Maqamats, Sacred Geometry and the Celestial Worlds

Posted on November 21, 2011 by Ian Whiteman

For years I have tried to understand what the maqams are (or maqamats, known as nawbas in Morocco) and I hope these few words here don’t confuse things further. In these posts I have always sought out subjects where the global homogenisation of culture is forcing out the subtler and more indigenous remains of previous traditions – things which enrich and complete the human experience whether language, calligraphy, art, architecture or music. A great loss to us all and future generations. This mode of music is one of the things being pushed out by rigid modes of western harmony. But first I want to step back a bit for a more general view of things.

Sacred Geometry
In my early years I was very conditioned against the concepts of sacred geometry by views instilled in us in the early 1970s. We were taught to view it as a kind of masonic Schuonian conspiracy. Since the drugged days of the 1960s when things like numerology were the rage, I have been a bit suspicious of mathematical explanations of the universe as the truth is that it left us all confused. Like the teachings of Gurdieff and Ouspensky, it was all redolent of higher realities but in fact left you amazed, but helpless, with no prescription of what to do.

A few years ago I saw a short lecture in Granada by John Martineau, publisher of Wooden Books, about sacred geometry and I revised a lot of my opinions on the subject. He expounded on the empirical geometry in creation from flower forms to shell formations and crystal structures – the undeniable geometry underpinning, well just about everything. A recent BBC TV series called The Code presented by Marcus du Sautoy also explored the mathematics of everything in existence as the key to understanding it. Whereas John Martineau suggested a new interest for me in divine mathematics, Marcus Sautoy left me quite uninspired with little understanding of it. The Code was a triumph of form over content with admittedly stunning computer graphic presentations but nothing that really moved me or got to the nub. What both Martineau and du Sautoy had in common was that they described well something fundamentally true except that they shied from talking about the root truth which is what I was looking for. In this, they share where modern science leaves us all short changed. Like the Hadron collider, the multi billion pound white elephant buried in the ground under the French Swiss border, it may unveil secrets about the stuff of what we perceive as solid matter but seems likely to leave us none the wiser about what it all really means. This vast subterranean tomb will deeply puzzle future archeologists whose only explanation will be that it was an underground 28 km greyhound race track.

Such divinely ordained things as the Golden Section are remarkable in that they seem to underpin beautiful proportions in the natural world as well as man made creations in art and architecture. I only digress into geometry here to illustrate how I also perceive the musical maqams by analogy. Empirical geometry – empirical musical harmonies. The golden proportions of musical harmony. I have no proof for this but I have hunch that the maqams are what the Pythagorians called the music of the spheres. These are harmonic sequences which are empirical, in other words they are not man made. They have pre-existed everything and permeate all of the created universe which includes us.

Maqamats
Pythagoras connected the harmonic relationships of the earth and the celestial bodies with musical harmony and beauty and so should we with the maqamats. The origin of the maqamats is not known but my assessment is as follows. Most of us in western cultures understand the difference between the moods of major and minor keys. These are two modes which we are preconditioned to respond to. Minor – sad. Major – happy. Now imagine many more modes which we are capable of responding to involuntarily but which right now we are not familiar with. This is the clue. Given this we can enter into a new universe of musical experience. Not the arbitrary emotional and horizontal imaginal worlds of western musical composers but something truly celestial and in harmony with something greater than the human self and a form of worship in the right situation. This music is not one of sensuality but one of elevated and inspiring beauty. It is not some cold mathematical world either but one which unlocks the heart and its secrets. This understood, western music can still inspire and unlock incredible zones of emotional experience which can be beneficial but may not be very pleasant sometimes in its inner evocations, like the music of Wagner. But it can be a window into the world that produced that music and musically very moving. But it is not celestial music.

Music is for some a difficult territory. For reasons of culture and religious legal opinions, some people have forbidden it to themselves and their communities. I have never visited India or Pakistan but I know that some sublime music has come from the subcontinent and this aversion to music appears to be something that lives mostly in expatriate communities in Europe or wherever. This is a touchy subject and I have always tried to be understanding of others’ restrictive views but I get frustrated that it’s all looked at in a black and white fashion. I’d better say a few things here before anyone reading this shuts me off  and before I get back to the subject of maqams which is what I really wanted to write about.

Like language, music can be profane or sacred, and it springs from whatever the intention is. George Martin, erstwhile record producer of the Beatles, (who I briefly worked with in the 196os), is famous for saying there’s only good music and bad music. And I’m with him there 100%. Music has been a huge part of my life and I know it inside out from Thomas Tallis to Verdi by way of Tamla Mowtown and John Coltrane from Gilbert and Sullivan to British Folk Rock and Classical Andalusi Maghrebi music, both as performer, writer or audience. Forgive my pun but music underscores western civilisation, as it has my own life, in the sense that it gives you an emotional taste of a period of time that has gone and timelessness in the case of timeless music. And you can learn from that. But with mass commercialisation of music it is not what it was and in many ways I enjoy more and more silence and the sounds of nature as there is too much pointless music around, horribly amplified, unconnected to meaning or context. Music in cars, radios, TVs, ipods, supermarkets, planes, hotel foyers, ringtones – absolutely everywhere.  Just too much. The real power of music is not now understood, having become another commodity to be exploited for a quick dollar. Much as I love music I’d be the first to warn of its dangers but also the first to advertise its huge benefits. But no reason to ban it. You would need an Inquisition to do that.

On the plus side music (singing included) can elevate the spirit, provide a release from stress and even be applied as a therapy for psychological and physical illnesses. Music therapy, was /is something specifically related to the maqamats and well known to the Ottomans and the Andalusians as it restored some kind of harmony, with the use of mainly instrumental music, to disturbed souls. Whilst maristans in both east and west were dedicated to this treatment in times past, it is now almost a forgotten science. Something well worth reviving. There is a quite a bit on the web relating to this subject and its revival in Turkey.

Dar-ül Kurr’a Madrasa, Erdine, Turkey. This hexagonal building was dedicated to music therapy as well as hydrotherapy in Ottoman times.

The maqamats exist in many musical cultures: in Egypt, Syria, Western China, Turkey, India and of course Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia. They share much of the basic maqamat harmonic sequences and have very similar names but reflect the local musical traditions and to the uneducated ear can sound quite unrelated. I can’t claim to be an expert on this but am exploring this intuitively from what I do know from 40 years practical experience of Moroccan qasaid.  I do know that Ziryab brought this musical science from Baghdad to Cordoba where he created the great Andalus maqamats blending Arab music from the Persian courts with Iberian music, Christian and even Jewish music of the peninsular. It left Spain for north Africa after the overthrow of Granada but only half of it is left extant passed down through families and now taught in conservatoires.

http://www.maqamworld.com/ is an interesting web site dedicated to explaining the modal system of arabic music. Worth a visit but it might be just a bit complicated for most people. And pity its interactive bits don’t work on a Mac. It’s pretty difficult for the western mind to wrap itself around the concepts involved on the site but it’s useful as a reference point.

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Write it! Sing it!

Posted on November 20, 2011 by Ian Whiteman

Where I live there are so many alternative therapies on offer up and down our valley. They include such things as underwater ti-chi to sacral osteopathy, magnet therapy, raw food cults etc., and many you have never heard of before. So one more may hardly be noticed. But I have happened upon what I think could be called quite legitimately a therapy and offer it along with the rest. It combines calligraphy and singing. Two quite different activities but when combined they have a dynamic and beneficial effect. This is why.

I have conducted a few Andalusi calligraphy courses down here in southern Spain in Andalusia over the past 8 years and they  consisted of teaching students, who claimed no previous skill in this field, to write very simple calligraphy of an old arabic poem in this ancient Andalusi script (pictured above). This kind of writing had previously come to an abrupt halt 500 years ago in Spain when arabic was banned by Ferdinand and Isabella, the conquerors of Granada. You had to face the Inquisition if you were found speaking arabic, writing it or owning books written in it. They piled the books high in the streets and squares and burnt them all. Burning people in auto de fes came afterwards. So writing in this particular style was like reconnecting the nerve endings of a civilisation brutally severed from its roots.

These courses would be held over a period of a few days with each student copying from an existing calligraphic sample. Calligraphy is by its very nature an exercise in hand eye coordination and requires stillness, neatness, concentration and awareness – brain activity in other words. The slightest tremor of thought is registered immediately on paper like some kind of seismometer indicating shivers in the earth’s crust. For people habituated to phone-texting and computer keyboards and the ever present TV remote, this can be challenging but with patience the struggle yields results. For people suffering low attention spans it can be a gratifying exercise as it produces good results quickly. Often as good as the sample being copied. Indeed I had students who after one day were producing good copies of this ancient arabic script, who previously had no experience with a calligraphy pen. It’s the beginning of an enjoyable process of self discovery. But it didn’t end there.

Come the evening the students would then meet in the enormous mosque attached to the Rosales madrassah (above), where the course was being held, to sing the poem which in the day time they had been copying. Write it! Sing it! was my slogan. The mosque had great acoustics which enhanced the voices. The act of singing is of course a totally different kind of exercise from calligraphy, requiring intense use of the lungs and the voice, two functions very closely connected to the physical heart. A voice coach trains the human voice using certain exercises, one of which is repeated strong out-breaths like that of  the sacred dance of some sufi brotherhoods. This strengthens the diaphragm and exercises the lungs, emphasis being placed on completely filling the lungs. Most people only use half their lung capacity and only by consciously lowering the diaphragm can full lung volume be reached. Hyper ventilation  can result but is not the point of it and is probably caused by incorrect breathing in the first place. This exercise is used by voice coaches to help people sing in tune and ultimately to have perfect pitch. So we would perform some of these exercises before trying to sing. And singing in tune is a real problem for people who have grown up in some Asian communities in the UK where music has not been encouraged or even allowed in the home and where things like singing and keeping time in a rhythm prove almost impossible to do.

Singing in tune in other words is not a psychological process but to do with developing physical harmony and well being. These two opposite activities of writing and singing seem to create an alchemy which produces nothing but good and is evidenced to me by people becoming happier, more relaxed, confident and expressive – even ecstatic in some cases. For some it was like seeing some insect unfurl its wings as it emerges from a long hibernation. Of course singing the poem in classic old Andalusian tunes was similarly reconnecting with a thousand year old tradition that only survived by retreating to Morocco where it carried on as a living tradition till now. This was the great ouvre of music that Ziryab created in the time of the Caliph Abdarrahman III in Cordoba a thousand years ago. It drew on Christian and Iberian music but was was based around the great maqamat tradition Ziryab brought from Baghdad. The maqamats are rather like the concept of sacred geometry but applied to sound, which you will find embodied in the music traditions of Turkey, Syria, Egypt and India – even China (and of course North Africa). They are God given harmonic sequences around which the melodies are composed and have probably existed in many previous civilisations. These harmonic sequences are known to have deep healing properties, especially for people with mental disturbance but also for people with just physical ailments. Music therapy is a fascinating area which it is worth making another post about as it having a revival in Turkey and needs reviving as a science.

As I said there is no psychology involved in recovering the ability to sing in tune and to beat a time in a rhythm. A healthy happy person will do this naturally from a very young age. But bringing these two traditions together which once flourished in Andalusia, is clearly a potent thing and is more than just any old singing and any old calligraphy. It has secrets. It’s a medicine and it’s recreation as well. It is is worth adding that in these times, people in the west generally sing much less than previous generations. It may have been hymns, or even great choral works by JS Bach or Verdi that we sang, even madrigals and folk songs or just standing round the piano singing pop songs. But it was singing. We enjoyed it.

The modern lifestyle does all it can to take us away from these kind of activities. It wants the masses to consume culture, not participate in it. It discourages ordinary people from artistic expression by making it seem that only experts matter or have any worth. Not that we don’t need excellence in these skills but not so that the rest of us become couch potatoes just watching others doing it – by yielding to mediated entertainment. It’s like slow murder, robbing you of your life. Getting off the proverbial butt has never been so important so get out there – write it, sing it!

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The Art of Art

Posted on November 8, 2011 by Ian Whiteman

In the aftermath of Steve Jobs’ passing various snippets about his life became public or better known to the public. Whilst being beatified as a genius by some and demonised as a monster by others there were certain sentiments which emerged which struck a chord with me. Notably some themes from his speech to the assembled graduates of Stanford University in CA some years back (above). He said that he dropped out of university but then dropped back in …to what? A calligraphy and lettering class. Now that makes a lot of sense to me as I have always believed this to be a foundational skill that has been forgotten by recent generations. No wonder it inspired him. In his speech he also urged the students passionately to pursue their inner voice,  to pursue what they loved. To do things with love. That also struck a chord which I will come to later. Also he mentioned death which is also indicative of a kind of realism that came into his life after he was diagnosed with cancer. Interestingly Jobs’ birth name was Abdul Lateef Jandali having a Syrian father, Abdul Fatah Jandali, who was from a notable sharif family from Damascus.

When I was awaiting to go to London many years ago, aged 18 to Architectural School, I wrote in my best italic handwriting on crisp white laid paper, to an architect in Cambridge named Christophe Grillet asking for a holiday job. His ex wife lived in my town and birthplace, Saffron Walden, which is all but 15 miles south of Cambridge and suggested I try for a job. Even the hand addressed envelope was a work of art. I was very pleased to be accepted. He said it was my good handwriting that got me the job. I don’t think my current scrawl would do the same, though if put to the test I could still manage a mean italic script but only done very slowly. Good calligraphers write skilfully and quickly and it’s a marvellous skill which all should attempt.

When I finally got to the Architectural Association School in London, which was the Mecca of Modernism in 1963 and still is, our very first project was unexpectedly on Roman lettering. Whether they still teach this I don’t know but the teachers (practising architects) were obviously fully aware that inbuilt into Roman lettering is a sense of scale, proportion, beauty, tradition, language, culture and so on and to master it is no mean feat but it grants the student an intuitive sense of design and is a good starting point for an architectural education.

I believe that Jobs’s introduction to typography began in those lettering classes and it infused all his life’s work. It granted him a meticulous and fanatic eye for detail and perfection inside and outside his computer products. I know people who work in Apple and some complain of the corporate climate but you have to admit the company understands marketing deeply and how to make people value their gadgets and to spend a lot of money on them. But as well as the slick marketing it’s the typography that is always so well considered – if a bit cold and clinical. But always exactly right.

Compare this to some of the Asian giants like Samsung who have really aped the Apple orchard in so many ways. I recently got a new phone, a Samsung Galaxy Ace, as my Vodafone points got me it for virtually nothing. It’s an imitation iPhone without doubt, same size colour, weight. It’s not bad as imitations go but from the very beginning before it’s out of the box you know that its no Apple product. The print of the word ‘Ace’ is so unutterably bad typographically that you just wonder what surprises the phone within holds for you. The Android operating system is Google’s so it is pretty good and preferred by some but in no way as sveldt as Apple’s multimillion selling offering. Typography sits right at the heart of all design projects but the corporate moguls for whom these projects are just money spinning schemes are mostly unaware of the fact – unlike Steve Jobs. Forgive me if I seem, like Steve, a little obsessive about this subject but typographers usually are. You have to be obsessive as the details really matter. The black tea shirted Apple sinyasins who work in the Apple stores, and who appear in their marketing videos, rightly scare some people. There is a cultish quality to it, but this is what love and devotion does to people. In the Jobsian quest for perfection even he must have realised at some point that nothing he  could make could be totally perfect. We can only aim for perfection.

This brings me to his other comment about love of what you do. Periodically I have given short courses on calligraphy, to wit Andalusian arabic calligraphy, which for me (as with all good arabic calligraphy) is the core of much of my own work. Ibn Khaldun wrote that the Andalusians valued penmanship higher than many other disciplines. On these courses, strangely but predictably I would be always asked the question: what is Islamic Art? I get stumped by this question as in some ways it is quite inane.  What is Islamic anything? I don’t think it’s a question anyone asked themselves in history because they didn’t look at the world like that. Any religious person, Jew, Christian or Muslim or whatever, lives his or her life and does whatever they do to earn a crust and more than likely enjoys what they do whether it is making shoes, painting walls, planting carrots, designing buildings, teaching children, you name it, but not with this self conscious idea that what they were doing was Christian or Hindu or Muslim. Most creative people borrow ideas from all over the place. The difference is not the label but whether it is done with love, as this is what comes out in the wash, so to speak. The artifact, the child, the calligraphy, the song, the speech, the book, the curry, the home grown potatoes …. all resonate with what was put into them. If it was love it will be clear, as the human heart responds intuitively to it.

Dr. Mesaru Emotu, the Japanese scientist, demonstrated conclusively that our energies affect water crystals instaneously. So then how about everything else? Doesn’t love, one of the strongest of human emotions, affect everything? Doesn’t love make the world go round?  Charles Dickens wrote that in the 1800s and nothing has changed and the world is still going round.

(PS Apparently the adjective Islam-ic wasn’t used in arabic in the premodern world. Some kind of fragmentation has taken place in which we stand outside everything looking at an idea rather than being it, worried about all these issues. We’ve become tourists looking on, overly concerned with identities and labels. It’s as if the language has become debased along with everything else. I’d be interested in any further light that could be thrown in this as I am no arabist.)

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The curse of the PA

Posted on October 4, 2011 by Ian Whiteman

The theme of this post is one that has really bothered me for some time and just how to get into has meant delaying its publication for some weeks. On the surface it appears a rather trivial subject but the more I examine it the more I think it of importance and long neglected as a topic. As I have said before, I am interested in room elephants and this is a big hairy one. A real mastodon.

For those unaware of what a PA is, it is not in this case a Personal Assistant but a Public Address system. You all appreciate them when they work well and enable a voice or a musician to be heard clearly but you also know immediately when they go wrong or are misused.

When you last winced at the screeching microphone feedback at the last public meeting or event you went to, did you bother to think how many times you had experienced such a thing. On the other hand how many times have you heard the cry from the back “speak up we can’t hear you!” I thought a little research was necessary after a recent visit to Morocco where it seems in the last ten years everyone has gone PA crazy and which has really prompted this investigation. The very first use of a public address system (PA) was as long ago as 1915 in San Francisco USA. Here’s what happened and why.

It was October 1915 and it appears that the new Civic Auditorium in San Francisco was about to be dedicated and “Magnavox” equipment was installed to reinforce the voice of the Speakers. Governor Hiram Johnson was supposed to be present, but was unable to attend in person due to a severe cold. It was therefore arranged to run a special line between the Governor’s home in Green Street San Francisco and the Auditorium, in order to transmit the message. Hiram Johnson, in front of a microphone, sitting in front of his fireplace at home delivered his speech which was heard in the Auditorium some miles away. This may have appeared as a great step forward for mankind but 86 years later I just wonder if it really was. Read on.

I was in Fes, Morocco in June last year (2010) seated directly in front of eight of the Fes singers, some of Morocco’s greatest exponents of Andalusi singing, under the direction of Muhammad Bennis, who were doing what they do a lot of, and that is the celebration held 40 days after a funeral. It was staged in a large courtyard with an audience who, for part of the event, were eating cous cous. These are quite common events in Morocco and singing for these is how many of  the professional singers in Morocco make a living. The Fes singers are truly some of the best singers you will ever hear sing in this style but I do have a gripe.  A big gripe. Despite two hours of the most sublime singing from a selection of the Burda, the Hamziyya and the Fiashiyya and much else from their enormous repertoire, they had made the mistake in my opinion of employing a really powerful PA system. It was just like an old rock concert in fact in its painful amplified acoustics. I have tried to understand why, and even sympathise with their plight, but I’m afraid my conclusion is that it was a monumental mistake to have introduced PA systems into this most intimate of vocal performances.

OK, they need to be heard and sure enough this is one way of doing it except that Moroccans more than anybody do not need amplification, as they almost universally have natural megaphone voices. But in this case each singer had his own microphone and use them they did with an almost Tom Jones type of microphone technique. But the effect of amplifying the voice in this way seriously distorts the voice and robs it of its unique acoustic quality which is what best affects the listener – voice to heart with no intermediary. It was also ear-splittingly loud for those unfortunate enough to be near the loudspeakers and tainted as well by a really crude electronic reverb. What’s more, the polyphony of the performance, i.e. the ability of the listener to locate the origin of each voice, is lost entirely. With all this it is hard to try and see the benefits of amplification, but some there must be. But in this case its intimate visceral beauty was utterly lost.

For centuries this kind of singing worked absolutely fine in the riyad courtyards, the mosques and zawiyyas of old Morocco with no amplification at all. So why has the PA become necessary? Weren’t the beautiful reverberating spaces of these old buildings enough? Clearly it is in part because it is just there, and the temptation to amplify is too difficult to resist. Also there is definitely an element of fashion about it but no consideration of the aesthetics of it at all.

PA systems have been around the developed world for some time but relatively recently in the third world. And I know few people who really like them although the majority just accept it rather in the same way that people accepted strip lighting in homes, offices and mosques even though it was harsh and ugly in every way. But it was the fashion and just part of the modernist package that had hitherto only invaded European cultures. Audio reinforcement had actually become quite a sophisticated science over the last 50 years with big auditoriums like the Festival Hall in London utilising very high quality and almost imperceptible audio amplification. Nothing like the crude PA systems of rock concerts amplifying already electric music to deafening levels from which it seems the Moroccans have taken their cue.

Of course it was not only musicians who saw the benefits of the PA system and how you could reach ever larger and larger audiences with the vastly increased box office receipts. Politicians and religious speakers realised they could preach their message to larger and larger audiences. The Third Reich also realised this was useful way of imposing itself in a big way on a lot of people before television could do the same with less bother. Mr Hitler used the microphone to win over friends and influence people in a big way as we all know and the Nuremberg Rallies (pictured above) were the clearest demonstration of this. The PA at the political rally was a symbol of power as it inflated the presence of the speaker till he was like some thunderous Divinity addressing the human race. But in a way it was cheating. Stories of old indicate that orators could miraculously reach hundreds or even thousands of people with no artificial assistance. The oratory style of religious speakers from the subcontinent of this time (as well as their frock coats) were modelled on the pre-PA oratory techniques of British Victorian politicians. But put that in front of a microphone and you have a frightening and deafening result. For the prophet Jesus, addressing the 5,000 was for sure an acoustic affair but now the audiences at religious conferences are assaulted with several thousand watts of amplified power. I’m not sure this is a good thing. The Nuremberg precedence is not a good one and even if the intention is a good one there is an inherent danger in the form of this kind of meeting with the speaker on a podium addressing the people with his voice greatly amplified. Add to that the giant video screens and you have a pretty deadly mix. Traditionally in the Islamic world , for very good reason, meetings would be on the same level with men seated in a circle or clustered around a teacher or a speaker. Sometimes the speaker, like an Imam or a teacher, would be slightly raised on a chair. But the artificially amplified voice, is like a kind of artificial podium high above the audience where there is no equality, rather like the theatrical stage, from which all manner of drama could be enacted and something open to abuse.

But for the political rally, audio quality was not as important as it was to music. As long as you could depict the words that was enough. Orchestral and choral concerts need no amplification as they are loud enough already. Even soloists both vocal or instrumental, never really need amplification – although nowadays subtle reinforcement is more than likely in a large venue. But this is a long way from the crude use of amplification that has invaded traditional cultures like Morocco. I sincerely believe this technology is corroding these old cultures whether it be in the mosque, at a musical celebration like a wedding or at a funeral celebration. But I might just be a lone un-amplified voice in the crowd!

The effect of  unadulterated acoustic voices on the human organism is central to its efficacy in expanding the heart and healing the body. Amplification interferes with this subtle process mostly for ill. Despite having ears on either side of the head the human organism can comprehend sound from a 360º surrounding sphere, above, below, right, left, front and back. The highly amplified blast denies this and effectively dumbs down the experience to just a one dimensional homogenised vibration. When stereophonic recorded sound was made possible it took advantage of that fact that we are naturally able to place the source of a sound if given enough information to reconstruct the stereo picture in our heads. But we are capable of much more. Many attempts have been made to create wrap round reproduced sound but has only really utilised in cinemas and home Dolby systems. In theory this could be a life enhancing experience but it would have to be so subtly executed.

When I was studying architecture in London in the late 1960s my fifth year thesis experimented with some of these ideas. I envisaged a kind of geodesic dome covered with an acoustic skin of canvas. Inside the dome were suspended many very high fidelity sound monitors through which sound could be projected and gently manipulated in many ways. It took advantage of what I described above, of our ability to perceive sound coming from a multitude of directions. The resulting environment could be used for theatre, musical performance, singing, exhibitions…almost anything comes to mind. With the kind of control of amplified sound that we now have the result could be truly stunning with subtle atmospheric directional reverberation, delays, movement and so on. It was called an Electronic Sound Space Synthesiser. Sadly this never came about even though at the time, pre-computers, it was all technically feasible though very expensive. My point is that the idea of Public Address could be used creatively and beautifully – but that in truth it all sadly gets reduced to a low common denominator – the over the top rock concert amplified over-kill. Maybe this is inevitable with all technology. It is of its very nature to sink to its grossest manifestation.

Is this the inevitable price we have to pay for modernism? To see all traditional forms dumbed right down till they are just one dimensional entertainment. Or is it not too late to try and bring some awareness of how this technology could be used to enhance rather than destroy. Or is abandoning the PA the only solution. For Muhammad Bennis and his singers I think it would prove a tough challenge to change.

In a future post I want to gather what I can about music therapy and the maqamats as it is intimately related to what has just been discussed. Sound can heal the human organism and it can kill it. A weapon of peace or a weapon war! And its time us, the long suffering public, fought back. I want to free Morocco from the curse of the PA. (and Spain come to that). Anyone with me? I feel the odds are against me!

You can read all about the history of PAs here:  http://www.historyofpa.co.uk/

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Death and Taxes

Posted on September 1, 2011 by Ian Whiteman

It’s the old chestnut. Death and taxes: the two inevitable facts of life except taxes are avoidable if you know how, whereas death is not.

The other day a female stand up comedienne named Lucy Montgomery stated on BBC Extra that she wanted played at her funeral Welcome to Hell, a record by a UK heavy metal rock band called Venom. (ouch) She could have been just joking in a kind of Goth fashion but I must admit I didn’t see the joke. It’s one of those things that casually slip out of folks without much forethought. It’s curious that people who deny any kind of divinity or afterlife experience will often admit that Hell exists even if they believe Heaven doesn’t. I suppose the logic is that at least you know that the worst that can possibly be expected is Hell so you can do what you like with no surprises later, whereas Heaven has to be earned. For most people, seeing the manifestations of a heavenly world on earth as expressed in architecture, art or music implies a belief in its existence afterwards and even the most die-hard (excuse the pun) atheist can be moved by such things. Maybe it takes imagination to advance your life to that moment when you leave this world. But imagination is in short supply these days as all the image-making is being created for you by the image-creators of Hollywood or wherever. So the images of Heaven or Hell are being played out there in the mediated reality, not inside us.

How many accountants or actuaries have every detail of their lives worked out to the last penny except for that moment when the axe falls and the angel of death comes a-calling.  Didn’t they factor this in to their Excel spreadsheet? All the taxes dodged and avoided, all unpredictable events insured and still the one certain thing that we know will happen has been completely ignored. Truly amazing.

This post is short. Like life.

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The silken curtain call

Posted on August 30, 2011 by Ian Whiteman

When the singer Amy Winehouse died recently it brought out the usual hypocrisy from the world’s media but largely hid the real tragedy that underpins such happenings. I didn’t know Amy’s music at all – wrong generation – but her demise was a familiar pattern to the various musicians and actors I knew or had worked with in the past, who died victims of their chosen lifestyles. Some of them had a stay of execution till later in their lives like the talented singer songwriter John Martyn, but others like Rick Gretch, Marc Bolan and Sandy Denny (all of whom I worked with) all died young for different reasons.

All of these artists were talented musicians but couldn’t ultimately deal with where their talent had taken them to, often aided and abetted by adoring fans and record companies. As Eric Clapton was reputed to have said: music is the drug, It is what kept them looking for an ultimate experience and an ultimate music at any price – something I can understand. Many musicians and actors explain why they keep going with their pretty tortuous lifestyles. They all say it is the star status and the applause after the final climactic number or the ecstatic curtain call. This momentary experience has been likened by some performers to a silken drug.

I just don’t go with the idea that without their lifestyle we would somehow be deprived of some great art. A lot of people have made a lot of money from other peoples’ pain, and music and film are two of the global businesses where it happens frequently. I’d rather these artists had lived fulfilled happy lives, hidden from the world, rather than publicly burning up like shooting stars in the upper atmosphere. All for what?

Almost universally, fame, and more so, the craven need for it, is considered by all spiritual teachings to be the last great barrier to a soul’s essential development and final return to God. It is a triumph of the lower self (nafs al-amara). The celebrity obsessed world we now live in reflects how, like some kind of virus, the desire for fame has gripped the masses. However some fame, one can rightly say, is God given, and something bestowed rather than claimed or engineered by the dark arts of PR. But its danger lurks in the breasts of all men and women and we have to constantly check our intentions.

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In defence of the polymath

Posted on August 30, 2011 by Ian Whiteman

When Dr Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google, berated the English recently for having a too unbalanced educational system I could see his point. But my own very English education looking back was actually very broad and probably accounted for my being more poly than math to be honest as all I remember was doing just about anything I wanted over a seven year period from arts to the sciences and everything in between with no thought of broadening my mind.

Us polymaths, if that is what we are, often get attacked for being jacks of all trades and masters of nothing at all. And actually that is true in many cases. But the classical definition of a polymath includes such dilettantes as Leonardo da Vinci, Aristotle, Goethe and Isaac Newton so we are not all a bunch of dabblers. I generally support the idea of having a broad education and embracing as many skills, arts, crafts, sciences and languages as possible, stopping to specialise only for the  purposes of earning a crust.

This is where my usual plug for Andalusia comes in as if there was ever a bunch of polymaths it was in the glory days of the caliphate around the 10th-12th century, something that Wikipedia conveniently glosses over. Many of the famous names of that time had a multiplicity of unlikely skills compared to the super specialists of this age. Importantly they considered religious scholarship as a key science to have under your belt. These days men are more famous for their advocacy of atheism than knowledge of God what with the Hawkins and the Dawkins of this world. Maybe it was because religious knowledge was the fulcrum of all the knowledges that were emerging at that time. Some have likened the expansion of, and thirst for, knowledge in this period of history and the migration of many to Cordoba, to the assembly of talents on the Californian west coast (including Google of course) in our time, where technical genius, entrepreneurship and design have produced an alchemy which has changed the world culture in a very short space of time. Where geek meets freak in other words. Mind you California has always had this pioneering aspect to it. It’s where the UN was founded and where cultural and economic models (not always good) have set the trend worldwide as if the prevailing winds have blown them across to Europe and Asia.

Take, for example, Abbas Ibn Firnas (810–887 A.D.), also known as Abbas Qasim Ibn Firnas for example. He was an Andalusian polymath: an inventor, engineer, aviator, physician, Arabic poet, and Andalusian musician. Of Berber descent, he was born in Ronda, Spain, and lived in the Emirate of Córdoba. He is best known for an early attempt at aviation. Then there was Ibn Rushd (Averroes) (1126-1198), an Andalusian Arab philosopher, doctor, physician,jurist, lawyer, astronomer, mathematician and theologian. And of course Ziryab, the famous poet, musician, singer, cosmetologist, fashion designer, trendsetter, gourmet, strategist, astronomer, botanist and geographer. I could go on. This kind of agglomeration of talents was the norm in that society. Eric Schmidt hit an uncomfortable nerve. Good for him. The next time you think only a specialist or an expert is qualified to do something then think again.

A full transcript of Dr Schmidt’s speech can be seen here:

http://paidcontent.co.uk/article/419-watch-live-here-eric-schmidts-edinburgh-keynote-and-twitter-reaction/

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Reviving Andalusi script part 2

Posted on August 30, 2011 by Ian Whiteman

The Style
The initial impression of ancient Andalusi scripts is of something beautiful and dynamic, executed quickly and accurately but also with a free spirit, each calligrapher creating their own unique ligatures and flourishes, though still somehow within the compass of the style. The colour of the ink varied from black though to brown, possibly from burnt sesame with a natural variation caused by the ink’s varying density. Those familiar with common arabic would need to get used to certain differences like the fa being dotted below the letter and the qaf being dotted above the letter. But also the many variants of the tarmabuta and the curious stress with which many letters like the alif begin with and the curl of the basic ba form at the beginning of a word. Close study unveils all these little secrets.

[Above: A page of simple Andalusi letter forms by the author using a felt tip pen on ordinary paper used as a teaching aid]

For anyone wanting to unravel all the different Andalusi letter variations I can recommend (url below) a useful essay from a Dutch researcher named Boogert who analysed some Andalusi scripts. His work helps to unknot some, but not all, of the more obscure letter configurations:
http://www.islamicmanuscripts.info/reference/articles/boogert_notes_maghribi_script.PDFI I think this document was designed for researchers and translators trying to decipher old manuscripts rather than an aide for calligraphers but I have found it very useful all the same.

Materials
Without doubt cane reeds would have been used though exactly what these were like we can only guess at. Some suggest the calligraphers of that pre-reconquista period in Spain wrote with a flat reed with a stub end rather like a felt tip. Not like the relatively sophisticated pens used by the Ottomans with their clear angle-cut reed tips. My guess is that most calligraphers had their own personal and secret methods for making pens as they also did for making paper and ink. Anyone interested can experiment themselves, it really isn’t that difficult and is an insurance against the day that you are not able to buy these things in the local store. Although the variegated brown ink style is very attractive, I prefer the black ink made from soot recipes just because it is clearer and more easily available. But you are the best judge.

A lot of trial and error and imitation is necessary for the beginner. Although it is possible to buy calligraphic ink, pens and paper the best ink and pen will always be what you make yourself. Coloured inks were often used in fancy Andalusi qur’anic manuscripts for the harakat (the diacritic marks) as in the sample below.

Making paper from scratch is not that difficult, but it is simpler to buy good quality cartridge and then treat it, dye it with tea, and burnish it before writing on it with an agate polisher. It’s worth borrowing some of the Ottoman methods to achieve this. These recipes can be found on the internet (eg zakariya.net http://calligraphy and qalam.com/index.html) and involve anything from egg white, starch, alum and gum arabic. What we are aiming at is a style of calligraphy, not a tradition for traditions sake and we should feel free to borrow any process which enhances and enriches the work. I’ve found that the more you put into preparation of the materials and prepare yourself mentally and spiritually, the better the result. The end result will reflect the love and care that has gone into all the stages of its production. The moment in time when it was made is captured for eternity. The Jewish rabbis of old had to make a complete immersion bath before they were allowed to write the Torah. Maybe we could benefit from this kind of fastidiousness.

It is a reminder of how modern man takes for granted the whole process of pens, ink and paper and how the whole experience of writing has been dumbed down until we scribble in felt tip pens on cheap copy paper. (what I am forced regrettably to do quite often) And ultimately abandon writing altogether for the keyboard. Arabic calligraphy (any calligraphy in fact) to me is like the electro-cardiogram of the human heart, expressing perfectly the spiritual condition of the calligrapher. By practice and repetition you see clearly before you your inward condition.

The calligraphers of old always taught their students to divide their time equally between collecting samples of calligraphy and studying them closely, (‘gazing’ is the word they used) and the act of writing. When I have given classes in this kind of calligraphy I have seen pretty miraculous results with quite unartistic people producing in a few hours very good copies of a page of an ancient manuscript. Something impossible with the Ottoman styles which require many years of training to get even mediocre results.

[A 19th century illuminated Burda from Morocco]

[ A hand copied Burda for personal use. Fes, 19th century. As printing didn’t exist then, to own such a text necessitated copying by hand if you were able to. A beautiful individual script on poor quality worm eaten paper, written with love and care.]

[close up]


[Above: a page of typesetting incorporating typeset arabic]

Typesetting. Its pitfalls and uses.
This is a huge subject but I’ll try and distill the key points. Roman (ie English, French etc.,) typesetting was based on hand drawn letter forms and although printing began with Gutenberg in Mainz, Germany in 1440, the best early typefaces came out of Italy, France and Britain. (Bembo, Jenson, Baskerville) Printing didn’t really come to Arabic till much much later partly because of its hand scripted nature and making moveable metal type a practical reality didn’t arrive till the beginning of the 20th century in Egypt. The different versions of each letter depended on its position in the word added to the character set making setting much more complicated. But also there were objections from Turkish religious scholars that the quite violent act of the printing press was unbefitting the pure nature of arabic sacred texts.

[Left: Samples of Arabic calligraphy and Roman typesetting/lettering mixed on a page. Far left: A CD cover using the image of an original illuminated Andalusian qur’an from Granada. Now in the State Museum in Berlin]

Many calligraphers don’t like typeset arabic because it does undeniably remove the human element but without it, much useful material would not reach the light of day. Also computer typesetting has displaced the commercial calligrapher. When the Daily Jang, the Urdu newspaper printed out of London, went over to typeset Urdu it put over 10o skilled calligraphers out of action who had to find other jobs. I knew some of them in the 1980s. However, typeset Arabic is here to stay and if used discreetly can be quite effective. Thomas Milo, a dutch computer genius with a knowledge of Arabic, who I worked with in the 1990s,  analysed exactly how good Turkish naskh was constructed by a calligrapher, and produced ways of typesetting hitherto impossible with linear type technology, carefully imitating the way a calligrapher would construct a line and the many ways letters were joined together. It was called Decotype Naskh and you will find it on many computers now although it sacrifices some of the subtleties of its fine tuning plug-in version called Tameem. If it is used well it is effective and I rarely use any other Arabic type in my work.

There were attempts in the 19th century by the French to create an Andalusi Maghrebi kind of metal typesetting and it may have had some success in North Africa. If you go to : http://tntypography.com/pdfs/tntypography-Aisha-poster_web.pdf
you can read some more about this early font and also a more recent exploration of a newer maghrebi script. This is interesting but highlights the problem of shoe-horning such a diverse personal style into a such a homogeonised thing as a typeface. Turkish naskh was such a conformed style that digitising it was quite straightforward. But every Andalusi /Maghrebi style was different defying any possibility of forcing it into a standardised typeset mould. This is an apt metaphor for how typesetting has imposed something on humanity and probably why I like the free spirited nature of the many Andalusi styles. In other words any aspiring scribe would be free to find his own style, within the parameters of the language and the general aesthetic of the tradition.

My chief point behind all this is that with Andalusi calligraphy there is no excuse not to do it. It is all too easy to write off classical Ottoman calligraphy as too difficult to do well and to leave it to the experts and end up doing nothing yourself. But with Andalusi scripts you can achieve something readable and aesthetic very quickly. We live in a world of expertism, leaving us content to sit on the sofa and let someone else do it whatever it is. I appeal to everyone who might read this to put aside the lap top, get out some paper and start to imitate some of the samples shown here. When you get to the reed pen and some real ink then the chances are you will have caught the bug and you will start to burn the midnight oil, not satisfied till it looks good. Then your computer will look strangely out of place.

You will see above some samples of arabic mixed with Roman type and this can be dynamic and beautiful. Alas in the case of the majority of publications coming out of the third world (and the developed world) the results are too often decidedly ugly. We seem to have a generation of designers now who know nothing of their own traditions and who have abandoned themselves to a kind of cod modernism, photoshopping their designs to death.

I stated previously how these very different language forms are a kind of metaphor for the convergence of alien cultures in these times and it is clear to me that you can blend these different cultures together if it is done beautifully. When cultures clash is when there is no awareness of harmony or beauty, period. But if you take the best of say Indian, African or Arab culture (and in our case calligraphy) and you lay it together skilfully with the best of European culture you get something greater than the sum of the parts. The art is knowing how to mix it. It’s not about integration, as if these forms could mutate into a hybrid, but the art of harmonising forms and ideas recognising their unique inherent qualities. Of course a hybrid might result in time. A long time.

 

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Reviving Andalusi calligraphy part 1

Posted on August 17, 2011 by Ian Whiteman

For most people, calligraphy and especially arabic calligraphy is an arcane subject but it’s been a life long involvement for me and I want to introduce some of my own observations on this blog which as far as I can tell aren’t discussed anywhere in the mainstream and which are unabashedly not academic and which I hope will be of interest.

In an age when people rarely touch a pen or pencil and when especially young people are more deft at text input to their smart phones than they are at handwriting, it is suddenly a matter of urgency that handwriting and calligraphy (i.e excellent handwriting) in every language are restored to peoples lives. There are secrets to handwriting which need to be revived and taught to our children before their fingers atrophy and fall off. But I have no idea how you accomplish that, short of making it a compulsory school subject which of course for generations it always was, up to quite a high school age. When students of this time suddenly experience creating beautiful written forms, a universe of delight opens. Arabic calligraphy is artistically and culturally elevating the activity of writing up to another level from English (i.e. Roman) calligraphy. It doesn’t actually require a knowledge of the language to be able to copy the letter forms but it does help and people from Western lands tend to be drawn into it for religious reasons usually as for people learning qur’an etc., you really need to know the written language.

(A non-linear Basmallah in Thuluth script – probably 19th century Turkish)

My interest in arabic calligraphy goes back over three decades to when I first visited Mohamed Zakariya, the well known master calligrapher from Washington DC. In a short meeting with him he ignited my interest enough to take it seriously.  He is primarily a master of the Ottoman styles which include Naskh, Thuluth, Muhaqaq, Nastaliq etc (see the link to his web site on the side bar of this blog) though he ventures occasionally into more obscure styles like kufic and Andalusi Maghrebi. It’s the last of these styles I want to focus on as it is, aside from its beauty, among the world’s threatened indigenous calligraphic styles. Rather like rare languages which are threatened with extinction every day, indigenous calligraphic styles have been over the last few centuries eclipsed by cultural globalisation and mass media.

Evidence suggests that when the Ottoman Empire collapsed, the media centre of gravity of the Arabic speaking world shifted to Egypt which had become one of the first Arab countries to employ printing presses. In fact they led the way with book and newspaper printing, audio recording, radio, film making and because of this became very influential right across the Muslim world. The first text faces in arabic were naturally modelled on naskh, the preferred script of the Ottomans, as it was very readable but also one of the most difficult to write well. It must have had an enormous impact in far flung countries like Algeria, Morocco, Senegal and Nigeria which had their own scripts which had developed over centuries from the very first days of the Muslim empire.

My own fascination with Andalusi script is for several reasons. Firstly that I live in Andalusia and that I like to feel that I’m writing in a language and a script that was dangerous enough to have been banned by the Inquisition so many centuries ago. Aside from that the script itself has deep secrets. If you analyse the form of the script the first thing you notice is its linear nature revealing its ancestry in the kufic scripts of the Arabian peninsular.

(Qur’anic Andalusi script , circa 12th century Spain)

If you compare this with the basmallah at the head of this article the andalusi script is quite different from the Ottoman styles which have left the line and fall in elegant cadences with each word. This linear nature reveals its antiquity as it has descended directly from the early monumental kufic scripts which evolved in the first hundred years after the revelation.

As Islamic culture spread across North Africa the scripts became less formal and the nun for example which hitherto had been vertical like the Hebrew nun started to change and curve into the nun form now written universally in modern arabic.  (below: a page of kufic arabic on vellum. Note that the scribe had no inhibitions about hyphenating words, something strictly avoided in later times)


A page from a Qur’an from Palermo in the Khalili collection (above) illustrates this transition 0f monumental arabic into a more practical and faster and speedier script. Mohamed Zakariya claims that there was always a cursive kind of quick script but only the important documents on vellum have survived.

So what happened in 1492 was that this line of history was cut off when the agents of Ferdinand and Isabella burnt all the books written in arabic in great bonfires in the streets of Granada, the last great muslim city to fall. The few books that escaped show what treasures they must have destroyed and which for this reason are immensely valuable. Another reason I enjoy this form of arabic is that is easy to write and is not subject to the strict rules of Ottoman calligraphy which came later.  Some calligraphers obviously excelled more than others but the styles were very individual rather in the fashion of different handwriting styles in our time. It didn’t aspire to a high art but was practical and beautiful nonetheless. Remember the culture of Andalusia and Morocco was very different from the structured government and bureaucracy of Istanbul and its far flung empire. People in early Muslim Spain wanted writing as a means to an end such was the thirst for knowledge. What was needed was a quick means of recording and transmitting all kinds of information, translations of Greek and Latin texts, books on science, mathematics medicine, law etc. It is reputed that Cordoba in its early days was home to 700 calligraphers working full time copying manuscripts. Most of them women apparently. No printing meant plenty of jobs for scribes.

I must make it clear that I am the greatest admirer of the Ottoman scripts and I have only ever seen the differences with earlier forms as complementary – expressions of beauty in different periods of history. But in defence of the underdog I revert to the Andalusi style because I think this is a script that many could learn well without having the exacting training and gifts to practice the Ottoman styles (which i do know but find incredibly difficult).

I’ll develop this further in a future post to discuss practical ways of reviving the Andalusi styles and some useful reference material you can download. Also how arabic and roman scripts can be blended to beautiful effect. How this convergence of scripts is a metaphor for the kind of cultural convergence taking place in societies everywhere. And whether computer typesetting ( English and Arabic) has any artistic merit.

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Acequias

Posted on July 24, 2011 by Ian Whiteman

Acequia is the Spanish and Arabic word that describes the ancient system of irrigation that, in Andalusia and other parts of Spain, is still the lifeline of small scale agriculture. Much is written of the great old muslim cities of Sevilla, Cordoba and Granada but these are famous of course for their buildings which are just monuments for tourists to gawp at. And beautiful places they are indeed but dead in many ways as well – just relics of a lost world. The acequias, on the other hand, are for me, a living and quite miraculous vestige of a civilisation which was overwhelmed by the greed of the reconquistadors who led Spain into five centuries of darkness, tyranny, injustice and famine. Culminating of course in the Spanish Civil war which ended in 1939.


Most ascequias are private associations which levy a very reasonable fee for a year’s rights to water….and a lot of it too. I speak here from practical experience having used and benefited from them for the last five years. Your land, if it has water rights, is flooded with water at a fixed time in the month or week or else when the neighbour has finished and your time comes. It varies with every association but the farmers jealously guard this life giving resource. Early on when I didn’t fully understand the system I once had an irate farmer jumping up and down waving his arms around in protest at my having taken his time for the water.

The first time my land was flooded with acequia water it was night time and for an hour or so I was wandering around up to my knees in water and mud trying divert it where it was needed with just a torch and a shovel. It was exciting, mysterious and primordial, something which many must have experienced down the centuries. Just you and all this water. Although for much of the year it is very dry here, you learn to respect water as when it does come (like the winter rains) it sweeps everything before it as it comes down the mountain. The most powerful of the natural elements that we daily deal with and so essential to our lives.

The summers are scorching hot here in the Alpujarras – a region which lies in a large valley to the south of the great Sierra Nevada mountain range that is to the south of Granada and which you see in the distance towering behind the famed Alhambra Palace in that city. But despite the heat, the acequia water can flood a field or terrace very quickly with enough water to keep the ground wet enough till the next allotted time, whenever that is, sometimes 10 days or two weeks later. The water itself comes from a variety of sources, mostly river water from the high Sierras but also from wells when the rivers dry up in mid summer. For anyone who grows crops, vegetables or fruit trees or who even just maintains a garden of any sort it is the great giver of life. The acequias also feed the wild flora and fauna of the valleys as the old water courses invariably leak. Without this it would be an arid landscape. Most of the old water courses that I know have been in use for over 500 years and very likely go back much further and are an engineering marvel considering how hostile the area must have been to the first inhabitants up here. I for one would love to know more about them and I’m pretty sure there are detailed histories in Spanish libraries if only my Spanish was better. They really are a living miracle and one of the very tangible legacies of the Moorish presence here not forgetting of course the orange, lemon, grapefruit and pomegranate trees, rice, jasmin, cherries, apricots, saffron and, and, and…

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