“You can never make a good instrument from bad wood,” says Nazih Ghadban, an oud maker in Ras Baalbek, a small town in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley. “But you can make a bad instrument from good wood.” Ghadban reaches for one of the instruments hanging on the wall in his workshop, which is not far from the mountains that separate Lebanon and Syria. All around him are tools and stacks of small wood pieces. He strokes the back of an oud. It is soft and rounded, like an Anjou pear that…
