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Al-Ahram Weekly 4 - 10 November 1999 Issue No. 454 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 4 - 10 November 1999 Issue No. 454
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Features Profile Travel Living Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Home-made
By Youssef RakhaMany participants at last week's two-day conference on Adolescent Livelihoods (organised by the Population Council and the International Centre for Research on Women) would have agreed that the most colourful aspect of the whole event was the multicoloured bag handed out, which contained the conference papers. The bags, made out of recycled cloth by the adolescent girls living in the garbage collectors' (zabbalin) community in Muqattam, seem to sum up all the benefits of community development. The project in which the girls work is not run by the government but by an NGO: the Association for the Protection of the Environment (APE). It seeks to empower adolescent girls by imparting life skills and providing access to income-generating opportunities through the exploitation of existing resources in the community -- in this case, by recycling material from waste. Finally, the project is very much market-driven.
Abu Khaled (Elias Jubran) owes his vocation to the chance conjunction of a window and a song.
He was a 25-year-old blue-collar employee ("I worked in soldering and welding"); one day, Marmar Zamani, a classic of the Eastern repertoire, drifted uninvited through his window. This was pure oud music, without the accompanying lyrics. When, enchanted, Abu Khaled sought to investigate the source, the neighbour who had been playing offered him the opportunity to see a oud for the first time. The encounter was to prove life-changing. "In Rameh, which is a village in Galilee, the arts were dead. There was nothing: no performance space, no electricity, no practitioners. In the whole village, only one person owned a radio -- a huge thing, battery powered -- and everyone went to his place to listen, at least when his father wasn't listening to the news. Otherwise there was a oud player, just one, who was neither too good nor particularly well-known and, on top of this, seemed to keep a low profile. So it is no exaggeration to say the artistic movement was non-existent..."
This was in 1955-'56. On the fateful evening when he took hold of the instrument, Abu Khaled managed to reproduce the tune almost immediately. He borrowed his neighbour's oud, and in the space of two weeks, "purely by ear", he had already mastered 10 popular songs. "I've always said that to be successful as a oud-maker, you must first be an accomplished oud-player. Only then do you get a genuine idea of the subtle differences in proportions, the position of the strings, the instrument's shape and size, how it all affects the quality of the sound and tuning."
photo: Randa Shaath
This is no joke: "In the end the perfect oud can only be made by someone who's sensitive to all this. A long time ago the best ouds used to come from Damascus, and people still had this idea of the Levantine oud, but in reality by the 1960s and 1970s those made in Syria were no longer any good. Of course this is doubly true today. Currently cheap ouds are available from Egypt and Jordan and they flood the market. They are no good. A really well made oud, one which could be compared to the Shami oud of the early 20th century, has become a rarity."
For the next two months, Abu Khaled played. He only had to hear the tune once to be able to reproduce it. Mohamed Abdel-Wahab and Umm Kulthoum's latest songs were heard live in Rameh for the first time. He learned to read musical notation ("I arranged for someone from Akka to come and teach music in Rameh, to start a course for me and other enthusiasts, but the man turned out to be so utterly boring, so repulsively commercialised that I could only suffer him for two months, by which time I could nonetheless read music and was capable of playing from notation"); learned to play other instruments, notably the violin, and deepened his knowledge of the maqamat ("because of the lack of teachers, I had to read what few music books I found over and over, until I'd learned them by heart"); and, finally, carved himself a niche in the depressingly curbed musical community of Palestinians living under Israeli rule (after 1967 he abandoned soldering and worked as a music teacher). In all this, Abu Khaled would encounter one overriding problem: He had no oud of his own. Nobody was making them apart from a Syrian Jew from Haifa, who charged as much as two months' salary for a oud. "My father had married for the second time, so I couldn't ask him for money. I realised I was incapable of buying a oud. And I really needed one. So I thought, I'll make it myself."
Abu Khaled sips his water contemplatively, looking down. "And this is were the difficulty begins," he says. "I burdened a lot of people, relatives and friends whose help I incessantly sought. I took the measurements of the oud I'd borrowed and made a drawing of it, imagining exactly what it should be like. Then I began to do my research, ask people what kind of wood should be used for which parts of the instrument. I took the drawing to a local carpenter, a relative of mine, and gave him precise instructions. The strings, the pegs -- these I initially just bought. In the evening I would come back from work and go straight to the basement, which I'd transformed into a sort of workshop, and experiment with what he'd produced, put it together and take it apart again, adjust my drawings and go back to him. Throughout that time I could think of nothing else."
It took him six months to get it right -- this was his first, perfect oud. "I was overjoyed." Forty-five years later, Abu Khaled's are among the best and the most expensive ouds in the world. In the intervening period he has made violins, buzuqs, qanouns -- all produced through the same painstaking process of trial and error. He has also developed the skill and acquired the machinery to do his own carpentry. And he does it well.
In 1982 he came up with an ingenious answer for a guitar with quarter-tones -- an invention that would not have been so stubbornly ignored by the Israeli authorities, he says, "had it not been for the [Arab] name on the document submitted to them".
He had started selling since the beginning. Though his ouds were just as good, he sold cheaper than the Syrian from Haifa. And his violins and buzuqs were initially the same -- inexpensive despite their quality. With the increasing proliferation of defective ouds, however, and the gradual contraction of the market, the business has become more and more exclusive. Ouds are usually commissioned before they are made, and have recently cost up to $1,000. "A fully-fledged project would need funding. But it's not commercially viable on any scale. So I have had to deal with individuals even after I applied for early retirement from my teaching post."
Another, fascinating fact: Abu Khaled's initial encounter with oud music roughly coincided with his marriage. Khaled Jubran is an accomplished conductor: "Because there was nowhere he could study Arabic music, it's only now, when he's an established conductor in the Western classical tradition, that he's beginning to discover the Eastern." His younger son, on the other hand, takes an interest in the profession: "He finds his way to the basement during the long holidays and tries his hand at it, but I don't want him to take that road. There don't seem to be any prospects for it, now that the Egyptian and, more recently, the Jordanian markets have flooded us with much cheaper ware. And nobody seems to know the difference any more." But over and above the instruments he has so caringly produced, and the life course his two sons have chosen, Abu Khaled gave birth to a remarkable singer, Kamilia Jubran (a founding member of Sabreen, an all-Arab band based in Jerusalem), as if the sole point of his life was to bring music to the world, through whatever means.
Abu Khaled looks away again. His story has not quite come to an end. Stranded between Israeli rule and a threatened Palestinian identity, he belongs to a whole class of Arabs -- those who stayed in Palestine after 1948 -- whose affliction was abandonment. "It may be slightly better now, and I'm not necessarily going to talk about it, but suffice it to say that there is no provision for Arab music whatever, and good calibres are fast becoming extinct." What can one do but turn one's basement into a workshop? This is home-made culture, as rare and extraordinary as a jewel. Yet Abu Khaled exists, and so do many others like him. Despite an oppressive climate, a nearly lost cause, the fact that oud music once drifted uninvited into his room was not utterly pointless, after all.
