Mawawil Rural Songs of the Nile Delta
ECCA has brought together musicians from Menufiya, Qalyubiya and Sharqiya, provinces in the Egyptian Delta, to form the group, Mawawil. These performers (Reda Shiha and Mohamed El Shahhat, singers; Salama Metwally, rababa; Amin Shahin, arghoul; Ramadan Mohamed, kawala; Ragab Sadek, tabla; Mohamed Kholoussy, hana & sagat) play a wide repertoire of the traditional music of the Egyptian countryside, performed and enjoyed over decades by the peasant population, as well as by emigrants from the countryside to urban centres. The music reflects the daily life of peasants though love songs, religious songs (stories of the Prophets, praise of the Prophet Mohammed), poetic texts, and the King of popular songs, the mawwal or narrative ballad.
The mawwal has links to historical forms of Arabic song and poetry, and the singer demonstrates his skill with non-metrical melodic improvisation on a poetic narrative text and melody, adding or substituting his own phrases to the words of a poet. In Egypt, the text features end-rhyme schemes, such as aaabba which cleverly use punning and play on words to present different meanings for the same phonemes:
alhan shababik - intertwining tunes
fatahu l- shababik - they opened the windows
gharami shaba bik - my love for you has come into its full flower.
The musicians of Mawawil play the rababa (a double-stringed spike fiddle made from half of a coconut shell covered with fish skin and a bow strung with horse hair), the kawala (an end-blown, oblique flute with six holes) and the arghoul (an ancient double clarinet characterized by two pipes of unequal length. The second pipe serves as a drone and can be lengthened by adding pieces. The player uses the technique of circular breathing to produce an uninterrupted sound. The arghoul can be traced back to Pharaonic times as it is exactly depicted on wall paintings of the temples of the third dynasty. Today, the future of the arghoul is at risk: the death of arghoul master, Moustafa Abd al Aziz in 2001, has reduced the number of players to only three or four in all of Egypt, including Amin Shahin. On a recent field trip, ECCA staff discovered an arghoul maker who also plays and, through him, hope to find other players.
