by Rachel Beckles Willson (Music 787.82 Wil)
The oud, a common stringed instrument throughout the Middle East, eventually begat the Medieval-era lute, which was at its essence an oud with gut frets tied around the neck, and from there, the guitar was eventually born. Though we don’t see lot of oud performances in the United States, it remains one of the most popular stringed instruments in Middle Eastern musical traditions, along with its cousins the baglama, the tanbur, and the buzuq.
We recently got a new book at the
Polley Music Library called The Oud: An Illustrated History by Rachel Beckles
Willson, and it may be the first book-length discussion of the history and
present status of this noble instrument published in the English language. As
it turns out, this book can show us a lot about the instrument itself,
lesser-discussed aspects of music history (both Eastern and Western), and the
many ways the instrument continues to be used in contemporary music, both
traditional and new forms that combine multiple traditions.
As Willson notes in her
introduction, the oud is found all over the world today, but there isn’t as
much concrete information known about its history, particularly for Western
audiences. She has a background as a writer, musician, composer, artist and
educator that makes her uniquely qualified for writing this book. As an artist
who has toured the world as a professional concert pianist, who also has
studied composition and the saxophone at the collegiate level, and who has regularly
published as a music scholar, she has been able to bring all of these skills to
her personal journey into learning to play the oud since 2010. She has returned
with an in-depth analysis of the instrument’s history and the social and
political conditions around its development over the ages. In her exploration
of the oud, she has studied many unique styles and traditions connected with
the instrument, finding that many nationalities take umbrage with the different
musical approaches of their neighbors. As she says, “My outsider position is my
strength. It is what allows me to bring together the multiple voices that make
up the history and contemporary life of this extraordinary instrument, and to
draw out the fascinating stories of those who have been lost along the way.”
Willson approaches the instrument
from a variety of perspectives, starting with the history of the instrument,
and early stringed instruments more generally. The oud is not the earliest
stringed instrument, though it is so ancient that the absolute beginning of its
development remains somewhat lost. Musicologists generally divide the early
chordophone instruments including the oud into two categories: long-necked and
short-necked. The long-necked varieties are much older, dating back to somewhere
around 2300 BCE in the area of Iraq. These evolved into a different set of
instruments: the tanbur, the dutar, the more modern saz and baglama
instruments. They generally all share characteristics of having smaller bodies
with their relatively long necks, relatively few courses of strings, and many
have frets made of gut tied onto their necks. In contrast, the oud features
more courses of strings and a shorter neck to achieve a similar range, all
attached to a considerably larger body. Evidence of instruments close to this
design start to appear in the historical record closer to one century BCE. The
relatively modern iteration of the instrument, likely very similar to the ouds
still in use today, appears to date to roughly the 7th or 8th Century CE.
Next, we explore construction of
ouds. While there are similarities in features and proportions, there are ouds
of somewhat different sizes in use today, each refined to the particular needs
of a region or country’s particular musical tradition. Arabic, Turkish, Iraqi
and Egyptian ouds are all common, and their subtly different scale lengths (the
distance that the strings span) and body sizes all create unique tonal
characteristics. Willson also discusses the techniques used to make ouds, which
include a lot of ingenious molds that help to shape wood staves or “ribs” into
the classically recognizable pear-shaped bowl back that these instruments all
feature. The various pieces of wood that comprise the oud are both functional
and made to be quite beautiful!
I found the third section of the
book to be the most interesting, as I knew the least about it: Willson explores
what she describes as the “tangled lives of oud players” historically.
Specifically, the early history of the oud, and of a lot of Middle Eastern
musical culture in general, was driven by the contributions of women: “Women
performed in temples and they performed in courts, playing a range of
instruments…women continued to dominate the professional class of players in
the first centuries of Islam, and so the earliest oud players were inevitably
women.” This is not to say that the culture at large was matriarchal: in these
earliest years, some of these women were free, and some were enslaved
courtesans, also expected to be responsible for musical entertainment. As many
religious scholars assessed that music itself was a corrupting influence,
musicians in general weren’t particularly admired, either.
Over time, men took over
music-making, and in present times, relatively few women have been involved with
playing the oud. Willson explores this transition in the next section, in which
the oud travels throughout Europe and gradually becomes the lute in many
countries. This happened in the 15th and 16th centuries, and at some point the
two instruments and their traditions more or less diverged permanently, with
lute players opting to play more contrapuntal and chordal-based music by
plucking with their fingers instead of a plectrum, aided by the addition of
frets to lute necks. Some things remained the same, though: women who played
this instrument in Medieval Europe were often courtesans as well. As empires
and trade routes changed from the Medieval era to the present, there appear to
be some similarities in the West and the East in terms of how music was treated
culturally: in both cases, the celebration of composers and performers as
“geniuses,” or people to be admired as representing their area’s cultural
traditions to an increasingly interconnected world, became common, and most of
those figures were men. And the instruments themselves, like many cultural
artifacts, have become collectable and valuable, an interesting phenomenon when
one considers how impoverished most instrument-making families have been
historically.
For readers with a musical background
but not much knowledge of how middle eastern music works, the section on taksim
may be the most important here. This tradition has dictated a lot of the
direction of middle eastern music since the 17th century. It’s a form of
improvisation, with some differences: in the West, our improv is often governed
by chord progressions. There, where the music is often not heterophonic or
chord-based, taksim dictates particular melodic directions and angles preferred
to be used with their scales, or makam. The playing of taksims remains an
important part of the oud playing tradition today, and the pieces produced
through this tradition often go on to become familiar songs themselves, with a
mix of composition and improvisation.
Though the oud is used by many
cultures in the middle east, most countries have their own unique traditions,
repertoire, and even microtonal tuning systems, which make a fretless
instrument like the oud ideal for traveling between traditions, and even
participating in the creation of new ones. The later sections of the book focus
on these new traditions, many of which find oud players taking on roles in
exciting new blends of musical traditions from around the world. It’s a
flexible instrument that shines in a wide variety of styles, and it’s great to
see it finally being celebrated in the West with this thorough overview book!
(If you enjoy this, you may also
wish to try Music and Traditions of the Arabian Peninsula : Saudi Arabia,
Kuwait, Bahrain, and Qatar by Lisa Urkevich or Music in the World of Islam: A Socio-Cultural Study by
Amnon Shiloah.)
( Wikipedia page about The Oud )
| ( official Rachel Beckles Willson web site )
Recommended
by Scott S.
Polley Music Library
Have you read or listened to this one? What did you think? Did you find this review helpful?
New reviews appear every month on the Staff Recommendations page of the BookGuide website. You can visit that page to see them all, or watch them appear here in the BookGuide Blog individually over the course of the entire month. Click the tag for the reviewer's name to see more of this reviewer’s recommendations!
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