The Rouhana Band in Concert for World AIDS Day

Rouhana band performs to promote AIDS awareness

The Standing Committee on Reproductive Health (SCORA), a committee made up of AUB medical students, presented Charbel Rouhana and his band in concert on December 2 at Assembly Hall on the occasion of World AIDS Day 2007. SCORA, a full member of the International Federation of Medical Students Association (IFMSA), has repeatedly hosted fundraising concerts to support HIV and AIDS patients at the AUB Medical Center. All proceeds from Rouhana's concert went to support the HIV/AIDS fund.

Rouhana, who is nationally acclaimed as one of the finest oud players in Lebanon, delivered an eclectic program consisting of fourteen Arabic pieces. Accompanied by his band, Rouhana began with six high-string pieces from his repertoire, including popular compositions, like "Wedding," "Lighthouse," and "Dangerous Lady." These were followed by eight energizing songs, some of which Rouhana performed for the first time at the concert and ranged from the patriotic, to the folkloric, to the blatantly satirical. In fact, most of the songs were written by Rouhana himself.

In "Anta" or "The Macho Man," whose lyrics he specifically wrote for the AIDS concert, Rouhana adopted the persona of a betrayed wife chiding her philandering husband for his "voracious appetite for tender female flesh" and the threat of AIDS that an unbridled sexuality suggests. In "Al Nisyan" and "Visa," he satirized the popular Lebanese stampede to exit the country at the nearest possible opportunity, in spite of the indignities Arab visa applicants typically suffer at foreign embassies and airports. Singing in a deep, melodious voice, Rouhana also serenaded his audience with songs calling on Lebanese people to abandon the evils and constraints of bigotry and sectarianism and to start weaning Lebanese culture from a puerile and unhealthy fascination with the West.

Rouhana studied music at the Holy Spirit University in Kaslik, where he obtained his diploma in oud instrumentation in 1986 and his master's in musicology in 1987. One of his major achievements has been establishing a new way of playing the oud, a methodology that was published and adopted by the National Conservatory of Music and the Faculty of Music in the Holy Spirit University, where he has been teaching since 1986.

Winner of several national awards, Rouhana also won the first prize at the Hirayama Competition in 1995 in Japan for Best Composition, entitled "Hymn of Peace." His fundraising concert at AUB lasted almost two hours, punctuated by prolonged rounds of applause following each musical piece.