The Arab Avant-Garde: Music, Politics, Modernity

297 Pages·2013·2.025 MB·English

by  Thomas Burkhalter, Kay Dickinson, Benjamin J. Harbert

The Arab
Avant-Garde

Thomas BurkhalTer, kay Dickinson,
anD Benjamin j. harBerT, eDiTors
The Arab
:
Avant-Garde
music, PoliTics, moDerniTy
:
wesleyan university press
:
Middletown, Connecticut
Wesleyan university Press
middletown cT 06459
www.wesleyan.edu/wespress
© 2013 Wesleyan university Press
all rights reserved
manufactured in the united states of america
Typeset in 10/13 point Galliard
Wesleyan university Press is a member of the Green Press initiative.
The paper used in this book meets their minimum
requirement for recycled paper.
The arab avant-garde: music, politics, modernity / Thomas Burkhalter,
kay Dickinson, and Benjamin j. harbert, editors.
pages cm.—(music/culture)
includes index.
isbn 978-0-8195-7385-8 (cloth: alk. paper)—isbn 978-0-8195-7386-5
(pbk.: alk. paper)—isbn 978-0-8195-7387-2 (ebook)
1. avant-garde (music)—middle east.
2. music—middle east—20th century—history and criticism.
3. music—middle east—21st century—history and criticism.
4. Popular music—middle east—history and criticism.
5. music—Political aspects—middle east.
i. Burkhalter, Thomas, 1973– ii. Dickinson, kay, 1972–
iii. harbert, Benjamin j.
ml348.a73 2013
780.956'0905—dc23 2013017387
5 4 3 2 1
"Cover illustration by Mazen Kerbaj, a Lebanese artist and musician."
Contents
A Note on Transliteration
:
introduction: “arab” + “avant-Garde”
kay dickinson 1
part i: alternative modernities:
norms and innovations
1. Transforming space:
The Production of contemporary syrian art music
shayna silverstein 37
2. Balancing integration and Disintegration:
amir elsaffar and the contingent avant-Garde
kamran rastegar 74
3. multisited avant-Gardes or World music 2.0?
musicians from Beirut and Beyond between
local Production and euro-american reception
thomas burkhalter 89
part ii: roots and routes
4. The “People’s artist” and the Beginnings
of the Twentieth-century arab avant-Garde
saed muhssin 121
5. challenging the status Quo in War-Torn lebanon:
Ziad rahbani, the avant-Garde heir to musical Tradition
sami w. asmar 145
6. a look at lightning: The life and
compositions of halim el-Dabh
michael khoury 165
part iii: political deployments of the avant-garde
7. sonic cosmopolitanisms: experimental improvised music
and a lebanese-american cultural exchange
marina peterson 185
8. activism and authenticity: Palestinian and related
hip-hop in an international Frame
caroline rooney 209
9. noise and its Formless shadows:
egypt’s extreme metal as avant-Garde Nafas Dawsha
benjamin j. harbert 229
Selected Discography 273
Contributors 275
Index 283
A Note on Transliteration
The Arab Avant-Garde adopts the transliteration system of the International
:
Journal of Middle East Studies (ijmes), electing to omit indicators for long
vowels and diacritical markings to signify emphatic letters. an ع (‘ayn) be-
comes a ‘, and a ء (hamza) a ’. For proper nouns, we have stuck to the most
familiar roman script versions, which frequently do not conform to the
ijmes format. Transliterating arabic, particularly in its varied spoken forms,
can never be an exact science. We hope the reader will be patient with any
seeming irregularities that arise from the many possible options produced
by this process of conversion.

vii

Introduction
“arab” + “avant-Garde”
kay dickinson
:
From alexandrian female heavy metallers and Beiruti jazz trumpeters who
sample the noises of warfare to migrants into the avant-garde enclaves of
europe and north america, arab culture has long offered up a wealth of
exciting, challenging, and varied musics. Theirs is not a singular scene, a
coherent body of interconnected performers. rather, the sheer breadth of
vanguardism in the arab world and its diasporas—as well as the experimental
work from elsewhere that is in its debt—spans history and geography too
expansively to warrant any such classification. The range of compositional
and improvisational techniques, performance styles, generic engagements,
professional educations, inspirations, and intercontinental collaborations
that have inherited the mantle of “innovation” within arab music are vast.
With the objective of honoring this multifariousness (although in no way
encyclopedically encapsulating it), our anthology collects together studies of
radical experimentalism within genres and modes as diverse as musical theater,
improvisation, hip-hop, folk-inflected art music, and electronica. its writers,
too, hail from a complementary plethora of countries and disciplinary train-
ings: practicing musicians, arab area studies specialists, ethnomusicologists,
and scholars of popular culture and media, all dedicated, like their research
subjects, to disturbing the eurocentric resonances of monikers like the avant-
garde. all are keen to imbibe, expand, and even challenge the growing body
of literature on alternative, non-Western, and postcolonial modernities.
as such, our emphasis on comprehensively hybrid and globally dialectic
practices purposefully undermines the focus on regionally specific genres
and staid notions of tradition that consumes most books on middle eastern
music-making. Given the dense spatial and temporal negotiations this book
1