My Naji Hakim Experience

By Garrett Schumann     10/9/08 7:00pm

Monday saw the initiation of this fall's President's Lecture Series. Graced by the presence of the renowned Lebanese-French organist and composer Naji Hakim, the Rice community, especially the Shepherd School of Music, was abuzz with anticipation for the rare appearance of a musician on the academic platform. Hakim is most famous for having succeeded Olivier Messiaen, one of the most important composers of the 20th century, as organist at Paris' Église de la Sainte-Trinité. He has won many awards for his playing and compositions, so I was excited for his lecture, although I did not know what to expect considering no one in the composition department had ever heard of him.Composers are not usually given the chance to address the public. It is hard to intimately discuss music in front of an audience who has little understanding of the musical lexicon. It may be for this reason that Hakim's lecture was bland. His improvisations were very safe, almost stunningly simple to an experienced listener like my friend Tema Watstein, a Lovett College junior and violin performance major.

"They sounded predictable - like a typical theme and variations in the style of Liszt or Chopin," Watstein told me after the event.

His spoken words were also unmemorable. Hakim left many parts of the mystery of improvisation inexplicably untouched. Perhaps with a presumably uneducated audience in mind, he inadequately explored specific techniques he uses to create melodic diversity when he improvises, which he easily could have demonstrated without exceeding the understanding of his audience.

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On Tuesday, the day after the lecture, along with other undergraduate and graduate composition students, I had the opportunity to eat lunch with Hakim and spend more time with him discussing his music. In this more private setting, I could see some of the reasons Hakim was chosen to speak at Rice. He has a humorous, genuine personality and an undeniable genius when it comes to playing the piano and organ. I do not, however, agree that his music continues the legacies of great composer-improvisers like Mozart, Beethoven or Bach, as advertised.

Even though these masters' music is considered generic in the 21st century, these three men were incredibly inventive, sometimes even experimental at the cost of their popularity. After hearing Naji Hakim's improvisations on Monday and his composed pieces on Tuesday, I was disappointed that his music is not at all a 21st-century incarnation of the avant-garde elements of Beethoven's work, the thematic and structural cleverness of Mozart's or the perfect engineering of Bach's. As excellent as it was for the President's Lecture Series to feature a musician, I felt the university missed an opportunity by inviting a musician who does not represent the cutting edge of his field.

After spending five weeks this summer in Paris studying music composition, I was not surprised by Hakim's philosophies. The new-music community in France is very different than that at the Shepherd School, and I wish the university, desiring to have a musician lecturer, had showcased an American composer or performer whose words and music could have shed more light on what musicians at Rice endeavor to do on and off campus. Perhaps this is selfish, but I think choosing a cutting-edge American composer would have made the lecture much more relevant to our institution and more interesting in general.

It is possible that my dissatisfaction with the lecture is isolated or unreasonable, and that the non-musicians in the audience on Monday found Hakim's discussion revelatory and engaging. But my musical background and training prevent me from judging the lecture with a layman's perspective. Obviously, the intent of inviting Hakim was good, and his company was pleasant and somewhat informative. Still, this lecture could have been so much more than it was, and I fear it will be a very long time until another musician gets the chance to make up for the uncovered ground left after Hakim's visit.

Garrett Schumann is a Hanszen College junior.

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