I give private lessons in Arabic Violin, and in Maqam (the Arabic modal system, similar to the Indian Raga system) through singing and listening. I teach Theory and Ear training in a practice-oriented way. I also teach other string players (viola, cello, double bass). Players of other instruments are welcome, but some instruments have inherent technical difficulties which make it hard to play most of the modes. I teach at my studio in Long Island City, Queens, New York, located right across the 59th Street Bridge from Manhattan. I am near the first F train subway stop in Queens (21st Street/Queensbridge), the first N/W stop in Queens (Queensborough Plaza), and the 7 train (Queensborough Plaza). Contact me if you are interested in lessons. Group lessons are also available by arrangement.
You can also find me at:
- Lotus Music & Dance in New York City. I'll be offering an introductory session on maqam on Thursday, Feb. 23, 2006 leading into an 8 - week workshop, "Improvisation and Arabic Musical Modes (Maqam)" on Wednesday evenings, Mar. 1 - April 19. http://lotusarts.com
- M.E.D. Folktours Music and Dance camp in Eastern Pennsylvania, memorial day weekend: May 26-29, 2006. http://folktours.com/campusa.html
- Lark camp, an 8-day world music and dance camp held in the Mendocino Woodlands in northern California, July 28 - August 6, 2006. http://www.larkcamp.com
TEACHING PHILOSOPHY
In a lesson, you don’t really need much talking or explaining to get Arabic music—the repetition of a basic musical phrase is it, as simple as that. It saves a lot of unnecessary words and time, which is better spent on listening and repeating, repeating and listening. This is more talking than I’ll ever do in a lesson! I prefer to spend the whole time immersed in the sound of a mode, repeating its details over and over until it sinks in. The same with a song or piece of music—with every repetition it is possible to sink deeper and add more detail and subtlety. Repeating a phrase teaches more than the same amount of time spent talking. But if you want an intellectual understanding of what I do and why, read on:
I believe in teaching primarily by ear. Having been heavily trained in written music—whether that is composition, performance, or theory—I found that I had much to unlearn in order to be able to hear and understand Arabic music. Not everything in music can be notated, especially in Arabic music, where there are many subtle ornaments and different tunings of notes (there are more than what people like to call “quarter tones”—Arabic music has many notes in between the standard 12 notes of Western music). But beyond that, there is something about the oral tradition fundamental to Arabic music. Arabic pieces and songs can be and have been notated using Western notation, but I have come to believe that it ceases to be Arabic music when that happens.
What I teach is a way of hearing music and a way of learning music that can be applied to other kinds of world music. Ears trained to appreciate subtle differences in intonation can find much richness in, for example, Swedish music, which also uses some “quarter tones” in some regional variants; I have heard very funky intonation in some Irish fiddle playing, and some old time American music. Expanding the ear beyond the standard twelve tones is necessary in dealing with European Baroque and Renaissance music; and learning to hear how ornamentation works in one genre of music can be helpful in dealing with ornamentation in genres of music where the oral tradition has entirely died out and the written record is all we have. Ornamentation in Arabic music is something which is tied up in the identity of different notes and their relationships with other notes—rather than something which you just “put” on to a note. I believe that is true of all world music. It is only when music is stripped of ornamentation and abstracted—as it has been in classical music over the last few hundred years—that ornamentation can be thought of as a separate element to be applied. In that case it ceases to be organic, and is often unconvincing. Ornamentation, like intonation in Arabic music, is like a lilt of speech, a regional dialect, and must be learned as such.
It is possible to present ornamentation, intonation, mode, and melody as a single package rather than separate elements of music. I teach through the use of simple basic melodic phrases, which, like simple sentences in language, contain all of the important musical information. These phrases—shared throughout the world of maqam-based music in regional dialect-like variants—form the building blocks of the modes and melodies used. The modal theory does not define the modes and melodies; rather the other way around—these melodies and phrases contain, collectively, the identity of a mode. Improvisation in this music is not something that can learned separately—it arises, like speech, from a developed vocabulary of phrases. And these phrases contain the emotional and expressive content of the music.
Through the use of repeating and varying simple basic phrases, I teach a different way of hearing and learning music than is common in the West. This translates to how you perform. When there is more communication and fun in learning, and more flexibility in the identity of a melody, performing communicates something more shared and more resonant with a culture and tradition to an audience, than when music has been learned from marks on a page in a way that suggests there is only one precise version of each song or piece.