor 9th minor, but what I’m playing is here is a major (i.e. natural) 9th.
This major ninth comes from this (Cairo Congress) recording by Ya la kawmi dhayaouni, so it’s a small detail that shows that, in a composition, there are lots of hardly perceptible things.
This whole story was an effort to explain just this note. An effort, in fact, to explain why at a certain moment, I don’t know what key we’re in and why there’s this major ninth coming in…
FIND OUT MORE
His mentioned album : Conte d’un retour au pays imaginaire
His PhD thesis : Ethnographie d’un réseau européen de joueurs de oud arabes : enjeux du traitement sonore d’un instrument en mutation
Oud Wanderings: Abderraouf Ouertani & Susannah Knights- Live in Concert; 18th August 2024
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