Loading ...A Palestinian Musician Imagines A Quieter Life — On Mars
In Middle Eastern music, the oud is king. It’s a stringed instrument, a distant relative of the guitar, and an ancestor of the European lute. When you hear one played by a virtuoso, it’s hard not to become transfixed.
That’s what happened to Palestinian musician Huda Asfour. She’s a prominent oud player in D.C., having fallen under the instrument’s spell as a child, when she first heard her grandfather play one.
“I was fascinated by the instrument,” Asfour says. “It was haunting for me, to just listen to that deep sound.”
The oud is one of the oldest instruments in the world, dating back to the Egyptian pharaohs, if not earlier — and today, it’s deeply embedded in Arab culture. Most famous oud players — think Marcel Khalife or Naseer Shamma — are men. But Asfour says the oud was important for women in her family, too.
“For me, it seems like it was always part of the household, and it was kind of part of the culture that women played the instrument,” she says.
Asfour was born in Lebanon during the 1982 Israeli invasion. Growing up, her family moved around a lot, often to escape conflict. They settled down in Syria, Tunisia, Gaza and Ramallah and later, Egypt. But Asfour says that even still, her mother was determined to make her a musician. At age 13, she began formal music training — not common for girls.
Huda Asfour with her other instrument of choice, the qanun. (Nicole Hanhan)
“I was the only female playing in an orchestra of … probably something like 10 musicians, all men, when I was 14,” Asfour says.Asfour’s family encouraged her music. But as she grew up, they urged her to consider a more practical line of work — something that capitalized on her increasingly obvious talents in math and physics. At one point, Asfour says, her mother let slip to her math teacher that Asfour wanted to be a musician.
“And he sort of flipped out,” Asfour says, laughing. “Then he made it his mission to convince me to actually try engineering.”
That was the path Asfour eventually took. Her family lived through the 2002 Israeli siege in Ramallah, then relocated to Egypt, where Asfour began her education in electrical engineering. But in 2005, she made her biggest jump yet, moving to the U.S. after receiving a scholarship to attend George Washington University in D.C.
Asfour earned her Bachelor’s degree at the university. Then she took another turn. She switched to biomedical engineering, with a focus on a different kind of instrument: the human heart.
“As an engineer, I feel like [the heart is] a brilliant design for a pump. So I was completely fascinated by it,” Asfour says. “That’s how I kind of got into this whole research field.”
These days Asfour works as a postdoctoral scientist at GW. She’s pursuing a project that could give surgeons new ways to visualize procedures in the heart. It sounds like heavy-duty work, but Asfour — who also sings and plays the harplike qanun — still makes time for her music.
In fact, she may have become more committed to her art. While earning her PhD, Asfour recorded her first album. A hypnotic work that merges classical, folk and contemporary sounds, the release is called Mars, Back and Forth.
Asfour says the album’s name speaks to a fantasy she’s always had, about finding a home without borders.
“The problem of borders is very alive in my childhood, and later on,” Asfour says. “[Mars] sort of became my haven, a place for me to imagine a world that was without borders… I was trying to find a place to dream.”
After living in the U.S. for 10 years, Asfour has put down roots. She’s one of the founders of the annual D.C. Palestinian Film and Arts Festival. She’s collaborated with D.C. poets and jazz musicians, and she says she broadens her creative range even more on two recording projects she’s working on now.
But the musician says her upbringing amid conflict left a lasting imprint on her music.
“When you live through war,” Asfour says, “you start looking at everything with a different lens.”
Source: wamu.org