Raqs Nerd: wibbly wobbly timey wimey stuff

Time: it is fair to say I have a weird relationship with it.

As a very neurodivergent person (definitely Autistic, probably ADHD), I experience what's known as "time blindness" - I tend to have very little inherent sense of time's passing. Even at the age of 37, slightly embarrasingly, I still will look at my watch, go off and quickly do something, then be horrified when I look at my watch again and it's not still the same time anymore as it was last time I looked...

My favourite T-shirt (from Bristol's weirdest anonymous artist, Jim'll Paint It) says "abolish time"

And that probably reads to most people as just a bit of surreal humour, because everybody around me takes time for granted as a fact of life.

But in a past version of my life, I wanted to become a theoretical physicist (I got as far as an MPhys, and no further) - and in theoretical physics, the existence of time at all is actually surprisingly controversial​

Jumping from the sciences to the humanities, I've also come to understand that time is culturally constructed. Different cultures conceptualise and experience it very differently, and give different meanings to it. Time in Western Europe tends to be rigid, linear, and treated as if it has a very strong existence of its own that we must contort ourselves to fit into. Time as conceived in, for example, Egypt, has historically tended to be considerably more loose and flexible.

But this is actually an email about music!

Because one of the most interesting features of Arabic music, to me, is its loose relationship with time - and how extremely powerful that can be.

And that is also one of the features I hear talked about the least - in fact, I'm not entirely sure I've ever heard this talked about in a dance context. As far as I can recall, I originally learned of it as a concept from "Making Music in the Arab World" by A J Racy, one of my all-time favourite non fiction books, which I have mentioned here before.

Arabic music is, in many ways, very rhythmically focused (and it is extremely rhythmically sophicticated)

And rhythm is the patterning of time

But the rhythmic patterns are not the whole story

As dancers we rightly spend a lot of time learning about rhythm, and learning rhythmic patterns. All of us will benefit from learning to recognise, sing, and play or clap, the core rhythms of Arabic music (the MaqamWorld website is a great free learning resource for that, BTW)

However, these rhythms that trace intricate patterns through time are only one layer of the music's relationship to time - and therefore, our dance's relationship to time...

Stretchy, squishy, bendy time

Our movements, as raqs sharqi dancers, are full of expansion and contraction, stretching and bending, extending and shivering... And the music we dance to, does that to time too.

The clearest example of this is in taqasim - solo instrumental improvisations. During a taqsim, there is no set tempo or metre; no set speed for the music, nor repeating count that you could clap along with. Instead, the musician plays according to their own internal time - a flexible pace, arising from flexible, stretching-and-contracting human consciousness.

It's not that there's no pulse to the music, or that the timing is random - there is an internal pulse there all the time. But it flows organically, speeding and slowing with the energy and emotion of the instrumentalist, and the ebb and flow of their in-the-moment composition.

During taqasim, time flows like water - not rigidly in a straight line, but with currents and whirlpools, ebbs and flows.

​Listen - accordion taqsim by ElGamal ElKordy

But wait, even with rhythm, it turns out that time is still bendy!

And this is where things get really interesting. Because you might think that having a regular rhythm would make the music's timing quite straightforward and linear - even if time got a bit wibbly-wobbly during the taqsim. But actually, things are still surprisingly wibbly - and more intriguingly still, the bendy nature of time during rhythmic parts of the music turns out to be an extremely powerful emotional tool.

Flexible tempo - one difference between humans and machines

If you listen to a lot of Egyptian music, and to the original versions of classics as well as the "made for dancers" versions, you'll start to notice that there's a certain something present in older versions, and versions with only analogue instruments, that's not there in the more recent versions which employ drum machines and pre-programmed keyboard backing tracks.

A sense of breath in the music, a subtle elasticity, a gentle organic ebb and flow

It's difficult to pin down, or to precisely point it out when it's happening, but the overall feeling is very different

What's going on with this? Basically, human beings aren't machines, and it doesn't feel right to human musicians to keep time rigidly in the way a machine would.

When Arab musicians play together, they collectively respond to each other and to the energy and emotional content of the music, subtly shifting their tempo to match - and we as dancers and listeners, respond to this unconsciously.

When they're prevented from doing this, for example by a drum machine playing rigidly to a set tempo which the human musicians must follow, the music can feel oddly flat by comparison. When skilled musicians are free to let the music breathe, the whole performance takes on an extra level of energy and aliveness

Weaving melodies around the rhythm

OK, now we're getting to my favourite bit!

The interaction between (living and breathing) rhythm, and stretchy, organic, freely-flowing melody:

Steady rhythm, free taqsim

The most obvious place you'll find a kind of interplay between rhythmic percussion and loosely-timed melody within Egyptian dance music is the style of taqsim that's played over a steady slow rhythm... For example:

​Listen - Ney Taqsim from "Princess of Cairo"​

But here, although the melodic phrases are flowing, and don't fit into neat counts of eight, they do land on the down beats of the music - if you tap your fingers to the beat whilst listening, you will notice that the emphasis of the ney's phrases falls with the pulse of the rhythm.

But what if things got a bit looser and stretchier again?

Let's move to the ashra baladi...

Here we often find a solo taqsim early on... but later in the improvisation, as the musicians settle into the fast and intense tet section of the music, something very interesting sometimes happens: over the pounding heartbeat of the drums, our lead instrumentalist peels away from the flow of time, like an aeroplane leaving the runway, into a floating realm of his own suspended above the "earth" of the percussion.

Sometimes, there will be a whole taqsim played like this, flying freely above the rhythm - weaving between the beats with incredible agility, not necessarily being bound by the tempo at all, until our musician returns to the flow of time by picking up a rhythmic phrase which hits with a sudden force after the freedom of the contratempo taqsim

​Listen - Samir Srour "Soheir Zaki Fi Baladi" - here our accordionist breaks away from the rhythm at around 3:25, and lands back into it forcefully around 3:57, before drifting away again around 4:20 to bring the improvisation to its close

Suspense and release

This musical technique, departing from and rejoining the rhythm, has a strong effect on me personally. As my description above hints, I feel that as the melody moves away from its rhythmic backing, I am literally lifted out of the flow of time into a somewhat altered kind of consciousness.

The taqsim melody itself is enchanting and absorbing... But it has also charmed us away from the rhythm - and rhythmic music is deeply satisfying and compelling to our brains on a primal level. Being lifted out of it, into this floating timeless state above it, creates a certain level of tension...

And when the melody rejoins the rhythm, rejoins the flow of time, the rhythmic phrases become even more compelling than before, as that tension is resolved

I could probably write a whole essay on this (maybe I already did here, oops), because these breakings-away of melody from time happen, in large and small ways, in a lot of other musical contexts too.

You will absolutely hear this type of technique deployed by singers of traditional sufi religious music, helping to create a state of consciousness that brings one closer to the divine

You will hear it in traditional tarab music, of course

And, you will hear it in sha'abi music, which shares a good amount of musical DNA with both of the above - most especially in mawawil (vocal improvisations)

I will leave you with a couple more listening examples...

​Listen - Sabri Moudallal - songs from Aleppo - an exmaple from the Syrian tradition... Notice how the backing singers hold closely to the rhythm, whilst Sabri Moudallal himself weaves around it more freely, especially further into the performance, with a vocal improvisation around 11:30

​Listen - Ahmed Adaweya "Sheesh Beesh" - you knew he'd be in here somewhere ;) Listen for the ney solo from 4:41 which stays strongly connected to to the rhythm... Then notice how the accordion very deliberately draws us away from the rhythm afterwards, and Adaweya's mawal floats loosely above it, sometimes landing on the beats and sometimes weaving between them, until all the musical threads draw back together for a final chorus

And a final bonus, from well over a hundred years ago - some very loose timing from Egyptian singer Abdel Hayy Hilmi (1857-1912) (the sound quality of course leaves something to be desired, since this is from a 19th century wax cylinder recording! But I think it's incredible that we can still hear artists' voices coming to us from so deep into the past)

Enjoy!

And, if you enjoyed this email, or have thoughts/comments/questions, please let me know - this has been one of my most unashamedly nerdy and idiosyncratic Raqs Nerd pieces so far, so I am intrigued to know if you're getting something out of it even when I go all-out like this, and whether you'd enjoy more of this kind of hyper-specific infodump :)

With Love,

PS - all of my dance classes and workshops for May to July are now up on my booking website! Including online class series on Pilates for juicy bellydance hip technique, and - inevitably! - on dancing to the songs of Ahmed Adaweya :D

PPS - every part of this newsletter is written by me, a flesh and blood human being, using my own thoughts, feelings, opinions, and writing style - now and always. This is a generative AI free zone 🚫🤖