The oud makers of the Marrakech Mellah.

There is a lane in the Mellah, the old Jewish quarter of Marrakech, where the smell changes. The spice market is two streets behind you and the metalworkers are somewhere to the left, and then quite suddenly it is cedar and hide glue and shellac. Four workshops remain on this lane. Between them they supply most of the ouds played professionally in Morocco, and a fair number of the ones played in Paris and Montreal.

Hicham El Khatib has been in the same room for thirty-one years, which he mentions without any particular weight, the way you might mention the bus you take. The room is perhaps four metres by three. There is a bench, a vice, a wood stove that has not been lit since March, and roughly two hundred clamps. The ceiling is hung with bowls at every stage of completion, ribs glued and unglued, some of them waiting for a decade.

The bowl is the part that takes the time. An oud has no corners and no bracing to hide behind, so the back is built from somewhere between seventeen and twenty-one ribs, each one bent over a hot iron and glued edge to edge against its neighbour with nothing but the mould to hold the shape. Hicham uses walnut, which he buys from a dealer in Fes who buys it from the Middle Atlas, and he will not use anything that has been dried for less than four years. When I asked what happens if you do, he laughed and did not answer.

What surprised me is how much of the work is listening rather than measuring. He taps the soundboard constantly — with a knuckle, with the back of a chisel, with a fingertip — thinning it by a tenth of a millimetre and tapping again, then leaving the room for ten minutes and coming back to tap once more. There is no gauge in the workshop. There is a ruler, and it is used for the neck.

The trade is not dying, exactly, but it is contracting. Two of the four workshops have no apprentice. The third has one, a nineteen-year-old who arrives at seven and sweeps for an hour before he is allowed to touch anything, which is how Hicham started and how his teacher started. The fourth is run by two brothers who have begun selling directly to players abroad through a website their nephew built, and who are, by some distance, the busiest.

I asked all of them the same question at the end: what makes a good oud. Three of the four said some version of the same thing, which is that a good oud is one a player keeps coming back to after they can afford a better one. The fourth said it was the wood, and then after a moment said no, it was the player, and then said that the question was badly formed.