Ethnomusicology Forum My Voice is My Weapon: Music, Nationalism, and the Poetics of Palestinian Resistance (original) (raw)
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The Arab Avant-Garde: Music, Politics, Modernity, 2013
The digital media-morphosis (Blaukopf, 1996) of the 1980s brought revolutionary changes to music making, allowing musicians and sound artists to find new possibilities for the production and distribution of their works. Further, new software and hardware tools led to new musical aesthetics. Many scholars (Tagg and Clarida, 2003, Grossmann, 2005) argue that the different academic fields that study music have not kept pace with this dramatic development. Music theory - from musicology, to ethnomusicology, to popular music studies - seems overwhelmed by the changes, and the amount of new musical phenomena to study. Ethnomusicology moved away from the production side of music to concentrate on questions of its reception and meaning mainly. This chapter focuses on the music itself, and on discourses around music making. It discusses with musicians and sound artists from Beirut how they create music. Beirut hosts an emerging circle of sound artists and musicians who work in the fields of electro-acoustic music, musique concrète and free improvised music. Many of these artists studied arts, design or film at one of the French or American Universities in Lebanon and are very knowledgeable about the history, philosophy and concepts of the arts in Europe and the US. In their CD-shelves and on their laptops one finds music by composers like Karlheinz Stockhausen, musique concrète pioneers like Luc Ferrari and Pierre Schaffer, innovators of free jazz and free improvised music like Peter Brötzmann or Evan Parker, and by many more artists from experimental to popular music traditions in Europe and the US, from past and present. The chapter discusses and analyses how exactly these artists from Beirut work within these influential concepts and genres as often defined by European and US-American avant garde artists. The results show that the sound artists from Beirut create their own personal approaches and aesthetics. Their definition of music is broad: it includes the noises and sounds of their closer environment. They rework, re-arrange and/or imitate the sounds of their city and the noises of war with the latest sound software. They move rather freely between experimental and popular music, and between what is often referred to as high-culture and low-culture. They work with the principles of trial and error – not unlike many previous avant garde artists. They organise sound and noise with a certain independency, they mix genres and styles freely. Furthermore, they do not shy away from imperfection, accidents, chaos and failure. Overall, they have a specific knowledge and taste for sounds and textures, and a very fresh, playful and direct approach to music and music making. The contribution suggests that it is no longer enough to look at the references and musical influences alone. We have to analyse how artists combine these influences and what the resulting aesthetics are. To call these artists “Westernized”, as many Lebanese and Non-Lebanese do, is not any longer tenable. To them “locality” and “place” are no longer linked to “Arabic” music, but very much to the sounds and noises of their environment, and to their “sonic memory” - mainly from the Lebanese Civil War (1975 – 1990). These artists from Beirut offer new representations beyond exoticized East-West formulae. Their music, noises and soundscapes reflect the effects of localisation and globalisation on various levels. One could risk saying that their music is an attempt to “create sense out of chaos” as Anthony Storr argues. Storr states that music is not an escape from “real” life, but a way of ordering human experience. (Storr, 1992, pp. 182-183) Together with like-minded contemporaries in worldwide knowledge networks, these Beiruti artists seem to create a new avant garde. They show that the specific contemporary sound of our digitalized and globalized world is not anymore created, merchandized and exploited in Europe and the USA exclusively, but across the globe.
2010
Although free improvised music (FIM) originated in Europe and the United States in the 1960s, it has come to possess meanings and roles unique to its individual contexts of production in today‘s transnational scene. By focusing on the Lebanese free improvised music scene which emerged in Beirut in 2000, my study aims to address the gap in scholarship on Lebanese expressive culture, particularly music, as a tool to negotiate identity. My thesis addresses the way FIM in Lebanon allows four musicians of the 'war generation' (Mazen Kerbaj, Sharif Sehnaoui, Bechir Saade, and Raed Yassin) to express their individual identities as well as their complex relationship with conflict. I propose that, in a society still coming to terms with the atrocities of civil war and constant political instability, the practice of FIM may have a role in reflecting conflict, facilitating inter-cultural dialogue, as well as breaking aesthetic, socio-economic, and sectarian barriers.
Introduction: Do Palestinian Musicians Play Music or Politics?
Palestinian Music and Song: Expression and Resistance Since 1900, 2013
This anthology is thus undoubtedly the first of its kind, drawing together some of the world’s leading researchers, performers, and composers of Palestinian music and song. It offers the reader a unique opportunity for hearing the inquisitive and perfomative voices of native and non-native scholars and music makers analytically reflecting on the dialectics and developments of Palestinian music throughout the Twentieth Century. Moreover, this collaborative multidisciplinary anthology is a multifarious dynamic account of Palestinian music as an inseparable component of the Palestinian social, cultural, economic and political life, and as such it is unlike anything currently available in the fields of ethnomusicology, anthropology, cultural studies and Middle Eastern studies. Why music? And, why Palestinian music?
Acta Musicologica, 2022
Abstract Abstract: This article focuses on the Lebanon-based movement Tajdīdmin al-Dakhil (Internal Renewal) which is responsible for the revival of the repertoire, aesthetics, and performance praxis of the music of the Nahḍa(Arab Renaissance) period (1885–1933). It asks, why does the Nahḍa era play such a fundamental role in redefining Lebanese contemporary identity? What main characteristics of this period render this historical period a fertile locus for the contemporary postcolonial imagination? How does the revival of Nahḍa music manifest the prevalence of nostalgia within the "culture of ṭarab" that characterizes the processes of traditional Arab music-making and consumption? To address these questions, the discussion draws on original fieldwork interviews in Beirut (between 2013 and 2014) and traces a journey from midtwentieth-century Lebanese traditional music (turāth) to the contemporary Tajdīd movement. I claim that this group attempts to disentangle Arab Levantine and Egyptian traditional urban music from what is commonly designated as "ṭarab music" which they perceive as a specific type of bourgeois aesthetics commonly associated with Lebanese ruling elites. To achieve this detachment, the Tajdīd calls upon the Nahḍa historical period—both factual and imagined—in which music turāth (heritage) was mostly defined in relation to the wider Middle East region. It is suggested that the emotional and identarian transformations brought by such nostalgic backward glances effectively allow the Tajdīd to address an ongoing postcolonial malaise etched onto Lebanese society and culture, creating a locus for reconciliation between past, present, and future yearnings.
Palestinian Popular Music: How Popular Music Becomes Heritage
The Rouledge Companion to Popular Music History and Heritage, 2018
One of the most distinctive characteristics of Palestinian popular music is that its production is exclusively based on improvisation (on-the-spot invention), mostly by performers who operate as poets and composers at the same time. This has been going on throughout Palestinian history, accumulating a tremendous repertoire of music and lyrics of various Palestinian popular music genres such as ‘ataba, dal’ona and zajal. After providing a precise definition of Palestinian popular music and enumerating the features that distinguish it from other popular music traditions in the Arab Middle East and the rest of the world, evidence will be provided for demonstrating the fact that all researchers of Palestinian popular music agree that productivity in Palestinian popular music has been brought to its demise in the last three decades, thus turning Palestinian popular music from a living and ever-growing tradition in people’s everyday life into a frozen heritage to be reserved and taken good care of. This has been taken for granted not only by researchers, but also by artists, performers, local audiences, and all those who are now in charge of Palestinian popular music, including the Palestinian National Authority in Ramallah (the PNA). This is what I call ‘heritagising Palestinian popular music’, and consider it the most decisive (and detrimental) feature in the current Palestinian cultural landscape. I will then show that, in spite of this sharp awareness of the phenomenon of ‘heritagising Palestinian popular music’, almost none of the involved researchers has addressed this issue, nor tried to problematise it or investigate the reasons behind it. Due to this severe gap in the literature, this chapter will end with a detailed account of the sociocultural and political process and conditions that have moved Palestinian popular music from the roads and yards of Palestinian peasantry to the archives and studios of Palestinian urban centres. In a way of summary, this chapter will end up with an analytical description of the state of Palestinian popular music at the time of writing.
Sharing Is Caring: Vocal Music and Arab Identity in the Middle East
Throughout history the region of the Middle East has known great conflict and war, many of which have appeared to have a religious nature. As a result many Muslim Arabs, who forming the majority of inhabitants of the region´s countries, have too often clashed with their fellow Christian Arabs. This article focuses on the nature of so-called religious conflict and argues that it is more truly political in nature, influenced by many external interests and interferences. Religion has been first pretext and, later on, the scapegoats for many wars. Secondly, our focus is one too often ignored: that of a single Arabic identity. The people of the Arab Middle East share the same language, culture, history and music regardless of any religious differences. Hence, from the Middle Eastern perspective, one is an Arab Christian or Arab Muslim, rather than a Christian Arab or a Muslim Arab. Starting from the interface of these two issues religion and identity-we focus on vocal music and the idea that practicing together their traditional Arabic music might offer an important living example to reinforce the elements of a shared Arab identity among Muslims and Christians in the Arab Middle East. As witnessed by the examples we use, these peoples, who can (and do) sing together and use the same melodies for their respective chants are able, through such practice, to understand one another better and learn how to listen truly to the other and live together more peacefully.