My Ud Teacher and I

Currently, I am taking lessons in how to play the Üd, which is an instrument used in both classical and modern Arab music. It is also helping me learn Arabic music theory. The two sort of go together as everything I learn I get to play to see how it sounds like, and are sort of combined into two one hour and a half sessions each week, which I record using my small digital audio recorder. I suppose this all started when I was in the medina about a month ago. As I was walking along the main street that eventually leads to the Kharoine mosque, I stopped at this little music shop when I noticed that there was a violin there. Being curious about what kind of violin it was and how much it was, I stopped in and asked if I could maybe play one of two of them. He wanted something like 800 dirham for them, about 80 euros, which was far too much for something that I was not going to be able to bring back to the states anyway. I thanked him, and continued on my way. A few weeks later I found myself in the same shop with Julian, who happened to know the owner of the shop next door, and I inquired the owner as to whether or not it would be possible to take lessons in the Üd. I explained to him my interest in al-melhûne music as sort of a representative of fassi musique, and asked if I could learn something about how to play the Üd in this style. He agreed to two lessons each week for 150 dirhams each, and that he would teach me how to play the instrument, as well as maybe a few melhûne songs.

So far, I have had three lessons. Every time, I come to his shop around five in the afternoon, when the heat is not too dreadful, we exchange greetings in French, English, and Arabic, and we each drink a glass of hot, mint tea. We sit in the back of his shop, which is about the size of a small dormitory room that has instruments lining the walls, and he begins the lesson as I set up my sound gizmo. A lot of what the lessons consist of is him telling me what he is about to play, him playing it, and me having to repeat what he plays. There is no music, even though he has told me for the last two lessons that he can make a photocopy of some instructions about how to play the thing, and I have to remember exactly what he plays. To make it a little bit harder, there is only one Üd in the shop that he likes to play, and that he bothers to tune and change the strings every so often, so that when he is done playing, he hands the thing to me to repeat what he just did.

I know that it doesn't sound that hard, but there is that sort of an immediate audio and finger memory that you sort of lose when he does that, especially when starting a new instrument. It is a bit like in sight-singing class, in the exercises where the professor plays something on the piano and you have to write down what the exact melody is. You can remember the parts in the beginning, but the parts afterwards are a bit fuzzy. Sometimes when I forget, I play what I think I heard him do, but that does not really work, as he says to me often, <> (maquams are the scales I am trying to learn about). Most of the time, I ask him just to play it again. It is hard, but I sort of feel better knowing that probably every music student in the last six or seven hundred years who has wanted to learn how to play the Üd, as well as every single anthropological/ethno-musicological nerd, has gone through the exact same thing as I've been going through. I'm learning this instrument in the old way of the oral tradition.

I am sure that many of you have no idea what an Üd is or looks like, but I will try to describe it as best I can. Picture in your mind the form of a guitar. Now erase in that image the curving body of the instrument, and leave just the fingerboard, strings, and the neck. Now curve back the part of the neck just above where the fingerboard ends and the tuning mechanisms begin so that that part is almost a 90 angle from the neck itself. Remove the frets, and replace the tuning machines with wooden pegs, like on a violin. Now make the neck more slender, almost like that of a violin, and add the body. If you have ever seen pictures of a lute, or even a very old mandolin, it looks somewhat similar to that. It has almost a curved triangular shape on the front side with a rounded sound hole in the middle, similar to guitar but more often oval shaped or with a decorated rose. It also has a rounded back that curves outward so that when you play it, your stomach sort of molds itself to its shape.

The way it is constructed and the also the way it is tuned is somewhat similar to that of a 12 string guitar. It has 11 strings, with 10 of those tuned together in the way a lute or mandolin is constructed so that you pluck two strings at a time that are tuned together so that they sound the same note, and with 6^th string, the bass string, not doubled and by itself. You play the instrument with a plectrum, fancy name for pick, which usually is a long thin piece of plastic that you primarily hold with your thumb and index finger, but it is also supposed to curve between your ring and pinky finger.

One thing I've been asked when describing the instrument is whether or not you can play chords, which technically you cannot. Arabic music in general I found seems to be defined largely, of course by western attitudes and tastes, by an absence of polyphony in the melody, or multiple voices. One thing that I have found is that there is a great repetition of the octave, and I suppose in that way there kind of a chord. From my Üd lessons, I have found the setup of the strings is so that you can actually hit the octave pretty easily without having to rearrange your fingers in a difficult way. But, even when you see a large orchestra of stringed instruments, they are all playing one line of music, perhaps at different octaves, but pretty much all the same pitch classes. The only contrast with this monophony in the melody is the sort of steady rhythm you get from the percussion section. But even during some parts, the rhythm section matches exactly the rhythm that the strings and <> section are playing.

What I am learning to play mostly are the instrumental parts, or the taqsim, that precede the sung portion of the melhun. These portions are sort of improvisations, but strictly based on the maquam scale. During the first lesson, my immediate reaction to the idea of the scale on which to improvise was that it was going to be something like Jazz, in the sense that you have a scale, and you can use different notes of that scale to create an improvisation over chord changes. But I learned quickly that I was wrong. What sort of happens is that you have different notes that are paired with each other in the idea that there is a note, and then a response to that note. In that sense, there is not a whole lot of freedom that you have, other than what you can do with the rythms as you alternate from one note to another.

The absence of frets is also interesting because it allows you to play the quarter tones that are frequently common in Arab and North African music. Quarter tones are pitches that are between whole tones. For example, one quarter tone that is used frequently used in the maquam rast is between E and F. From what I have learned so far, most of these quarter tones are not something you rest on in the scale, but serve as sort of passing notes. They are usually accomplished by either making sort of a very wide vibrato, as you would do on a violin, or by making a quick grace note with the ring finger.

When the taqsim ends, the Üd and other stringed instruments such as the violin follow the melody that the singer has exactly in a monophonic style. There are brief moments where the ud has little instrumental parts between the stanzas, but from what I have read, the music follows the text in a melismatic way with many notes per syllable.

Something which maybe I should not have done is I actually bought one. Even though it is a smaller size Üd and designed for travel, there is no way I can possibly bring it back to the states. For my purposes here, it is rather useful. I bought it last Wednesday, tuned it, practiced it, and during my lesson on Monday I understand a lot more about what he was telling me. I even learned how to play the maquam rast, which serves as an introduction to a popular song by Oum Kalthoum, as well as part of that song. So in that way it is useful for right now as sort of a temporary learning tool. The instrument itself is not of very good quality and it didn't cost very much. I won't get upset when I have to leave it here, and I might just give it to the family up the street that Julian knew, if they want it, at the end of the month. Ah well…I just might end up ripping the frets off one of my father's old student lutes when I get back and putting different strings on it. I probably shouldn't tell him that though…