Muharram 1392, Heliopolis, Cairo (1972)

On February 17, 1972 musician Michael Ranta joined a gathering of musicians in the flat of Harmut Geerken in Heliopolis, Cairo for a night of musical improvisation. Also present that evening were percussionist Salah Ragab, Omar El-Hakim and Hubertus von Puttkammer. After Hartmut turned on a recorder connected to two stereo microphones, the improvisation session went on for 16 or 17 hours without break. Over the phone Geerken recalled to director Philip Rizk, “there was always someone playing.”

Forty years after the event, in 2011, the recording label Sagittarius A-Star released a single LP of the session as the now out of print album entitled “Muharram 1392.” While pouring over music for months in search for the score for his film, an excerpt of the music session on the record label’s website caught Philip Rizk’s attention. After receiving the rights for its use the session became a central auditory component in his film “Mapping Lessons.” In the film the director interlaces footage filmed in Syria in 2012 and fiction film excerpts with diary entries from a journey by K. Ouda from Russia to her hometown near Nazareth in the early 1920s following the fall of Ottoman Empire. In the vacuum left in the absence of states, the communities Ouda visited were carrying out their own form of improvisation in the hopes of forming a society the way the communities themselves desired without the intrusion of outside occupiers.

In 1932, the Conference of Arab Music under the patronage of King Fouad I, sought to reform the practice of music. In parallel with a much wider state-making trend that looked to Europe, states like Egypt that were still in the midst of being born, sought to emulate the Occident in order to receive their own status as fully fledged nation-states. This meant the establishment of militaries and ministries, police forces and agricultural policies but it also meant that music, so central to the state-building process, needed to be re-thought. In the 1932 conference, the participants put the “music of the Orient” on trial, seeking to organize what they deemed to be in disorder, calling for European instruments to replace the ones in use in the Arab world, and creating a program to bring the free flowing music-making of the street under the roof of centralized state institutions where music would be written, taught and performed. The national elites believed that only organized music would allow a society like Egypt to join the tune of modernity, systemization meant reason, the ordering of sound would bring about the order of the nation-state.

Muharram 1441, Cairo, Alexandria, Beirut, Herrsching (2021)

By engaging with the reality of communities in pre-state Egypt, Philip Rizk’s upcoming film “Terrible Sounds” imagines that another world is possible. As a sign of order and disorder, music is a vessel of this possibility. Inspired by the gathering that took place on the night of February 17, 1972, a new recoding session is planned to take place. Due to Covid-19 restrictions the original concept of recording in the town of Dahshour, in the shadow of the minor pyramids of Dahshour, an hour outside of Cairo, Egypt will no longer be possible. Instead the improvisation will take place as a kind of auditory exquisite corpse, whereby the musicians living in different cities will record an iteration and send it on to the next to respond to. The recording organized by Philip Rizk and musician Nadah El Shazly, will bring together Hartmut Geerken in Herrsching, Germany - the only active musician from the Muharram 1392 session - with musicians Nadah El Shazly, Maurice Louca and Ayman Asfour in Cairo, and Sherif Sahnaoui in Beirut. The recording harks back to one of the first free improvised “Jazz” recordings in the Arab world that revisits the old practice of improvised music despite the state’s plans for a different order.