Canvas of Sound with Tazeen Qayyum
The Hub, 21/8/2025
Tazeen Qayyum, Basel Rajoub & Feras Charestan
Two consummate musicians play trippy oriental music, while a calligrapher kneels on a 2-metre-square sheet of paper and, spiralling outwards from the centre, inscribes over and over a four-word mantra in Urdu, using that most luscious of scripts, Arabic. Tonight’s mantra translates as “hope, justice, kindness, peace.” Sadly, there is a flaw.
The trio, the spokesperson says, have presented this event often before but always in more intimate spaces, and “They are nervous. This is the first time in a concert hall.” Well, as concert halls go, this one is surely sympathetic to what is billed as a “contemplative performance”, for it is EIF’s Hub, set in the sanctuary of an old Gothic Revival church. Its skinny spire is the highest point in central Edinburgh, perfect pivot for any spiral.
Tazeen Qayyum is a Pakistani-Canadian conceptual artist. She is elegant, barefoot, in a short kaftan and leggings; all three performers in black. She mounts the platform to stand on her paper. Rajoub takes the first of his four instruments, a chunky wooden pipe adapted from the duduk and breathes a melting “Woooh”. Ripples of sound follow, redolent of the desert. Some minutes later, Charestan takes over on the qanum, the spine-tingling, triple-stringed ancestor to the dulcimer. They then combine.
Qayyum has been stroking the paper around her, as if smoothing sand, then with a brush-tipped felt pen, begins to scribe. There’s a screen behind showing the growing image from above. Gradually, the mandala of letters turns into a wreath or crown of thorns, then a Medusa’s head, hook-clawed scorpions or snakes. The script whose strokes normally look so flowing, becomes tilted and spiky, like the silver plucks on the qanum-player’s finger-tips.
Some of the music displays wonders of fusion, passages of Eastern maqam seeming to reappear unaltered as Western jazz. Then back again. Rajoub identifies strongly with jazz. Having fled Syria for Switzerland, he keeps alive his Syrian heritage with a group of players. Charestan also Syrian, now lives in Sweden. He performs solo on qanum and with symphony orchestras.
The first time the music pauses for Rajoub to change instrument, someone claps. Tentatively, others join in. But others resist. Does it not break the spell they want to weave?
All of which cuts out Qayyum, who has continued writing throughout. Suddenly she is seen as a sideline. If we were to have immersed ourselves in the music, how was her writing to have served us? The Medusa’s head had become just an ever-expanding thicket. Were we just witnessing her own therapy session? If so, shouldn’t we also get clipboard and pen? The concept is flawed, and I think the performers feared this.
I was lucky. I was nestled at the front amongst the armchairs and beanbags. This meant I could ignore shortcomings, close eyes, and bathe in sounds. Not so lucky my companion with his last-minute ticket up in the gods. The show lacked warmth, and that was felt keenly in the gallery. The message of contemplation didn’t project well. He was bitterly disappointed, and like a good few around him, left early. Still, I do not speak for everybody, and plenty seemed happy.