Ibrahim Farghali applauds a project encouraging musical dialogue That the old adage West is West and East is East and ne'er the twain shall meet proves particularly trite when it is a matter of cross-cultural musical dialogue, shorn of the value-judgments that so weigh down words, was demonstrated by the Swiss- Egyptian musical project Al-Sabr Gamil. After a year of preparations supervised by Essam El-Mallah, a professor of ethnomusicology at Zurich University, whose idea the project was, Al-Sabr Gamil held concerts last month in several Swiss cities before moving to Egypt for a series of performances in Cairo and Alexandria. Funded by Prohelvetia, the Swiss Arts Council, the aim of the project was to produce musical compositions blending Western melodies with patterns drawn from oriental taqasim, or solo recitals, played on both Eastern and Western instruments and bringing the two musical traditions into dialogue. The project brought together Swiss composers, using Western notation, and Egyptian composers. Among the latter were Abdou Dagher, already well-known in Europe for his skilful improvisations of taqasim on the violin, Atiyya Sharara, a virtuoso violinist, and the young composer Mohamed Saad Basha, an assistant professor at the Cairo Conservatoire. Two compositions, Al-Sabr Gamil (Patience is Beautiful) and Gamil Al-Sabr (Beautiful is Patience) attested to Basha's skill in combining the clarinet with the nayy and the qanun with the violin to produce original melodies. Fikri El-Qinawi contributed a composition on the rababa entitled Sidi Ana (Master of My Soul). The Swiss composers included Paul Giger, Alfred Zimmerlin, Erica Goudibert and Mischa Kaser. The Swiss-Egyptian performers included Amal Ayyad on the qanun, El-Qinawi on the rababa, Ahmed Arnab on the nayy, Giger on the violin, Anna Spina on the viola, Regula Schneider on the clarinet, Walter Grimmer on the cello and Khaled Hegazi on the duff, tabla (drum) and the riqq (tambourine). Ayyad says that through participating in the project she explored hitherto undiscovered capacities in the qanun. The Swiss composers spent much time studying oriental instruments, particularly the qanun, drawing on their own folkloric musical heritage as they entered into a dialogue with oriental music, as was the case in Giger's composition. Just as the Western composers brought out hitherto unknown potentials in oriental instruments, the Egyptian compositions, especially Dagher's, adapted Western instruments to the melancholia of oriental music. The Swiss team spent three weeks in Cairo last June, rehearsing Dagher's composition Al-Risha wal-Kaman (The Plume and the Violin) at his house, and some of them, including violin-player Spina, started training in taqasim. In addition to the contrapuntal texture of the compositions and performances, the cross-cultural nature of the encounter was palpable in the relationship between the musicians during the rehearsals. For lack of a common language, Schneider and the rababa and nayy players resorted to hand gestures and sign language. And during a recital by the Egyptian musicians of an oriental composition, Spina ululated, Egyptian-style, at the moment when the melody turns festive. The project began with six compositions by six composers, explains El-Mallah, and as it evolved came to comprise 11 pieces. In addition to performances, El-Mallah ran two workshops in which El-Qinawi and Arnab gave presentations on playing techniques for both the nayy and the rababa, the way the instruments are made and their history. The first European concert, which took place in an old church in Boswil, was packed to capacity. The audience, some of whom had come especially from France and Germany, demanded encores from Dagher and El-Qinawi. This was followed by performances in Zurich, Basel and Lucerne, as well as a concert in Rottenberg. The group performed yesterday, Wednesday, at the Gomhouriya Theatre. Their final concert is scheduled to take place today, 14 December, at Beit El-Harrawi at 8pm.
