Chiara De Cesari, Heritage and the Cultural Struggle for Palestine (New Texts Out Now)

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Dec 17, 2020 Palestine
Chiara De Cesari, Heritage and the Cultural Struggle for Palestine (New Texts Out Now)

Chiara De Cesari, Heritage and the Cultural Struggle for Palestine (New Texts Out Now)

By : Chiara De Cesari

Chiara De Cesari, Heritage and the Cultural Struggle for Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2019). 

Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?

Chiara De Cesari (CDC): The seeds for this book were sown in the late 1990s when, as a young student of Middle East Studies, I became involved in museum and heritage work in Syria. I have very vivid memories of a visit to the Deir Ez-Zor museum of antiquities together with a team of European archaeologists and Syrian ministry personnel—a museum later to be shelled in the recent war. I left when I began to question what exactly we were doing there: the blatant denial of heritage’s political nature; the distinctive colonial legacy informing settings, relations, and practices; the paradox, if not outright scandal, of self-declared liberals effectively collaborating with a brutal dictatorship in the name of scientific advancement and popular enlightenment, knowledge, and progress. 

Later, I encountered the work of Palestinian cultural organizations, which appeared to hold the promise of a very different cultural politics. Organizations like Riwaq regenerated historic houses for public use and organized artistic activities in and around them. This work differed through the anticolonial politics it enacted (helping Palestinians stay put) but also through the temporality it inhabited: eyes on the future, while embracing the past. That movement held an anticipatory force giving this work of preservation a whole new quality, far off the dustiness of old museums and deeply compromised projects like the Syrian one sketched above. The drawing on the book’s cover, by late artist Hassan Hourani, heading from Hebron’s old city up into the sky, stands for that. 

In the contexts I have described above, two different types of heritagized landscape, the archaeological site and the historic neighborhood, and a powerful device, the museum, are mobilized to produce very different kinds of bodies and souls. Many scholars, most prominently Nadia Abu El-Haj, have illuminated the potent connection of these sites (and related knowledge practices) with both colonial and national ideology and state formation—as well as neoliberal urbanism. Zionism, for example, mobilized Biblical archaeology as key tool for refashioning Palestine into Israel and for obscuring its settler-colonial dimension; the cult of antiquities has undergirded the propaganda of many postcolonial nationalist leaders. Historically, state (but also non-state) actors have utilized heritage to rule, govern, dispossess, and eliminate the enemy, most often, and in a way paradoxically, natives.

There is a strong interest in both popular and academic interests in issues of heritage and conflict—Daesh’s destruction of monuments, heritage “in the cross-hairs,” and authoritarian heritage as propaganda. While not denying the role of this scholarship, to which I myself have contributed, I have grown impatient with it. This book and my new project testify to how the Palestinian cultural work I portray tells another, important but often unnoticed story: one of future-making, of worlding by heritage preservation. So, the book explores how Palestinians rearticulate this instrument of colonial state power to resist it—and specifically how Palestinian organizations refashion heritage and global cultural formats into something new, a set of generative experiments. Although I do not use their theory in the book, I now see these rearticulations as akin to Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s “fugitive planning” as the fragmentary, improvised arts of an emancipatory cultural governmentality.
What is key here is this cross-pollination between heritage, memory, and artistic practices, this swinging movement between past and future ...

J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address? 

CDC: The book is about urban regeneration enacted as a project of counter-settlement and counter-governmentality, in order to stop colonization and the destruction of the historic lived environment, and make Palestinian cities, villages, and lives more livable. It is also about proliferating museums as particular public spaces where visions of the future are debated and creatively (pre)figured.

The Hebron Rehabilitation Committee (HRC) and Riwaq are good examples. The Israeli army controls Hebron’s old city and, with Israeli settlers, terrorizes its Palestinian population while the Palestinian Authority (PA) cannot enter. Many Palestinians have left. The HRC has run a large urban regeneration project since the 1990s. It has restored many historic buildings and organized public services, allowing Palestinians to stay and stopping the expansion of the settlements. Over the years, the PA not being present, the HRC has taken over many functions of a municipality. It has become a fundamental presence in the life of local people. To protect Palestinian heritage and identity, it has developed a mixed form of governmentality combining the classic instruments of state bureaucracy (maps, surveys, and so on) with more informal logics (organic local knowledge). 

In Palestine, it is indeed the case that NGOs and local organizations do the job of a (mostly) absent “state.” Riwaq is an NGO that has worked as the shadow Palestinian ministry of cultural heritage throughout the post-Oslo period. There has been a lot of criticism of NGOs in Palestine and beyond, especially for their role within globalized, donors-driven economies, as conduits of neocolonial rule and interests other than those of constituents. But, especially in the cultural field, Palestinian civil society organizations like Riwaq have constituted true laboratories for resourceful experiments with institutions and the process of “instituting” itself in a context where formal politics have failed people. Palestinian organizations have set up smaller and bigger museums, local heritage management units, heritage-led planning infrastructure, and national biennials. Partnership arrangements between organizations have coalesced into an informal infrastructure of cultural management. This creative institutionalism emerges out of a broader cultural mobilization, of which the so-called Palestinian museum fever is a part: a flowering of the arts that has opened up important spaces for debate and for thinking of a political otherwise.

What is key here is this cross-pollination between heritage, memory, and artistic practices, this swinging movement between past and future, as well as the fundamental tensions between institutions and counter-institutions, governmentality and counter-governmentality. Palestinian organizations do two things at once: “institution-building,” in the language of policy, and “institutional critique,” in the language of art. They do what I call anticipatory representation; they critically (re)present the institutions of the future in the here and now. These tensions and these oscillations give Palestinian experiments a peculiar generative power. 

In a way, heritage and culture at large might be said—although it is perhaps a little too early to say this—to harbor a new (cultural) politics, after the failure of formal political structures, parties, and the “state” to produce meaningful assemblies, even a semblance of publics. So, Palestinian cultural organizing poses a number of key questions around radical museology and art, but also issues of government/ality and instituting. Jim Ferguson has argued for developing a “left art of government.” The cultural work that is the subject of the book goes some way in that direction. 

J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?

CDC: I hope the book is helpful to people working on the ground as a space of reflection generative of new questions and ideas. I also hope that a broader readership will learn from this seemingly exceptional space, Palestine, and come to see it as an imaginative place to think the future, to plan and rebuild out of the rubble produced by colonialism and the failure of progressive state projects. 

J: What other projects are you working on now?

CDC: My current work comes from “Palestine out”—it takes some of the ideas that have emerged from my engagement with Palestine and explores them in a broader context, particularly in Europe where I am now located. One strand of my research attends to struggles over colonial heritage in contemporary museums. 

The other concerns the question of instituting in and through culture. Indeed, the problem of state failure and how to reimagine it are central to politics both in the Global South and Global North, where states have been reconfigured, if not partly dismantled, by neoliberal policy. In many places, artistic practices have played an important role in recent protest movements, as artists have conducted a variety of social experiments in the vacuum resulting from such state failure. So, my current project on “Imagining Institutions Otherwise: Art, Politics and State Transformation” focuses on transforming (cultural) institutions and artist-run spaces as producing an institutional otherwise that prefigures the future—also in places like Lebanon, Hungary, and Italy. Can the failure of the state open inroads for artists to reinvent (some of) our organized ways of being together? Can there be “activist statehood,” to use a term by Davina Cooper, and, if so, at what scale? What is a radical, emancipatory institution? 

J: What part of the book did you enjoy writing the most? 

CDC: What I enjoyed the most was writing about folklore and museums. If today Palestine’s political heritage lies in the historic houses being restored, in the past it lay in folklore, particularly embroideries, on which preservation once centered. It is a fascinating history. In the 1970s and 1980s folklore preservation became an important site of political mobilization and subjectivation. Folklorists involved have been criticized especially for their essentializing view of Palestinian culture. Nonetheless, in their full embrace of the political and the participatory, in their twin goal of popular education and emancipation, these folklore studies and preservation practices were avant-garde. They can be said to have anticipated participatory practices that are widespread today in heritage (and whose origins tend to be located, wrongly, in the West). Women started producing embroideries as national heritage, and became political subjects, nationalist and resistant, through this labor of preservation; popularizing scientific practices of preservation were part of the process of mass mobilization that then led to the First Intifada. Interestingly, some artists like Jumana Emil Abboud now propose a “return to folklore” and the folkloric imagination to re-enchant the Palestinian landscape as a renewed political tool. 

 

Excerpt from the book (from chapter 4: Palestinian National Museums Post-Oslo, pp.158-162, 189-192) 

[In Palestine,] State attempts to create a national museum have thus far proved fraught with difficulties, a symptom of both the PA’ s failure to complete its project of state building under an enduring occupation and its fundamental problem of (political and aesthetic) representation. […] 

Yet alternative projects have mushroomed: there is talk of a Palestinian “museum fever” that is gripping the West Bank in particular. […] Many of these museums and exhibition spaces, like older, pre-1993 ones, display collections of folklore objects, but contemporary art initiatives are gaining increasing visibility. These are mostly run by Palestinian artists and cultural producers, not bureaucrats. Several of these Palestinian cultural operators worked for the PA in the 1990s. But with the collapse of the peace process and the shattering of the promise the PA embodied — viable and democratic statehood — they set aside the project of creating large-scale national institutions, at least from within the PA. Instead, they have variously experimented with the format of the national museum — creating virtual museums, museums in exile, nomadic museums, or art installations staging national museums. 

Over the years, their scattered initiatives have dovetailed into an emerging, unplanned infrastructure of museums, cultural centers, exhibition and art spaces, biennials, and artist residency programs. Based in the West Bank, this infrastructure extends transnationally, along the routes of a growing Palestinian cultural network encompassing the globe. This emerging infrastructure is virtual in the sense of something “imagined” (a quality like that of works of art) and something “in essence, potentiality, or effect, although not in form or actuality,” imbued with Latin potentia or (imaginative) power, containing the seeds of possible futures within itself. Or rather it is both potentiality, a projected future, and a partial form in the here and now. By creating alternative, critical national institutions, Palestinian cultural producers effectively participate in a form of “experimental statecraft” from without, at the threshold of the state. […]

National museums in Palestine are a “practical impossibility,” as Jack Persekian, a key Palestinian curator, has argued. Museums seem unfeasible and unmanageable under a military occupation. […] Crucially, in Palestine there are hardly any objects to display and no national collection, as objects have been looted and relocated elsewhere. This impossibility, in other words, rests on a fundamental material loss, a lack of being. The majority of movable Palestinian cultural property is in Jerusalem or in Israel, which means out of reach for most Palestinians, or in the collections of international, colonial institutions such as the British Museum. Also, the location of such a museum is in question. As the quintessential sign of the nation, such a museum can be located only in Jerusalem, the Palestinian center of gravity and symbolic capital. However, Israel opposes any kind of Palestinian institutional presence in the city that it has administered since 1967 as its own “eternal and undivided” capital, despite the fact that Jerusalem’ s annexation is against international law and various UN resolutions. […]

Impossibility and failures produce interesting experiments, if not without contradictions. I argue that these creative Palestinian ventures and experimentations with the format of the national museum open up spaces for representing and negotiating the Palestinian state and its attendant institutions; in so doing, they function as productive imaginings of the state-to-come as well as institutions for the here and now. […] 

Picasso in Palestine 

In the Dutch Van Abbemuseum, visitors can also admire a painting by Pablo Picasso known as the “Picasso that visited Palestine.” On June 24, 2011, one of modernism’ s key icons, the Buste de Femme (1943) was put on public display in Ramallah for several thousand Palestinians, Israelis, and international visitors who came to a room of the International Art Academy Palestine especially prepared for this extraordinary show. This widely covered event included a speech by then Palestinian prime minister Salam Fayyad as well as folkloric dances and performances, the object of pride but also derision by inhabitants of the Palestinian cultural capital (“Is there a wedding today?” was the circulating joke). Picasso’ s 1943 portrait of his lover had been loaned to the academy by the Van Abbemuseum and had arrived in Palestine at the end of an “epochal logistical challenge” in the words of its initiator, Khaled Hourani, artist and then academy director, and a long trip from Eindhoven to Ramallah, via a number of checkpoints, which itself received a lot of media attention. The transnational circulation of works of art for public display is standard museum practice, yet this “attempt to realize the ordinary” in museum business clashed against conditions on the ground and especially the exceptional and legally uncertain status of Palestine. It produced an extraordinary journey that marked the social life of the painting and revealed something important about the nature of institutions and institution building in Palestine. 

The point of this exhibit, called Picasso in Palestine, was to stage a Palestinian modern art museum — even if a temporary, transient, and miniature one. A story about the beginning of this project, which took at least two years to be realized, indicates both its predicaments and its promise. Reacting to the Van Abbemuseum director’ s proposal to lend the painting to Palestine, the museum’s director of collections in the Netherlands is reported to have gone mad and to have shouted, “You can’t do that! There isn’t a museum [in Palestine], there aren’t the conditions, there isn’t insurance. It’ s ridiculous.” But the lack of a proper museum venue was not the only obstacle. As a nonstate, or not-yet-a-state, Palestine had not signed any of the international agreements and conventions that allow paintings, among other things, to cross international borders and to circulate. Following two years of complex negotiations and inventive solutions, however, Khaled Hourani saw the project come to fruition. Despite the lack of official papers and permits, the van transporting the Picasso arrived in the gray area and nonplace (from the point of view of international cultural property treaties) that is Ramallah. 

While revealing a fundamental lack, a legal and institutional void, the initiative was precisely about creating a semblance of such institutionality, evoking and prefiguring a set of institutions to come. For Khaled Hourani, what was needed to dramatically expose and confront the Palestinian institutional lack was a Picasso, as synecdochical representation of modern art and the modern museum institution in itself. When I interviewed him, he emphasized how Picasso in Palestine was first and foremost “about institution building ... [about] creating a space and capacity for it [to host the Picasso]” in a place lacking a museum infrastructure, but it was also, simultaneously, about “questioning these institutions, [about] revisiting them.” In other words, the initiative reproduced a modern art museum – like assemblage of objects, sites, and people, and in so doing, it proposed an exercise in imagining what a Palestinian museum could and should be like. 

Setting in place a temporary “national museum,” Picasso in Palestine was a performative ritual of nation-statehood. At that time, rumors circulated that the initiative was actually a celebration for Prime Minister Fayyad, who had opened the exhibit with a speech about the successes of the PA in taking care and providing security for the painting. Yet this particular ritual, this “ritual symbolization of nationhood and state power,” differs from the classic ones discussed by Raymond Williams and Jim McGuigan. First, as I have argued before, this ritual is an anticipatory one, in that the state that is the object of representation and celebration is not fully in place yet; it is a work in progress — state power, in this case, has to be produced rather than reproduced. Also, and this is crucial for the argument I have been exploring in this book, the agents of such representation are not state actors but a nongovernmental organization, an international institution and, crucially, artists and cultural producers. Despite Fayyad’ s symbolic presence, the PA did not have much to do with Picasso in Palestine. The project was almost entirely run from the Palestinian side by the Art Academy Palestine, then a (Norwegian-funded) Palestinian NGO. Hourani, another key figure in the Palestinian cultural scene, had previously worked for the PA ministry of culture, and has himself a long family history of militancy within Fatah, but Picasso in Palestine was clearly not a PA project. Or is it so? Hourani’ s life trajectory should be familiar to the readers of this book in that it is similar to those of other Palestinian cultural producers: after a long political militancy mostly in the leftist factions of the PLO, many ended up establishing, post-Oslo, their own NGOs and cultural institutions — often after an unsuccessful stint as bureaucrats of the PA, what some call the “project of our life” that deeply deluded them. 

Begun as an art project and a pedagogical experiment, the Art Academy has developed over the years into a fully fledged institution — in fact, the only institution of higher art education in Palestine — soon to be merged as its own faculty with Birzeit University. If the story of the Art Academy tells of the ongoing tensions between criticality and creative experimentation, and institutionalization, as with the Palestinian Museum, the Picasso in Palestine project stands as a symbol and telling tale of the intertwined though distinct, at times clashing, at times competing, at times colluding processes of institutionalization and disaggregated state making in today’s Palestine, one by the PA and one by a transnational, deeply globalized, Palestinian “civil society.” And yet, as a friend and informant once asked me rhetorically: “Did we [NGOs] catch them [PA]? Or did they catch us?”

 
Aug 24, 2019 Lebanon
Johnny Farraj and Sami Abu Shumays By :
Johnny Farraj and Sami Abu Shumays

Johnny Farraj and Sami Abu Shumays, Inside Arabic Music (New Texts Out Now)

Farraj, Johnny and Sami Abu Shumays. Inside Arabic Music. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019.

Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?

Johnny Farraj (JF): When I started learning Arabic music around twenty years ago, I was not able to find a good introductory book in English that was aimed at musicians. As such, my training was by and large oral; I learned the tradition from teachers and fellow musicians, as well as through extensive listening. My first attempt at filling the resource gap was in creating maqamworld.com, a website that documents Arabic music theory and performance using simple language, musical scales, and hundreds of audio samples.

Having seen the wide appeal that MaqamWorld had among musicians, I decided to turn it into an introductory book that covers Arabic music theory and performance in much more detail, from the perspective of a practitioner. I set out to write a general readership book that could become the definitive Arabic music primer for musicians and listeners alike—in short, the book that I wish had existed when I started learning Arabic music.

Sami Abu Shumays (SAS): I collaborated with my friend Johnny on his initial development of the MaqamWorld website, and later developed my own website called maqamlessons.com. In 2013 I published an article in Music Theory Spectrum challenging the dominant theories about Arabic maqam, largely based on Greek tetrachord theory. Having discussed my new ideas with Johnny for several years, he invited me to join him on the book project, initially as a music theory consultant. In that process, I saw the potential the book had to reach a wider, more general audience, and realized that if I could present my ideas in the accessible tone Johnny envisioned for the book, it would be a win-win. We had a lot of debates about content and style, and somehow that pulled me in further—the dialogue was enormously productive, even when it was occasionally contentious, and helped me to think through my ideas more clearly. I am enormously grateful that he invited me to be a collaborator!

J:  What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?

JF and SAS: The book covers twentieth-century music from Egypt and Greater Syria, especially the mid-century period often referred to as “The Golden Age” of Arabic music. Within that frame, the book addresses a broad range of topics, from instruments used, ensemble designs, rhythm, arrangement strategies, ornamentation, vocal and instrumental musical forms, improvisation, the tuning system, and the melodic system underpinning Arabic music, known as maqam. In that sense, it is suitable as an introductory textbook for all those interested in learning about that music.
We celebrate the richness of orally-transmitted knowledge, and we discuss the aesthetics of traditional listening, as well as how that aesthetic evolved during the twentieth century due to increasing influence from the West.

The book goes beyond the introductory approach in discussing maqam—presenting what we feel to be the most cutting-edge theory and analysis on this widely misunderstood practice, in a way that is nonetheless very readable to both beginners and those unfamiliar with Arabic music. Our approach to maqam theory is designed to make it more rather than less comprehensible. 

Finally, aesthetics, oral tradition, and the importance of practice are major themes throughout the book. We celebrate the richness of orally transmitted knowledge, and we discuss the aesthetics of traditional listening, as well as how that aesthetic evolved during the twentieth century due to increasing influence from the West.

J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?

JF and SAS: The book is definitely an extension from our previous work—both as practitioners and as teachers. We are both long-time performers of the music, and our practice is rooted in oral tradition and aural learning. At the same time, we have sought to communicate the music to a wide range of students, both through classes and through our websites. Our insights about music have come directly from our practice—insights which we have used to critique existing theory and descriptions of the music. Our pedagogical work has been aimed at spreading knowledge that is not broadly available, and maqam in particular is widely misunderstood. Thus, in many ways, Inside Arabic Music is a culmination of the work we have been doing for decades.

J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?

JF and SAS: We hope everyone interested in any kind of music, and everyone interested in Arab culture, will read the book: we think its themes have an interest and appeal beyond its specific subject matter. And we hope it inspires people to listen to and participate in the music.

Because it is rooted in the oral knowledge we have accumulated, and communicates practical insights, the primary target audience was initially fellow musicians, music students, belly dancers, and any reader wishing to learn more about Arabic music. When Oxford University Press agreed to publish it, we decided to achieve a secondary goal, which is to contribute to scholarly discussions on music and music theory. We hope researchers and students in ethnomusicology, anthropology, and music theory will engage with the book, and we invite discussion on its themes. Because we have clearly thought-out connections to linguistics, cognitive science, and network theories, we believe the book has merit for a broader academic audience interested in multi-disciplinary approaches to culture and music.

In terms of impact, we believe it has the potential to become the primary textbook on Arabic music in the English-speaking world, and beyond, if translated. We hope it will impact the field of music theory through its focus on culturally acquired knowledge. We also hope it will have an impact on Arab readers, encouraging them to develop a greater appreciation for the richness and depth of our own culture, which we Arabs often overlook in attempts to Westernize.

J: What other projects are you working on now?

JF: I am in the process of completing an overhaul of the maqamworld.com website, with grant funding from the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture (AFAC, which also supported the book). It has a new look and feel, suitable for smart devices, with English, Arabic, French, and German languages released. With these languages, the readership is about four hundred users a day. I am now working on integrating the Italian and Spanish translations, and possibly Greek.

The next step for Inside Arabic Music is to have it translated into other languages, starting with Arabic and French, ideally more if there is demand.

I have also been sketching out ideas for a future book on the Arabic `ud. 

SAS: I am working on developing a video series to accompany the book, to bring to life the musical examples mentioned there. On other fronts, I am right now heavily immersed in deepening my knowledge of Maqam Sikah Baladi… I am also working on a CD with my eight-year-old daughter, who is a very talented melody composer with a dark sense of humor!

J: What is this book’s added value compared to other books on the same subject?

JF and SAS: This book adds value on many fronts. First, it has the widest topical coverage of any book published on the subject of Arabic music in English, providing accessible and insightful information on every important subject area in performance as well as theory. Second, because the authors have been listening to the music, studying, performing, and teaching it for decades, the content is validated by personal experience, instead of simply research into other written sources or observation and analysis. Third, the book has an approach unlike most other textbooks, privileging performance practice and practicality over abstract theory—and developing new conceptions of music theory rooted in oral tradition.

 

  

Excerpts:

From the Introduction:

Traditional Arabic music is improvisational and highly personalized… The abundance of improvisation keeps the music from sounding too rigid and makes it much more personal. The effect of improvisation is to constantly assert the presence of the performer and the essential relationship between him or her and the listener.

Because of its richness in ornamentation, Arabic music is not required to faith­fully follow a composition note for note and can therefore be highly personalized. Heterophony (when different musicians simultaneously ornament the same melody differently) is a dynamic exercise, one that cannot be composed or notated. It hap­pens in a live performance and needs a type of musician who devotes more energy to listening than to reading sheet music. Therefore, experienced Arabic musicians develop a resilient disposition that allows them to be attentive and quick to react to the other musicians’ playing.

In a well-oiled ensemble, a singer and an attentive audience feed off each other, and the musical tradition affords performers a fair amount of room to interpret pieces according to the mood of the performance. Singers in Arabic music are given a relatively wide license to repeat sections or to insert a short mawwal (traditional vocal improvisation) at convenient junctures in a long song. Although these additions may be planned, often they depend on the mood of the performer and that of the audience; therefore, they can be unpredictable and require the ensemble to be ready to act on short notice.

… To a Western observer, Arabic music may appear “informal” in many respects: musi­cians vary the composition with each performance, sometimes even simultaneously; audience members react vocally—sometimes loudly—to things they like in the music; and music is transmitted orally, with variation in versions and the addition of individual or regional characteristics. While these aspects of Arabic music (and others discussed here) may appear to be informal compared with Western classical music, it is important to recognize that in reality, they reflect different standards of formality than Western music does—and Arabic music adheres as closely to its standards as Western music does to its own.

As an example, one very obvious area in which the standard in Arabic music is far stricter than in Western music is intonation. In Western music, numerous compromises exist in intonation because of the development of harmony, and as a result the intonation of performers tends to be fuzzier and less precise than it is in Arabic music, even among the ranks of the top professional classical musicians… In Arabic music, because the slightest difference in into­nation can suggest an entirely different maqam (there are so many different notes identified in between the notes of the Western equal-tempered scale), and because there is no harmony to confuse matters, the standard for intonation is much more stringent. Thus, we could say that Western music is more informal than Arabic music in terms of intonation—or we could say that the two traditions have different stan­dards of formality.

Another example of apparently “greater formality” in Arabic music has to do with improvisation. In a traditional improvisation, the opening and closing phrases are more or less completely set by tradition for each maqam and are completely familiar to audiences, who expect to hear certain melodies (albeit with ornaments and var­iations) open an improvisation in a given maqam. There is room for a great deal of unique variation in the middle of the performance, but the ending is also standard. This type of formality doesn’t exist in Western improvisation today, and not enough is known about improvisation in the time of, for example, Mozart to know whether there was that level of formalism in the past.

There are also numerous ways in which Arabic music doesn’t adhere to Western standards of formality. The main priority of Arabic music is to create tarab and to please and entertain the audience. For this reason, the protocols governing the audi­ence’s behavior during a live concert are informal and more accommodating than in Western classical music. In live recordings with large orchestras and iconic singers such as Umm Kulthum, Warda, or Abdel Halim Hafez, the cheering of the audi­ence could stop a new section halfway and force the orchestra to restart the pre­vious section, which the audience enjoyed greatly and didn’t get enough of.

* * *

From Chapter 5, "Ornamentation":

… Instruments that were more recently added to the Arabic ensemble, such as the piano, accordion, and electric guitar, came from other musical traditions with their own established (foreign) ornamentation techniques and aesthetics. However, by incorporating them into the Arabic ensemble or orchestra, Arabic musicians intro­duced a new Arabic ornamentation tradition that transformed these instruments from Western to Arabic.

The accordion used in Egyptian raqs sharqi (belly dance) or baladi musical genres is stylistically a totally different instrument than the accordion used in Italian, French, or German folk music. The piano played by Abdallah Chahine or Ziad Rahbani is stylistically a totally different instrument than the European piano…. The violin is used in many musical traditions across the world, from European classical music, to Scandinavian, Irish, and American fiddle music, to musical tradi­tions of the Middle East, North Africa, and India. In every case, the same physical instrument is transformed by different techniques and styles of ornamentation.

The electric guitar used in Omar Khorshid’s taqasim and in Umm Kulthum’s recordings is stylistically an entirely different instrument than the one used in rock and roll music of the same era. Through his pioneering vision, Omar Khorshid al­most singlehandedly created the “Arabic electric guitar” style by establishing a tra­dition for ornamenting it. What’s more remarkable about Omar Khorshid is that he managed to achieve that without modifying the guitar to perform quartertones or changing the placement of the 12-tone equal-tempered frets. His guitar sounded Arabic by virtue of his ornamentation and phrasing, even though it was confined to the equal-tempered tuning system. 

* * *

From Chapter 11, "Tuning System":

… Intonation and musical scales are cultural products, not mathematical objects. That makes them easy to comprehend on a practical level but challenging on a theoretical level. On a practical level: we have personally found that even American children, with no prior hearing of Arabic music, can sing maqam scales in tune immediately when asked to imitate basic melodies in call- and- response fashion (the central tech­nique of oral transmission).

At the same time, on a theoretical level we have encountered so many misconcep­tions, misunderstandings, and misrepresentations—stemming from both Western and Arabic sources, in historical scholarship as well as in internet discussions, and even from the mouths of master musicians themselves—that we find it necessary to examine and critique some of the underlying assumptions about scales and intona­tion before proceeding with a description of the system in use.

The most problematic assumption we wish to dispel is the idea that intonation and scales are determined by some kind of mathematical logic. We understand the roots of this misconception: the ancient Egyptian discovery of “rational” harmonic relationships (i.e., based on small- integer ratios) among strings of different lengths, resulting in “consonant” sounds— which Pythagoras learned on his travels to Egypt and developed into a rich tetrachord theory, influencing all subsequent music theory in the Arab world and Europe.

…we assert that musical intervals and scales are fundamentally arbitrary (following Saussure’s definition of the arbitrariness of the sign), by which we mean that they are the result of cultural choices and conventions—even in cases when there are mathematical relationships expressed in some of them. “Arbitrary,” in this technical sense, is very different than the colloquial understanding of the term, which people take to mean “random,” “unjustified,” or “capricious.” Instead, for us it means based on choices, which are then shared by com­munities and passed down.

Our understanding of Arabic intervals and scales shares one more feature with Saussure’s concept of the arbitrariness of the sign: these musical elements do not ap­pear arbitrary to practitioners immersed in their usage; instead they appear to be immutable, determined, and part of fundamental Truth. That is because the indi­vidual practitioner inherits them through tradition and cannot individually change them; they only change extremely gradually over time, and only by the unconscious activity of whole communities. It is only with a comparative approach (as in linguis­tics) that their arbitrariness becomes apparent.

We can state our objection to the underlying assumptions common in both Western and Arab music theory in another way: we do not find that there are rules governing music, but habits. The elements of music must be learned individually; they cannot be derived from other elements of music. Therefore, the function of music theory, from our perspective, is not to create rules that explain music. We have found that this activity always leads to contradictions and inconsistencies and imposes an overly restricted view of what really happens in practice. Instead, we hope to document the knowledge musicians embody and inherit. It amazes us that in the other arts, people fully recognize that one must learn each dance step, or each cooking technique, or each brushstroke, while in music so many people falsely assume that one can derive scales from mathematical principles and melodies from rules.