'Mustapha Skandrani'

(inadvertently) emblematic

Dear reader, coucou

How is it going? I hope 2025 is already rocking your boat.

I’m just starting this year with a new cycle of pieces, (for)semaison, partially inspired by Mustapha Skandrani’s Istikhbars and Improvisations. Needless to say, I’m a little nervous to start this project — not only because I’m the QoP, i.e. the Queen of Procrastination, but also because I’ve loved Skandrani’s pieces for many, many years. My relationship with his pieces has evolved over time, supporting my journey of unveiling the history of my complex family tapestry. Skandrani’s music has somehow mirrored my awareness of this topic: prolonged absence(s), and sudden flashes. Anyway, as I finally lean into composing (for)semaison, I returned to Skandrani’s music and already bumped into some interesting stuff along the way. For instance, the Istikhbars and Improvisations were repressed by EM Records in 2021 and re-edited in December 2024. I had no idea, and this made me think that ‘something’ around Skandrani’s music was perhaps in the air. But are we talking about the same ‘something’ or even the same ‘someone’? Short answer: nein. And it’s probably oké si c’est pas kif-kif.

3, 2, 1, let’s go.

Mustapha Skandrani & Algiers

For those who don’t know him, Mustapha Skandrani (1920-2005) was an Algerian multi-instrumentalist and dedicated member of the Mouloudia Algiers football club.¹ While scoring goals, Skandrani spent hours at the club playing on the piano that was there, next to other Algerois musicians. Since the piano wasn’t commonly used in Andalusian or chaābi orchestras in those times, Skandrani’s talent was even more quickly noticed, allowing him to perform with la crème de la crème of Arabo-Andalusian musicians. For instance, he worked at Radio Alger in the late 30s/early 40s alongside Meriem Soussan and Rachid Ksentini, an infamous & audacious music-comedy Jewish-Muslim duo. Skandrani also gradually replaced exiled Algerian Jewish pianists, until he fully dedicated his time to this instrument, accompanying other popular musicians in Algeria and abroad, like Salim Halali, Lili Boniche, and Alice Fitoussi. Skandrani was appointed as a soloist in the Radio Alger Orchestra from 1956 until 1963 and then became a professor at the Conservatory of Algiers in 1966 (= 4 years after Algeria’s independence). He may have taught young people resembling the following who may, or may have not, left for France:

[ a worth-while documentary ]

He finally directed the Andalusian/ chaābi orchestra of the Algier Conservatory until 1982 (= year of the Algiers Accords), in an Algier probably resembling the following:

Mustapha Skandrani & the School of Sanāa

Skandrani’s contribution to Arab-Andalusian music and the Algerian classical music scene in general is immense. More specifically, he composed over 300 modern compositions or chaābi and 187 qasida and songs, belonging to the repertoire of the Alger School = School of Sanāa, Çan’a, or çanāa (or the more hypothetical ©’@n@) — a sophisticated modal music, mostly orally transmitted, where interpretation and improvisation play an essential role. Skandrani was not only the first Algerian pianist who developed a technique specifically adjusted to this Sanāa School, i.e. one emphasizing an ‘Alger-interpretation’. He was also the first Muslim Algerian pianist of the XXth, whose style contrasted with ‘previous technique supposedly used by Jewish musicians.’² Although I don’t support the idea of assigning one religion to one type of musicianship, it is probable that

1. some of the Jewish Algerian pianists of that time may indeed have experienced a Westernized music education and approach to piano playing;

2. Skandrani’s piano style results from his musical upbringing = his uncle’s tuition, Habib Skandrani, himself a musician trained in traditional Arabic music;

3. + as Skandrani worked with Muslim and Jewish musicians alike, and many more, he was most likely influenced by all kinds of musicianships throughout his life.

This multiplicity of musical influences reflects all at once an essential dimension of Arab-Andulasian traditional music, the Sanāa school, and Skandrani’s style: they exceed national/religious borders and don’t have clearly delineated origins. For this reason, Sanāa music bears the marks of the more or less approximate means used to preserve it but also of the under-exploited strokes of its ingenuity.³ At the same time, Sanāa music remains “in perpetual and slow evolution, one that participates to a quest for ‘beauty’ without ever claiming ‘perfection’“.⁴

Listening to Skandrani’s Istikhbars and Improvisations

Skandrani’s Istikhbars and Improvisations were recorded in 1965 in Paris. Istikhbars refer to the introductory sections of the traditional Arab-Andalusian vocal suite called nūbat and are essentially one single melodic voice introducing the main mode of a nūbat, with elaborate modulations and ornamentations.

So, without further due, let’s finally listen to Mustapha Skandrani’s Istikhbars.

Skandrani’s music has quite clearly the power to allude in a split second to a multiplicity of musical references, styles, and contexts, without ever being fixed on one but its own. Approaching the piece from a music analysis perspective, what is striking besides Skandrani’s extraordinarily rigorous exploration of modes and rhythms, is his sense of (dynamic) restraint and clarity, the richness and elegance of his pianistic touch. The latter is embodied in subtle ornamentations and articulations, a light but very central use of the pedal (giving the recording a quality of resonance found in contemporary music repertoire), a sparse and delicate presence of bass notes in an overall, narrow collection of notes unfolding in the middle range of the piano. In the rest of the CD, one may also notice an interesting mix of different recording qualities, some pieces being noisier, roughly, and distantly recorded, and others rendered in a more ‘Westernly produced’ way.

So, overall, from this very succint analysis, one can already sense there’s something fundamentally a-stereotypical in Skandrani’s Istikhbars and Improvisations, appealing to a plurality of listening experiences, themselves being potentially multilayered.

Mustapha Skandrani, a vessel for various projections

As I returned to Skandrani’s music, I started to collect descriptions and comments made on his recordings. At first, I did it for fun, but the process of collecting and comparing the different impressions from Skandrani’s listeners led me to experience an unexpected plethora of thoughts and emotions. Something like a slightly tightened throat, a slightly clearer mind & a slightly more open heart.

• EM Records: a politically correct, stereotypical (& perilous) story-telling of trans-Mediterranean ‘co-existence’

In their LP description, EM writes that listening to Skandrani’s recordings reminds us that “the Mediterranean is not a barrier, but a unifier, and that the differences between the cultures are not vast.” [ ]. Wait a minute, Sherlock, could this un-tout-petit-peu-naive description be a footprint of a gigantic red flag? Let’s give EM Records the benefit of the doubt. In the rest of their linear note, they claim Skandrani’s playing “may remind the listener of a modal Goldberg Variations, Bach and Glenn Gould transplanted to Andalucia.“ As much as their reference to Bach can make some sense musically speaking, I lost it after the adjective transplanted and the misuse of Andalucia. The coup fatal came with the following description: “Skandrani's powerful musical vision perceives the European element involved in Arabo-Andalusian musical culture, a world of exchange and co-existence, and his decision to play this music on the piano reminds us of this European influence.” I might be wrong, but I sense an undertone in EM’s description that could glorify something resembling colonization. The discomfort is real. This is what uninformed, politically correct descriptions of ‘World music’ can do: like pharmaceutical companies, they can homogenize a complex, certainly not easy-to-swallow historical context (with potential healing properties in it) into something sweet, easy to sell and digest.

But well, let’s embrace EM Record listening experience as one having its own ‘validity’. In fact, their description may be the more common view on Skandrani’s music, one reflecting our uninformed knowledge of Algerian history and Arab-Andalusian music.

• Youtube commenters: opening the valve for interpersonal / intercommunal listening experiences

Mixing Arabic, French, and Hebrew, the Youtube comments under Skandrani’s pieces praise his beautiful and emblematic style, but rather briefly. Mostly, it is as if Skandrani’s music was teleporting Youtubers-listeners in a different time and a different place, one where they could be heard/read and discreetly find their peers. Contrary to EM’s description, Youtube comment sections do not convey a monolithic reality, and do not suppress/silence the existing social, historical, linguistic, real, and imagined gaps between the different lived experiences of Skandrani’s listeners. Instead, Skandrani’s music becomes a modular kind of vessel for Youtubers-listeners to express anything between political stances (nationalism), grief (of a country, a people that is no more), nostalgia, mere joy, and (family/childhood) memories. Although based on a common appreciation of Skandrani’s music, this large spectrum of listening/ life experiences comes with its share of opacity and tensions without resolution. Perhaps, the comments are haunted by a joint, lived history of violence and disruptions that led to individuated ‘conclusions’, wishes, and (sometimes unprocessed) emotions.

I’ve just selected a few comments among many, but their accumulation is like a wide-open wound feedbacking onto itself. For instance, under a video of a performance in Paris in 1988:

‘انا محضوض عشت هذاك الوقت.زمن رائع.’ — I am blessed to have lived through that time. A wonderful time. [ joy / perhaps nostalgia ] 

‘نضنا مع الهماج مزية كاين هاد الفيديوات نشمو بيهم ريحت هداك زمان’ — We grew up with the savagery. It's a good thing these videos smell like that back in the day. [ childhood / grief / nostalgia / perhaps joy ]

‘Vive l'Algérie authentique’ — Long life to the authentic Algeria [ nationalism / joy ]

‘وين راهي هذه الجزائر التي كان يحكي عليها ابي.’ — where is the Algeria my father was speaking of? [ nostalgia / nationalism / family / childhood / perhaps grief ]

‘Cela me ramène des années en arrière, ma jeunesse, ma famille formidable, mes parents, mon papa, ma soeur, mes 3 oncles, ma grand-mere et bien d'autres encore décédés, mon départ en France, la maladie de mon aîné, les lourdes responsabilités qu'il fallait assumer. allah yarhamouhoume ou allah yarahmou skandrani, un virtuose, une perle rare que je connaissais depuis ma tendre enfance, 55 ans plus tard il continue a bercer nos vies ’ — This brings me back years ago, my youth, my wonderful family, my parents, my dad, my sister, my 3 uncles, my grandmother and many others deceased, my departure for France, the illness of my eldest, the heavy responsibilities one had to assume. allah yarhamouhoume or allah yarahmou skandrani, a virtuoso, a rare gem that I knew since my early childhood, 55 years later he continues to rock our lives. [ nostalgia / childhood / family / grief / perhaps joy ]

In this next video from 1994, Skandrani and Reinette l’Oranaise — a very famous Algerian Jewish singer with a commanding presence to say the least, are squabbling with one another. See one of the comment below:

بحجة أنهم يهود حُرمنا من الإستماع إلى هاته الأصوات الجبارة التي تدعوا إلى الفخر بموروثنا الشعبي ‘ الأغنى في كل هذا العالم .. كم كنا كبارا بفكرنا الراقي وقبولنا بالآخر وأصبحنا صغارا جدا بتعصبنا المبالغ فيه ..’ — Under the pretext that they were Jewish [= referring to Reinette], we have been deprived of listening to these powerful voices that inspire pride in our richest cultural heritage in the world. How great we once were with our refined thinking and acceptance of others, and how very small we have become with our excessive intolerance. [this one hits differently. It echoes to what Azoulay and Negrouche’s describe as “Algeria’s incompleteness without its Jewish genealogy,” pointing at a collective and intergenerational feeling of loss.⁵ ]

So, there we are. Listening to Skandrani’s music is woven in a poignant flow of emotions, highlighting how much contemporary meaning there is in his music. Extending the spot-on words of Samuel Sami’s Everett about Reinette l’Oranaise to Skandrani: this collection of listening experiences shows “the importance of music as an embodied materiality with affective resonance that can transcend political bolstering without playing into the saccharine clichés Andalusi intercommunal imaginary”.⁶

‘comparative music-ing’ — an open proposition

Feeling like zooming/zoning out even further to conclude. This little case study around Skandrani shows that listening/music-ing can be “a means to compare the different manifestations of the human experience — the process of trying to understand, reflect upon, shape, transform, know reality with the help of all the means available to us” — which is how Raimundo Panikkar defines comparative philosophy.⁷ For Panikkar, we do comparative philosophy […] as a mature ontonomic activity of the human [mind], contrasting everything, learning from everywhere, and radically criticizing the enterprise itself’. ” Accordingly, comparing requires to rely on diatopical hermeneutics⁸, i.e. a “method of interpretation when the distance to overcome is the distance between 2 (or more) cultures, which have independently developed different spaces (topoi), their own methods of philosophizing and ways of reaching intelligibility along with their proper categories.” This method calls upon “the researcher’s conscious engagement with empathy and a preparedness to bracket-out belief in the truth of one or the other position.”

Panikkar’s methodology of interpretation feels especially relevant when listening, composing or performing music that inherently mixes/originates from multiple topoi, like Arab-Andalusian music. I also see how diatopical hermeneutics are perhaps especially relatable and empowering for those of us who have been raised (/torn) between radically different musical heritages. This category of ‘hybrid’ listeners, composers, and musicians may be more prone to feel estranged and/or easily impressionable by the conventional (= homogenized/predominant) ways of considering music, listening, analysis, and composition. Instead, people with a hybrid music heritage may have a different wiring — one where some of them would prefer to attend all these activities of listening, analysis, and composition by actively giving space and exploring their hybrid cultural heritages in rigorous and systematic ways. By doing so, listening, performing, and composing may really become a self-reflective venture for them. A vaguely contoured methodology could look like the following. A subject interested in learning/creating from/with their hybrid musical heritage would be invited to:

1. delineate which music heritages have shaped their personal, and family trajectory;

2. set a respectful yet fresh gaze/analysis on these musical repertoires, i.e.

   patiently develops a fearless, deep intimacy with these musics, bypassing any feeling of ‘illegitimacy’ or ‘estrangement’;

3. patiently debunk any stereotypes around these repertoires (including racist, exotic, and exilic imaginaries) ;

4. perhaps, experience a sort of symbolic dissolution of the musical repertoires and topoi initially examined ;

5. turn the latter into a new, a-referential, a-stereotypical something (for instance, a piece of their own)

+ have fun throughout.

Moral of the story: I better practice what I preach & start composing my pieces.

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Thank you for reading until the end. You’re most welcome to connect here you’re always most welcome to connect here, the best part for me remains to hear from you.

With warm, non-bracketed wishes, take good care

Lucie / QoP,

1. See some images of the football club below. (Apparently, he was a ‘mauvais joueur’)

There are other 2 main Algerian city-based schools: one in Tlemcen (West-Algeria, Gharnati music) and one in Constantine (Est-Algeria with Malouf music).

2. Translated from Yafil Association.

3. Yafil Association, same source as above.

4. Yafil Association, same source as above.

5. Azoulay, Ariella Aisha, and Samira Negrouche. 2023. “Correspondanc Ariella Aïsha Azoulay et Samira Negrouche.”

6. Samuel Sami Everett (2024) Curating Commonality: Multimodal Materialities of Intercommunal Northern African Heritage, Material Religion, 20:5, pp. 324-338.

7. Panikkar, Raimundo (1989). What Is Comparative Philosophy Comparing? In Richard Rorty (ed.), Review of Interpreting Across Boundaries: New Essays in Comparative Philosophy. University of Hawaii Press. pp. 116-136.

8. For those (like me) mostly avoiding big words like the plague (until you have to admit they can be useful), diatopic means ‘occurring over or changing with space, geographic; or pertaining to or concerned with changes that occur over space’. And hermeneutics is the theory and methodology of interpretation.