You have to use your shoulders-your whole back-to play a cello. Moving this way, I become aware of the world beyond the small instrument I’m swaddling I start to play more for others than for myself. My arms have to travel more in order to move up and down the longer neck the muscles around my shoulders become engaged, as they do when I’m playing the guitar. Listeners notice-they ask, “What is that thing?” After I bought the oud out of the attic of a player who had given up on it, two remarkable luthiers restored it, and the oud started to speak in a way that possessed me. Later, an Armenian American luthier tried to remake it as an Armenian instrument, with disastrous results. In the nineteen-forties, my Nahat was savaged by a notorious Brooklyn dealer who tried to claim it as his own by covering the original label and marquetry. I have an oud similar to one Atrash played it was created by a member of Syria’s multigenerational Nahat family, whose instruments are often described as the Stradivariuses of the oud world. (Imagine a cross between Jascha Heifetz and Elvis Presley.) His playing was often crowd-pleasing, extroverted, and muscular. The most famous oud player of the twentieth century was probably the Syrian-Egyptian superstar Farid al-Atrash, who was both a respected classical musician of the highest order and a pop-culture figure and movie star. The instrument is confessional to me.īut that’s not how all players experience their ouds. While cradling an infant, I feel pretensions drop away: here is the only future we truly have-a sacred moment. Holding an oud is a little like holding a baby. You must find just the right way to hold it, constraining your shoulders, moving mainly the smaller muscles below the elbows. This makes playing one a tender experience. But where a guitar has a flat back, an oud has a domelike form that presses backward against the belly or chest. Ouds resemble lutes, which in turn resemble guitars. I keep a small oud in the kitchen, and sometimes, between e-mails, I improvise with it. ![]() I’ve become a compulsive explorer of new instruments and the ways they make me feel. (Duduks are the haunting reed instruments used in movie soundtracks to convey xeno-profundity.) There are many more instruments in other rooms of the house, and I’ve learned to play them all. A reproduction of an ancient Celtic harp sits near some giant penny whistles, a tar frame drum, a Roman sistrum, a long-neck banjo, and some duduks from Armenia. There’s a Baroque guitar some Colombian gaita flutes a French musical saw a shourangiz (a Persian instrument resembling a traditional poet’s lute) an Array mbira (a giant chromatic thumb piano, made in San Diego) a Turkish clarinet and a Chinese guqin. I feel them even more when I’m learning a new instrument.Īs I write this, on a laptop in my kitchen, I can see at least a hundred instruments around me. I played it with extreme force, sometimes bleeding onto the keys. Afterward, I was both boundlessly angry and attached to the piano. When I was just a boy, she died in a car accident. ![]() She taught me the piano by holding her hands over mine, bending my fingers into arches above the keys. ![]() She was a concentration-camp survivor-a prodigy concert pianist in Vienna who was taken when she was only a girl. “Waves Only Get Real When They Break,” by Colin Farish (piano), Jaron Lanier (guzheng), and Jhaffur Khan (flute).
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