Volume 21 Issue 8 - May 2016

Framing image design: Raja Javanfar, using images of the Dresden Damascus
Room kindly provided by Museum für Völkerkunde Dresden, Staatliche
Ethnographische Sammlungen Sachsen, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen
Dresden; painting of Ottoman women drinking coffee, c. 1730 by Jean-Baptiste
Vanmour, used with permission of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.
Leipzig-Damascus: So here we are, half an hour in, finally starting
to talk about the current project, “Tales of Two Cities.” We have
reached the Leipzig-Damascus Coffee House.
As always it’s finding the similarities in different places at the
same moment in time that is her creative spark.
“It’s very interesting. They were both entrepôt cities, at the crossroads
of ancient, often Roman, roads - ancient trade or caravan
routes. Leipzig was a small city but it lay at the crossroads of the
east-west road that went from Santiagio de Compostela right to Kiev
and Moscow, and goods and ideas flowed gradually along that route.
And then there was a north-south route that ran from Venice and
Rome to the Baltic Sea. Those two roads crossed right in the middle
of Leipzig and because of that the Holy Roman Emperors declared
it a trade fair centre with tax incentives and a protected place, so
it meant for centuries traders from all over Europe and as far away
as London and Siberia and Constantinople converged in this little
crossroad town of about 30,000 - the size of Toronto’s Annex.
“The city of Damascus was a much more ancient city - some
people think it is the oldest continually inhabited city in the world,
and it lay at the crossroads of routes from the Mediterranean, from
Tyre and Sidon through Syria to Baghdad, through Iran to the Silk
Road and the Far East. And the north-south route that went from
Yemen up to Mecca and Medina, Damascus, Aleppo, Anatolia and
finally Istambul.”
Damascus became the place where travellers on the pilgrims’
road to the hajj provisioned for the very dangerous journey. And
they would come back to Damascus with coffee which was grown
in Yemen, first known place of cultivation of what we know as the
arabica coffee bean.
The parallels go on and on. Both cities at the axis of a trade
route and a pilgrims’ road; both cities famous centres for scholarship
and learning; Leipzig hugely important for book publishing
and dissemination, poetry, literature, plays, philosophy; the same
true of Damascus, renowned for science, theology, law, poetry and
travel writers.
From there the stories start to actually intersect in extraordinary
and tangible ways – an important family library of secular and
religious 18th-century works of Damascene scribes being sold to
the Prussian ambassador and finding its way to the University of
Leipzig; the Ottoman ambassador to Louis XV bringing 10,000
pounds of coffee to France. And the emergence in both cities of
lively coffee house cultures, Zimmermann’s in Leipzig being the one
most notably associated with Bach and Telemann.
In the German city of Leipzig, Johann Sebastian Bach directed
an ensemble which gave Friday-night concerts between the
hours of eight and ten at Zimmerman’s Coffee houses on the
Katharinenstrasse.
In the coffee houses of Damascus, singers and performers on
the oud, kanun, ney, and daf played classical Arabic taqsims and
muwashshahs, and used their instruments to accompany famous
storytellers reciting from the rich tradition of adventure stories and
Sufi tales found in Syrian manuscript sources.
The Leipzig-Damascus Coffee House of the show’s title promises
to be resplendent visually, revolving around a set piece with
a large imbedded projection screen which will evoke in turn two
18th-century interiors – a Damascus ajami room and a Saxon woodpanelled
interior, prepared under the guidance and supervision of
Dr. Anke Scharrahs, a conservator who specializes in the research
and restoration of polychrome wooden surfaces and who is one of
the most highly respected international experts on the conservation
of Syrian-Ottoman interiors.
But true to Mackay’s credo, the music will be, as always, at the
heart of things. Tafelmusik will perform, from memory, music
plausibly connected with Zimmerman’s; Arabic music, appropriate
to the Damascene coffee house,will be rendered by Trio Arabica, an
ensemble consisting of Toronto-based, Egyptian-born, and Syriantrained
Maryem Tollar (narrator & vocalist), Naghmeh Farahmand
(percussion) and Demetri Petsalakis (oud), with narration/context
provided in English and in Arabic by both Tollar and by actor Alon
Nashman, blending storytelling and documentary roles as required.
And naturally, at appropriate and carefully chosen moments, the
work of the two ensembles will combine and intersect because such
hard-earned coincidences have been in one respect or another the
lifeblood of the magic she weaves for Tafelmusik. They are, in a way,
the continuo of her imagination.
Mackay’s work is not overtly political, but one can detect a quiet
satisfaction in her at the timing of this particular tale. In a time of
geopolitical ferment when traffic on the road from Damascus to
Leipzig appears to be going only in one direction, it does no harm,
and may even do some good, to reflect on the extent to which, in
terms of history and culture, this is is very much a two-way street.
David Perlman is the publisher of The WholeNote.
Trio Arabica
This Conversation can be listened to in its entirety alongside this
story at TheWholeNote.com.
LIZ FLOYD
18 | May 1, 2016 - June 7, 2016 thewholenote.com