Output details

"Arabic & Western Musical Meeting: Introduction to Arabic Art-Music and Duo Improvisation Performance"

Taiseer Elias (ud) and David Dolan (piano).

The DVD "Arabic & Western Musical Meeting" presents the outcome of a project that extended the researcher / performer’s understanding of the potential of extemporisation. The goal was to test whether extemporisation could form a shared creative process of sufficient flexibility and strength to produce functional pieces embracing two very different musical cultures.

Whilst there have been many intercultural musical experiments carried out over the last fifty years or so, most have focussed on the commonality of surface features – mode, metre or timbre for example, few on a generative process underpinning and energising those surface attributes. Extemporisation provides one such fundamental process, being the key of creativity within many Arabic art-music traditions and, until the early twentieth century, a core skill of the western performer.

The research / rehearsal process required each musician to tune into the instinctive flow of improvisatory thought of his colleague, and to respond with a complementary, rather than identical, process himself. In this way the danger of cheap “lowest common denominator” creativity was avoided, for the surface presented to the listeners was the honest outcome of two autonomous traditions actively listening and creatively responding to each other’s understanding of improvisatory practice.

The researcher / performer’s other projects within the field of extemporisation – three are now presented as other REF outputs – argue the case for reversing the collective memory lapse that has, for recent generations of western musicians, tended to confine extemporisation to a footnote of performance practice. The current piece of research, focussing on an intersection of Arabic and Western practice, starts to suggest that even when the West’s rehabilitation of extemporisation is complete, the potential of the practice could extend even further.