Before I left the United States to come to Palestine, I almost, almost bought a field recorder. I took a huge detour that makes me regret not buying one (there’s a lot for a musician to hear in Istanbul, Lesvos, Rome, and Berlin), but I’m lucky in that my two flatmates in Nablus happen to be very interested in ethnomusicology, and brought along one recorder each. Giulia has been especially diligent in making sure we capture pieces of what we hear everyday. Some of these are a few weeks old, and really belong to some of my earlier posts, so I’ll go back and edit in the links, but this post will provide a sort of sound collage of Palestine for anyone interested. 

Adhan Thohr Juma3a – This is definitely the most exemplary sound byte I could include here to represent Nablus. Here, the time of day is clearly marked by the five calls to prayer. In other words, the call serves as a musical sundial. This particular adhan plays in the afternoon on Fridays, to announce the most important prayer of the week (similar to Sunday church bells for Christians). And although many Muslims have insisted to us that the call is vocalizing the Qur’an, not merely singing it, I can’t help but love it based on it’s sheer musicality. Each call is sung in a maqam, or Arabic scale, and sometimes the vocalizers ornament each phrase and elongate the words (religious rubato, though they might not appreciate the expression). It’s one of the things I know I’ll miss once I’m back in the States.

Wedding Song and Dabke Dancing – Because to understand a Palestinian wedding, you really need to hear it. Actually, maybe it’d be better not to; the speakers were turned up louder than anything should ever be ever, and I think my left eardrum has some aural form of PTSD. But you can’t hate this music — it’s designed to get people moving, and there’s a strong sense of rhythm that makes it hard to resist the dance floor, even if you suck at dabke (like me).  Also, here’s a recording of us almost dying as our car raced twenty others to get to the wedding first. And here’s one of me, at the wedding lunch before all of this, killing time drumming on a bunch of soda cans.

Pool Jam Session #1, 2, and 3 – This is what happens when you stick a bunch of musicians in a pool house for a weekend. We had two oud players from Nablus, one singer from Canada, one flute player from Italy, and me, playing guitar and occasionally oud as well. #1 is probably my favorite. It’s called Ya Leyl Ya Leyl, and Professor Habib composed it. It’s so simple but we never get sick of playing it, and it’s the easiest to jam, because the accompaniment is just switching between Do and Fa, and then repeating the same thing in the minor key. I don’t know what into the second recording, but a lot of it is improvisation between Nidal and Habib. And the third is an Egyptian political song. We don’t know the name; we just call it Ham/Hum, for obvious reasons. 

Students at Sabastiya and the Medical Relief Center – We gave our students drums and taught them to beat out rhythms while singing. Our Sabastiya kids are mostly 10-12 years old and we had them drum along to Tik Tik Tik Ya Musleiman by Fairouz. Everyone here knows Fairouz, and especially this song; the Lebanese singer has a lot of classic children’s songs in her repertoire, and even the adults we meet love it. And apparently, my own mother used to sing it to me when I was a baby, though I had no idea until we had already taught it to the kids here. The Medical Relief Center students are a little older — 14 to 18 in age — and a lot of them know some pretty complex rhythms. In this recording, one of our students is leading a call and response song/chant/game with the rest of the class. Giulia, Tessa, and I have noticed that students respond really well to rhythm, but don’t have as much familiarity with pitches and harmony. That observation could be made of Arab music culture as a whole; the beat tends to be a lot more important to the essence of a song than the melody is. It’s worth mentioning that every student there knows how to dance dabke.

The only other recording I want to include here is of daytime fireworks, but only because we’re so relieved that our ears have finally learned to distinguish between a spray of bullets and a wedding celebration.