Fuad and Fairouz Foty, founders of Quartertonez Music.
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Palestinian American father-daughter duo Fuad Foty and Fairouz Foty are pillars of Arab American culture in D.C. The result of their 35 years of activism, cultural celebration, and building solidarity as Washingtonians was the creation of their Arabic music school in 2019. Quartertonez is unparalleled as a publicly available resource in the DMV, and in the U.S. as a whole.
Those interested in learning to play traditional Arabic instruments in most U.S. cities must typically resort to online lessons, or, if possible, access classes at a university. But with a cultural practice as richly engaging as Arabic music, community connection is integral to the experience. That’s partly why Fairouz and Fuad co-founded Quartertonez Music school. Though the school located in Friendship Heights also offers virtual lessons to students around the world, there are unique opportunities to connect in person. “The heart of Quartertonez has always been a collective singing, community singing,” Fairouz says. “The school is not just us two. The school is everyone … the community helping us make it the way it should be.”
For the past 35 years, Fairouz and Fuad’s community has been the neighborhood of Chevy Chase, where their family of seven was “one of very few Arab families that grew up [there],” Fairouz remembers. Though Chevy Chase is considered one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the city with famously prestigious private schools, the five Foty children attended D.C. public schools. They took music lessons from a young age, and were “all scholarship kids because my parents couldn’t afford five kids and music schools,” Fairouz says.
Now an adult in her mid-30s, Fairouz says, “Most of the people that I grew up with aren’t able to live in D.C. It’s too expensive.” Gentrification over the past few decades has been evident to Fairouz and Fuad as D.C. residents, but forcible displacement impacted the city’s economic and demographic distributions well before their family arrived. Fairouz references the Black Broad Branch Project, a local public history project about the long-standing impacts of the land dispossession of Black communities in D.C., including a history of racist land dispossession in Chevy Chase specifically.
Reflective of this local story and community care, Quartertonez’s first offering in 2019 was not traditional Arabic music instruction, but an English-language children’s choir that taught local D.C. history through song, singing about gentrification and displacement while wearing shirts that read, “Where did all the Chocolate go?,” designed by Egyptian American visual artist Mona El-Bayoumi, Fairouz’s mom and Fuad’s wife. “The main thing about what Quartertonez does is to connect all marginalized people, and to do that through music,” Fairouz says.
Fuad himself is no stranger to displacement. He was born and raised in a refugee camp in Ramallah, Palestine. His family was forced to relocate due to economic reasons in 1974. At 13 years old, he found himself in Houston, Texas, listening to old cassette tapes to teach himself to play the oud his father gave him. The guitar’s predecessor, the oud is an iconic Arabic instrument known for its resonance and nuanced tonal range, in which there are more notes than exist in Western music or on the frets of a guitar. Whole tones, half-tones, and then the distinctive quarter tones are spun into an improvisational fabric. It is these same quarter tones after which the music school is named. The nuances of pitch may register as off-key to a western, classically trained ear, but are actually indicative of a richer and more precise sound.
Fuad and Fairouz founded Quartertonez with the hope of decolonizing the approach to both teaching and learning Arabic instruments, as well as Western classical music. Fairouz’s training and profession is in opera, yet she says, “A lot of what we’re fighting against, in terms of how we want to shape our students and the next generation, is that people promote Western classical music over everything, you know? Everything that was taught to me was like, you’re getting a degree in voice. But what does voice include? It includes French opera, Italian opera, German opera, English opera. That’s it.”
“So you’re getting this degree in voice, but you don’t know how to sing most types of music,” she adds. “You only know how to sing classical, Western music.”
Even as operas and music institutions become more diverse in their stories and participants, “the curriculum and the systems of teaching are still within this framework of learning Western classical music,” Fairouz says. It’s for this reason that Quartonez instructors teach music from an Arabic perspective, whether their students are learning oud, buzuq, and tabla, or guitar, piano, and cello. The curricula include both Arabic and western classical instruments, voice, and music theory, all through the lens of decolonization.
The father-daughter duo has also made sure the school is a place to make friends and celebrate culture. The Sada Al-Thawra (translated, Echoes of Revolution) choir, Quartertonez’s Arabic-language choir is free to join, and ample support is provided for Arabic language learners. Community relationships, intersectional solidarity, and providing a safe space for LGBTQIA folks are foundational to Fuad and Fairouz’s work. Through Quartertonez Music—and their family band, Foty Fusion—Fuad and Fairouz have collaborated and performed for decades with fellow local activists such as Medea Benjamin of Code Pink, Luci Murphy (sometimes with the Black Workers Center Chorus), and more recently with award-winning D.C. go-go dancer Crazy Legz.
“I think that that’s the resilience of D.C.,” Fairouz says. “It’s the development of our communities despite the erosion of them, despite the gentrification … There is a really, really deep sense of community.”
After 51 years in the United States, Fuad says he plays the oud because it brings him “closer to home in Palestine.” Fuad shares that same sense of home through events that he and Fairouz spearhead, such as the DC Arab American Cultural Festival. The third annual festival took place on May 17 in Brookland with dozens of performers, vendors, and upward of 500 attendees. The Sada Al-Thawra choir performed, along with Malikat Al Dabke, the self-proclaimed “first all-women dabke dance troupe in the DMV,” of which Fairouz is a founding member. As she performed the signature Levantine line dance with fellow Arab American women, Fuad beamed and clapped from offstage. All proceeds from the event were split between HEAL Palestine and the Leonard Education Organization.
“The festival was really to illustrate D.C.’s Arab American culture and to really show that we do exist inside D.C.,” Fairouz says. “To take up space and to show different types of Arab Americans.”
Quartertonez Music offers a variety of music lessons, in both group and private settings, as well as opportunities to join the Sada Al-Thawra choir. quartertonez.com.