Ode to the Oud--The National

Behind the oud’s improvised moods

A Tunisian musician performs taqasim, extemporised musical interludes in Arabic music equivalent to jazz improvisation. Dave Bartruff / Corbis

ABU DHABI // The player’s fingers slide and flit against the oud, bouncing and wobbling for vibrato and discovering new riffs at a rhythm and pace all his own. For one sublime moment, he focuses not on his articulation or melody, or on muscle memory or what he has rehearsed for hours.

“Instead, you focus on nothing,” says Ahmed Alali, reflecting on his frame of mind when he improvises a solo.

“You must forget everything when you play. You are not thinking about technique, or what comes next. You just relax and let yourself be like a bird in flight. You let your oud speak for you.”

Never mind the power of the brain. Mr Alali believes impulse, spontaneity and clarity of mind are what it takes to perform taqasim – extemporised musical interludes that are traditional Arabic music’s equivalent to a jazz improvisation.

New research from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD, suggests Mr Alali may be on to something.

Like jazz pianists in mid-solo, traditional Arabic musicians performing taqasim are likely to suppress areas of the brain that rule inhibitions and planning, a study suggests.

Scientists analysing brain scans of jazz pianists found that spontaneous, free playing stimulated a part of the frontal lobe linked to self-expression and individuality.

Conversely, the improvisational performers showed less activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex – a region of the brain related to motor planning and organisation. It is also the area of the brain linked to inhibitions and self-censorship, such as carefully selecting the right words to use during an interview.

“I say, what’s the difference between jazz and this? You don’t keep any music, you just play what you’re feeling and it comes out,” Mr Alali says of the art of taqasim, which – unlike western music – involves quarter-tones but lacks harmony.

“You want to tell your story in music, so you start with an introduction and a conclusion,” he says.

Indeed, the concept of expressing a unique “story” is what happens when a jazz soloist creates music spontaneously, says Charles J Limb, MD, an assistant professor in the department of otolaryngology - head and neck surgery at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.

A jazz saxophonist himself, Dr Limb told the journal Science Daily that musical improvisations were an intensely personal art form, which explained why the brain scans illuminated parts of the brain wired to self-expression during performances, but showed a slowdown in activity to areas linked to inhibitions.

“What we think is happening is when you’re telling your story, you’re shutting down impulses that might impede the flow of novel ideas,” he said.

Dr Limb also noted in the article that while many studies had tried to gain an appreciation for how listening to music stimulates brain activity, few researchers had investigated what happened to the brain when the performer was composing music on the fly.

Researchers at Johns Hopkins may have only scratched the surface of the complex interplay between music and the brain. There are, for instance, people with “amusia” – a disorder indicated by the inability to perceive music as music. Whether it be a symphony or a pop song, people with the disorder will experience a tune as if they were hearing the clatter of pots and pans.

And then there is the story of Clive Wearing, the British musician and musicologist whose rare brain infection – a bout of herpes encephalitis more than two decades ago – forever altered his memory, leaving him with the most severe case of amnesia ever recorded. But in spite of Mr Wearing’s amnesia, his musical powers remained intact.

In an article in The New Yorker, the author and neurologist Oliver Sacks pondered whether Mr Wearing’s musicality – “his beautiful playing and singing, his masterly conducting, his powers of improvisation” – could really be called “skills”.

“Can any artistic or creative performance of this calibre be adequately explained by ‘procedural memory’?” Sacks wondered.

The damage to Mr Wearing’s brain after the infection in 1985 was so serious that he could no longer store new memories. His power to recall experiences was limited to mere seconds and he was unable to remember most events from before the onset of amnesia. He was still living in the 1950s and had never heard of John Lennon or John F Kennedy, nor could he identify his favourite composer, Lassus.

When Sacks asked Mr Wearing to play Bach’s Prelude 9 in E Major, the conductor believed he had never heard the piece, but while he was playing it said: “I remember this one.”

“He remembers almost nothing unless he is actually doing it; then it may come to him,” Sacks wrote, adding: “He inserted a tiny, charming improvisation at one point ... With his great musicality and his playfulness, he can easily improvise, joke, play with any piece of music.”

Music eventually became torturous for the Romantic-era German composer Schumann. Towards the end of his life, confined in a German asylum, he spoke about a maddening single note that had bored into his ears and played incessantly.

But it has been well documented that music can also alleviate mental suffering and, since it stimulates nearly every region of the brain, scientists consider it a window into how the mind functions.

As a result, research labs and neuroscientists also value music as a way to study the evolution of the mind.

For Mr Alali, who performs with his oud for the Ministry of Culture in Abu Dhabi, music is much more simple than complex brain science – but no less profound.

“It is everywhere when I want to sing, or in my head,” he said. “I am eating music, breathing music and feeling music. To me, that is what makes life good.”