Black Fire White Fire

Or L’Oud and the Abstract Truth

Prelude

Excerpted From Vision

As I wrote this I was coming to my senses, having not left my hotel room overlooking the Old City of Jerusalem for two days. The hotel staff was kind, they knew something was wrong but didn’t ask. I was in Israel to do some teaching, most of which I had to pass on, and to study with my music master with whom I had met enough to acquire my pieces. I worked them lying on my back on the floor. I had a load of books and the Wifi. I had borrowed a very tasty Turkish style oud and a decent German nylon string guitar I purchased in Prague and kept in Jerusalem because I had been studying there every summer with my musical muse. I didn’t speak to anyone for days.

I didn’t have that much to teach anyway. I had entered the listening learning curve of my life, having moved through the talking teaching curve as a young man when I had the hubris to think I knew something. I was on the less is more track, find your silence, give it all away track.

Because of the injury I spent much of my time laid out on the floor in a hotel overlooking the Old City. I played lying on the floor, often sleeping in fever with the borrowed oud at my side.

I shared my obsessions and inspirations with my old friend Zach. I have known Zach since he was a little boy. Zach had grown up and acquired the oud obsession, much exceeding my ability on the instrument. I had written to Zach and told him about the vow I had taken to write a piece for every portion of the Torah based on the text and inspired by the maqam, the musical form, for that portion.

From Jerusalem I wrote to Zach and this time he responded with: why don’t we put the pieces you wrote and the maqams together? Let’s record them. Let’s create a new form.

I wrote this in my journal that summer from the floor of the hotel:

I have entered into an adventurous challenge project today, presented it to my collaborator and am delighted to begin not knowing at all where it will lead. If anywhere.

By this time Zach had deepened himself in the tradition of maqam. Maqam is a musical form belonging to the eastern Mediterranean and central Asia. He was working with a synagogue community in New York who sponsored a year of videos featuring one of my pieces and music Zach put together to correspond to each weekly Torah reading.

We recorded the pieces live all over New York City with a professional group of musicians he convened called The Epichorus. We were onto something, we all knew it.

We called it The Maqam Project. In its first incarnation, we recorded pieces from the entire Torah, portion by portion. What were you doing in New York? I was asked the several years it took to complete the project.

Recording the Torah.

Zach and I then worked the audio on the pieces that were dearest to us and we committed them to a double CD. We called it L’Oud and the Abstract Truth.

Epilog:

I passed away in Jerusalem. It was some kind of strange Kawangee fever that I picked up over the African Asian rift where germs wander when they are bent on revenge.

Until my death, I never once subscribed to the germ theory.

When found I was laid out on a pallet on the floor of a hotel room cradling a Turkish oud in my arms with a look of such ecstasy on my face that the room keepers thought I was sleeping for two days. Then they decided I was dead.

They wrapped me in a sheet and went about looking for who I was. I left few clues.

They held my funeral between two groves of olive trees. The officiant was a blind holy man, perhaps a woman (“there are so many more than two possibilities,” s/he said when asked), who was called Tiresias, an irony in the Land but just right for the essential ambiguity of the way I experienced life in the sacred and ridiculous.

Tiresias described me as light and sound. My soul a luminescent blue, my sound the hum of insects at night.

Of course I wasn’t dead. I revived. I only seemed to be dead. The work I was doing, the music, the writing, the integration of it, saved me.

Thus was born these pieces. Next came the written form and the question: was it the white fire or the black fire? Both. Or all. It’s all fire, all over.