Мунир Башир: Жизнь и творчество иракского виртуоза уда.

Munir Bashir, (منير بشير; ; 1930 – September 28, 1997) was an Iraqi Assyrian musician and one of the most famous musicians in the Middle East during the 20th century and was considered to be one of the supreme masters of the Arab maqamat scale system. He created different styles of the Arabian Oud. He was one of the first middle eastern instrumentalists known to Europe and the United States. Bashir's music is distinguished by a novel style of improvisation that reflects his study of Indian and European tonal art in addition to oriental forms. Born in Iraq, he had to deal with numerous disruptions of violent coup attempts and multiple wars that the country went through. He would eventually exile to Europe and first became notable in Hungary.

Munir Bashir was born in Mosul, situated in northern Iraq to an Assyrian Christian family. According to different references he was born in a period of time from 1928 to 1930. His father Abd al Aziz and his brother Jamil had good reputations as oud soloists and vocalists; Jamil wrote an important textbook for the oud. The family started musically educating young Bashir at his age of five, Bashir's father began to instruct him and his older brother Jamil in the basics of oud. His father, who was also a poet believed that a pure tradition of Arab music had devolved in Baghdad. He first learned to play the violoncello, a European instrument that had become a popular bass instrument in Arabian music during the end of the 19th century. He simultaneously was taught playing the oud. The lute plays a similar role in Arabian music as the piano does in European music: it is the instrument used to impart the most important theoretical aspects in music. Due to a blend of many different styles and traditions there is a rich musical history in northern Iraq. In this milieu Bashir came in contact with Byzantine, Kurdish, Assyrian, Turkish, Persian, and traditional Abbasidian music.

At the age of six talented Bashir was sent to the Baghdad Conservatory, founded 1934 by the distinguished Turkish musicologist Scharif Muhyi ad Din Haydar Targan (1892–1967). Already during his studies, but especially after his degree, Bashir paid his attention to documenting and preserving the traditional musical styles of his country. Due to the turbulent Iraqi history and other reasons these styles were overridden by "Western" ones, especially commercial ones. In 1951, Bashir took a teaching assignment at the new founded Académie des Beaux Arts in Baghdad, besides his editorial work for the Iraqi broadcasting.

Bashir always had an ambivalent relationship to his country: On the one side he felt deeply rooted in the rich cultural heritage of Mesopotamia, on the other side the Iraq had no phases of inner stability during the musicians lifetime. Especially the 1950s and 1960s – the last years of the Hashemite monarchy and a time of military coups following the fall of Faisal II. in 1958 – forced Bashir to work abroad. His reputation had already arrived in Beirut, therefore he was contracted as an accompanyist and also as a "star soloist" by the legendary Lebanese chanteuse Fairuz immediately when he arrived at the Lebanese capital in 1953. He got to know US and Latino American popular music but intensified his attempts of investigating Middle Eastern musical traditions. Due to his profound musicological knowledge he gained teaching assignments at the musical colleges of Baghdad and Beirut. The years 1953 and 1954 marked the beginning of Bashir's career as an instrument virtuoso. His first concert as a soloist took place 1953 in Istanbul, in the next year the 24 year old was featured in Iraqi television. 1957 he started several tours leading him to most of the European countries. The difficult political status of his country and the resulting problematic working parameters for musicians forced him to leave the country permanently.

After a sojourn in Beirut, Bashir settled down in Budapest in the beginning 1960s, where he established a place of residence until his death. He married a Hungarian, his son Omar was born 1970 in the Hungarian capital. This city was attractive for the Iraqi not only because of its status as European music metropolis, but for giving him the opportunity to study at the Franz Liszt Conservatory under supervision of Zoltán Kodály, where he did his doctorate in musicology in 1965. His style noticeably differs from other oud players, for example from the urban “showmanship” in the “typical Egyptian” style of Farid Al Attrach, or from the heavily jazz oriented music of Lebanese Rabih Abou Khalil, who is very popular in Europe. Especially in the field of soloistic improvisation (taqsīm) over the common scales (maqām) in Arabian music, his colleagues considered him to be an unsurpassed master. The reesha is held in the palm of one's hand, resulting in a difficultly learnable picking technique; furthermore the doubled strings have a less controllable attack than single strings. Therefore, the inevitable rhythmic reliability in fastest, asymmetric accented, melodies is a special trademark of virtuosos. Generalizing: Arabian music is much more interested in rhythmical patterns that are more complex than European ones. Bashir's virtuosity of picking can easily be understood, when he shows his ability to apply the abovementioned scordatura, with its string pairs tuned in octaves, in an improvisation in the fast 10/8 metre, without the immense stopping problems of this method becoming hearable. Bashir's dealing with foreign musical forms appears also in his experiments with alternative picking techniques. He made the fingerpicking, cultivated on the guitar – especially in flamenco – to an essential attribute of his mature style. But after a few experiments, he gave up using a thumb plectrum (mezrab) that he got to know during his studies of the Indian sitar.

Bashir's preferred improvisational type, the taqsim improvisation pulls its attractiveness out of the intelligent and strictly regulated ornamentation of melodies or familiar melodic fragments. Therefore, a taqsim evolves out of different, but no less artful criteria, than in modern jazz, where an improvisation takes place inside of a relatively strict metric, harmonic, and formal raster. But similar to jazz improvisation, some distinct patterns can be assigned to their originator. On this note, a connoisseur of Arabian music is able to recognize a lot of "bashirisms", analogue to a jazz fan, who undoubtedly identifies the influence of Louis Armstrong or Charlie Parker in special melodic phrases.

As mentioned above, the oud belongs to the family of short scale lutes. The widest interval that can be stopped between the open string and the end of the fingerboard is a fifth (quint); though it is possible to play wider intervals on the same string by stopping tones on the top of the corpus. Although Bashir has not invented this slightly unorthodox technique, he has integrated it into his style in an exemplary manner. Also, before Bashir, the usage of flageolets did not belong to the traditional playing techniques of the oud, even though this technique actually is characteristic for stringed instruments.

Munir Bashir emerged into the scene at a time that was anything but fortunate for Arabian music. Because of his professional experiences he was more conscious of these difficulties than many of his colleagues, who often tended towards retreating into niches or more or less resignedly accepting these conditions. Bernard Lewis, the British historian, refers to the musician as an example of a Middle Eastern, who has understood to meet the influence of the Western culture on the basis of equal collaboration. Bashir sought and found new possibilities of musical expression by standing up for the traditions of "his" music and by dealing with older forms. On a more technical level, Bashir put his improvisations in the context of maqamat, which were never used outside of Iraq, or which fell into obscurity during the 20th century.

Bashir's integration of foreign elements of style led to a lack of understanding and criticism of the traditionalists. As reported by the music journalist Sami Asmar, Bashir was accused of chumming up to his western audience by preferentially making music in extra simple maqamat. It was explicitly stated that Bashir abuses the maqamat Rast and Shadd Araban that way. knight of the French Legion of Honour, and secretary general of the Arabian music academy in Baghdad.