Author: Yuval Klein
Title Image: Yuval Klein
A man with long gray hair perches himself beside a younger acquaintance, a woman in early adulthood who sports wiry glasses and a colorful flannel shirt. The woman’s bag is strapped to her waist, brushing upon my lap, on which an I-phonic notebook is littered with the ramblings of an unseasoned ethnomusicologist. Above the stage are speakers that shuffle through a diverse lineup of instrumental tracks – the sounds are pleasant, so as to prolong one’s joy of music; and innocuous, so as not to be an imposing presence in this language-oriented phase of the evening, an interlude between two featured bands. Christopher Small would argue that these spontaneous, unmelodic conversations are no less a part of the musical experience than the noetically-willed vibrations produced by licensed performers – with their fingers deftly mingling and withdrawing from musically-inclined instruments; their bodies delightfully confined to within the parameters of a socially and altitudinally exalted stage; their faces generously lit by a spotlight whose existence is justified by an ability to leer in a way that directs the sentient human gaze towards them. The woman speaks openly to the man about a mutual friend to whom she is evidently closer. She mentions him by name and expounds upon his many mental health issues. The space is such that my presence doesn’t impede upon her ease at exposing these otherwise private anecdotes; my comprehension is rendered insignificant by our absence of coordination outside the confines of a narrow chronological and spatial framework, one that is outlined in the invitation to this event: ‘Show: THE CEDAR… 7:30 PM… Monday, September 23, 2024.’ All the faces, disparate and connected alike, convene in imitating the stage-bound gaze of the spotlight. The band is introduced; the audience claps and shouts so as to legitimize the musicians’ high artiste status, becoming more excitable in the face of a protracted wait. Pre-recorded animal sounds trickle onto the stage, and so too, members of The Balkan Paradise Orchestra.
Ten women now face the center of the room, around which an open space beckons the seated audience hither. “Are you mad, mate? Get up from out ya’ seat – I’m where the party’s at!” exhorts the dance floor. Compelled by its informal rhetorical prowess, people around me copiously flock centerwards – masses heed the calls of exodus, embracing the hustle and bustle of the big city, and leave my once fertile oasis of idle observers desiccated and desolated. I eye a cluster of dance-crazed megalomaniacs and recall an article by Tom Turino in which he contends that “for people in the capitalist-cosmopolitan formation where music and dance have become more specialized activities, it might be hard to imagine that music making and dancing are as basic to being social as the ability to take part in friendly conversation, but such is the case in [many] places…” This in mind, I halt my antagonization of those common non-specialists with their audacity to presume a proactive role in our collective musical experience. We are all participants. That said, the event was by no means egalitarian; there remained a rigid hierarchy affirmed by the stratification of people into audience and performers. The band is presenting to the audience a hermetic sequence of movements and sounds forged by labor and coordination.
Balkan Paradise Orchestra members playing their instruments while simultaneously performing choreography (Photo Credit: Yuval Klein)
All of the musicians play brass, percussion, or woodwind instruments. While three of them emit terse, monotonic chirps with their heads inclined, a parallel row hiccups syncopated responses, punctuating each note with synchronized head turns. The performance is unceasingly giving and effervescent. Nothing on the stage falters – the music, the movement, the energy – yet I remain stagnating alongside a largely older cohort of concertgoers in a sterile and sequestered stratum of Cedar society. I find myself responding viscerally, resenting my attempts at intellectualizing these fleeting moments of musical rapport. A tubist summons a triumphant deluge of percussive melody while her associates, disarmed of instruments, move around, thereby establishing a precedent of energy and mobility that, by an act of osmosis, we dancers absorb. Yes, I am now a dancer – with neither certification nor ethical vindication, my body responds assuredly. Then it doesn’t. I’m once again bashful, searching my pocket for that darned I-phonic entity and swiftly unsheath it. Adjusting the strap of my camera, I implore my fingers to type the witty observations that my brain seems to resent; I write one that is simultaneously prosaic and humiliatingly ironic: ‘Many people are dancing passionately, [whereas I am not].’ I immediately pocket this rectangular invective towards musical immersion. Rather than prescribing words to the ineffable qualities of music, I dance – the intensity of movement wavers in tandem with my confidence. Counting the seconds of kinesthetic attunement before each inexorable regression to captivity under the yoke of paralyzing inhibitions, I try to traverse patches of song and time in order to elude the claws of a tyrannical cognition. Towards the end of the concert, I managed to dance for longer intervals – now sixteen seconds, now twenty – but ultimately fell short of the glorious terminus: 3,2,1, liftoff! Musicians jump on the stage, then those in the open space respond accordingly, feet flailing like children at play – while I stand, overwrought, at the same elevation as before.
The next day, two musicians alight on stage. I observe them from the sparsely populated dancefloor, looking at the chairsome rows from whence I came. A mustachioed young man and the nearly eighty-year-old Ustad Bakhsh Noor – with his makeshift turban and well-like eyes – sit on a carpet with legs crossed. They commence playing with gestures of modest recognition and without a spoken preface. The mustachioed man strokes his lute-derived instrument called the Dambura with a looping, trance-inducing fervor. This provides the framework for virtuosic, cascading impressions imparted by Ustad with impressive musical fluency. His instrument is the benju, an esoteric zither-like import from Japan. The amplification gives it a steel-pressed sound, a chaste folkloric resonance with a decidedly metallic texture.
Noor plingys the benju (Photo Credit: Yuval Klein)
Few dance, with one noticeable exception; the woman in front of me contorts her body, conceiving of impressionistic, undulating motions to compliment each passage. Her arms seem possessed by graceful serpents, erotically caressing one another while fingers press opposite digits as though tapping two ends of imperceptible and adjoined pianos. The song ends and Ustad greets the audience in his Balochi tongue. With fluent English, his partner translates that a third musician is absent from the stage tonight due to food poisoning. His otherwise unnoticeable vacancy adds a dimension of negative potential to the performance, placing the music within a realm of higher possibility. Yet, the dearth of instruments lends to a delightful homeliness.
Noor addressing the crowd (Photo Credit: Yuval Klein)
Dambura player translating Noor's words to the crowd (Photo Credit: Yuval Klein)
In retrospect… Whereas the Balkanic band celebrated youth, the Balochs highlighted the seniority of their soloist; whereas the Balkanics paired music with movement, the Balochs threaded elegant phrases while seated; whereas the Balkanics were entirely female, the Balochs were male; whereas the Balkanics had a self-aggrandizing print of their name in the background, the Balochs had a globe with the festival’s name; whereas the Balkanics compelled people to dance, the Balochs invited a more passive participation; whereas the Balkanics complimented their performance with superimposed animal sounds and other pre-recorded accompaniments, the Balochs structured their songs without adhesive; whereas the Balkanics mobilized loud brass instruments to pound the room to its foundations, the Balochs captivated the room without seizing it; whereas the Balkanics elicited in me a desire to cast away pen, paper, and I-Phone, the Balochs lended themselves to linguistic scrutiny.
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