On Saturday, August 8, JISR – BRÜCKE performed in a chamber music setting with five musicians from Morocco during Young Euro Classic at the Konzerthaus Berlin, with pieces from the Arabic-Andalusian tradition, which dates back more than a thousand years. Because I wanted to know more about this music, I spoke with bandleader Mohcine Ait Ramdan before the concert. With passion, he explained to me why Arabic-Andalusian music is actually European music – and what a mislabeled channel on a mixing console has to do with it. Because we didn't have enough time, we continued the conversation later. Below is the account of an inspiring and educational conversation.
It is a small moment, but it is the moment Mohcine Ait Ramdan reaches for when you ask him about the core of his work. A soundcheck, somewhere, a sound technician behind his mixing console. On one of the channels it says "hakkebord". On stage, however, there is no hakkebord, but a qanun, an Arabic plucked zither. The technician didn't know the name and reached for the nearest word he did know. "To be honest, he wasn't even that far off," says Ramdan. "The qanun and the hakkebord are family. Both plucked zithers. One is plucked, the other is struck." He showed the man the instrument, gave it the correct name – and the technician, who had been doing the job for decades, was immediately enthusiastic. "That's what I mean," says Ramdan, "when you make music, there is always something new to learn. For everyone."
Precisely that confusion, that casual recognition of kinship, is in miniature what Ramdan is trying to do on a large scale with his project JISR – Arabic for bridge. For ten years, the musician, who grew up in Marrakech and now lives in Munich, has been bringing together musicians from completely different traditions. By now there are more than seventy of them, from student to seventy-year-old, across genres and generations.
Music that left and came back
For Ramdan, this music is the best example of what JISR stands for. It does not, as many assume, come "from elsewhere". It "originated in Europe. In al-Andalus, on the Iberian Peninsula," from where it moved to North Africa and has remained alive there to this day. "So it is European music that left and came back," he says, "but it is at home here. Just as much at home as any other music in Europe."
This is most clearly seen in the instrument: from the al-oud came the European lute, and the lute was the central instrument of Europe in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance – the early suites were written for it. "Baroque music originated on an Arabic instrument," says Ramdan. With the lute came not only an instrument, but an entire way of thinking about music. The emergence of Baroque music is therefore not only the beginning of its own European period, but at the same time a further development of what came from al-Andalus – "as its DNA."
Nostalgia does not drive him in this. "Preservation doesn't interest me," says Ramdan, "what interests me is what this music can do today, when it encounters a vibraphone, a Chinese pipa, a theremin."
Listening instead of consensus
How actual shared music emerges from such different systems is, for Ramdan, not a matter of culture, but of technique. He immediately mentions two examples. The first concerns pitch: whereas a Western tempered instrument is fixed on the twelve semitones we know, Arabic-Andalusian music works with quarter tones – pitches that lie precisely in between. The second concerns rhythm: whereas Western music usually thinks in fixed time signatures of, for example, four beats, this tradition is built on long, cyclical rhythmic patterns of up to ten beats. "That's where the work is," says Ramdan.
The solution is never that someone gives up their own system. Instead, the ensemble deliberately searches for larger common building blocks between the systems – in scale, in rhythm, in the structure of a piece – and builds from there. "That is more laborious," says Ramdan, "but it is the only thing that works."
There is little explanation in the process. "Never by talking. Always by playing," says Ramdan. What continues to surprise him is the speed at which musicians without a common language find each other – sometimes within a few days. His explanation: "Music doesn't ask for consensus. It only asks for listening." Cultural diversity at JISR is not the subject at all, but the foundation on which work is done: "The measure is artistic quality, nothing else."
Moreover, rehearsals take place almost without sheet music – for classically trained musicians, often the most difficult part. Ramdan himself is self-taught and never learned to play through notes: "You play, the other plays after, you listen, you correct, you repeat. What ultimately stands there is not on paper, it is in memory." The learning process goes both ways: those who come from the orchestral world must learn to listen without a score; those who come from an oral tradition, conversely, learn to work with sheet music.
Ziryab, the nouba and eleven of the twenty-four
The roots of this tradition lead, according to tradition, back to a musician called Ziryab who came from Baghdad to Córdoba in the ninth century. He is credited with numerous innovations, including a fifth string on the lute – but above all the ordering of the nouba, a large cyclical form with a fixed sequence of sections, in which the tempo gradually increases throughout the course. According to legend, there were once twenty-four noubas, one for each hour of the day, each with its own atmosphere and character. "I deliberately say 'according to tradition'," Ramdan emphasizes, "because much of that is story and not proven. But the form itself is real, and old." In Morocco, eleven of the original twenty-four noubas have been preserved to this day – and that is precisely what is being worked with.
This music is still very much alive in Morocco: orchestras in Fès, Tétouan and Rabat maintain the repertoire, conservatories teach it, but it has long since extended far beyond the institutions – on the radio, at weddings, during the nights of Ramadan. "As a child in Marrakech, this was not old music for me," Ramdan recalls: "It was simply the music that was there. That it is a thousand years old, I only understood much later."
From the living room to Berlin
JISR emerged without any plan. It began with two refugee musicians who had come to Munich about ten years ago. "We played together because it made sense," says Ramdan. "There was no concept, no application, no subsidy, no name. We had a space and instruments." Over ten years, this grew into what now comprises just over seventy musicians – always through personal recommendations: one person brings someone along, another knows a harpist. Ramdan's lesson from this: "The music comes first, the theme comes after. Whoever starts with the theme gets a project. Whoever starts with the music sometimes gets something that lasts." There is no fixed ensemble – for each project, a new constellation forms from the group of just over seventy, depending on what the piece requires: one time gembri, theremin and strings, another time oud, pipa, vibraphone and harp.
For the performance at Young Euro Classic, this had a special significance. The festival poses the question of what European music will be in the future – "and that is precisely our question," says Ramdan: "Al-Andalus was Europe, Córdoba was a European city. For me, the question is therefore not whether we may play. It is: what do we actually mean when we say European music? Which sounds do we count, and which have we at some point stopped counting?" On the stage in Berlin, therefore, stood young musicians from Morocco – "not as guests from outside, but as participants."
At the end of the conversation, one point remained for Ramdan: such encounters do not happen by themselves: "Projects produce events, but only institutions produce continuity." If soundbridges like this are not to remain exceptions, they must get into the concert halls, into the programming, into the education – a demand that the Deutsche Musikrat also made in May in a position paper on the occasion of UNESCO World Day for Cultural Diversity. What JISR does on stage is now in black and white there.
Back to that soundcheck, to the channel with "hakkebord" on it. It was a mistake, but a telling one: someone naming the unknown with what he already knew, and thereby happening to come closer to the truth than he suspected. Perhaps that is ultimately also what JISR did with this concert on Saturday afternoon in the Werner-Otto-Saal – not explain that two musical worlds are related, but simply make it heard, and let the audience fill in the rest. You don't build a bridge by proving to both shores that they are the same. You build it by letting people walk across it.