Avuncular American

All Ears for Bowles' Moroccan Music

No, TALIMblog has not become "BOWLESblog," but it may seem so, with a recent spate of activity in a surprising number of venues on the man's work recording for posterity the musical heritage of Morocco in 1959.  And anyway, there's already the authoritative Paul Bowles website.

Today, we're featuring a number of very exciting moves, including the upcoming 2 April Marrakesh performance and presentation of a research project related to the Bowles collection of traditional Moroccan music.  Here is sound artist Gilles Aubry's account of his "Ears Preservation" project:

Following the 2010 repatriation of the Bowles Moroccan music collection to Morocco via TALIM, artists Zouheir Atbane and Gilles Aubry have started a collaborative research in order to re-examine discourses and practices related to cultural preservation and audio recording.

Their project, "A Moroccan Anthology of Ears Preservation," involves returning some of the Bowles recordings to their original recording location in order to discuss them with local musicians.

Various questions are addressed in the process, including how to make sense of 50 year old music recordings from a local perspective? Which cultural elements have been preserved? Which ones are missing? What should be done with this collection today?

After the presentation of their installation and "Who Sees the Mystery" at the recent Marrakech Biennale of contemporary art, Aubry & Atbane are now on a residency at the French Institute in Marrakech, further developing their project together with guests Natasha Pradhan, NYU's Anna Reidy and Robert Millis. The results will be presented to the public on 2 April at the Riad Denise Masson in Marrakech.

We are particularly pleased that American scholars Pradhan and Reidy and Swiss researcher Aubry have been among the handful of students of Morocco's music who have taken advantage of our digitized collection of the Bowles Library of Congress recordings.

Meanwhile, back in the United States, we're seeing encouraging efforts to get that digitized collection online, and even to release a four-CD album of excerpts from the collection, updating the two-LP album which was released in the Seventies.  And in Europe, where interest in Bowles' work has always been high in musical and cultural circles, we hope to pursue projects that will further disseminate the music of Morocco that he was instrumental in preserving.

Now, if the Moroccan authorities would just honor their commitment - from 2010, year of the Bowles Centenary - to do something (radio programs? museum of Moroccan music? cultural programs throughout the country?) with the digitized the collection repatriated to Morocco...

Reminds me of what Paul Bowles wrote over a half century ago, "there is no fast way of listening to Berber music."

Text Gerald Loftus; photos Gilles Aubry

Paul Bowles: Saving Morocco's Music

Lynnsay Maynard (photo, left), former public radio producer/host at MPBN, now manuscript reader with Electric Literature (Brooklyn, NY), reflects on the work of Paul Bowles in recording and preserving Morocco's traditional music and the role of the American Legation in continuing his work.  Lynnsay's guest post originally appeared on The View From Fez, probably Morocco's best English-language blog of the cultural scene.  We are happy to "cross-post" with them.

Due to the length of the article, this is a "split post" - just click on the highlighted line midway through the article to continue reading.

- - - - - - - - -

In early March of 1959, the first performances of Tennessee Williams’ play “Sweet Bird of Youth” opened at Martin Beck Theatre in New York City starring Paul Newman and Geraldine Page. Directed by Greek-American Broadway and Hollywood legend Elia Kazan, most famous for conceptualizing ‘method acting’, the production of the Hollywood-lustful gigolo Chance Wayne would go on to garner four Tony Award nominations and enjoy over 350 performances in its initial run. Hidden amongst the dazzling list of cast and crew was the production’s composer: Paul Bowles, an American composer and author known preeminently for his 1949 novel “The Sheltering Sky” and his notoriously colorful expatriate lifestyle in his adopted home base of Tangier, Morocco.

 

Bowles was busy in 1959. A collection of his short stories, “The Hours after Noon”, was published. From Tangier, he was caring for his wife, writer Jane Bowles, who had suffered a debilitating stroke two years prior. A lifelong friend and collaborator of Williams, “Sweet Bird of Youth” marked the third production to which Bowles penned the music. And in the spring, Bowles was awarded a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation totaling $6,800 to fund an expansive project in conjunction with the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress (LOC): travel across Morocco and record as much folk, tribal and modern music as possible.

 

After a weeks’ training on Ampex reel-to-reel recording equipment at the LOC in Washington D.C., Bowles returned to Tangier. In early August, Bowles set out in a Volkswagen Beetle stocked with equipment, bedding and pots and pans accompanied by Christopher Wanklyn, a subdued American associate of Bowles’, and Mohammed Larbi Jilali, a kif-dependent native Moroccan who knew the local officials and the terrain.

 

My stint, in attempting to record the music of Morocco, was to capture in the space of the six months which the Rockefeller Foundation allotted me for the project, examples of every major musical genre to be found within the boundaries of the country... By [December 1959]... I already had more than two hundred and fifty selections... as diversified a body of music as one could find in any land west of India.

 

Paul Bowles, Their Heads Are Green ("The Rif, To Music")

During four, five-week trips separated by days of respite in Tangier, the trio zipped across Morocco visiting 23 cities and towns along the Rif and Atlas Mountains, northern Sahara and southeastern and northern corners operating from a map of Bowles’ design.  In his essay, “The Rif, To Music”, Bowles details portions of the trip including terse negotiations over performance costs, audible gunfire from Oujda, a town 5km west of Algeria which was in the throes of its revolution against French forces and the unbridled joy of a hot shower after days of traversing unpaved back roads.

Morocco & American Studies

It all started in February 2011, when three wise men from the east (eastern Algeria, as it happens) visited Tangier, seeking to learn more about TALIM, AIMS, and how their focus on American Studies might benefit from a relationship with the Legation.  We invited several Moroccan scholars and visiting Fulbrighters to meet their Algerian counterparts from the University of Guelma, and had a nice brainstorming session, reported in TALIMblog.

For me, the visit was the lightbulb-in-brain moment: eureka... Maghrebi scholars studying America, at the very place where the young United States of America established its first diplomatic property, in the country whose monarch was the first foreign head of state to recognize American independence.

It was the ideal mirror image of what TALIM was already doing - as the AIMS (American Institute for Maghrib Studies) research center in Morocco - fostering American scholarship of the Maghreb.  And using the Legation's USP - our "unique selling propostion" or competitive advantage - to best advantage.  More than two centuries' worth of history, increasingly cross-fertilized between our research library and our museum, enriched by blog posts and press articles, on relations between Morocco and the United States.  And diplomatic and other archives for scholars to explore.

So last weekend's workshop, starting with a musical hommage to an American - Paul Bowles - who did much to help educate his fellow citizens on Morocco and especially Tangier, was the culmination of a four-year effort on our part to show that TALIM could also be a home to Maghrebi scholars of America, especially of Moroccan-American relations and America's engagement with the Muslim, Arab, and African worlds, symbolized by this institution.

And of course we know that this realization didn't start here.  "American Studies in North African Universities," the proceedings of the 2nd conference on American Studies in the Maghreb, is dated September 1992, and "The Atlantic Connection: 200 Years of Moroccan-American Relations," published in conjunction with the 1986 bicentennial of the historic bilateral treaty, show that serious scholars have long been preoccupied with the subject.

Closer to the present, the excellent December 2012 Marrakesh conference on American Studies in Arab Universities, post-Arab Spring (organized by Hassan II University, Ben Msik, Casablanca), was a chance to gather scholars in the field from Morocco, the greater MENA region, and from Europe and North America.  Last weekend, our friends from Ben Msik, joined by fellow Moroccans from universities in Meknes, Rabat, and Tangier, as well as Dartmouth College (TALIM President Dale Eickelman) and Kennesaw State (ASA International Committee member Nina Morgan) in the US, as well as Boris Vejdovsky of the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, convened in Tangier.  The workshop heard from representatives of the American Studies Association, who detailed what eventual affiliation with the ASA might offer a Moroccan association.

Moroccans who would form the nucleus of an association - perhaps to be called M.A.S.A. or Moroccan American Studies Association - debated the issues related to possible ASA affiliation, but in the end came to the conclusion that organizing a national association took precedence.

The consensus was that a follow-on gathering would take place in early May, to finalize the shape of a Moroccan association, with nationwide membership and inclusion of the numerous faculty and graduate students of American Studies in Morocco.

Conclusion: our intimate gathering of scholars and interested partners - TALIM received vital help to host this workshop from the US Embassy Rabat Public Affairs Section, as well as from the American Language Center of Tangier - is a promising start to what we hope will be finalized in early May.  How nice it would be to have a Moroccan representative from the new association attend the annual ASA conference in Los Angeles next November...

Gerald Loftus, text and photos

Keep On Walkin' - Walk Morocco

In 1982, Louis Michael Figueroa, aged 16, ran from New Jersey to San Francisco for the American Cancer Society, unknowingly inspiring a line for Forrest Gump's famous run on the silver screen. "I just put one foot in front of the other," it goes. "When I get tired I sleep. When I get hungry I eat. When I have to go to the bathroom, I go."

IMDb, "Forrest Gump"

Danny Garcia, Mohamed Taleb, Khalid Jebbar

On Tuesday, Danny Garcia and Khalid Jebbar departed from the Legation on their epic Walk Morocco hike, destination Dakhla in the extreme south.  They should be getting to Oujda tonight, all the way over on the Algerian border.  Even though Danny told me they plan on trekking some 50 miles per day, I still am a bit fuzzy how they can do this in three days, given the distance.

But that's not the point.  I'm just glad that I randomly returned from errands in town in time to meet them as they left the Legation, down the American Steps, where a friendly plainclothes policeman accompanying Danny and Khalid stopped to introduce us.  Otherwise I might have missed this unique event.

Danny - a former US Marine - was overjoyed at seeing our exhibit on the first Marine Security Guards, and we were thrilled that he and Khalid (head of MAYD, Moroccan American Youth for Democracy) had chosen the Legation as their point of departure.  They know a thing or two about symbolism.

Speaking of symbolism - and maybe metabolism - Danny Garcia, "the Walking Man," also celebrated his 69th birthday on March 18, starting on this trek for "faith, children, and world peace."  Happy birthday, Danny, and you and Khalid keep on walkin' to Dakhla.

Gerald Loftus

 

Blue Mountain, Old Mountain: Bowles by Herrmann

Photo courtesy Irene Herrmann

As I type this, I'm listening to one of Paul Bowles' compositions from Blue Mountain Ballads, his 1946 musical rendition of poetry by his friend Tennessee Williams, inspired by southern American music.  You can listen to selections on Song of America.

But in Tangier last Friday, we had some of those same Bowles ballads live, or as close as we could get to "live" some 15 years after his death.  For the overflow audience at the Legation concert - featuring the inauguration of our new (used-but-tuned) piano - Bowles was almost with us again, thanks to his friend and musical heir Irene Herrmann.  And it wasn't just Irene on piano; we also had her daughter Kaethe Hostetter playing the violin and Latifa Azmy, soprano of Tangier.  What an evening.

Right to left: Irene Herrmann, Kaethe Hostetter, and Latifa Azmy

We have our partners the American Language Center in Tangier and the US Embassy Rabat Cultural Affairs Office to thank for their support.  Here's the ALC's abbreviated YouTube video (approx 20 minutes); other photos in this post courtesy Rachid El Mziryahi, ALC.

Natasha Pradhan of ALC - herself a student of Moroccan traditional music - recorded the concert and has made us a podcast - click here.

Irene Herrmann doesn't just apply herself to the keyboard when she evokes Paul Bowles.  Selections from his oeuvre (spanning seven decades) are interspersed with readings from his and Jane Bowles' letters and published works, and anecdotes - some never heard before in Tangier, where Bowles spent most of his long and productive life.  Her "Paul Bowles, Composer" is a very concise summary of this Renaissance man's musical side, which Bowles, writing in the shadow of Tangier's "Old Mountain," continued even after he became much better known as a writer.

Before Irene Herrmann first met Paul Bowles in Tangier, she had made a pilgrimage to the Henry Ransom Center archives at UT in Austin, finding a wealth of material by Bowles, including unpublished musical scores.  When she met Bowles later in Tangier and played some of these for him, he playfully made her repeat the recital until he admitted that he recognized his own work - but only when she played a false note on the third go.

It was this kind of "insider" relationship - without the slightest shade of name-dropping - that makes Irene such a pleasure, and a treasure.  Though she only knew Bowles in the last decade of his life, her commitment to music - his music - led Paul Bowles to name Irene Herrmann as his musical inheritor.  Irene takes her responsibility very seriously, and is the indispensible reference for work involving not only Bowles' numerous compositions, but also his work to record Morocco's traditional music, a project in which TALIM is very active.

Maybe it's because we have Bowles' music - his compositions, his Moroccan recordings, plus his narration of selected writings - playing at the Legation's Bowles Wing on our iPod continuous loop, but I can hear his melodies echoing in my ear.  Now relatively little known, his music is precise, like the man apparently was (it's evident in his writing, too).  Precise, but melodious, though sometimes the words can strike a jarring note - Irene Herrmann read us some of Jane Bowles' writing set to music, and the poignant frailty of Jane comes through with painful clarity.

Irene Herrmann last saw Bowles in 1999, "shrinking away in bed, yet still precise in his answers."  Herrmann modestly puts herself in the category of mere "performer," and says that Bowles "listened differently; he had a composer's ear."

Those of us who listened to Irene last weekend know that she too has an eye and an ear for detail, and her musical portrait of the man whom some of us never met was a precise as anything that Bowles might have written.  A Bowles evening, with Irene Herrmann.

Gerald Loftus

Culturally Significant, Symbolically Strategic

Thanks to the State Department's Bureau of Overseas Buildings Operations - OBO, our landlord - we bring you this nice link where you can download the PDF of the glossy brochure illustrating the Secretary of State's Register of Culturally Significant Properties.

The Tangier American Legation is the first property on the Register, by virtue of our status as the first American diplomatic property, thanks to the gift of the Sultan of Morocco in 1821.

It's a story that we never tire of telling, for it strikes us as particularly significant - culturally, but also strategically and symbolically - that America's oldest and first diplomatic property is located smack in the middle of an ancient medina.

A medina in an Arab, Muslim, African country - Morocco - whose Sultan in 1777 was the first foreign head of state to recognize "the Americans."  George Washington - at the time hunkering down for the winter with his troops in Valley Forge - was later, as the first American President, to write to his "Great and Magnanimous Friend," the Sultan of Morocco.

In the above page and in the table of contents of the OBO brochure, we're listed as "Tangier Old Legation," a nomenclature that we're trying to edge away from.  "Old American Legation," and its French equivalent "Ancienne Légation Américaine" which we still see on maps published for visitors, connotes "former," "relic," or "moribund."

Wow, moribund We Are Not.  Just come and see.  This place is hopping.  Culturally, academically, and as a force in the community.

As Aretha Franklin said, give us a little respect.  Our "propers" include not just getting financial help from generous donors, but deserving attention for what we symbolize.

Gerald Loftus

Paul Bowles and His Synthesizer

"I did a score on synthesizer, but I don’t consider that composing. There’s no compositional technique involved. I suppose it is composing, though, in a different way."

Paul Bowles interview in New Music Box with Frank Oteri and Ken Smith, January 1998.

By the time Bowles self-deprecatingly admitted that he had indeed used a synthesizer, he had already composed incidental music for three plays put on by the Dramatic Society of the American School of Tangier ("music by Paul Bowles, costumes by Yves St. Laurent" - that's the kind of place Tangier was in those days, where even high school plays turned into international talent shows of Tangier's literary and artistic crowd).

Now, thanks to the efforts of Thomas Gunther, Karim Benzakour, and Oliver Orion, the synthesizer which used to sit in Paul Bowles' apartment in Tangier is safely on display in the Legation's Paul Bowles Wing, where it joins a wealth of other material - books, musical scores, paintings, photos - on this Renaissance man of the 20th century.  Thanks to AST - the American School of Tangier - for sharing this piece of history with the museum-going public.

Bowles originally visited Tangier with Aaron Copland, reflecting Bowles' initial vocation, that of composer of modern American music.  His last instrument, acquired in 1992, was a synthesizer.

Joseph McPhillips, then Headmaster of the American School of Tangier (AST), had persuaded his friend Patricia Robinson to finance the purchase of the synthesizer.  Patricia's son Adam Adams brought it to Tangier and taught Bowles the first steps.  Bowles' initial project was to compose the music for the school's production of the Euripides tragedy Hippolytus.

After Adam’s departure, Karim Benzakour of AST (photo at right with Bowles, from the ARTE TV documentary "Der Titan von Tanger") took over as Paul Bowles' synthesizer mentor (click on this link for a YouTube excerpt).  This arrangement continued for several years, until Bowles died in November 1999.  The keyboard came back to the American School of Tangier, until it was given to the American Legation museum in February 2014 for this exhibit.

According to Bowles' musical heir Irene Herrmann, Bowles' last three scores for AST school plays "were created directly on synthesizer."  Our display includes the "floppy discs" for individual "instruments" that got slotted into the synsthesizer, plus other floppies anotated by Bowles "Hippolytes" and "Salomé."

Thanks to Oliver Orion, former music teacher at AST, who first suggested saving the venerable relic from oblivion - see his note painted on the base of the synthesizer at left:

"This machine was used by Mr. P. Bowles to compose music for such AST productions as Salome and Hippolytus.  Since all of its technological wonders can now fit on a mobile phone, perhaps it belongs in a museum, if not in an elec. music class."

Oliver, your advice has been followed!

To Thomas Gunther, an American in Paris and friend of the Legation, whose idea it was to display Bowles' synthesizer as part of our exhibit.

And to Karim Benzakour of AST, who not only taught Mr. Bowles a bit about using the machine, but who has lovingly safeguarded this part of Tangier's past.

Gerald Loftus, text and photos

Claude McKay's Love Songs to Morocco

The following guest post by Jacqueline Bishop on Claude McKay introduces many of us to an African American writer of the 20th century about whom too little is written in the literature on Americans in Morocco.  Jacqueline Bishop is a writer and visual artist who teaches full time in the Liberal Studies Program at New York University.  She collaborates with the photographer Lhouceine Aamar in documenting Claude McKay’s Morocco.

 - - - - - - - - - - -

When I came to Morocco on a Fulbright Fellowship in 2008 I was surprised to learn that almost no one knew that the celebrated African American writer Claude McKay had lived and worked in the country. Even more surprising were the people who knew of Claude McKay’s importance as a writer, without knowing that he had written most of his books in Morocco. Back in the United States, almost no one seemed to take seriously the author’s time in Morocco. To date there hasn’t been any examination of the influence living in Morocco had on the author’s work and the development and clarification of both his anti-colonialist and anti-imperialist ideas. This is a lacunae still waiting to be filled, as this is but a brief introduction to Claude McKay and some of the work that he did in Morocco.

 When he first came to Morocco in 1928, Claude McKay was in an upbeat mood. His first novel, Home to Harlem, had just been published and was steadily climbing up the New York Times best-seller list, one of the earliest such feats for an African American writer. McKay had money in his pocket and was well on his way to writing his second and perhaps most celebrated novel, Banjo, which he would complete in Morocco.

 In fact the time McKay would spend in Morocco, roughly from 1928-1934, would see the author producing an astonishing body of work in the country --- not only did he complete Banjo on his first trip in 1928; but he would go on to complete the short story collection Gingertown and the novel Banana Bottom while living in Morocco. He would also revise the novel Savage Loving (which would later be re-titled Romance in Marseilles) while living in Tangier. Sometime in 1933, McKay thought of a new novel and began to write what would eventually become Harlem Glory. In addition, he wrote several poems and various sketches of Moroccan life while still living there. Later he dedicates a significant portion of his autobiography to his time in Morocco and the country would keep showing up in subsequent works as well. Though McKay would eventually leave Morocco to return to the United States, Morocco would not leave McKay and he would be preoccupied with the country, and all the relationships he forged there, until the end of his life in 1948.

 What made Morocco, more than any of the other countries that McKay lived in, so conducive to his producing such a substantial body of creative work? I believe the answers can be found in his biography.

 Born in 1889 on the island of Jamaica, McKay would come to the United States as a youthful twenty two year-old after having publishing two collections of dialect poems on the island. More publications would follow in the United States, but McKay was an ever restless and wandering person; after only a few years in the United States he set off for Europe, where he would end up living for a decade and a half, primarily in England and France. But always there was the pull to Africa. McKay writes in his autobiography that he was first invited to visit Morocco by a sailor from Martinique he met while working in France. In time McKay would take the sailor up on his offer to visit Morocco.

  From the very start McKay fell in love with Morocco, and his published works - particularly his moving poems about Morocco - give us some sense of why the country became so meaningful to him. There was, of course, the colorful landscape, so reminiscent of his native Jamaica. His poem “Two Songs of Morocco” is a love song to the northern landscape of Morocco, where McKay lived for most of his time in the country. Here, in the breathtakingly beautiful cities of Tetouan, Chefchaouen and Tangier were the flaming “yellow daisies” that McKay remembered from his Caribbean childhood. Here too was a landscape of abundance, in which “fishes leap up like tumblers in the air.”  In his lovely poem Xauen, McKay is particularly taken with the tiny all-blue mountain municipality, where the waters kept “… flowing like the dawn … [in] the gem the Moors call Xauen.”

 

Down to the Sea in Tugboats

For a moment, clear your mental picture of tugboat toys for toddlers in bathtubs.

We are talking serious, strong, adult-strength vessels, those that can withstand Force 10 gales and deploy to sea in minutes to save supertankers in distress.  Moroccans were just reminded of the dangers at sea, with the loss of life following a collision between two fishing boats off the southern port of Dakhla two days ago.

That's the world of Christophe Bommelaer, who has sailed the rough seas from his native Dunkirk on the English Channel, via the Breton coast and its legendary "Abeille" series rescue tugs, to the port of Tangier Med, where he heads Boluda's fleet of intra-port tugs on the Strait of Gibraltar.

Thanks to Yves Gomez of Rotary Détroit for conceiving and presenting this informative session with M. Bommelaer.

As we've seen from anthropologist Janell Rothenberg's logistics presentation last year, and from our 2011 April Seminar on the socio-economic impact of Tangier's ports (two-part report: Day One, and Day Two), the topic of Tangier as an important Atlantic-Mediterranean port city continues to captivate our audience.  With considerable investments to foster both commercial shipping and tourism, Morocco has ambitions for Tangier as a major hub, connected to the world.

It always helps to show pictures, and the work of a tugboat captain, especially during dramatic rescues in mountainous waves, is very photogenic.  Christophe Bommelaer did not disappoint, and his spectacular footage, through YouTube, of the work that he and his colleagues do had the audience of Tangier students, Rotarians, and the interested public holding its breath.

The stats in this business are impressive: a $35 million tug (of the heavy duty Abeille class) to save a container ship worth $350 million; traffic in the Strait of Gibraltar: 300 ships per day (in the English Channel, it's twice that).  Bommelaer's pièce de résistance was a look at a real time website showing maritime movements, www.marinetraffic.com.

The glimpse we had, on a Thursday evening, circa 9:00 PM, revealed a snapshot of Tangier Med with roughly three ships versus rival Algeciras in Spain, where numerous vessels were lining up.

The above real time screen shot from Sunday morning illustrates either (a) that Algeciras appears to be (literally) eating Tangier Med's breakfast, or (b) that Tangier Med's super efficiency means ships roll in and roll right out again, after transshipments.  I'll leave it to the Tangier Med (TMSA, renamed TMPA) marketing department to clarify this, but, oops, their website appears to have disappeared.

Listening to Christophe Bommelaer, I get the impression that, like Horatio Clare's recent book on the container industry - "I thought I went to sea to find out about ships and oceans, but though I saw something of those, I saw much more of men" - there's a book on tugboat people and their dangerous and romantic profession that has yet to be written... perhaps "Down To The Sea In Tugboats."

But wait, they made a film:

Can't get more romantic than that.

Gerald Loftus