When Nashville rolled out the welcome mat for the Rolling Stones, did that say more about where rock and roll is headed or where country and western is coming from? If the Three Tenors represent a tradition of the timeless and true, does singing in football stadiums somehow drag their music off its pedestal? And for Pete's sake, why are rocker Elvis Costello and crooner Tony Bennett sharing the same microphone?
Similar questions could be asked about mugham, a traditional, ageless music of the Middle East once played in the royal courts of Persia and the Ottoman Empire, an art music beloved by knowing connoisseurs that has changed little in hundreds of years.
Until now. The song lyrics of mugham are the intricately rhymed ghazal of classical poets, and its 70-odd scales, also called mughams, are the cousins of South Asia's ragas.
Yet upon reaching its own 21st century crossroads, some musicians have chosen to dabble in western forms like jazz, rock and opera. Conservatives and progressives debate which way this music should be played. And nowhere is this conversation more fraught with cultural meaning than in the Republic of Azerbaijan, the Caspian oil patch where all petroleum-importing eyes now turn as the Persian Gulf becomes increasingly unstable.
The Republic of Azerbaijan, whose Azeri-Turkish culture spreads south into northwestern Iran has, since before Alexander the Great's visit in 333 B.C., been a crossroads of invading and retreating nations. And, hard up against the soaring Caucasus Mountains, Azerbaijan is a crossroads with many snowbound hiding places, where cultural tradition can remain untouched for centuries.
Jahangir Selimkhanov, a musicologist and composer of new music in the tradition of Pierre Boulez and Karl Heinz Stockhausen, heads the Soros Cultural Foundation in Baku, an organization whose function is to expand the various east-west meeting places available to the post-Soviet generation. Says Jahangir, "mugham has been under glass for too long. The Soviet cultural policy ignored it, and so it stayed in the shadows, where itsurvived but never moved forward. I see it as the music of my grand fathers. "
But mugham in its pure, unadulterated, timeless sense-indeed, all the qualities that make it hopelessly out of date in the new petro-fueled Baku of chiming cell phone s and blaring disco hits-can take a listener to a level of contemplation, spirituality and ecstasy th at its watered down versions can only dream of.
And, based on a recent visit to Azerbaijan, Jahangir is wrong about it being merely a music for grandfathers. Among Azeris, mugham is alive and well, both in its pure form handed down from master teacher to apprentice student, and in its hyphenated forms as sampled, borrowed and even kitschified by Azeri musicians playing with their western ears wide open.
Elvis Costello and Tony Bennett, meet Arif Babayev.
Arif Babayev is a fading star of mugham opera, a hybrid genre encour aged by Soviet culture commissars to merge the high tradition s of Mussorgski and Tchaikovsky with what they wrongly considered to be the simple folk music-not the real "classical" music-of the Caucasus, just as Rimsky-Korsakov had done with "Sheherazade." While the plots and settings came from such Azeri epics as those written by the 16th-century poet Fuzuli- who, ironically, lived in Baghdad and Mosul all his life- the music and orchestration is mostly Western except for a few token arias and accompaniments using mugham scales and the kemanche, a spike fiddle, and tar, an hourglass-bodied long necked lute.
Arif now teaches at the Baku Music Academy, and most of his student s aspire to careers in the relatively well paid world of mugham opera, rather than to sing the pure mugham in itinerant wedding ensembles that, given the shrinking paying audience for such music, end up playing mostly for their own enjoyment and that of their lucky friends.
During one Friday afternoon master class, five students seated in child-size desks faced their well-groomed silver-haired and mustachioed 60-year old teacher, Arif. His voice was weakened by age and a cold he caught on his recent pilgrimage to Mecca. The grand piano in the corner is irrelevant for this music, its western tuning rendered meaningless before mugham's eastern modal system. A hot plate brewing Azerbaijan's pot of tea offered the only heat in this darkening winter's day.
Arif looked over his class- Nazakat Tymurova, the class's only woman and Arif's protegee with a career already in motion ; ]avid Abdullayev, a burly 30- year-old with a beard in the making; Kazem Behineh, an Iranian-Azeri refugee hoping to open a music school for fellow exiles in Copenhagen; Islam Muhammadov, a 20-year-old freshman with buzz-cut red hair, gold teeth and a blue suit; and special guest Kasemfar Abbasov, Arif 's past prize student who now directs his own mugham school. The tar and kemanche accompanists took their seats facing the students, who nervously cleared their throats and thumbed the pages of ghazals of Nizami, Fuzuli and the other lodestars of the Azeri lyric.
]avid was first to take up the tambou rine, holding it as a resonator to his cheek as he began a couplet by Fuzuli known by its first line- ''Ashiyani murgi dil zulfi parishaniindadir." In your hair I will build a lovely nest. And, as with all ghazals, the last couplet contained a direct invocation of the poet's name, so ]avid ended with a tribute, "O Fuzuli!"
Arif rocked his head back and forth, his fingers laced together and his eyes closed. "Sing at a higher volume, one that suits your age, otherwise you sound like my grandmother." ]avid no sooner began anew than Arif slammed his hand on the desk. "If you don't sing at the proper pitch you won't get a grade in this class." Arif demonstrated with a quick burst of song.
Nazakat began immediately in tahrir, rapidly shifting her voice between nose and chest to create a pitch-perfect warbling sound. A mugham singer's greatest success is to be mistaken for a nightingale.
Arif shouted, "Good. More. Good. Louder." He joined her in duet and ended with a teacher's warning. "The rhythm of this mugham is the most difficult in all the repertoire- but you still don't sing it as I showed you before."
He sipped his tea, unwrapped and bit into a hard candy, an Azeri substitute for stirring in sugar, and nodded his head at the car player's improvised interlude.
"Don't sing as well as you want, sing as well as I want." He demonstrated again, looking deeply at Nazakat as his voice fluttered dead-on between two notes.
Nazakat repeated sotto voce after him , leaning forward to concentrate on his falsetto playback. "Don't come in so heavy after taking a breath ," he warned. "It must be a seamless return to the lyric. Don't add something that is not there. Sing it as it is, not like crying. Take your time."
She shook her head. "I can't sing this part well."
''I'll help you," he says.
She looked at the floor, singing to herself. I’m drawing it out too much," she said in dismay. "That's why I'm missing the measures." Her drop earrings bobbed as her head rose and fell with frustration.
Arif turned to Islam, who gripped the tambourine like the steering wheel of an overburdened truck descending a steep mountain road. He sang carefully, as if in slow motion, with a heavy tentativeness, correcting the pronunciation of a single word.
Islam continued briefly until Arif suddenly clapped out the error in his place of attack in the last lyric. "You're singing like a girl," he shouted. "Why do you pause between verses? Is that Gorbachev's accent I hear, or a Lesghi's?" referring to a Caucasus ethnic type commonly seen as country yokels.
An electronic tinkle of Nazakat's cell phone disrupted the class. She answered the call, which was from her father, and handed it to Arif.
"What's she doing here, you ask? Sometimes she wants to sing and sometimes she does not. I've finished with her today, so okay, yes, I'm sending her home to you." Nazakat took back the phone, put on her overcoat and left with an embarrassed smirk.
"Kazemfar, please sing for us," said Arif.
Kazemfar complained about the tar's poor tuning, but sang quickly through an entire ghazal, nodded to his teacher sheepishly, and. turned to leave. At the door he turned and said to the visitor, "My father has died, but I feel obliged to come here every week to see my other father." And to Arif, "Goodbye, teacher."
With that, the class ended. Teacher, father, mentor, and scold- Arif Babayev passes his technique co the next generation. The wheel turns full circle, his own voice failing as it gives new voice co others, just as in the words of 12th-century poet Nizami Ganjavi ....
Those poets rare who sang their songs
Grew old, departed, now sleep long.
I their executor; to their
Sage legacy, the noble heir.
None more than I has made anew
Those ancient modes that men once knew.
Just how crossed up Azeri culture can be is evident in the contrast between Fuzuli and Nizami, a Persian-language poet who never left Azerbaijan and was called the "prisoner of Ganja," his hometown. Baku's main square is fronted by the Nizami Museum, in which his poetic diwan is displayed in manuscript upon manuscript, but his words can be read by Azerbaijanis today only in translation.
That Baku is a less multi ethnic city today than 10 years ago is beyond dispute. The brutal Soviet suppression of the Azeri independence movement in January 1990, followed by the war with Armenia in the Karabakh region, which devastated 20 percent of Azeri soil, resulted in a huge Russian and Armenian emigration. The golden age of Baku depicted in the early pages of ''Ali and Nino," the cross-cultural Azerbaijani love story set in the 1920s which became a best-selling novel in the United States in the 1970s now exists only in the theater.
One mugham opera that patches that golden age back together is "The Cloth Peddler," by Uzeyir Hajibeyov, an Azeri composer born in 1885 in Karabakh. Hajibeyov studied with Prokofiev in St. Petersburg and, although he became a Russian modernist, at heart he re main ed an Azeri sentimentalist. He single handedly established the genre of mugham opera. His grand classics, "Layla" and "Majnun," "Koroghlu" and "Mashade Ibad" come from the heights of Azeri literature.
"The Cloth Peddler" is lighter fare, an operetta of sorts which satirizes the clash of old Azeri tradition s with new ideas introduced in Baku during the first oil boom at the turn of the 20th century when such industrialists as Rockefeller, Nobel and Krupp came to town and found donkeys, turbans and arranged marriages. Its first production in 20 years, staged in Baku's ornately chandeliered State Theater, was eagerly awaited by the well-heeled beneficiaries of Baku's second boom.
The opera follows the comic twists an d turns of Asker and Gulchora, the former a Westernized oil baron who scorns the customary prohibition against meeting one's bride before the wedding day, the latter a beautiful maiden whose tradition-bound father, Sultan Bey, refuses to let her out of the house. Asker dresses himself as a lowly peddler to gain ent rance to Gulchora's room , where she immediately falls in love with the humble character of the disguise and not the cocky capitalist who wears it.
An hour before curtain time, the director, Hafiz Guliev, hurried from the costume department to the stage. His crew was still moving props and setting up lights. Guliev urged them on as he dashed to the makeup room . There he found his principal singer, Azer Zaynatov, who was playing the role of Asker, put tin g the finishing touches on his two costumes, a waistcoat and cravat for the oilman, and a high-buttoned tunic and cummerbund for the peddler. With both , he sported the same Persian lamb hat, the Azeri national symbol.
''Azerbaijanis love this opera because they see a little bit of themselves in both sides of the story," said Guliev. The alternating set design said it all- a cafe table, rocking chair and door bell in Asker's house; fountains, carpets, and pointed arches in the home of Sultan Bey.
As curtain time approached, Zaynatov warmed up his strong tenor voice by running up and down a Western scale. He was trained in Venice and his accents were heavy with Italian, his second language. Next to him one of Arif's former students trilled the contrasting scale of mugham, which she would sing in the role of Gulchora's servant. A troupe of young ballerinas chattered away in Russian, waiting for their cue in the overture. Regardless of the oriental setting, the original convention of mugham opera, then as now, required incidental notes of "high culture." T he painted backdrop for all this was the skyline of the old city showing the medieval quarter and the towers of the shah's palace. ·
The theater was filling up with patrons gaudily dressed and conspicuously bejeweled. As always, the late comers were accessorized with cell phones. Many who came to the performance were perhaps the grandchildren of oil barons like Asker and those who came to see opening night of "The Cloth Peddler" in 1913, the year Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" also premiered. So even with its premiere, this mugham opera was considered a quaint throwback by westernized Bakuvites. After this modern-day performance , some of the disco-ready younger patrons might move on to a nightclub where the latest hit is "Sari Galin," a tired mugham folk tune, whose languid introduction on the kemanche leads into ... raunchy French rap lyrics declaimed against a pounding techno beat.