Music makes the world go round

One week after rocking to lively music in Southwest Germany, I joined a very different musical atmosphere at the International festival of world sacred musics in Fez. The theme of the Fez festival this year was the transmission of traditions and heritage. In a musical form, transmission is usually most easily achieved through repetitive melodies and harmonic patterns. The music I listened to over the week-end was therefore mainly of the repetitive sort, whether traditional or contemporary. In its sacred form, repetitive music can lead to a state of mystic transe; I did not witness any swooning or twirling though.

The weather in Fez last week-end went from hot to very hot. My Chinese paper fan was a very welcome implement during the outdoor concerts. On my last day, I stayed all day inside the relative cool of the inner courtyard of my traditional hotel Riad Myra to avoid the heat outside radiating from walls and roads until the evening concerts. 

The festival organisers had set up a canopy sheet above the audience in the Jnan Sbil garden. When a breeze would blow through it, the canopy would rise and fall slowly like a wave in a very poetic manner, and a fitting movement to accompany the live music.

I saw concerts of contemporary Western and Oriental classical music, jazz, and also a string quartet of traditional instrument players coming from 3 different countries along the silk roads of Central and Eastern Asia. There was also a magical show of Khmer traditional dances in the setting of a traditional Fassi house.

I joined close to 5000 other people within the fortified Al Makina door of the Fez walls to listen to Oriental music mega star Sami Yusuf. I had bought tickets for the two nights Sami Yusuf was playing thinking from the programme notes that the content would be different. Both nights turned out to be exactly the same music and show. However, my experience of the two concerts was very different. On the Saturday night, I was seated closer to the stage but in the middle of a group of same-levelled chairs. This meant I could not see the stage at all. I spent most of the concert trying to get a glimpse of the stage through heads and mobile phones filming the artists. However, the sound experience was very good right in the middle of the audience. All my neighbours seemed to know the songs by heart and this first concert felt like sitting in the middle of the show's backing choir. The Sunday night concert was advertised as fully booked so I arrived earlier to choose a better seat. This time, I was farther away from the stage but in a row that was higher up one step from the seats in front; this meant I could actually see what was happening on stage. Unfortunately, the sound balance was not as good on the second night or my seat was just not at the right spot within the audience; the sound kept shooting to loud booms every now and again. My neighbours on the second night did not know the songs or were too shy to sing out so this second experience was more passive and not as fulfilling for me.

Music makes the world go round
Hamilton Brothers

Im Wunderschönen Monat Mai

In the wonderfully beautiful month of May, as all the buds were leaping out [my translation of Heinrich Heine] I went for a holiday in Germany. My original plan was a road trip in a German car through Germany to visit friends there when the temperature is much cooler than in Morocco. The road trip part of the plan was only partly successful because of repeated problems with the car rental company; I prefer not to elaborate on that here. There was a heat wave on the Northern Atlantic so it was also over 30°C in Germany that week, though still 10°C cooler than in Meknès.

On the other hand, I did get to visit a total of 11 friends in 7 different places. They were friends I had made from different periods of my life, from my Masters in public rural administration in Paris in 1999, working together at ILRI in 2014, to trekking through China, studying Chinese agriculture or singing together in Beijing during the past five years.

My first stop was the old city of Aachen from which I crossed the border into the Netherlands to the equally historical city of Maastricht. During the next three days at the historical centre of the European Union project, my mobile phone and I were baffled by my crossing borders incessantly and having to change language between Dutch, French and German to speak with the locals. English was the easy default language to fall back to if I could not understand them or make myself understood.

And then I started my German road trip. From Aachen, I drove to Berlin, Postdam, then back Southwest to Ingelheim on the Rhine and finally South to the Swabian Alb region and Stuttgart. All this over seven days. My highlights from this trip were:

• Catching up with old friends, some of whom I had not seen in more than 14 years;
• Driving on the German Autobahn at more than 160 km/h with an odd sensation of both levitation and a constant state of intense awareness to slower cars in front and even faster cars zooming in from behind;
• Eating seasonal white asparagus cooked in various forms;
• The sunny outdoors trekking and biking;
• The typical architecture of these old Northern European cities in the sunset.

Also memorable was the Music Night festival in the small Swabian village of Kirchheim under Teck. The contrast between thumping rock bands, clapping and headbanging audience, cobblestoned streets and half-timbered houses was striking. Among the many rock acts on show, I particularly enjoyed the country music sounds of Johnny Trouble and his band, the easy tunes and harmonies by looping one-man-band artist Ricky Vicente, the mindboggling energy and eclectic repertoire of Orangefuel, and the electrifying unstoppable rock’n roll by The BangBags.

Dichterliebe, Robert Schumann
Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Christoph Eschenbach