Songs of the city

AS THE bombs rain down, it is hard to think of Aleppo in terms of anything other than bloodshed, terror, and destruction. But the massive collateral damage includes the muwashshah, a courtly song-form to which Syria’s second city has been home for 800 years. The style is known as “Andalusian”, because that is where it originated—Al-Andalus, Moorish Spain. In the 12th century muwashshah-singing spread eastward, putting down roots in north Africa and the eastern Mediterranean, with its farthest outpost in Yemen.

Wherever it settled, it took on local colour, but what it reflected was the unique Andalusian mix of Arab, Jewish, Christian and Berber influences. Its first and greatest celebrity was Ali Ibn Nafi, a charismatic black singer from Baghdad nicknamed Ziryab (Blackbird), court musician to the Emir Abd al-Rahman II in Cordoba. It became the fashion for rich patrons to maintain singing slave-girls whose refined artistry earned them rock-star fees and a life of luxury.

Love-poetry is the main subject-matter of muwashshah and it may have influenced the poetry of the Provencal troubadours. But whether in the classical Arabic or in the Hebrew style, that love was simultaneously both human and divine. The poem’s typical setting would be a garden where a drinking party was served by a beautiful young cupbearer, but the love would be unrequited. The beloved would be unattainable; the lover would pine away for her (or him). No wonder this poetry and its music became the pabulum for Sufi gatherings, where this human-divine ambiguity was the keynote.

Until revolution erupted in 2011, Aleppo and Damascus were the focal points for this music’s Syrian variant. The al-Kindi Ensemble—based in Paris, but with Syrian and Turkish musicians—was its highest-profile exponent. In its most recent CD, “Le Salon de Musique d’Alep”, al-Kindi skilfully evokes the atmosphere of this music, and the circumstances in which it was performed in Aleppo. Choral muwashshah are interwoven with instrumental and solo vocal improvisations to create the complex suites of music that are traditional in the Middle East, with a mood that is by turns exuberant and ecstatically devotional.

The Syrian National Symphony Orchestra still gives occasional concerts of Beethoven and Brahms in Damascus; Western classical music has its own momentum. But when the bombs cease to fall on Aleppo, what will be left of its intimate traditional music? Without the continuity which has nurtured it in the heart of the old city, that music—like so much else in Syria’s traditional culture—is threatened with extinction.