A touch of Arab genius to perfect a multicultural experience

It’s not especially fashionable any more, but I’m an old-fashioned sort of guy, so I still feel attached to the idea of multiculturalism.

Carlos Bonell binding his spell
With an Alhambra guitar and RC strings. And an Arab wall behind him

The other day, Danielle and I travelled into Valencia, the Spanish city on whose outskirts we now live, for a guitar concert in one of University’s buildings. The city offers these, and many other cultural activities, free to anyone who cares to show up. Plenty do: the room was packed. Coming from austerity England, where fundamental necessities – such as a police service, refuse collection or adequate healthcare – are increasingly rare, it’s refreshing to be somewhere that still values culture enough to offer it free to citizens.

That’s especially striking since the national income per head in Spain is a third lower than in Britain.

Nor, I should say before anyone decides I’m making a partisan point, was the funding entirely public: two companies, one making guitars and the other the strings, had subsidised the concert. Long may Spain maintain that kind of collaboration between sectors of the economy; let’s hope that Britain can, some day, find it again.

What made the concert particularly satisfying for an unreformed multiculturalist like me, was that it was given by an outstanding guitarist, Carlos Bonell, of Spanish parentage but born and trained in England, where he still lives. Among other more highbrow pieces by contemporary or nearly contemporary composers, he also played his own arrangements of two Beatles songs. He explained that a guitarist brought up in England has that music ingrained in him, though he also played some classic Spanish music to restore the balance.

What’s more, the concert took place in a room where one of the walls was built by the Arabs, at the time of the Moorish occupation. The room is in a basement now, but the wall was clearly at ground level during Moors’ rule: that’s what happens with old cities, they get built on top of themselves, as new houses are built over the wreckage of old ones.

One of the reasons that the organisers selected that room for the concert was that the acoustics are particularly good. And they are. You could hear every note, follow every melody, with perfect clarity, and without any echoing or reverberation. It was an ideal setting for such a concert.

English, Spanish, Arab, all combining to give a glorious cultural experience. It’s hard to imagine what could be better.

Though it does leave one question that still puzzles me: how did those Arabs, a millennium ago, work out that building that wall, in that place, with those materials, lend itself to such a superb musical experience a thousand years later?

Arab wall built of just the right stuff, in just the right place,
for superb acoustics