The instrument, Qanun, is originally Persian and is played by picking with long nails. In the center it has strings of different lengths stretching from right to left in close triplets. On the left side there's keys for tuning, as well as levers. The artist plays by plucking the strings with both hands, sometimes using his left hand to switch or finely tilt the levers. These make the Qanun instrument different from any other...
Every time I heard Arab music, it sounded so wrong and didn't fit the familiar western music scheme. I'd just forget this and it didn't bother me because I don't like that music. Tonight however the mystery was resolved. Ariel kindly gave explanations and historical background between the pieces he played, including names of pieces and composers, their classification and origin.
In Western music, we have tones divided to just half tones, so we have "available sounds" A, A#, B, C, C#, D, D#, E, F, F#, G, G#, that's 12 half-tones in an octave. For the guitar for instance each fret is a halftone. We have our scales (e.g. melodic minor, harmonic) which are sets of sounds on which a piece is based.
Now, in Eastern music each tone is divided into 12 subtones! Meaning that each of the above 12 halftones (A to G#) is multiplied by 6, and that's the amount of different sounds per octave there are in Eastern music. The ear senses the difference sharply, so each time we hear an Arab or Turkish tune played with D, E#, and then some A+1/6 instead of A, the tone interval is wrong and it sounds odd.
Each string on the qanun has several levers (I've counted 13 on some), a lever per subtone raise. When a lever of a string is turned from right to left, the string is shortened since then it's in contact with the lever's edge. The intermediate lever position (between locked at left or right position) is used for playing with the note's pitch "live".
Music for the qanun is not written in symbols on sheets like in the West school, there's no notation. Maybe just the "skeleton" of the piece, and the rest is improvisation. Works are mostly transferred from one artist to another by learning to play them by ear. Typically the time signature is 10/8 (Western most popular today is the 4/4).
This qanun didn't have a pickup installed, maybe others come with piezoelectric or other pickups. Ariel just placed three microphones, two above it and one below the instrument.
"Heavier" pieces (very different from Western music) took a while to adopt to them and understand the logic. It was so confusing at first that after the each of the first two pieces Ariel would finish playing and had to bow and say "thank you", so that the public would get it and start clapping hands.
It's difficult to appreciate an musician's performance when you're not familiar with what's being played or worse, - don't dig that style of music at all (with the confusing 1/12 intervals). But then Ariel played a classical piece which I think was Mozart. It sounded beautiful, and he made only about 7 mistakes :) which is reasonable for its complexity and the tempo he took.
The performance was so great, you could see Ashkenazi people swaying from side to side to Turkish, Arab and Armenian sounds. At the end Ariel was pleased with the crowd's cheering and decided to do a piece by request; it was Umm-Kulthum's "Enta Omri". The lady who asked for this, sang the solo - and quite well, to everyone's surprise. I've never seen a guest from the crowd participating in a performance before. Maybe it was the environment...
After that Ariel played yet another piece, the listeners cheered loudly.
Ariel's music on googlepages, myspace
