Arabic singing workshop with Aïcha Redouane
The workshop programme includes:
• Progressive preparation, with physical relaxation and breathing
• A gentle vocal warm up and opening up of the voice
• Vocal inflections
• Combining text and rhythms
• Discovery of the modal language of maqâm
• Repertoire of Eastern-Arabic singing
• Sufi singing
As far as teaching is concerned, Aïcha and Habib put substantive work into imparting their knowledge through classes, workshops, masters classes and presentation-concerts. They are the co-creators of the book and CD pack ‘Arabic Songs of the Near East, Egypt, Irak, Lebanon, Syria’.
The Franco-Moroccan singer Aïcha Redouane is a qânûn player (table zithar), composer and teacher. She is one of the great performers of maqâm from the Near East, and her spectrum of expression comprises Berber song (amazigh), jazz-blues, lyrical song, classical Arabic singing and even Sufi singing. Her musical research has been suppored by the French Minster for Culture and she has even followed a course in Koranic chanting (tajwîd) with the Cairo Sheikhs of Paris.
In 1991, Aïcha Redouane and Habib Yammine founded the Al-Adwâr ensemble in line with the Sheiks of Nahda to spread the art of Maqam and the classical Arabic repertoire. For several years now they have been working on mystic poetry, and setting the texts of great authors, such as Râbia Al-Adawiyya, Ibn Arabî, Al-Hallâj and Ibn al-Fârid, to music. For Aicha, singing Sufi poetry is the natural expression of her lived experience of her spiritual development under the guidance of master Sufi Sidi Hamza on a path of love, light and knowledge.
