From guitar to qanun: the unusual career of Julien Jalal Eddin Weiss

UNESCO Courier, March, 1991

WHFN I was in my teens began to learn the classical guitar, which pianists and violinists tend to regard as a somewhat marginal instrument because its intimate sound is more suited to solo performances than orchestral work. Its repertoire is extraordinarily eclectic, but the dominance of Hispanic folk music made me familiar with particularly effective kinds of musical intermixture very ear y in my career.

During a long stay in the Caribbean I studied jazz harmonies and Brazilian and Afro-Cuban rhythms. This liberated me from the rigid written repertoire of my classical training and allowed me to improvise within a framework of harmonic rules which though complex were much less restrictive. I felt that I was getting rid of the heavy chains that bound me to repetitive exercises which were allen to the essence of music and left no room for either emotion or imagination.

I already thought that living forms of music, both popular and classical, had an incomparable vitality and expressive force. I became interested in other types of improvisation, and as I progressed I composed a number of contemplative works laced with Ravelian dissonances and Afro-Cuban, Brazilian and Indian rhythms.

I soon learned that the spontaneous creation of a rhythmic and melodic idiom was not exclusive to jazz but was the basis of traditions such as that of classical Arab-Islamic music, which does not suffer from its lack of a harmonic structure but celebrates the divine unity of a spare and graceful monody, pure and penetrating, full of hidden meaning, which the prolixity of harmony would disguise and deaden.

I discovered this Arab music by chance, while listening to a recording by Munir Bachir, one of the great masters of the qanun. I had already come across the taqsim, an Arab-Turkish form of improvisation, but the qanun was a revelation.

For the next six years, worked on both the guitar and the qanun. Then, in 1984, the Tunisian singer Hedi Guella invited me to play in the first part of his show at the Carthage festival, in front of 7,000 people. The public were indifferent to my performance with the guitar, but they greeted my qanun playing with enthusiasm. From that moment on, I knew that I would dedicate myself to the qanun.

Ever since then my work has had something in common with that of a musicologist. Apart from the dally ritual of practice, I have studied at length the history of Islamic music and civilization, concentrating primarily on the work of the great Orientalists. I have rediscovered many vocal and instrumental pieces, both structured and improvised, which were useful for comparative study, but also as the basis of arrangements for the Al Kindi ensemble which I was then setting up, and as additions to my repertoire as a soloist.

I explored different classical traditions: the Syrian muwashah, the Egyptian dawr, the Iraqi maqam, the Persian tshaharmezrab, the Turkish bashraf Each of these opened up a new dimension for me: the lack of orchestral ornamentation and the virtuosity of Persian music; the Bedouin ruggedness and majesty of Iraqi music; the melodramatic cadences of Egyptian music; the mystical depth and surgical precision of Turkish music; and the multiple facets of the Andalusian music of North Africa.

My compositions are impregnated with all these diverse musical forms. The Western influence is also present, although in small doses these days. One of the blends I like best can be heard in Wasla Bagdadi, a piece for the qanun in which I introduced Persian musical effects into Iraqi rhythms and added hints of Kurdish phrasing and the Somali pentatonic scale.

I have however composed one polyphonic work, inspired by the sober romanticism of Erik Satie, and on occasion I have enjoyed playing in Iconoclastic mixed sessions. I have played the qanun with the Paris Symphony orchestra and the chorus of Radio France on film soundtracks, with Arab-French rock singers, and in a performance of the medieval music of Guillaume de Machaut and Adam de la Halle.

But the most extraordinary experience I have ever had was when I performed a work by the contemporary composer Francis Bayer with an ensemble made up exclusively of traditional instruments-the Tibetan trumpet, the Turkish ney, the shenay of Benares, the japanese koto, the Indian sitar, the Balinese gamelan, the rain rod of the Australian Aborigines, the gong of the opera of Beijing, the Iranian zarb, and the indian tabla. For someone like me, who seeks musical marriages of all kinds, this was something quite unique.