Tom Perchard Other Writing

Other Writing

Epiphany: Umm Kalthum. First appeared in The Wire 268, June 2006

A Lebanese friend came around for lunch, and with him he brought a CD of Umm Kalthum’s Inta Umry (You Are My Life). Kalthum, my friend explained, had been an Egyptian singer and a culture heroine throughout the Arab world. We listened to this hour-long live performance, me rapt, my friend offering occasional comment on the love poem that formed the music’s text. The Arabic was beyond me, as was the reason that the audience burst into applause and cheering at seemingly arbitrary moments; yet I found the melodic lines beautiful, the vocal powerfully communicative – communicative of something – and I appreciated the workings of the extended song-form. Amazing how much and how little music can show you. Amazing how familiar and simultaneously strange music can be.

So I looked up writing about Kalthum (and Kalthom, and Koulsoum, the vagaries of transliteration meaning many spellings are in use), and found Virginia Danielson’s biography The Voice of Egypt. It’s an excellent book, and one which I abandoned after a few chapters: having located the singer in time (1904-75), and found out when and by whom the piece I’d heard was written (in 1964, by Abd Al-Wahhab), I realised that I wanted to undertake my discovery of this music through listening alone, and that the central questions I had – about what was thought good and why – could be answered by the recording itself, by the sound of the audience in dialogue with the artist.

Listening now I’d say that this is music largely constructed of questions and answers, the former posed by the orchestra in total homophony, the latter given in melody by the vocalist. The orchestra of strings, guitar and percussion works with a tonal palette that sounds like the ever-present tambourine looks: a low brown and wooden, a middle empty, hollow and white, a silver glint surrounding. The singer’s voice is alto and aged, her windpipe closed, sound beginning from the top of her chest and forced out flat and hard, or escaping as a whisper, or, frighteningly, ripping through the vocal chords. But no matter how guttural the pronunciation, no matter how much phlegm and raw throat is heard behind the pitch itself, the execution is never anything other than minutely controlled. Kalthum sets her melody circling a few small intervals, hovering on convection currents sent up by the orchestra, then has it plunge dramatically down to the bottom of the mode; she tongues turns and microturns on short, fast-moving notes; she manipulates technique and timbre inside single phrases, just like Rollins or Aretha. This music may not be well known in Europe, but the journey from Egypt to African America doesn’t seem so very far.

Yet neither is the Mediterranean that wide, and the sounding signs of romantic passion, devotion and agony are understood on all the sea’s shores, even when the words in which those things are expressed remain unintelligible. What Europeans know of the tragic heroine of 19th-century Italian opera will do here, and this isn’t just transference of the unknown into something familiar. The cultural-political links between North Africa and Southern Europe, and the presence of musical practices common to both, are heard in this piece’s passage of recitative, which emerges at the midpoint, and maybe in its formal conception, where inter-referential sections, each a couple of minutes long, are lined up alongside each other and extended with a grandeur that speaks of antiquity. These are aspirations common also to the Classical symphony, but this African structure finds a different kind of balance: orchestra and singer often repeat a little panel of material again and again, the vocal increasingly determined even if the music seems (to Other ears) to hang unsupported way above the home key, the expectation of collapse increasing and ever more thrilling. Still, a familiarity with Western art music means the design is not generally difficult to weigh up. The principle melody gives way to a contrasting second, and after the recitative a couple of dance pieces increase the emotional pitch, one, at the golden section, exploding into jubilant double-time amid a hand-drum flurry. The first theme returns, ever so slightly altered, at the close.

But this particular performance might not represent Inta Umry as such, or as composed. While we listened my friend told me that the audience, extremely vocal at the end of each number, was shaping the piece by calling for favourite sections to be repeated – Haydn’s listeners were the same – so that while this version lasts an hour, others last two. At breaks between numbers it’s clear enough if the crowd want a part repeated, and the orchestra generally obliges. But initially I couldn’t grasp what was driving the audience to light-headed, full-throated ecstasy during the music. Studying those responses, and identifying their provocation, eventually brought into focus not only what those knowledgeable listeners liked, but also what it was that Kalthum was doing, what she wanted to be liked for. The recording shows a passionate, beseeching melodic line extending without pause until dying from exhaustion, any lovers of tragedy present swooning in return; an almost inaudible heart-flutter appearing in the middle of a stretched-out, undersung syllable, the crowds romantics translating the signal into noise; a vocal note, held at unlikely length or suddenly coloured with a wide, wide vibrato, the technically minded whistling their admiration for the singer’s skill. No book could be expected to provide critical commentary as musically instructive as that which this audience had given in the moment of performance. And learning to anticipate the listeners’ responses – learning something of their aesthetic system through practice rather than theory – put me among them, in a sense.

Really, of course, I remain isolated from this music’s crowd, separated not merely by the facts of time and place, but also by my self-imposed ignorance of more abstract stylistic and cultural contexts. The cost of hermeneutic listening is singularity of all kinds. But there’s something to be said for a musical experience that isn’t bolstered by pre-digested knowledge of authentic form, performance practice, text, history – at least, isn’t bolstered by the ‘right sort’ of knowledge. It raises suspicions at home and hackles abroad when someone uses an acquaintance with exotic codes to observe, to imagine an understanding of, and finally to hypothesise about a culture. Maybe what I’m describing is a different approach, a kind of self-Orientation, where objective observation and deduction is scant because what’s actually being explored is the nature of one’s own response, the direction one turns when confronted with something unknown. It’s nothing we don’t do all the time. Still I’m not sure I understood how far my conception of musical form had been shaped by the Classical symphony, nor how much my understanding of instrumental virtuosity was reliant on African American music, until I heard and had to think about Umm Kalthum. This is the thing: to impose on one’s self extramusical ignorance in order to test the musical intelligence one has already cultivated; to select the wrong tools for the job in order to learn what work they really do; to find out what one knows by listening to what one doesn’t.

Book Review: The Wisdom of Sun Ra: Sun Ra’s Polemical Broadsheets and Streetcorner Leaflets, Ed. Anthony Elms and John Corbett (Chicago: Whitewalls). First appeared in The Wire 271, September 2006

Proselytisers, preachers and demagogues dotted the sidewalks and crowded the storefronts of Southside Chicago in the early 50s, the speakers variously espousing Christianity, Islam, Marxism or proto-Pan Africanism; quieter thinkers deprived of any institutional outlet aside from the street also engaged in public scholarly discussion. Sun Ra was known in the area not only as an idiosyncratic swing-to-bop bandleader, but also as one of those intellectuals, and while this activity of Ra’s has always been known about – his musicians have reported how Ra’s writings circulated among the national jazz community – little was known of their content until a few years ago, when a cache of Ra ephemera was retrieved from a skip and the 46 pieces collected in this book were discovered. The torn, yellowed, crayon-marked original scripts are presented here in facsimile and followed by typeset transcriptions somewhat easier to read. Somewhat, but not much. Ra’s investigations of biblical interpretation, which form the basis of every text, are rhetorically oblique to say the least; further, removed from performance and so deprived of the verbal and gestural persuasiveness that the performance of good talk guaranteed, however they sounded, the pieces read strangely indeed.

Ra’s ambiguous and sometimes-inconsistent attitude towards his chief subject doesn’t help. The musician betrays a Nietzschean distaste for Christianity which he seems to have seen – like many black discontents of the time – as part responsible for a perceived black social docility: ‘To be CHRISTLIKE is to be meek and led to the slaughter without protest. The AMERICAN NEGRO HAS DONE ALL THESE THINGS’. The Bible and the religion, Ra polemicises, are not things for ‘negroes’; behind much of this is an intense (and rather Protestant) suspicion of institutional authority, and a relentless questioning of authoritative interpretations. ‘Who would you rather give you freedom and all the happiness that life can bring: NAACP, Democrats, Republicans, Churches and Religion, Communism, or the true God?’

For Ra the Bible does contain that true God’s true word – but that truth is not the truth the book purports to contain. ‘THE CONCEALED TRUTH’, Ra types with one finger on shift, ‘IS THE ONE OF MOST IMPORTANCE TO THE NEGRO. THE BIBLE IS WRITTEN IN SUCH A WAY THAT IT HAS ONE MEANING FOR THE NEGRO AND ANOTHER MEANING FOR THE WHITE MAN’. And many of Ra’s texts are devoted to the uncovering of this true meaning, through outrageous hermeneutics, endless language gaming, operations squarely at the centre of African American talk culture. Words are for Ra not symbols given meaning when linked by grammar or in argument, rather, Nommo-like, material repositories for the very thing they name. Words are plastic things, and the skill of Ra the sculptor reveals hidden unities, as in the game that tracks back from a contemporary black cultural anonymity to a glorious past: ‘JOHN DOE, OD, OUD, SPODE ODE, DRINKIN’ WINE SPOITHE OITHE, ETHIOPS’. Much of Ra’s etymological bullshitting (in English, Cantonese and Latin) is in this way illustrative of thought and language in motion, bearing more metaphorical and creative meaning than literal. But sometimes that elucidating is overcome by autodidact obfuscation: ‘In the English Alphabet 2 is ten (X) from Z which is a non curved 2. Z then is equal to 2 because the first is the last’. ‘Truth is Frank. Frank is French. The French language is the Truth language. The mind of every Frenchman is a key to ETERNAL LIFE in the TWO world.’

Ra could be a disingenuous man, which is perhaps how after all this verbal play he can chide: ‘TOO MUCH MOUTH IS THE CAUSE OF THE AMERICAN NEGROES CONDITION TODAY’. Indeed, his attitude towards his audience is continuously provocative, and while mentions of music are rare, it is once introduced as a pretext by which to chide black people as uncultured for not subsidizing the arts, specifically – surprisingly – symphony orchestras, ballets and opera companies.

Concert Review: Karlheinz Stockhausen, Old Billingsgate Market, London. First appeared in The Wire 262, December 2005

‘There are no interpreters’, Stockhausen announced before returning to his machines and pressing play. ‘I have made everything’. The name that once stood for modernism’s exploratory impulse is now often taken to represent that era’s megalomania, and the composer does little to defend himself against such charges. Taken with the cosmic grandiosity of Stockhausen’s rhetoric – lambasted in these pages last month – the vast (and vastly kitsch) Licht project that occupied him for nearly 30 years can suggest the worst of 19th century visionaries, musical and otherwise; it’s out of experience that we have come to suspect such visions, even if it’s unfair to the composer and his later work.

So introducing Oktophonie (1991), a work drawn from Dienstag aus Licht’s second act, the composer said nothing of that music drama. Nor that what we were about to hear was written to accompany a battle between good and evil which, in the opera, takes place on transparent runways extending into the audience, like a new music Starlight Express. Instead he talked about the music’s innovation in ‘verticality’. Eight speakers were placed in the hall’s corners, four at ear level, four several metres higher, allowing sounds to travel up, down and around. But those sounds, mostly synth fizzes from a DX7, were often in competition with a drone, and the distinction between high foreground and low background was too clear for more complex spatial effects to be perceived fully. And that simple opposition was repeated in the piece’s structure, linear, episodic.

Much more alive was Kontakte (1958-60), a piece composed at the Cologne radio studio where Stockhausen had already spliced together such important tape works as Gesang der Jünglinge. On record, the stereo Gesang sounds as it should, while quadraphonic Kontakte is a shadow of itself: here though, coming from all sides, that piece was breathtaking. The ‘contacts’ of the title are the meeting points of acoustic and electronic sounds, of pitch and rhythm, and of the various parts and their spatial positions. Indeed the tricks of perspective in this four-channel piece, nearly 50 years old, seemed much more convincing than those of Oktophonie. When a drum roll slowed down so much that a single attack became a long tone, the effect was of an engulfing magnification. And Kontakte’s drama was so much stronger: electronic ‘Flutklang’, flood sounds, poured into and around the hall, exploding into waves and switching direction to implode back into themselves, revealing a few pitches of tuned percussion.

It was in those instruments, often partly submerged by electronic sound, that the wreck of 50s serial language could be made out. But a tradition of European musicality was present even when notes weren’t, when tape squeals suddenly coalesced into harmony, or were treated in counterpoint. Oktophonie’s structural simplicity suggested theatre. But Kontakte’s intensely concentrated interplay of parts and sound sources situated the piece in a tradition of chamber music, even if the chamber was now instrument as much as venue.