October 26, 1997
A promoter of non–Western music
"People who sing together don't
shoot each other," record producer Eckart Rahn says. Rahn, director
of Mayflower Music, which houses the Celestial Harmonies label, specialises
in music of non–Western cultures, and was in Canberra last week
to work on two major new projects. His company, based in Tucson, Arizona,
is his own brainchild. "I'm nothing but a 1960s dropout," he says.
With no qualifications to do anything, Rahn played some jazz, listened
to be–bop music and worked as a humble card–filer for the German
overseas radio service Deutsche Welle. There he had access to the vast
resources in the overseas recording files. Self-educated in world music,
initially that of Africa and India, whose improvisational traditions he
admired, he made his first recording, of Macedonian music, in 1966.
It pleases him that he has managed to survive for 30 years. Most of
his peers have either sold out to major recording companies or dropped
out altogether. A quick glimpse at the 1997 Celestial Harmonies catalogue
gives an idea of his scope. Armenian music, Australian Aboriginal music,
Gregorian chants, the music of Süleyman the Magnificent, the music
of Bali, American–Indian music, an anthology of chant, another
of women's music, and four-disc anthologies of music from Cambodia and
Vietnam.
Australia hold a particular lure for Rahn. Here, he says, we have some
of the best sound engineers in the world, like Don Bartley in Sydney.
There are technicians in Sydney who are capable of turning music recorded
in desert or jungle conditions sound pristine.
As an off–shore record producer who uses Australian talent, Rahn
supports the recording industry's stand against government moves to
remove parallel importation restriction on CDs.
But we are talking music, not politics. One thing which brought Rahn
to Australia this time around is the need to meet Gareth Evans. Evans
was his greatest support on the Cambodian project seven years ago in
very difficult times. He hopes Evans can assist him with a project on
Aboriginal music he wants to undertake with the Australian Institute
of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies.
Ancestors and Spirits will be recorded and produced by Michael
Askill, the founder of Synergy and a former percussion teacher at the
Canberra School of Music. The other half will be undertaken by New Zealand
musicologist David Parsons, who did the Cambodia series.
Rahn is hoping for a CD to accompany the year 2000 exhibition entitled
Oceania, a joint production by the National Gallery and the Art Gallery
of NSW. Rahn's interest in visuals is an intriguing sideline, and one
which ensures the Celestial Harmonies label is at the leading edge of
marketing style. He wants to match the music of Aboriginal and Oceanic
culture with visual imagery and scholarly notations, so that anyone,
even, say a Swiss graphic artist sitting in his studio, could become,
in a few hours, more closely acquainted with that culture. "I want my
CDs to become the informed persons' gold pot," Rahn says.
Celestial Harmonies created such a CD for the Art Gallery of NSW's
Indian exhibition Dancing to the Flute, held early this year,
and sold 800 copies at the gallery shop. But he knows it will not be
so easy with Oceania. There are too many countries, and while
he could just "send someone off to Benares" to record Indian music,
he will need to cover a wide span in this region.
Rahn's self-proclaimed ignorance can be taken with a grain of salt.
He trounces me on a point to do with Ravi Shankar and expands on the
finer points of Chinese music and didgeridoo. It is clear he believes
the split between music handed down and music written down is irrevocable.
Nevertheless, he concedes that Shankar brought wider audiences for Indian
music through his collaborations with George Harrison and Yehudi Menuhin.
By chance I touch on his favourite subject, Rahn is just putting the
finishing touches to a 17–CD box called The Music of Islam,
featuring rare music selected from Iran, North Africa, Turkey, China,
Palestine, India, Indonesia and other Muslim countries, to be launched
in conjunction with the Art Gallery of NSW's Orientalism show
opening in December.
Rahn has been working through scholarly notes—60 pages for each
CD. There is so much information that he's had to bring the notes out
on fine "Bible" paper to fit in the packs.
Oddly, he first got interested in Islamic calligraphy, not music. "The
highest form of writing in the world," he calls it. Only then did he
turn to Islamic music. Influenced by Michelle Zackheim's trail–blazing
Tent of Meetings project which brought together the cultures
of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, it astonished him how few people
knew of the deep connections between the three "Abrahamic" religions.
The project has taken many years, with the final gaps only being filled
this year when he was able to track down a troupe of 19 exiled Iraqi
musicians living in Qatar. All of them are graduates in music from the
University of Baghdad.
Rahn relates how they tried to take a bus from Amman to Baghdad, but
were turned away at the border on the suspicion of being spies. He tracked
down the world expert on Yemenite music, an elderly former East German
professor who only writes his material by hand. He found the world's
top Indonesian music expert Margaret Kartomi of Monash University via
his "friendly counsellor", Michael Atherton at the University of Western
Sydney. He recorded a wedding at Marrakesh: "so precious," he says.
That forms one CD.
"How do you get your teeth into all of this?" he asks rhetorically.
One way was by networking in the Islamic world, by meeting leading Islamic
experts like the dervish leader Sheik Nail-Kesova. Five years and 17
CDs later, Rahn looks with satisfaction on his pet project. If you run
the spines of the assembled CDs together you can read a Koranic verse.
Each cover features authentic calligraphy. On the front of the CD featuring
Nubian music, the Arabic writing is edged with African designs. The
collection has even been blessed by an Imam.
Rahn is looking to the future. He talks of the extraordinary collection
of music in AIATSIS—thousands of hours of Aboriginal music recorded
in the '60s and now in danger of disintegration.
If Rahn fulfills his dream of a series on Aboriginal music, which is
to him a kind of meeting place of spiritual ideas and feelings, he will
have done some good. For he believes music is a force for harmony and
understanding.
With such an articulate sparring partner as Rahn, it is not easy to
have the last word, but I try, with a borrowed Shakespearean quotation
to match his open gambit about music and peace, " The man who hath no
music in himself, nor is moved by concord of sweet sounds, is fit for
treasons, stratagems and spoils."
"That's a good one," Rahn says. "I like it."
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