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Growing up, my home was very quiet. The neighborhoods where I lived were made up of similar kind of people. They were all full of white people or the rare Indian family. The houses were separated by yards; there were no apartment blocks. So, quiet. The sounds were predictable. My mother required that it be that way so she could rest, and I seemed to have inherited that trait as well. We spoke softly, we walked up and down the stairs in a careful way, we didn’t sit on our porch at night.

Here in Istanbul it is noisy. 17 million people or so making noises in the crowded streets, malls, and  apartment buildings. I find that in Istanbul I can’t relate to sounds like how I used to. My unconscious reactions to sounds are often mismatched to the actual situation. Sounds that I instinctively perceive as threatening, like a raised tone of voice, could mean a variety of things. Someone could be in a fight with someone else. Or, they could be hard of hearing, or talking as they work near a loud machine. Or that’s just how they talk. A loud bang outside at midnight could be gunfire or some other kind of violence, but it’s probably one of the many trash collectors carelessly sorting through the nearest metal bin on the street.

So far I have lived in Istanbul for 6 years and I wouldn’t say I have adjusted. I manage. I am like a cat that was raised in a house and now manages to live outside. When I am out in the crowds on the street or public transportation my sense of hearing exists in an isolated dimension, with little shocks of adrenaline going into my body.

Sitting upon a ferry boat taking me across the Bosphorus, my eyes widen with concern upon hearing a loud voice that seems to be yelling angrily somewhere on the lower floor. The two women across from me take no break in their conversation to turn their heads and the man beside me sleeps an unbroken slumber.

This week I have been watching Siegfried by Wagner, in preparation for my annual Wagner music history lecture. In several of his operas Wagner created characters that are overtly anti-Semitic stereotypes of Jews that overlap with the patterns of Nazi anti-Jew propaganda, for instance the dwarf Mime, who has a main role in Siegfried (people have argued that these actually aren’t really anti-Semitic, but I just don’t buy it). Wagner’s anti-Semitism is a well-known and undisputed fact, but different people place more or less emphasis on it. Because I find the philosophical ideas behind the way Wagner wrote music so interesting and beautiful, I de-emphasize his xenophobia in the classroom. In my typical Wagner class, I focus on the final act of Die Walküre, which in terms of literature, music, and philosophy is incredible. Sometimes the night after I teach that class I can’t sleep because the music is stuck in my head! In the face of such a personally powerful experience of Wagner’s music, it is difficult for me to seriously consider Wagner as someone who may have contributed to the racist atrocities committed in Europe and the U.S. starting in the early 20th century. It’s easy to say that Wagner died in the 1880s before all of that anti-Jew talk began to have tangible negative effects, so we can’t really say whether he bears any responsibility, and that no one who goes to see Wagner today conflates Mime with Jewish people.

As I watched Siegfried this week, though, I was at the same time watching a troubling series of xenophobic hate speech and hate crimes in my home country, the United States. This situation has led some Americans to start discussing the nature of xenophobic speech. For example, should people spreading lies about certain types of people and even calling for their persecution be allowed to speak freely in the public sphere? White nationalists have been given some nasty welcomes at American universities recently; how should we evaluate violent discourse—and even physical violence—as a reaction to white nationalist discourse? Some people say that no matter the qualities of someone’s ideas, they must be debated calmly and logically in the public sphere. That is the only ethical and rhetorically valid option for handling hate speech. Clearly, though, there are other people who think that white nationalists are extreme and must be dealt with through concordantly strong communicative acts (“You say immigrants get out of our country, we say get out of our university!”).

A few years ago, when some very public figures in American politics and media started making shockingly public xenophobic statements (things like immigrants commit a lot of crimes or conspiracy theories about the ill intentions of Muslim Americans), it wasn’t so clear what to do. There was unease, sure, but this is a country whose society and economy were built on racist ideas (slavery and all that flowed from it) and cannot easily leave that heritage behind. We can all joke about racist things some of our family members or neighbors say—but it’s just the way they are, right? Xenophobic and racist discourse broke into mainstream politics and media a few years ago…but maybe it’s just your grandfather with a microphone? It’s just the way some people are, but only a few, and the rest of us know that what they’re saying is factually incorrect and morally disgusting? Then it’s 2017 and U.S. Representatives are proudly declaring their support of cultural purity, Jewish cemeteries and cultural centers are being terrorized, mosques are being vandalized like never before, and repeatedly Indian immigrants are being attacked by people who think they are doing America the favor of getting rid of “Arabs”. Maybe we can’t clearly say that hate crimes are on the rise, but aren’t there at least too many of them happening lately? Maybe there was a point at which the violent discourse transformed into violent acts? Could we have seen it coming?

Enter Wagner, incredible composer and Jew-despiser. This part is important, because it’s when my job gains some rare concrete urgency. It’s easy as a musicologist to focus so much on analyzing the meaning and function of other people’s music that you forget to do it for yourself, about your own music and the situations involving music at the present moment. Adrian Mourby  has made a good analysis of differing points of view on how to evaluate Wagner’s art in line of his nasty views, but I think he fails to consider two important things: Wagner’s public power and opera’s power. Wagner was not just a guy who drew some Jewish caricatures on a napkin at home or wrote a diary entry blaming the Jews for the decaying of society. Wagner intended his literary and musical discourse about Jews to be public, having his operas performed, and his essays and librettos published. Then after his death, as Wagnerism really picked up in multiple countries, his ideas became incredibly public.

Mourby focuses on an essay that Wagner wrote as the worst evidence against him, but to me the stereotyped characters in his operas and the villain roles they play within the drama are much worse because the opera medium is such a powerful one. There are stories about how Wagner’s music, in particular, drove late-19th-century audiences into highly emotional states, and as I shared earlier, I find it to be very moving as well. A xenophobic message can gain real traction when shared in such an emotionally powerful, multi-sensory form, which creates such a memorable experience that can be etched in the mind (people were declaring themselves “Wagnerians” in some periods). In Siegfried, for example, Mime is a villain, a member of a dwarf race that seems corrupt in their essence, controlled by a desire for wealth and power but physically and spiritually deficient. He tries to keep the hero, Siegfried, from realizing his destiny by tricking him. All aspects of the opera’s form that relate to Mime, even the way Mime’s melodies sound and the stage directions to the person playing his part, are ugly. At least for earlier audiences, I think a suggestion of Jewishness would have also been evident. For a few hours the spectator sees the ugliness of Mime and his clear contrast to other, nobler characters like Wotan and Siegfried, of the favored race of the gods. And it’s not so easy for people to forget what they’ve seen.

Ok, someone might say, you’re making a hypothetical argument about a serious claim. We can’t know if watching Siegfried has driven someone to vandalize a Jewish cemetery. Yes, absolutely, so let’s shift the perspective from music as a singular cause of something else or not and instead to music as a tool people can use to do things with, and to music as unavoidably interconnected with other cultural forms. Shortly after Wagner’s death, a circle of anti-Jewish German nationalist intellectuals began to congregate around Wagner’s operas. This so-called “Bayreuth Circle” included active participation of Cosima Wagner, who had become quite anti-Semitic herself, and her son-in-law the extreme racist Stewart Chamberlain. The group then drew in Winifred Williams, and after Cosima’s health declined in the 1920s they became associated with the young Hitler. So, while it is not as though Hitler wrote Mein Kampf as he listened to Siegfried, it is true that over a long period a group of people who would have much to do with the rise of Nazism were frequently coming together around a shared love of Wagner and his music. They used his music as what Tia DeNora (2003, p. 125) has called a musical “anchoring practice” for their political work.

Some people say that because there is no evidence that Hitler read much of Wagner’s writings, the composer cannot be implicated in what he did. Again, this is missing the powerful nature of music, I think, as a form that can be used to communicate ideas and structure people’s ideas about themselves and the world. Hitler was devoted to Wagner’s music and to an idea that he could become in politics something like the ideal German hero that Wagner had become in the realm of composition. He kept several original Wagner musical scores in his war bunker and he would have Wagner excerpts played at Nazi political rallies. Wagner was played at Dachau concentration camp to “re-educate” prisoners. So, people used Wagner’s music to do some very bad things and, furthermore, they had a line of personal connections to Wagner leading back through Cosima Wagner that engendered a transmission and development of anti-Semitic ideology. In both Hitler and Cosima Wagner we see people who became devoted to xenophobic ideology and to Wagner’s music, and through the way they organized their life activities linked the two in a relationship. That Hitler used Wagner’s music as a tool for constructing his own subjectivity and his powerful medium of public discourse seems clear, and I think that is a problem that needs to be recognized and dealt with. In Israel the solution has been to ban Wagner—something like the violent protestors who recently said, emphatically, “no!” to Milo Yiannopoulos and Charles Murray. I can respect this answer.

What will I do in my class tomorrow? That is the question I have been asking myself as I wrote out this blog post. It seems that I must seriously discuss the general stereotypical aspects of characters like Mime, how they are represented in musical sound, and their function and meaning within the entire drama. Not saying anything seems like someone shrugging their shoulders at Blackface or Zwarte Piet. I am going to see which clips I can find of different stagings of the anti-Semitic characters. This Danish version is probably what I’ll use in class tomorrow instead of my usual traditionally-staged Metropolitan Opera version. The blog post also casts my thoughts about the captivating beauty of Wagner’s music (specifically at the end of Die Walküre) in a new light. Along with making a portrait of sublime beauty that connects with the lofty metaphysical aims of Romantic philosophy, I need to mention the dark side of beauty. Beauty can be influential. The aesthetic power of captivating mediums like music, social media, or campaign rallies can be directed towards discursive power, decorating an idea that in its naked form someone would be less likely to accept or take up. I find Wagner to be beautiful and it’s unsettling to admit that so did that archenemy of the good, Hitler, even though the music decorates very different ideas for me versus him.

The point of this discussion is not to label people who like Wagner as racists. I doubt many people use Wagner’s operas to sustain xenophobic ideologies today—there are other cultural forms serving that purpose like White Power Music. Instead, bringing up anti-Semitic issues in Wagner serves as exemplary history in several ways. Generally, this is a good example of the power of aesthetic culture like music, television, or the visual arts to be used in politics and violence. It also forces us to take seriously the notion that a pure artwork doesn’t exist; art is not a timeless, neutral object of beauty, but a complex phenomenon centered around an art object that people cause to accumulate layers of meaning as it passes through different eras. What happened with Wagner also warns us, perhaps, about our present moment, to take seriously the potential damage someone can do if they are blaming certain minority groups in a society or hatefully stereotyping them and they gain a public following—especially people who don’t seem so insidious or who still make a few good points. Brave people have been calling out the lies and the destructive hate and we need to keep doing it. We hope that people who say horrible things don’t really mean it. But in the 1920s German newspapers started publishing pages devoted to Jewish crime and we find ourselves at a similar point in the U.S., and we can’t assume that it will lead nowhere.

It disappoints me to have to say such things in my Wagner lecture, because I prefer to celebrate certain ideas about the world and certain musical sounds that I enjoy, period. I’ll have to cut out some of the things I love talking about to pollute the sanctity of the temple with unpleasant ideas about racism and Nazis. The option to just carry on in my music-lover’s bubble is unacceptable, though, because it would mean failing to take seriously the role that musicologists can play in society, as specialists in analyzing cultural forms in a time when spectacular cultural forms are once again exerting a breathtaking effect on collective life.

Tonight I had the great pleasure of hearing and seeing a live performance of Onur Türkmen’s Sailing to Byzantium, a composition that Onur told me about a year ago and that I have been anticipating ever since. I had gotten worried that perhaps an obstacle on his way had come up, but suddenly last week I got a Facebook invitation to a performance of the piece in Istanbul, at Koç University.

Here is the official description: Sailing to Byzantium  / İstanbul’a (Bizans’a) Seyahat, yapıtları aynı dönemde sembolizm bağlamında paralellikler taşıyan büyük İrlandalı şair W.B.Yeats ile Ahmet Haşim’in şiirleri üzerine kurgulanıyor. Besteci Onur Türkmen’in yazdığı eseri, Avrupa’nın en özgün çağdaş müzik topluluklarından İrlandalı Yurodny Ensemble sahneliyor. Türkiye’nin önemli geleneksel müzik icracıları Nermin Kaygusuz (şan/kemençe) ve  Miase Bayramoğlu Örümlü’yü (ney) Yurodny Ensemble ile bir araya getiren bu özel çalışma “zaman” kavramının farklı boyutları üzerine yoğunlaşıyor. Sailing to Byzantium is compiled of poems of the major Irish poet W.B Yeats and Ahmet Haşim that were written in the same era and share Symbolist parallels. Composer Onur Türkmen’s work brings to the stage one of Europe’s most original modern music ensembles, the Irish Yurodny Ensemble, along with significant traditional Turkish music performers Nermin Kaygusuz (voice/kemençe) and Miase Bayramoğlu (ney). This special endeavor centers on different dimensions of the notion of time. 

Onur has subtitled the work “Ay, Kuğular ve Ruh Üzerine bir Törensel Drama” or “A Ritual Drama about Moon, Swans, and Soul.” It is an accurate description of my impression of the piece, which consists of 9 parts, some of which are songs and others of which are entirely instrumental. The texted portions are on a few strange and lovely poems by W.B. Yeats and Ahmet Haşim. Many of the instrumental sections relate to single words in the poems. The ensemble for the premieres in Istanbul and Ankara (held a few nights ago) consisted of the Irish Yurodny ensemble (Scottish harp, violin, piano, saxophones, trombone) and 3 Turkish musicians (ney, kemençe, cello). There was one Irish vocalist and the kemençe player also served as the Turkish vocalist. At many points the performance had a ritualistic air that encompassed a gradient of solemnity and ecstasy that reminded me of George Crumb–especially his Ancient Voices of Children. Like Crumb, Onur and the musicians made avant-garde music with a touchingly human voice.

We arrived to the concert a bit late, joining everyone at the start of the 3rd movement, a gorgeous instrumental section that featured the Scottish harp. Catriona McKay, the harp player, seems to have what Franz Liszt referred to as transcendental execution: high technical skill that allows her great freedom and precision of expression. My attention was immediately aroused by this display. I can say the same thing for the performances of violinist Diamanda La Berge Dramm, cellist Gözde Yaşar, and saxophonist Nick Roth. (I cannot comment on the other musicians regarding this issue, because they seemed to have less virtuosic, soloistic parts.)

The main reason I was so keen to hear Sailing to Byzantium was because Onur had explained to me that it would combine Irish and Turkish traditional instruments. Onur is someone who has for several years tried to engage in a systematic and personal way with the Turkish makam (scale) system and with traditional Ottoman-Turkish aesthetic ideas. So, I believed that he would not simply give some of the melodies to a Turkish instrument or splash in some traditional percussion parts. Indeed, the interface between Turkish and European art and folk music proved to be complex, inventive, and surely weighted. I heard the noisy, percussive, mostly un-pitched sound world of avant garde European art music; the sober, curving tones of Turkish classical music; the poignant strains of Irish music; and both cool classical art and warm popular vocal hues. The result was a fusion of very particular sound worlds into something familiar and yet noticeably unique, a fine balance to strike. One moment of especially impressive fusion was the use of prepared-piano alterations to the piano strings to alter the pitches into what sounded to me like the tuning of one of the Turkish makams. Another was when Nick Roth circulated the stage, performing a solo part for soprano saxophone that at first reminded me of the playful exploration of timbre in Berio’s Oboe Sequenza and then transformed into an exuberant realization of Black Sea tulum (bagpipe) playing.

Lately, the strongest sign that I am listening to a good piece of contemporary art music is that I become still and very focused on each and every perceptible sound. Generally, Türkmen’s musical textures are uncluttered and unfold with patience, making it is easy for me to locate such a listening mode in them. This kind of listening is what I would call sincere: I have the sense that I am an open, optimistic receiver for the sounds, and as they enter my body I am freely feeling and thinking responses to it. The wonderful Turkish word “samimiyet” came to my mind during the concert, particularly during the song setting Haşim’s “Ruhum” or “My Soul”. It gave me great satisfaction alone to read this finely crafted poem, but the effect was then doubled by Türkmen’s breathtakingly sincere attempt to complement it with sounds. I suspect that as he composes, Onur considers every sound that he represents in the notation. He imagines the sufficient into existence but through some kind of patient listening and disciplined mind stops holds back any excess. Remarkably, in Sailing to Byzantium, he even managed to do at moments of seeming violent rage. I know the work of conductor Ivan Arion Karst well, and I can say that he possesses just the same qualities (I also heard tonight from one of the musicians that he is additionally a kind conductor who brings out the best performers can offer). Tonight, all the musicians echoed and amplified this loving care towards sound, with their performances coming together into a glorious garment.

Current music, wherever it lies along the popular-art trajectory, seems to be gripped by one or more manifestations of excess: loud sounds, high drama; lots of experimentation, notes, noise, sensuous beauty; plurality of sources and references; thick textures; lots of different instruments; highly energetic dancing and affective response. I do not mean to suggest that this is a bad thing–some of the popular and art music that I am most enjoying listening to at home certainly possesses abundant excesses. The compositions that I know by Onur Türkmen, however, seem to go in a less common direction. Or, no, I changed my mind as I wrote that sentence. Perhaps it is the condition of music to be excessive; in some way it is inescapably heavy (kesif), and it is a fallacy to try to escape it. Onur’s generally subtle (latif) sounds seem rarely excessive to me. At the same time I perceive in his works an imposing intellectual edifice, and they typically provoke in me a flood of meanings and interpretations. From listening to Sailing to Byzantium only one time, I already glimpsed the possibility of a great number of webs of connections that the verbal and musical components can form. The most obvious one of these concerns bodies of water. I need to study all of it again before I can say more, and I hope to be able to do that soon in another post.

For now, let me congratulate Onur Türkmen and the skillful musicians who were on the stage tonight. While you are waiting for more, readers out there, I encourage you to check out Onur’s other compositions on his Soundcloud account.

During my very first visit to Pakistan, as a musicologist who loves music, I really wanted to go to some concerts of local musicians drawing primarily on the traditional musical culture. Unfortunately, it was hard for my husband’s family to find any events. They explained that there are not a lot of concerts in Lahore. The master musicians (ustad-s) play only a few times a year, and their concerts are expensive (like $200 a ticket!) and exclusive. After some searching we learned that on the night Farhan and I returned to Lahore from Islamabad, Cafe Peeru’s was hosting a “ghazal” night. Perfect, we thought! As it turned out, it wasn’t “perfect” in the way I had hoped, but still, there was plenty to see and hear.

In the following paragraphs I give some observations of the show. My training as a musician and a musicologist gives me a certain point of view that I am not trying to hide. At the same time, I am sure there are things I have missed or misunderstood. I would be curious to learn, especially from Pakistanis, how other readers respond to what I will say. Perhaps people can make comments at the end of my post or on Facebook.

The design and feel of Cafe Peeru’s is enjoyable, and I recommend it to anybody who hasn’t gone there yet. There are several wooden tables outside under a canopy of trees, with colorful fabrics and lanterns hanging from it. Even though the air was cold and we were sitting outside, a nearby fire sufficed to keep us warm.

On the menu a vision for the cafe was explained:

Indeed this cafe was unique among all of the restaurants I visited in Lahore or Islamabad, because it clearly had been designed to do what the vision statement suggested, to serve as a kind of unique, beautiful, artful escape from mundane life.

My experience of the music at the cafe was hardly sublime but rather a kind of confused and disconnected cultural jumble. The confusion manifested itself in the band’s instruments, the style of the music, and the choice of songs. As shown in the above photograph, the musicians consisted of 1 male singer, 1 electric keyboard player, 1 electric guitar player, and 1 of those djembe-ish drums that seem to have become a percussion instrument of choice around the world over the last 25 years. (For those who don’t know, a djembe is a traditional drum from West Africa that is portable and can produce a variety of distinct sounds). I felt disappointed when I noticed these instruments on the stage upon entering, because I was hoping to see the more traditional harmonium and tabla drums. What I did see suggested some kind of world pop fusion. Not wanting to fall into the typical tourist mode of privileging one’s imagined idea of the traditional essence of a distant culture, I said to myself, ok, let’s see what they do with these instruments.

In contrast to the plain shirts and pants of the instrumentalists, the singer wore stylish, cosmopolitan clothes. Before they began he explained that they were aiming to do something in the style of Coke Studios. I have never researched Coke Studios thoroughly, but as I have been learning more about contemporary Pakistani and Indian music I have come across it several times. As far as I have observed, in a place like Pakistan where there is not much infrastructure to support music, Coke Studios steps in and offers the local musicians a performance platform that of course also doubles as advertisement. Generally, the musical results are a kind of “world music” in which the melodic content remains local but is inserted into a rhythmic, harmonic, and formal context that is firmly Anglophone rock. The example of “Allah Hu” by the Nooran sisters is a clear case of such a stylistic transformation. Originally a pretty traditional (I think) Qawwali song with an emphasis on mystical poetry that is meant to take listeners into a different state of consciousness, in this Coke Studios version most of the words have been cut out and what is left is a metrically regular, thickly-textured groove. Here is another extremely hodgepodged example I happened upon when I was looking for the traditional Istanbul song “Üsküdar’a Gider iken”. The transformation results in a seductive sound that people from all over the world can potentially nod their heads to while they are at work, stuck in traffic, or wait for their food to arrive at a restaurant.

In the case of our “ghazal” concert, this meant a local vocal style the likes of Shafqat Amaanat Ali with a regular rhythmic/harmonic grid. The guitar and keyboard players employed jazzy idioms built from tertian chords. The djembe player played with only two different hand strokes (trained tabla players can make many different sounds on their instrument) and he played something like a fusion of a rock beat and some tabla-like fills. The first song was an arrangement in the above-mentioned style of a “ghazal,” but then after that the band mostly played Bollywood hits. They only played ghazal tunes when Farhan’s family members went up to the stage and specifically requested them. The band wasn’t familiar with some of these requests. In terms of overt behavior, Farhan’s parents seemed to be the only people present in the audience who had considerable knowledge of the ghazal genre.

As is probably clear, I am not a fan of Coke Studios, but we have to recognize that there are reasons why musicians such as the Nooran Sisters have entered into business with it and why the guys at Cafe Peeru’s seemed to be trying to get in on it. That is, there is a benefit, a usefulness, a value being created in the Coke Studios institutional space. Apparently Nestle also sees the value, because in Pakistan the Nescafe Basement is also operating (some people might understand the contradiction between multi-national Nescafe and Basement, which in the U.S. refers to a very small, local venue). This is an example of globalization. I thought frequently during my time in Lahore about globalization, because it seemed to be staring me in the face much of the time. “What is it, exactly?” I wondered. My tentative and not so sophisticated answer is that it is fundamentally power flowing among geographically distant points. Several years ago I learned of the debate among humanities scholars about whether globalization was primarily helpful or harmful. It seems to me that it depends on the directions of the flow of power. In the cases of specific performances at Coke Studios or Nestle Basement, are the local musicians getting to use as much as they are being used? I don’t know, but I am not optimistic, because even if the performers featured in such media are reaping a lot of benefits, the mode of production is ultimately capitalistic. I believe a power flow operating under capitalist principles, if not carefully managed, can engender an extreme power imbalance. In this particular case, very profitable music can be produced that only requires the participation of a small number of workers (many of whom might be making low or no wages). The final product consists of mass-produced, mass-media forms that are infinitely replicable. Such an arrangement has the potential to put large numbers of local musicians out of work and to standardize or flatten out the music being produced.

Back to our band at Cafe Peeru’s. The vocalist and guitarist had attained a certain level of musicianship; what I mean is that they had enough technical ability and performing experience that they were attuned to each other, and it was pleasing to watch and listen to them relating to each other through the music. The keyboard player often sounded like he wasn’t fitting stylistically with the others. The djembe player had trouble relating to the vocalist, who was leading the ensemble. It seemed that he often just wasn’t listening, so that when the vocalist tried to soften the group’s sound he didn’t follow, and so the vocalist had to directly gesture to him to play with less energy. As some people might know, in the traditional musical culture of this region, musicians learn by observing and playing with older master musicians for several years. The result is that the disciples attain a deep familiarity with the performance practice, and so when you watch them perform together they are communicating with extreme sophistication in mostly non-verbal ways. This “ensemble problem,” as some musicians call it, was compounded that night in Lahore when a man in the audience who appeared to be the owner of Cafe Peeru’s started to also play on his djembe. The two percussionists were continually clashing. I think the owner wanted the younger djembe player on the stage to follow him as he played a more complex part, but this certainly wasn’t easy to do given that the older musician was not even visible to the other one, being concealed behind a table to the musicians’ right side.

To conclude the observations about the performers, I can say that the vocalist had a vision for the musical experience he was leading, just as the owners of Cafe Peeru’s aimed at a special experience in their restaurant. Will he be able to realize it? What will happen to this vision as he finds himself in particular institutional arrangements and gains more knowledge about his profession?

At the end of the post I would like to briefly describe the audience. Eventually the following groups were present: a young couple sitting right in front of the stage, the six of us sitting a little further back, and a large family of three generations behind us. On the left side there was the owner at a semi-private table by the stage, a group of 5 middle-aged men behind him, and then a group of 5 middle-aged women out celebrating someone’s birthday. Besides us, the djembe-wielding owner, and the large family, the people at the other tables did not visibly engage with the musicians in any way. Several times the singer explained that if the people liked the music they could clap to demonstrate it to the musicians, but for some reason, most of the audience seemed to do nothing at the end of each song. Actually, while I watched them, the majority of the people didn’t seem to be paying attention whatsoever to the music.

The large family spread over a few tables at the back of the space at first acted excited about the music. The patriarch had his children go up and request not one but two Bollywood hits in dedication to his wife. Besides us, this family were the only other people to request songs. Both times when the musicians started the requested song the family behaved in a marked way, recording the performance and taking pictures with phones, laughing and speaking excitedly about what was happening. But, after less than a minute these behaviors stopped. After maybe 20 minutes of this extreme high-and-then-low pattern of reaction, the family became subdued and, looking tired or unhappy, they left.

At least in terms of observable behavior, the singer’s repeated attempts to engage with the audience were almost wholly lacking in reciprocity. This, frankly, made me sad, because in traditional Pakistani and Indian music the musician-audience exchange can be incredibly rich. That is, somewhere in Pakistani culture the potential for such a musical experience is there, I am sure of it, but the knowledge required for it is perhaps not diffusing through society. I asked Farhan about why the audience was behaving in such a way at Cafe Peeru’s. He pointed out that he himself had never gone to any concerts in Pakistan before we went to this cafe, and that in all of his many years of education at a variety of schools in Karachi and Lahore, he never learned about music. People like me who were enculturated in (i.e. grew up in) cultures featuring frequent presentational musical experiences (i.e. concerts, talent shows, recitals, school choir shows) can come to believe that knowing how to attend a concert of a certain kind of music is natural. Actually, though, we have to learn how to do this. As evidence, just think of people you have witnessed clapping at the “wrong times” in concerts of European art music.

I have a few more (and more positive) experiences of music in Lahore to share with all of you, but I will save them for the next post.

 

 

 

A few days after arriving in Lahore, Farhan and I took a bus up to Islamabad. The trip took 4.5 hours, and the road and the bus were in good condition–in that sense the trip was no different from a bus journey in Turkey, the US, or Western Europe. Along the road, through the foggy window, I saw many remarkable things: perfectly flat, wide, bright green fields, clumps of hand-built stone structures in which children played alongside the animals their families were keeping, and beautiful geological formations. After perhaps two hours of traveling we entered a region whose history had clearly encountered much more geological activity than the flat and fertile lands in south Punjab province. At one moment I saw columns of pink rocks sprouting up from the grass that reminded me of the Painted Desert in the U.S., then just a minute later we passed high rock walls. I was especially struck by a few hills that had evidently been formed when the sedimented layers of the earth were pushed up and at a sharp angle.

I had never seen such geological diversity in a small area–it reminded me that we weren’t all that far from the famously mountainous areas of Khyber Pakhtoonkhwa (KPK) and Kashmir.

The first thing we did was to go for dinner to an Afghani restaurant. I generally don’t eat red meat, but Afghani cuisine has a lot of it, so I made an exception. Everything that we ordered tasted great. We saw a lot of families from the KPK region there and we even met two Turkish people sitting at the table right next to us.

The next day we visited a few touristic areas, with a driver taking us around everywhere we went. First stop was the Pakistan Monument. Each of the four petals represents life in each of the four provinces. It was a peaceful place.

After that we walked a short distance to the Pakistan Monument Museum. At the museum I learned a lot about the history of the founding of Pakistan. Reading about Allama Iqbal made quite an impression on me, and now I know who the Lahore airport is named for! Really, Allama Iqbal seemed to have been an impressively educated, spiritual, eloquent, and artistic person. In Lahore I bought a biography about him.

Shortly after we entered the museum several groups of school children came through. I was disappointed to see that the teachers weren’t talking to the children about the exhibits or even giving them much time to look at them. I asked Farhan to translate to me what the children were saying to each other. Generally, they seemed confident, witty, and playful–it was fun to just listen to them. One group was having a discussion about whether or not a statue of Muhammad Ali Jinnah (the founder of Pakistan) was real or not. Then we saw a few girls in the line of students carrying these signs:

Farhan asked the girls why they were carrying them. “Our teacher gave them to us,” they offered, but then added, “We are protecting the environment.” The boy behind them spoke up, saying, “They are holding these signs but they don’t know why they are doing it.”

The next museum we entered was the Lok Virsa, where I bought several cheap DVDs and CDs of Pakistani music and we saw lots of exhibits on the clothing styles, handiwork, dwellings, and customs of the many people groups that have lived in what is now Pakistan.

We noticed that at the ticket counter there was a list of entry fees: one for Pakistanis and one for foreigners. At both museums the workers were surprised that 1) I was a foreigner and 2) that anyone would ask for the foreigner price instead of trying to pass as a citizen. The foreigners’ ticket was much more attractive then the other one–it was so we could keep it as a souvenir, one of the guards told us.

Next, we went to the largest mosques in Pakistan, Faisal Mosque, named after the Saudi king who donated a lot of money to the country. Surprisingly, the mosque was designed by a Turkish architect, Vedat Dalokay.

We then went a few kilometers north up to Damn-e-Koh (“The Lap of the Mountain”), which is a large park with picnic tables, play areas, and a few restaurants that offer nice views of the city. As the car climbed up the mountainside I saw a furry dog at the treeline…no wait…a monkey! Islamabad was the first place where I saw wild monkeys in my life. If you offer them food, they come right up and take it out of your hand. But, as I learned, if they don’t like what you have given them, they get angry!

We had a delicious meal at one of the restaurants, and we invited our driver to join us.

My favorite moments during the trip happened when we had conversations with the people around us, especially the service workers. We learned that our driver was from Gilgit. We can’t confidently recall his name, unfortunately. His wife and children live there and he works in Islamabad. The speak one of the Pahari dialects of Punjabi. We asked him of his opinions on the Bacha Khan University attacks that had happened just the day before. It was a horrible thing, he lamented. He also told us that the attackers blended in well with the many other people at the university that day, so that even if the security had been adequate, how would they have been able to stop them?

In the evening we walked to the Centaurus Mall, where I saw called Outfitters that looked exactly like a Hollister.

It was nice to walk around a bit in Islamabad, which was easier to do near our hotel than it had been in Lahore. That portion of the city (near the mall) felt familiar to me, with lots of grass and trees, wide, straight streets, and rows of large houses.

After two days we took the bus ride back to Lahore, arriving in time to catch a music performance at a restaurant that I will pick up with in the following post.