The city of Taroudannt, Morocco, is surrounded by perfectly-preserved
red-ochre mud walls dating back, in part, to the sixteenth century
Saadien dynasty, which chose Taroudannt as its capital before
moving to the larger and more accessible Marrakesh. While the
walls and their ramparts are impressive, the real attraction of
Taroudannt lies in its purely Moroccan character, which has remained
essentially unchanged for centuries. Situated in the Souss River
valley and cut off by the snow-capped peaks of the Haut-Atlas
mountains to the North, and the semi-desert Anti-Atlas range to
the South, the French occupiers never created a modern ville-nouvelle
here, with the typical unimaginative grid of streets one finds
in many cities, large and small, throughout Morocco. The feeling
of Taroudannt is timeless and traditional.
Outside the walls through the western gate, hides are tanned using
the time-honored method of soaking in vats of animal urine...the
nose warns of their proximity. On a side-street, thick black smoke
billows from the doorway of the charcoal maker.
The tools of practical magic are found in the souk: dessicated
lion skins, snakes and ravens hang in the shops, over great baskets
of herbs, lizards, and porcupine quills (used as a sympathetic
remedy for impotence). Shelves lining the walls, hold jars of
alum (shebba, used as an oracle to discover the identity of one
who has worked black magic, and against various evil influences),
carbonized wool (smoqh, for ink used to write amulets), cantharides
beetles ("Spanish fly"), and numerous other ingredients,
animal, vegetable and mineral. Magic practitioners (fqihs) of
the Souss are particularly skilled in love-magic, for both good
and evil (especially the latter).
Though the valley is seasonally green the landscape can be harsh,
the surrounding hills arid and stony, showing tortuously convoluted
sedimentary layers, the result of violent geologic activity. The
roughness of the setting influences the artistic-religious expression
of its people; even the adhan (call to prayer) seems to spring
from the sun-baked rocky land. Not singing, but proclaiming with
a vital urgency, the muezzin (caller of the adhan) seems to announce
the great message of Salvation for the very first time- a cock's
crow to humanity- and eons removed from the graceful melisma called
by the muezzins of Arabia, Egypt, and, in fact, most of the Islamic
world.
The early morning prayer, salat as-soubh (also known as fajr),
may be performed at any time between the very first light of dawn
and the first appearance of the sun as it begins to break the
horizon. The adhan which precedes this prayer is, therefore, called
into the predawn darkness. I did not seek out a barnyard to provide
the avian ambience heard on the recording (one simply encounters
chickens frequently in rural Morocco), but it does afford a comparison
between these two of earth's creatures, ritually announcing their
existence just before the welcome return of the sun. One is almost
prepared to imagine that the cock's crow has provided a stylistic
model for the muezzins of the region.
A brief series of introductory chants precedes the adhan proper.
Due to the early hour, a special exhortation (line 5) is inserted
into the adhan of salat as-soubh, absent in adhans for the other
four regular daily prayers:
Allahu Akbar (4 times) * Ash-hadu an la ilaha ill-Allah (2 times)
Ash-hadu anna Muhammad-ar-rasoolullah (2 times) Hayya 'alas-salah
(2 times, face of muezzin turned to the right) Hayya 'alal-falah
(2 times, face turned to the left) As-salatu khairum minannaum
(2 times) Allahu Akbar (2 times) * La ilaha ill-Allah
Allah is Most Great! * I bear witness that there is no God but
Allah! I bear witness that Muhammad is the Apostle of Allah! Come
to Prayer Come to Salvation! Prayer is better than sleep! Allah
is Most Great! * There is no God but Allah! [track 1]
I arrived in Taroudannt during a punishing heat-wave in the month
of August. During the day, and especially between the hours of
noon and five o'clock, my chief concern was survival. My friend
Hemidann Hassane (known to his friends and family as Hussein)
had provided me with a room in the nearby village of Dar El Boura.
Electricity had come to the place only weeks before my arrival,
and I did have an electric fan in the room, but it merely succeeded
in blowing hot air into my face. The minutes passed like the proverbial
hours as I waited each day, feeling utterly useless and desultory,
for the sun to sink lower, and with it, the temperature.
Hussein and his extended family had left their house in central
Taroudannt to spend the summer at Boura. I was an honored foreign
guest, and was duly treated with the famous Arab hospitality,
or in this instance, Berber hospitality ("Berber" is
a name given to the indigenous North Africans by foreigners, and
is derived from "barbarian". Their true name is Amazigh.
The language is Tamazight, while in the South, Chleuh, also known
as Tashelhait or Soussi, is spoken.)
Hussein's 15 year old sister Saadia was assigned to my case: she
cooked, cleaned, washed my hands and clothes, and generally saw
to me. Each morning as I made my way down the pise steps to the
courtyard, Hussein's mother would yell, "SAADIAAA!"
The graceful-as-a-gazelle young girl would then appear, bowl in
hand, to serve my breakfast. After the meal, she would pour water
over my hands, and pass me a towel. Those who have never experienced
this kind of feminine attention have no idea how pleasant and
seductive it is. When I expressed admiration for the manner in
which Saadia was attending to my needs, visions of wedding bells
appeared; I noticed that the women, in particular, began to gaze
at me with a special tenderness.
I was plied with food numerous times each day...corn soup in the
morning, and bread dipped in honey and argan oil during the day.
Morocco is the only place on earth where the argan tree can be
found. Oil is extracted from its nut in a most peculiar manner.
As it would be extremely tedious work to break into the hard nuts
to get at the oily seeds, the work is left to the goats, which
eat the nuts. The seeds are evacuated in their feces, then recovered
by the women of the household, and pressed for the oil.
Evening meals consisted mainly of tajine, a meat and vegetable
stew, slow-cooked in the courtyard over a covered clay stove.
I could never eat enough to please them:
"Please, Hussein, I have eaten enough for ten people!"
"Good...now eat enough for fifty!"
After a meal, we generally had grapes, picked from the vine which
grew thickly along an arbor over the courtyard.
Hussein knew that I was in Morocco to record music during the
mouloud (birth) season, the twelfth day of the Islamic month of
Rabi' al-Awwal, the birthday of the Prophet Muhammad [Salalahu
aleihi was-salaam!]. He assured me that I would have opportunities
to hear much good music; a moussem (annual celebration of a Moroccan
saint) was approaching, to be held right there in Boura.
Moussems provide the opportunity for local observance of Moroccan
saints. Most are held around mouloud (although others occur at
harvest, and follow the solar calendar). It is a time selected
specifically to underline the importance of the local cultus as
against the wider observance of world-Islam. These mouloud-tide
moussems serve a triple purpose. The birth of the Prophet may
be celebrated, a local saint may be venerated, with the intention
of acquiring his (or her) baraka (holy power), or commonly, as
an opportunity to socialize with neighbors from surrounding areas.
A market may be held, musicians brought in, and singing and dancing
engaged in by all. Moussems, therefore, may be secular, religious,
or a combination of both. One fine August evening in Dar El Boura,
the courtyard began to fill with people from nearby villages in
the foothills of the Anti-Atlas mountains; the women dressed in
their most beautiful jellabas and scarves. It turned out that
the moussem of a local wali (saint, founding sheikh of a religious
brotherhood), one Sidi Nasri, was to be held during the next two
evenings. It also turned out that the zaouiyya (religious hospice,
place of meeting used by a brotherhood, and devoted to its sheikh)
was only about 50 yards from the house, and that Hussein's step-father
was the muqaddem (leader)!
Often, the exact day of a moussem may not be definitely fixed.
Logistical or other problems may arise, causing some uncertainty
and confusion. As I was making my way back to Dar El Boura on
the first night of the moussem, the driver of the car in which
I had hitched a ride asked where I was going. When I told him
that I was headed for the moussem, he turned to me and gently
said, "I am sorry, but you missed it. It was held last night".
He evidently was unaware that the event had been pushed back by
one day. There is a lesson in this: In Morocco, and elsewhere,
no doubt, never accept important information from only one person!
This was a largely secular moussem, more like a two-day music
and dance party than religious ritual. The first night afforded
an opportunity for the women to actively participate in the music-making
and dancing, mixing with men in the musical ensemble in the courtyard.
Hussein's elder sister, Fatima, played a small flat drum of the
variety known as tar, and quite expertly at that. She can be heard
in the selections recorded that evening. The following night,
an ensemble composed exclusively of men would perform, within
the open-air zaouiyya. As the musicians played in the courtyard,
guests took turns dancing to the lively rhythms. At one point,
the young and beautiful Saadia took center-stage and, dressed
in a gorgeous yellow jellaba, her new gold necklace around her
slender neck, began whirling, jumping and twirling, her arms held
over her head, her feet stamping so hard the dust rose from the
ground. I was perched on the wall above, microphone in hand. She
gazed up at me, to be certain I was taking it all in. I was, Subhan'allah!
[tracks 2, 3] (Saadia is now happily married -to a Moroccan- and
living in Morocco.)
The Guerrera
As Taroudannt is a gateway to the desert, many Saharan influences
can be heard and seen in its music and culture. Both nights of
the moussem the featured musical form was the Guerrera (or Gourara),
named for the desert town in Algeria which gave birth to it, an
isolated oasis about forty miles northeast of Ghardaia.
The most striking features of the Guerrera are its polyrhythms,
in septuple and quintuple meters, and its distinctive polychoral
hocketing. While the music in the courtyard was beautiful, spontaneous,
and affecting, containing all the essential elements of the Guerrera,
the men's performance the next night in the zaouiyya, attended
by hundreds, brought the form to its ultimate grandeur, an epic
journey through a musical landscape of astonishing novelty, complexity,
and intensity.
It began with a series of non-metric introductory verses, first
intoned by a soloist, and followed by a choral response. Among
the messages communicated in the dedicatory prologue, good wishes
were offered to the King, on the occasion of a royal visit to
the Western Sahara town of Laayoune. This verse in all likelihood
refers to a visit by King Hassan II in 1985, to commemorate the
trip made to that place 100 years earlier by his Alaouite ancestor
and name-sake, Sultan Moulay Hassan. [King Hassan II has since
passed away (1999), succeeded by his son, now King Mohammed VI].
Seemingly without warning, the verses were suddenly interrupted
by the hocketing of three groups of singers, as the percussion
instruments beat out a dense and driving accompaniment in rapid
quintuplets. The hocket rhythms began to impose on the verses
more frequently, the musical gestures piling up, each entrance
subtly varied, and progressively more active, until a soloist
announced the main lyric, in septuple meter, sung in the Chleuh
dialect ; it was a love-song:
"W'al habib-ayyazina, libwit rassi bwitulik(aaa)."
"My dear, my beauty, what I want for myself, I want for you."
The lyric continued in the form of statement and response between
two choruses, situated widely apart in the space of the zaouiyya,
and separated by episodes of tri-choral hocketing. The nakous,
a heavy block of metal played with 2 metal rods, beat out a stream
of repeated notes bearing a relation of 5:2 to the pulse of the
preceding melody, as the hocketers sang 3 notes to each quintuplet.
The drumming motifs were marked by great rhythmic freedom, especially
when "shadowing" the moves of the dancers. The effect
to the untrained ear was of two completely independent over-lapping
rhythmic schemes, each entering apparently at random, a brilliant
and complex example of rhythmic ambiguity, which of course was
second-nature to the participants. A new, wordless melody, ten
beats to the "measure", was then introduced and passed
back and forth between the two choruses at either end of the zaouiyya.
The hocketing episodes grew more and more insistent, longer, until
the melody was left far behind, never to be heard from again.
We found ourselves in...outer space! At a certain point in the
extended final hocketing section, the main body of the piece,
I became aware that we all were spinning out on a great voyage
together. Rising to the surface during a passing moment of objectivity,
I wondered, "How did we get here? What has transpired, that
we find ourselves swimming in this sea of hocketing? Where did
this all begin...? It became a throbbing, living entity, engulfing
all present.
"Ah!" was the syllable sung during the hocket sections,
with each singer pouring out his soul in every utterance. Some
were so transported they could only grunt out their syllables,
nearly spent as they were from the continuous high level of excitement.
That such intense monosyllabic repetition should lead to a dhikr-like
religious state of mind is exemplified by the voice of one hocketer
we can hear whose "ah" changed to "al-LAH".
At last, suddenly, the journey came to an end, to the exclamations
of all, uttering deeply-felt praises to Allah and His Prophet.
The instruments played during the Guerrera are all percussion,
including the long hour-glass shaped tarreja and darbouka, flat
bendir and tar, sheep-shears, clapping hands, and the most penetrating
of all, commanding the hocket sections, the nakous. Although the
nakous produces a steady stream of even notes during the hocketing,
they are divided between the hands as follows: llrl rrlr...etc.
In the main section, men emerged from the crowd to jump into the
center and dance in a stylized martial fashion, leaping and spinning
in the air. At these times, the small high flat drum would follow
their movements closely, the sharp slaps timed to coincide with
the leaping dancers as they stamped back to earth. After completing
his turn, each dancer would run back into the crowd to rejoin
his friends, all laughing joyously. [track 4]
City Mosques
Sizable cities have a high concentration of places of worship.
In the case of Islamic countries, the adhan is called five times
each day from its mosques, at quite specific hours related to
the movement of the sun. The result, in a concentrated living
area, is a beautiful and bewildering counterpoint of muezzins
calling the adhan at more or less the same time, each entering
like a new voice in a fugue: their adhans differ according to
the stylistic peculiarities of the muezzin. Introductory chanting
often precedes the soubh prayer, as in the present example. As
our point of "view" is the Place Assarag, we also hear
sounds of the town's center, its pedestrian and vehicular activity,
as it comes to life in the early morning. [track 5]
Street Musicians
Morocco has a long tradition of itinerant street musicians, who
often provide story-telling in the oral tradition along with their
music. In most Moroccan cities, one may find musicians representing
all the main styles, including the predominantly northern Arabic,
and more wide-spread Berber, as well as representatives of various
specialized schools, such as the African-influenced Gnaoua sect.
In Taroudannt, I recorded two examples of the many one encounters.
The first is a soloist accompanying himself on the oud, the oriental
precursor of the lute (Arabic: al-oud, becoming "lute"
by dropping the "a").The song he performs in Arabic
is reminiscent of the genre popularized by such Egyptian artists
as Muhammad Abdul Wahab, and may have been adapted from the repertoire
of that well-known singing film star. Our performer was working
in the main square (Place Assarag) in the early evening. [track
6] Also enlivening the Place was a group of five Berber musicians
singing and playing percussion, rabab, or amzhad (single-stringed
violin) and banjo. When the leader was asked for a translation
of their song, he laconically replied "it is about Morocco".
These ensembles often convey political messages through their
music. [track 7-8]
Moroccan Saints
Taroudannt's predominantly Chleuh Berber population follows the
ancient rhythms of a life punctuated by the unique rituals of
Moroccan Islam. Ortho-practic Islam, throughout the Arab world
and beyond, prescribes a sedate existence, spiritually elegant,
modest, orderly and controlled. Access to Allah is accomplished
through direct prayer. But Allah is remote. He may not be - even
fancifully - depicted in Islam. (Islam, in fact, in its strictest
form, forbids the depiction of any living thing.) As in virtually
all other religions, man finds himself in need of a more immediate
connection to the object of his supplications, something he can
see, touch, whose essence he may share or come away with. To the
pagan, this role may be assigned to a manifestation of Nature,
be it a planet, mountain, tree, spring or animal. Among the Moroccan
sufi brotherhoods, saints provide this contact. Each brotherhood
is composed of the followers of a particular wali. French orientalists
have labelled Moroccan saints, together with their domed and whitewashed
koubbas (structures, usually whitewashed and domed, containing
the tomb of a saint) as marabouts (from the Arabic murabit - a
pious man residing at a fortified frontier post to participate
in holy war- jihad). Walis have carried much political influence
throughout Morocco's history.
As the tzaddik provided a human intermediary for East-European
Jewish mystics, so the wali offers the same for Moroccan Muslims.
The Moroccan saints are known to be workers of miracles, specifically,
miraculous cures, possessors of the very same power, now Islamicized
as baraka (holy power), which drew their ancestors to the aforementioned
trees and springs. It is no coincidence that many koubbas are
situated in close proximity to sacred natural phenomena around
which a cultus was formed and anciently practiced long before
the arrival of the saint who superceded, or more accurately, absorbed
it. In fact, some saints are thought to be legendary figures who
never existed in mundane reality, but emerged from the imaginal
world to Islamicize an already-existing natural site.
The Hadra
The baraka once possessed by the wali in life has been passed
on and, in death, enhanced. This baraka, which is transferable,
resides not only at the koubba, where the air is thick with it,
but is also released at any place or time the devotee performs
the appropriate ritual. The engine of this ritual is the music,
or hadra, which resonates in the individual to bring him (or her,
much to the dismay of those who embody the strict conservative
mores of normative Islam) to a state conducive to the absorption
of baraka, a state generally known as a trance. This power is
further activated by a dance which seems to be the natural physical
consequence of the music.
Under the influence of Morocco's saints certain aspects of religious
expression became everything that commonly-practiced Islam was
not: ecstatic, spiritually violent, immodest, wild..... out of
control. Their ritual music may feature the pounding of flesh
and sticks against goat skin drums, shouted, screaming anti-melody,
blaring and frenzied double-reed ghaitas, accompanied by dancing,
leaping, twirling, stamping.
In a state of trance, devotees of the more extreme brotherhoods,
such as the Aissaoua and Hamadsha, may wound themselves with axes,
eat glass, devour live animals using only their teeth, engage
in animal-mimic dancing and grunting, all led on by the irresistible
force of some of the most powerful music on the planet. Surely
this tendency towards ecstatic catharsis has its roots in pre-Islamic
Berber ritual.
It may come as no surprise that the Authorities, representing
the "received" Islam of Arabian heritage, do not approve
of such practices, and this disapproval has been made manifest
in their steady suppression over the course of, mainly, the twentieth
century. "It is not Islam". But heresy only exists,
as in all religions, in the eyes of its beholders, its opponents.
To members of the tawaif, or local circles of devotees dedicated
to a particular sheikh, they act from the very center of Islam.
Through their rituals, they give perfect expression to God's will,
as they are the possessors of the One Truth, the Gnosis; how could
it be otherwise?
The hadra is essentially a curative ritual, and the baraka acquired
as a result of participation may be directed towards a specific
condition or illness, or simply for its acquisition. A hadra may
be prescribed at any time, and indeed is most often performed
as a private ceremony in the home, to benefit an ailing individual.
It is especially beneficial at the time of a moussem. The hadras
of the Aissaoua are well-known to heal mental infirmities. Insanity
is met on its own terms in the wild trance-dances brought on by
the hadra. In Morocco and many other areas of the world where
ancient traditions survive, life is heavily influenced by powerful
unseen entities- djinns (Arabic plural: djnun).
Against the evil among them (some are beneficent) war must be
waged at every turn. Djnun are available to inflict every possible
variety of malevolence. A djinn responsible for a particular illness,
as a result of the possession of the victim, may be reached and
driven away through a melody specifically associated with that
djinn. On hearing the tune, the djinn is unable to resist its
power. In the throes of battle - the hadra - the possessed person
exhibits all the signs of the wild struggle taking place in his
soul.
Structurally, the hadra consists of introductory verses, the successive
statements of musical themes, each at a faster tempo than the
preceding, and may conclude with dhikr (from a root meaning "remember"),
the ritual repetitive chanting of some form of the profession
of the Tauhid (from a root meaning "one") or Unity of
God, La ilaha ill-Allah..."There is no God but Allah,"
or other short phrases which may be shortened or transformed.
The participants form either a line or a circle around the musicians
and perform the distinctive "limping" dance, while other
participants may dart in and out of the inner area in varying
degrees and states of abandon. During a hadra at Meknes for the
annual convocation of the Aissaoua, a woman entered the circle
and began rolling back and forth on the ground: after some twenty
minutes she lay motionless, and was later carried out.
The lead musician may run up to a member of the circle to confront
him with a violent drum beat. All present are swept away by the
power of the music and occasion. (At the aforementioned hadra
at Meknes, held in the zaouiyya housing the tomb of Mohammed ben
Aissa, venerated by the Aissaoua, I had intended to record the
music, but was so "entranced" that I could not push
the record button. No one could remain uninvolved or motionless.
The impact of this ritual on an unsuspecting foreigner is considerable,
especially when accompanied by the acts of ritual self-mutilation
for which the Hamadsha in particular are well known; one finds
oneself amidst an experience at once utterly alienating and mesmerizing.
In his somewhat sensationalized but aptly-titled "Morocco
The Bizarre," George Edmund Holt, the American Vice-Consul
General in Tangier from 1907 to 1911, describes what sounds like
a meeting of Hamadsha in that city during mouloud :
"...when he hears the interminable beat of the low-voiced
drums and the never-ceasing monotony of the shrill pipes [ghaitas]:
when he sees the banners of the Prophet, malignant green and red
and gold, then [the] Christian foreigner feels that here is something
which he cannot understand; that here are a people voicing the
ideals of the Mohammedan world, which somehow seems to become
suddenly larger, and that he himself has had a mistaken conception
of what Mohammedanism means. And when his eyes behold the rise
and fall of the glittering axes upon shaven heads of man and boy,
and he hears the peculiar rattle of contact between head and weapon,
and notes the beginning of the red flood, which gradually spreads
down over face and neck and garments, witnesses the ecstasies
of pain in the name of Allah, then somehow the sun seems to become
unbearably hot, the air stifling, the shriek of the pipes and
the beat of the drums simply infernal. And with it all comes just
a faint impression of what fear might be, and the desire to get
away from it all, for surely this mob of dancing, singing demons
is not real."
The hyperbole (not to mention cultural chauvinism) grows still
further in Holt's account of an Aissaoua hadra at Tangier:
"...one may hear in the distance the rumble of drums, the
shrill notes of pipes, and finally the crowd at the lower gate
breaks apart and the red and green banners of the Aissawa brotherhood
pass through. The music becomes louder, having the free air of
the socco [the main square in Tangier] to swell in, half a dozen
pipes shriller than the shrillest bagpipes, three or four drums
louder than any drums heard on battlefield, shouting, crying,
wailing together in an indescribable ecstasy, in which the monotonous
repetition of notes seems to focus on one small point all the
delirium which uncivilized man has been able to put into his barbaric
music.
"And then, worked into a frenzy, come the dancers, two lines
of white-robed figures rising and falling in regular cadence.
For perhaps five minutes they dance in one spot; then they pass
on a few feet, never ceasing their dancing. The rhythm of the
dance is two short notes and one long one [clearly discernible
in our recording]. The first two notes the dancers, their hands
held in front of them, raise themselves on tip-toe; with the third
note they sink on bended knee and raise themselves to their toes
again, gradually adding, as the dance continues and the ecstasy
increases, a hundred other motions, but never getting away from
the rhythm. They may whirl about, they may wave their arms or
dance on one foot, but the rhythm, the one-two-three, one-two-three,
is always there.
"And after a person has listened to them awhile, he catches
himself keeping time to the music, maybe at first only with a
fan or walking-stick; then perhaps one finds the muscles of one's
knee stiffening in time to the music, and one may even go so far
as to rise on one's toes and fall back again as the beat, beat,
beat of the drums and the wail of the pipes sink deeper into one's
blood."
The music Holt described is the same captured on this recording
at a Friday evening hadra held at the Aissaoua zaouiyya (Taroudannt)
during mouloud festivities, coinciding with a moussem devoted
to this highly-revered saint, especially favored by the lower
classes. Muhammed ben Aissa lived during the reign of the second
of the Alaouite rulers of Morocco, the famously ruthless Sultan
Moulay Ismail, who ruled Morocco for 55 years, from 1672 to 1727,
a testament to his great power and authority to be sure! Moulay
Ismail is also remembered for his building, conquests, and control
over the disparate and rebellious tribes of the country, not least
of which included the Chleuhs of Taroudannt, who attempted his
overthrow. They were defeated in 1687, suffering mass executions
at the hands of the sultan's formidable army of black Africans.
Moulay Ismail made Meknes his imperial capital, where Muhammed
ben Aissa and his followers resided. These great personalities
are connected in story and song, based on an historical association
between the two. In this context, it must be remembered that the
sultan (now the king) of Morocco is the halifatu lillahi fi ardih
(the vicegerent of God on His earth). In addition, the Alaouites,
who continue to rule Morocco, presented themselves as shereefs,
descendants of the Prophet, and therefore possessors of considerable
baraka over and above that of the sultan.
As Ben Aissa had traveled widely in Morocco, there are many zaouiyyas
devoted to him throughout the country. His followers are best
known for their masochistic derring-do, which may include eating
glass, handling red-hot metal with impunity, and devouring freshly
slaughtered goats: (after all fall upon the victim and rend the
body cavity open with their teeth) "...nothing can stop these
madmen who bring each other to greater states of excitement, their
beards bloodied, ripping apart with their teeth this meat soiled
with excrement. Skin, liver, heart, lungs, trachea, intestines,
all is devoured in the wink of an eye: it is the most horrible
quarry one could possibly imagine." [Edmond Doutte: Magie
et Religion dans L'Afrique du Nord]. The Moroccan government has
suppressed many of their more impressive practices, at least in
public. Yet to this day, for example, it is advised to avoid the
wearing of black clothing in their presence, as this is taken
to be a manifestation of possession by djnun: those so attired
are rendered liable to fierce attack at the hands of a devotee.
As is customary, the chief musician and singer is the muqaddem
of the zaouiyya. In our recording he performs an introductory
poem glorifying Moulay Ismail, and asks a "Noble Presence"
(perhaps that of Moulay Ismail himself)) to allow the participants
of the hadra to embark on the spiritual journey they are about
to begin. By affirming "this is neither to sell nor to buy,"
any mundanity is effectively removed from the experience.
Our hadra was described by Hussein as a Hadari hadra, "the
mother of all hadras." The instruments used include one large
and two smaller flat drums, and two double-reed ghaitas, most
often playing the rhythmically-complex melodies in close unison.
The melodic scale, as in most Moroccan music, is of limited range
with most of the melodies based on 4 or 5 different notes. Adjoining
tones beyond this range serve as occasional ornaments. The players
employ circular-breathing to play uninterrupted long melodic lines.
The oscillating tone of the ghaitas results from the players'
continuous waving of the instruments back and forth. Dancing and
trancing are integral parts of the hadra. Most participants engage
in the limping-dance during the music, arranged either in a line
or circle while others may become overtaken and move about wildly.
The tempo increases with each new melody, until those so overtaken
generally complete their activity by collapsing to the ground.(Note
how the adhan to the salatul-isha (night prayer) emanates from
the nearby Grand Mosque at the hadra's conclusion: Perhaps the
muezzin listened for the nearby drumming to cease before determining
that it was safe to begin the adhan.) [track 9]
A note about the recordings: The Guerreras and the Hadra were
recorded with a hand-held stereo microphone, allowing free movement
through the musicians and capturing the performances from a variety
of vantage points. Sometimes particular instruments or voices
were targeted, allowing the listener to hear the role they played.
As a result, the sound is not static, the balance of elements
shifting with the motion of the microphone. The performances were
not the result of prearranged sessions. All were "encounters,"
recorded at public events held during the course of daily life
in Morocco. Particularly in the large Guerrera, we find ourselves
joining the throng of participants, surrounded by their expressions
of enthusiasm and excitement, along with their casual socializing.
-- James Irsay ©2000.