Pandemic inspires passion for oud

The centuries old string instrument is helping people deal with stress

Cairo: While he waits for his lesson at an Egyptian music school, Maissara Mohammed plays his oud, its soothing tones dissolving the stress of daily life during the coronavirus pandemic.”I play four instruments, but the oud is certainly my favourite,” the 27-year-old Sudanese engineer says, hunched over the pear-shaped body of his instrument.

The oud, a stringed instrument popular in the Middle East whose origins date back thousands of years, is a key element of classical Arabic music.Its tuning and practice is based on a complex system of Oriental melodic modes known as maqamat.

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Mohammed arrived from Khartoum in September to learn the oud at the Kipa music school in Giza.He chose Egypt because it was renowned for oud players like Mohammed al-Qasabgi, who composed and performed some of Egyptian diva Umm Kulthum’s greatest hits.

In the Al-Marg area north of Cairo, Khaled Azzouz, a veteran oud-maker, bustled around his workshop.”The problem with the oud is that it requires long hours of practise and people usually don’t have time,” he said. Azzouz heads the biggest oud workshop in Egypt, producing 750 instruments monthly.

Occasionally, children from the neighbourhood earn pocket money by doing odd jobs at the workshop, such as removing staples from the unfinished oud bodies, Azzouz said.It supplies the Cairo branch of Beit al-Oud, a specialised school with branches across the Arab world, and exports to 12 countries, from Sweden and the United States to Saudi Arabia and Tunisia.”We make the oud from A to Z… but Egypt has no forests, so all the wood here is imported,” he said.