Music of the Arab World

In 2004 I received a research fellowship by the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG). The major aim of this scientific project gave particular attention to all types of blowing instruments found among the abundant ethnic communities of the East African region. The investigations included a six month lasting fieldwork and data collection in thoughtfully selected five countries of this geographic region, i.e. Ethiopia, Uganda, Kenia, Tanzania and the Sudan, which took place between the months of February and July 2005. However, prior to leaving for field research, I undertook pre-studies in several institutions in  Berlin and Vienna. This referred to the historical Phonogram Archives (Phonogrammarchiv Berlin and Wien) including the museums, particularly the collections of African musical instruments in both institutions (Völkerkundemuseum Berlin and Wien, today’s World Museum of Viena). At the Phonogram Archives, I was able to access abundant  audio recordings made during fieldwork by mainly European scholars and researchers, while on the other hand by travellers may also be mentioned. According to the data, the recordings were made at different times as well as in the different African regions.

The title “Im Labyrinth des Oktōīchos (Inside the Oktōēchos Maze)” refers to the spatialisation of a two-dimensional, hand-drawn image known as the “Koukouzelian Wheel” (trochos tou Koukouzelē). This image is the key to a musical art of memory which developed in the context of the kalophonic art of chant (psaltikē technē) in the school of Iōannēs Glykys at the end of the thirteenth century. Arabic representations of the tonal connections between melodic models (naġme) in the form of wheels and trees also exist from this time. The form of the wheel represents a tonal system in which every tone can be the centre of every mode – a network of tonal relationships beyond the imaginary capabilities of musicians, who therefore can use the wheel to help guide them along even the most complex of paths through the labyrinth without losing their sense of orientation. Previous research regarded the trochos as an unsolved puzzle. This first attempt to solve the puzzle throws up several questions, of which many will only be answered after further research work.

Der Titel „Im Labyrinth des Oktōīchos“ bezieht sich auf eine räumliche Umsetzung einer zweidimensionalen handschriftlichen Darstellung, die „das Rad des Koukouzelīs“ (trochos tou Koukouzelī) genannt wird. Sie ist der Schlüssel zu einer musikalischen Gedächtniskunst, die Teil der kalophonen Gesangskunst war, die sich Ende des 13. Jahrhunderts in der Schule von Iōannīs Glykys entwickelt hat. Aus dieser Zeit sind auch arabische Darstellungen der Tonbeziehungen zwischen den Melodiemodellen (naġme) in Form von Rädern und Bäumen erhalten. In seiner Form repräsentiert das Rad ein Tonsystem, in dem jeder Ton das Zentrum jeder Tonart sein kann, ein Netz von Tonbeziehungen, das außerhalb des Vorstellungsvermögens von Musikern liegt, die dafür mit Hilfe des Rades jeden noch so verwickelten Pfad durch das Labyrinth nehmen konnten, ohne die Orientierung zu verlieren. In der bisherigen Forschung galt der Trochos als ein ungelöstes Rätsel. Dieser erste Schritt, es zu lösen, wirft sicher viele Fragen auf, von denen viele erst in der weiteren Forschung beantwortet werden können.

The living traditions of monodic Orthodox chant were going through innovations, as the music theory and its notation were created starting from 1814. They are the results of a reform finished under the third generation or the “4th music school of the patriarchate” (Istanbul). The reformers, who were called “the three great teachers”, had close relationships with musicians at the Ottoman Court, with musicians belonging to Sufi brotherhoods, and with synagogal singers—a context which Rudolf Maria Brandl called 1989 the Levantine community of traditional musicians (“The Music of the Fanariots”).

The paper is about the performance practice of Greek-Orthodox singers and is focused on the various forms of the diatonic (papadic) ēchos barys, as they can be found in the living tradition today. It is also an attempt to trace back the theoretical concept of this mode and to answer the question, to what extent the reformers were inspired by traditional musicians of the Levant.

Edward Said was one of the first writers who drew attention to the power relationships hidden in the Orientalist representations of the East. In his famous book he brilliantly demonstrated in what ways the Orientalist discourse served to justify the unequal relationships between European and non-European people and how it silenced the “Orientals” by paralyzing their ability to represent themselves. However, as some critics rightly noted, “Orient” is not only represented but also speaks for itself. Non-Western people create their own images of West and East and define their identity by using these mirrors. After all, as Arif Dirlik notes, Orientalism requires the participation and complicity of “Orientals” for its legitimation and hegemony. So it cannot be properly understood unless being analyzed at the same time as a discourse created by non-Western people. For this reason, Orientalism should be seen as the product of the contact zones in which Western and Eastern elite encounters rather than a discourse created solely by the West. These contact zones are the media through which non-Western elites builds their national identity by creating their own images of East and West. This nation-building process may even lead to sharp conflicts with Western imperialism, which turns the entire process to something like Westernization against West.


Terms such as Self-Orientalism or Occidentalism have been coined to conceptualize this area of subjectivity in which non-Western elites built their self image with reference to East/West dichotomy. Turkey’s complicated modernization experience gave rise to a mentality that we can best understand in these terms. We can call it Turkish Orientalism. To legitimize their Westernization project, the pioneers of Turkish modernization internalized the Eurocentric conceptualization of the world and embraced the depictions of the “East” as the low-other of the West. However, as ardent nationalists, they also opposed the negative judgments of Western Orientalism about Turks who were seen as an Oriental Other by the West. To reconcile these two attitudes, they created an interior Other into which they would store up all the undesired, “Oriental” elements of Turkishness which were thought to be incompatible with the Western models. Therefore they defined the ideal Turkish identity as something opposed to these “Oriental” elements of Turkishness. This “Oriental” Other was mostly identified with Ottoman past, sometimes with Islam and always with Arabic world. On the other hand, so-called “genuine” Turkishness was redefined as something compatible with West and an antithesis of everything “Oriental” including Arabs. For example Falih Rıfkı Atay, rightly defined by Nadir Nadi as “the leader writer of the Turkish State”, depicted Westernization as Turkification, more precisely being freed of Arabization.


This formula was put into practice in the field of music as well. In early republican period, while Turkish music being redefined in the mirror image of the West-East-Turkishness triangle, the Ottoman musical tradition was dismissed as the Oriental Other. According to official policy, the model was Western music; the enemy was Eastern music which was to a large extent synonymous with the traditional urban music of Turkey, the source of national music was Anatolian folk songs which, unlike Ottoman art music, was considered to be compatible with Western models. And the goal was to create a modern Turkish music which was expected to be both Western and national in character. In other words, pioneers of the music reform divided the musical culture of Turkey into two conflicting part by a self-Orientalizing strategy, sweeping aside the “Oriental” musical elements inconsistent with the national self-image as foreign intrusions. So Ottoman musical legacy was seen as a non-Turkish cultural element related to Byzantine and Arabic elements in the past and expelled from national music culture. Labels used to define this music during the alaturka-alafranga debate reflects all the degrading Orientalist clichés such as being irrational, unscientific, drowsy, fatalist, obsolete, submissive to despotism etc. Accordingly, this living urban music tradition was relegated to the past as a fossilized relic while sometimes appeared as an object of admiration for its past civilizational achievements. For this reason Turkish music was frozen down in itsold forms and symbolically put into museum in official institutions.


The discourses and labels used to degrade Arabesk music were almost the same as the ones that once used to degrade and dismiss Alaturka or classical Turkish music. But this time intellectual spokesmen of the three officially recognized genres (Turkish art music, Turkish folk music and Western type polyphonic music) united against Arabesk to define it as an antithesis of the ideal Turkish identity. The cultural dichotomies of Turkish orientalism were and are still being reproduced by all parts of the discussion in different ways. Unlike its producers and listeners, intellectual commentators identified Arabesk with its so-called Arabic/Oriental elements, reducing the emotions invoked by this music to an unhealthy melancholy and its message to fatalism. Arabesk artists were also condemned to spoil Turkish music by distorting its traditional forms and patterns. In this article, it is argued that this reductionist and homogenizing approach has its source in Turkish orientalism which substitutes cultural essences for culture as lived experience, therefore freezing the ideal culture in the past or addressing itto a utopian future. This mentality has restrained us to see Arabesk music as a lived cultural experience having arisen from the complex historical relationships between Turkish (art and folk), Arabic, Western and other musical elements rather than a degeneration of the genuine Turkish culture. In this respect, this article traces the impact of self-Orientalism and Occidentalism in Arabesk debates from past to present in a historical perspective.

Simon Shaheen needs no introduction as perhaps the greatest living performer of Arabic music, ‘ud viruoso, accomplished violist, composer, creator of innovative styles, and professor of Arabic music. 

Here I share memories of my association with Simon to add to the scant information about his life in Israel ca. 1979-1980 and to assist those documenting his contribution to world music.  It’s written from the perspective of an American ethnomusicologist who had the good fortune to meet Simon when we were both in our twenties. To bring these memories to life, I rely on letters, journal entries, taped interviews, recorded music, and photos.

This article (book chapter) explores major the most complicated instrument of the maqām tradition with a fixed supply of pitches, the qānūn plays a central role in the definition of the Near-Eastern tuning system. Originally this instrument had to be retuned separately for every scale structure, comparably to the Iranian santur. During the first half of the 20th century, mandal-s, movable levers, were applied to every course of strings with which the intonation can be adjusted during performance. These small metal bridges, however, have also caused confusion between theory and practice because they are tuned, on all common models, upon the tempered twelve-note scale that has little in common with pure Pythagorean and harmonic intervals as they are described in the traditional treatises. The study provides a brief account, containing four existing systems invented during the 20th century.

This article is a case study of Sydney based oud player Joseph Tawadros. The discussion centres on the strategic market positioning of this musician and the use of identity as a tool for navigating patronage within the local and international music economies. This study observes the ways in which Tawadros embraces multiple identity positions, reinscribing himself and his instrument within the dominant narratives of art music in Australia, and considers how this may have helped him gain access to different forms of patronage. By reference to media interviews and interviews conducted with the author, this case study presents him as a musician who skilfully adopts and invokes various musical identities and identities tied to nationalism. These have helped Tawadros navigate diverse musical categories and mainstream media. This paper uses the Tawadros case study to explore the strategies used by musicians associated with World Music, Multicultural arts and Culturally and Linguistically Diverse arts in Australia.

Статья посвящена концепции тараб как специфическому явлению арабской музыкальной культуры. Данная концепция рассмотрена с музыкальной и культурологической точек зрения. Автор приходит к выводу, что концепция тараб является стержнем музыкальной классики, поскольку в ней заключена истинная цель музыкального исполнения и показатель его качества, что отражено в музыкальной терминологии и музыкальной практике.

Ключевые слова: музыкальная культура Арабского Востока, арабская музыкальная классика, музыкальная эстетика стран Арабского Востока, концепция тараб, маджлис ат-тараб, экстатическое состояние.

Résumé/Abstract Researchers in Korean studies looking into the popular entertainment industries during the colonial period have historically focused on cultural nationalism or economic prowess. Studies of music from this period that are not primarily concerned with ...

This article revisits the official culture of the early khedivate through a microhistory of the first modern Egyptian theater in Arabic. Based on archival research, it aims at a recalibration of recent scholarship by showing khedivial culture as a complex framework of competing patriotisms. It analyzes the discourse about theater in the Arabic press, including the journalist Muhammad Unsi's call for performances in Arabic in 1870. It shows that the realization of this idea was the theater group led by James Sanua between 1871 and 1872, which also performed ʿAbd al-Fattah al-Misri's tragedy. But the troupe was not an expression of subversive nationalism, as has been claimed by scholars. My historical reconstruction and my analysis of the content of Sanua's comedies show loyalism toward the Khedive Ismail. Yet his form of contemporary satire was incompatible with elite cultural patriotism, which employed historicization as its dominant technique. This revision throws new light on a crucial moment of social change in the history of modern Egypt, when the ruler was expected to preside over the plural cultural bodies of the nation.

The popular culture of pre-revolution Egypt did more than entertain - it created a nation. Songs, jokes, and satire, comedic sketches, plays, and poetry, all provided an opportunity for discussion and debate about national identity and an outlet for resistance to British and elite authority. This book examines how, from the 1870s until the eve of the 1919 revolution, popular media and culture provided ordinary Egyptians with a framework to construct and negotiate a modern national identity. Ordinary Egyptians shifts the typical focus of study away from the intellectual elite to understand the rapid politicization of the growing literate middle classes and brings the semi-literate and illiterate urban masses more fully into the historical narrative. It introduces the concept of "media-capitalism," which expands the analysis of nationalism beyond print alone to incorporate audiovisual and performance media. It was through these various media that a collective camaraderie cro...

This article critically considers how the musical piece The Burda has introduced ground-breaking formal and rhythmic innovation within Arab contemporary traditional music. I explore the centrality of Said’s musical adaptation of Arabic prosody in generating new rhythmic modes whilst highlighting Said’s claims of ‘continuity’ with an Arab literary and musical tradition of the Nahḍa era.  Analysis of the musical processes of composition are used as an essential tool to examine the role of the poetics of mu’arada (building upon pre-existing models) in the process of creating new contemporary Arab music. This article draws upon ethnomusicological as well as, postcolonial theory as a fundamental tool of analysis for the underpinning socio-political commentary present at every stage of creation and production of the The Burda.

The Baltic - a term with conventional rather than rational implications - can be used as a general frame to arrange a multitude of organological facts from historically, linguistically, and denominationally different musical cultures - Estonian (EE), Latvian (LV) and Lithuanian (LT). The A. first examines the documentation of instrumental music, as well as the research and significant publications of the period from the 13th century until the end of the 20th century. Arranged in chronological groups, these publications mark a synchronic regional perspective and outline some significant steps in the development of organological thought. Basic functional groups of musical instruments and music are then discussed. Thus, the A. describes the instruments and the music related to the Baltic people's economic (mainly herding) activities, social events and religious practices. Further, he examines musical instruments used for contemplation and dance in their terminological, morphologica...

Today regional traditions have an interactive relationship with musical multilingualism and intercultural music-making and improvisation. In our age of tourism, migration, and the growing closer of the world and of technologically determined globalization, the conceptualization of culture ...

Guihangtar comprises guitarist Le-Tuyen Nguyen (Australia) and percussionist Salil Sachdev (USA). Guihangtar performs original compositions and arrangements largely inspired by, but not limited to, nature and traditional music. The essence of the duo is such that it is an evolving musical dialogue not bound by any specific cultural confines.

Traditional melodic and rhythmic idioms weave with Western music exploring the technical and expressive dimensions of the guitar, enhanced with percussion instruments from various parts of the world. The tone color of gongs is recreated by the confluence of guitar harmonics and Tibetan gong. The Hang drum (invented in Switzerland in 2000) and guitar overtone clusters depict the ambience of the Vietnamese gong ensembles, whereas guitar scordaturas (different tuning systems) combined with the West African drum (Djembe), rattles and foot jingles, represent the aura of traditional dance and festive contexts.

Unusual techniques comprise the use of broken glissandi on the frame drum, use of ‘finger mallets’ to play bells, and the invention of a new guitar technique, staccato-harmonic duotone.

Guihangtar exemplifies a continually emerging and exciting interaction between two musicians with varied cultural and musical backgrounds residing on opposite sides of the world. It is an expression of tradition, innovation, and global interaction.

Nguyen, Le-Tuyen & Sachdev, Salil. Dawn of the Mountain Forest.  Guihangtar. 2014. CD.  Available at: http://www.guihangtar.net/#!buy/c2250

The popular culture of pre-revolution Egypt did more than entertain—it created a nation. Songs, jokes, and satire, comedic sketches, plays, and poetry, all provided an opportunity for discussion and debate about national identity and an outlet for resistance to British and elite authority. This book examines how, from the 1870s until the eve of the 1919 revolution, popular media and culture provided ordinary Egyptians with a framework to construct and negotiate a modern national identity.
Ordinary Egyptians shifts the typical focus of study away from the intellectual elite to understand the rapid politicization of the growing literate middle classes and brings the semi-literate and illiterate urban masses more fully into the historical narrative. It introduces the concept of "media-capitalism," which expands the analysis of nationalism beyond print alone to incorporate audiovisual and performance media. It was through these various media that a collective camaraderie crossing class lines was formed and, as this book uncovers, an Egyptian national identity emerged.