The Middle East as a musical area is recognizable in patterns of historical, geographical, religious and musical continuities, yet is also subject to discontinuities that result in part from extensive cultural and political conflict, and geographical and geo-cultural divisions (e.g. mountains/desert, urban/rural). Scholarly traditions espousing the musical unity of the Middle East are based primarily on the theoretical similarities in the art musics of the region; on the extensive presence of Islam throughout the region, with its historical, linguistic and aesthetic influences on musical practices in virtually all Middle Eastern societies, even non-Islamic; and on the geographical location of the Middle East, historically imagined as lying ‘between’ Europe and both Asia and Africa. If the musics of the Middle East display unity when viewed from the top down, discontinuity predominates when local practices or hybrid traditions are viewed from the bottom up. As a regional musical culture the Middle East is the historical template for tension between canonic traditions and extensive variation, religious ideologies and aesthetic resistance to them, and the pull between centralized repertories and fragmentation at geographical peripheries.
Geographically, the Middle East stretches from north-western Africa eastwards to Iran and into Afghanistan. The northern boundaries include the Mediterranean and Black Seas, but the influences of Middle Eastern musics reach far into south-eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia, even as far to the north-east as the Uighur area of western China. The southern boundaries are similarly impossible to draw with precision. They stretch along the Sahara, through eastern Africa into the Indian Ocean, but these boundaries have been permeable for centuries because of the exchange of musics across them. Musically, the geography of the Middle East is best defined by the ways its boundaries have facilitated musical exchange rather than by the containment of repertories and practices specific to the region.
The Middle East comprises four historically interlinked art music systems: Arab, Persian, Turkish and Maghribi, or North African. These art music systems were never entirely fixed and unchanging, although medieval treatises and modern nationalism emphasize their concentration of the representation of culture in a classicized core: usually a modal and theoretical framework, a distinctive repertory and instrumentarium and specific connections to literary and artistic traditions. In the regional and national cultures of the Middle East, the conditions of art music, even in fragmentary fashion, are often extended to other musical practices (to popular and traditional musics), thereby laying aesthetic and ideological foundations for the dominant presence of art musics and their historical symbolism.
Two other extensive sets of musics dominate the Middle East, albeit not primarily as distinctive art musics. The music of Jewish peoples, especially in the societies of the Sephardi diaspora along the Mediterranean littoral and in the communities of the eastern Mediterranean, such as Yemen and Iraq, occupies an important position in the histories and modernity of Middle Eastern music. The music of Christian church liturgies, especially those of the Roman Catholic Church in western Mediterranean societies and of various Orthodox traditions in the Levant, also stretch across the region, providing a network of unity.
Religion and religious attitudes toward music both unify and fragment the musical practices of the Middle East. The three major religions of the region, Islam, Judaism and Christianity, as well as several more localized religions (e.g. that of the Druze), share some fundamental musical concepts, although they also maintain some sharply different ones. A distinction between vocal and instrumental practices, particularly their relative acceptability, cuts across the religions of the Middle East. Cantillation traditions in Middle Eastern religions conform to the modal organization of the region. It is distinctive of the Middle East as a whole that religious doctrine plays a very significant role in determining what musics are allowable and in which circumstances, and how certain restrictions are placed on music-making, both sacred and secular.
Language and poetry have left their imprint on musical practices. In regions dominated by a particular art music there is usually a related literary tradition derived from a dominant language, such as Persian music and the Persian language. Language may also directly affect both theory and practice in art music, notably in the ways musical metre relates to language and poetic use of language. It is further characteristic of the Middle East that the music in a single area may weave together repertories in different languages, for example, Arabic in the sacred practices, local dialects in traditional music practices, and several languages from outside the area in professional and popular music practices. Multilingual repertories, by extension, serve to connect regions in a complex network of related musical practices.
Within the Middle East topography, geography and political economy often produce musical landscapes that contrast with those represented by religious or art music practices. Around the Mediterranean musical exchanges may be found that reverse the influences of major language families and the major religions, making it possible to interpret many musical practices in southern Europe as influenced by the Middle East, not only because of the presence of Islam, but also because of the centuries of Ottoman domination in south-eastern Europe. The eastern Mediterranean has a special musical landscape of its own, as do the cultures that border the trade routes of the Red Sea and the Arabian Gulf. The musical geography of the Middle East has historically depended on the interaction between rural and urban societies. In particular, the Middle Eastern city has been characterized by extensive cosmopolitanism and hybridity, making it possible to construct music histories of the region around cities, stretching from the courts of the earliest Muslim caliphates in Damascus and Baghdad to the postmodern centres of the recording industry in Istanbul and Cairo.
The concepts and histories of music in the Middle East involve a number of paradoxes: the ways in which religious beliefs are used to reject some musical practices and accept others; the restrictions on musicians and music-making that give rise to alternatives; and the distinctions made between geographic and linguistic cores and boundaries, and between canonical art-music traditions at the centre of nationalistic thought and the seemingly infinite variations occurring at the peripheries. Historically, these have resulted from interaction with musics at the boundaries of the Middle East – European, African and Asian traditions – and the regular attempts to reject those musics.
II. Histories and historiographies of music
V. Local, regional and transnational musics
VI. Gender and musical identity
VII. Popular music, modernity and the Middle Eastern diaspora
PHILIP V. BOHLMAN
Religious texts may contain not only myths about the origins of music, but also the restrictions of allowable practice. In the Pentateuch, or Torah, music and musical instruments originate in several narratives. In the passages of Genesis known as the Akedah or ‘binding of Isaac’ (Genesis xxii), the sacrificed ram yields his horn, which symbolically becomes the shofar, the musical instrument used to mark significant beginnings and endings during the Jewish liturgical calendar, for example, Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. Through the Qur’an, as the accounts, or ahādīth, of the Prophet's life report (cf Ibn Ishāq Muhammad, B1955, pp.105–6), the voice of God is revealed to Muhammad as possessing musical qualities, which in turn are extended conceptually to the recitation of the Qur'an itself.
Non-religious texts also contain fundamental musical concepts, though these often remain ambiguous in their specific identification of music. The Arabic, especially North African, poetic practices gathered in books referred to as maqāmāt, derive from musical practices used in conjunction with the performance of poetry, which utilized the modal structures also designated as maqāmāt (sing. maqām). Epic traditions are widespread in the Middle East and in the boundary areas of the Middle East, such as south-eastern Europe and Central Asian Muslim nations. The epics of the Middle East are found either in written texts that originate in the region (for example, the epic of Moses in the Bible) or in the oral traditions of transnational migratory peoples (the Hilālī epics of North African Bedouins). The performing practices of Middle Eastern epics reveal similar concepts of the relation between poetry and the composition of melody, as well as between the meaning of narrative and the accompanimental functions of musical instruments.
One of the most basic conceptual distinctions in the music of the Middle East separates theory from practice. Theory, in the broadest sense, means speculation about music and the investigation of music as a science. The earliest music theorists borrowed extensively from Greek concepts of music, and elements of Greek musical thought remain in some domains of music theory even in the modern era. The application of scientific theory to music depends on literate traditions, which both undergird the conception of music as a form of religious or philosophical aesthetics and serve as a framework for mathematical operations on music. In contrast, practice depends primarily on oral tradition and the contexts of music-making. Musical learning (for example acquiring skill as a reciter of the Qur'an or learning a musical instrument) takes place largely through oral tradition. In many scientific writings the gap between theory and practice is considerable and the concept that theory and practice differ continues to influence ontologies of music in the Middle East to the present.
The earliest concepts of music in Islam treat it primarily as sound that is experienced rather than sound that is produced. Samā‘ literally means ‘hearing’ or ‘listening’, and when applied to the allowability of music, samā‘ refers more specifically to the act of perception rather than to the performance of music itself. Great debates, the so-called ‘samā‘ controversy’, about the extent to which listening to certain types of music was theologically acceptable or not, accompany the entire history of Islam, but versions of them are found in other religions of the Middle East, for example, in Judaism, in which hearing a woman's voice in the synagogue is proscribed and is a primary aesthetic-theological reason for excluding women from praying in the main sanctuary of orthodox synagogues.
Samā‘ and the physical experience of music plays a central role in the rituals of the mystical sects of Islam included under the rubric of Sufism. Though Sufi genealogies, beliefs and ritual practices vary in different Islamic societies, the concept of samā‘ as a component of and even name for rituals of remembering the name of God, dhikr (‘remembering’) is essential for transforming the body through musical experience into a vessel whose capacity to draw closer to God is heightened.
The exact nature of musical experience through samā‘ is open to great debate. In the Qur’an there is no specific reference to music, but Islamic theologians and Qur’anic exegesis regard certain passages as containing references to music or as referring obliquely to the Prophet Muhammad's attitudes toward music. Theological debates about music appear first in a body of literature called hadīth (plur. ahādīth), the accounts of the Prophet's life. The hadīth chroniclers describe the Prophet either participating in musical activities or scorning them, and because both types of accounts are found, this body of literature fuels rather than quells the debates about what music is and to what extent certain musical practices are or are not acceptable.
Concepts of both theory and practice make their sharpest distinctions between vocal and instrumental musical practices. At the most fundamental level, in recitation and cantillation of religious texts, vocal practice is not music in any ontological sense. Recitation of the Qur’an and the call-to-prayer (adhdhān) that takes place in Muslim societies five times daily are not understood to be music, even though they often adhere fairly strictly to the Arabic modal structures, or maqām. The terms mūsīqī or mūsīqā, however, are frequently employed categorically to separate instrumental from vocal practices, thereby marking instrumental music with cognates of designations for music borrowed from the Greek language. These divisions between vocal and instrumental suggest further distinctions between Self and Other, relegating questionable musical activities, such as those associated with dance, to a domain of moral, intellectual and aesthetic otherness.
Otherness or foreignness in music frequently provide conceptual categories that resolve the samā‘ controversy, at least temporarily. Listening to foreigners (e.g. non-Muslims in Islamic society) is not the same as playing a music that is morally questionable or even that has been rejected as unacceptable. Instrumental musicians, for example in many Muslim courts, were often religious outsiders or foreigners. Orchestras with largely Jewish members often played in the courts of Iraq and Iran, and Jews even dominated national ensembles, such as the radio orchestra of Iraq, in the first half of the 20th century. Islamic law (sharī‘a) itself recognizes the participation in Islamic society of certain types of acceptable ‘others’ or dhimmīs. The performance of outsiders in traditional musics is also widespread in the Middle East. The role of outsider may result from religious and gender differences, ethnic and linguistic differences, the knowledge of foreign repertories, especially those in languages foreign to an area and to the musician's status as a professional, which is one of the most marked categories of otherness in Middle Eastern music. The professional musician known as ‘āshiq (‘lover’ in Arabic) performs widely throughout the northern and north-eastern areas of the Middle East (from Turkey to Iran) and succeeds in part due to the presence of many such attributes of otherness.
Gender distinctions are present in virtually every music of the Middle East, either implicitly or explicitly. Musical genres are generally divided into those in which men participate and those in which women participate, both as practitioners and listeners. When men and women participate together, with relative equality or not, considerations of acceptability are often magnified. The gendering of musical genres, moreover, also leads to distinctions between the languages used for musical repertories. Men are far more likely to perform in traditions that use a classical language. In art, traditional and popular musics, instrumental musicians are largely male. Men dominate the public positions associated with religious music (for example the muqri' or reciter in Islam, or the hassan or cantor in Judaism), forming a ‘priesthood’ of sacred musicians. Women have had some success as popular singers during the 20th century by opening an even larger space for music's sexual character in modern societies, and homosexual and transsexual popular musicians have heightened and complicated the question of sexuality and otherness in music even more.
The conceptual ambivalence about music in Middle Eastern societies is linked to the way it serves as a source of power. On one hand, music can serve as a means of expressing imperialism and nationalism, for example, in the widespread nationalizing reforms of Atatürk in Turkey during the 1920s. The centralization of the Persian classical music system during the 20th century, as emblematized by the consolidation of the performing practices and modes called the radif, paralleled the centralization of national power in Iran, especially in the royal family prior to the Islamic Revolution in 1979. On the other hand, music may be used by musicians as a form of resistance. The Algerian popular music known as Rai first emerged in the mid-20th century as a voice for the disenfranchised in colonial Algeria, and since independence from France for many caught in the conflict between the opposing forces struggling for an Algeria under military or Islamic law. The Turkish popular music arabesk in different ways has provided a resistive voice for workers and ethnic minorities occupying the social periphery of the modern Turkish state.
Not all, or even most, musics in the Middle East are religious, but few concepts about music and its contexts are not related in some fundamental way to religious thought and practice. The major religions of the Middle East maintain strong positions about the functions of music in ritual and liturgy, and about the spiritual efficacy and moral acceptability of music. Religious doctrines both implicitly and explicitly create a place for music in human actions and often explicitly exclude music from certain actions. Music's presence at specific historical moments (for example the destruction of the temple and temple orchestra in Jerusalem with the inception and resolution of the Jewish diaspora) contributes to the history and practice of religions in the Middle East. Several crucial aesthetic and metaphysical debates – notably the samā‘ ‘controversy’ – are religious at their core.
However, there is very little agreement about the precise relationship between music and religion, not just in the mainstream of the major religions but in the regional and popular variants of these and the local religions that are distinct from Islam, Judaism and Christianity. Religious positions towards music are multi-faceted and may sometimes appear contradictory, and they change over time and according to circumstances. Despite these contradictory and contested positions, three basic positions of religion towards music are discernible. First, certain musical concepts and practices are inseparable from religion, which is to say, religion and music are inseparable at certain levels. The recitation of fundamental religious texts – the Qur’an and Torah – are performances which draw on musical structures, even though they are not referred to as such. Second, religious dogma rejects some aspects of music and music-making, and when it does so, the proscriptive language is often unequivocal. The rejection of music frequently marks moments of sweeping religious change, for example, the call by 20th-century religious movements for social and political revolution. Third, religious doctrine may also be ambivalent or even mute about certain kinds of music and music-making, or religion may not have articulated positions on certain forms of music that did not exist when fundamental doctrines were written and became canonic. The third position is the most complex and common in the Middle East, and its prevalence is the primary reason that religious, especially Islamic, positions towards music are constantly undergoing debate and processes of reform, and that they often engender considerable and visible controversy.
The expression of religious texts often depends on musical performing practices. Recitation of a sacred text takes place at the nexus between speech and song. In the three major religions of the Middle East, the rules for recitation have been canonized, which is to say that recitation of the Qur’an or the Bible is not simply heightened speech, but rather a style of performance that one learns in certain ways. There are rules, and these rules have parallels in musical practice. Instrumental improvisation (taqsīm) in Arabic classical music, for example, contains many structures and rules that correspond to those sometimes used for vocal improvisation in public recitation of the Qur'an. Both rely on the maqām system of modes, which has its own distinctive music theory; both demonstrate a formal architecture that grows from phrases that are arch-like. The only restrictions are conceptual and rhetorical, and they do not directly affect sound itself, that is, samā‘ in a strictly Muslim sense of the concept.
When religious restrictions do become applicable, they are often unequivocal, at least on their surfaces. Within Islamic law, or sharī‘a, there are detailed restrictions about which types of music are permissible or acceptable. The restrictive elements in Jewish religious law are not dissimilar from many in sharī‘a, though they arise from quite different historical circumstances. Men praying in the orthodox synagogue, for example, should not experience the distracting qualities of women's voices, leading to the separation of men from women in the synagogue. Strict interpretations of Jewish law also ban musical instruments from sacred spaces, at least until the Messiah comes. Debates about the permissibility of instruments in the synagogue raged in the Jewish diaspora, and the restrictions have become law in modern Israel.
The ambivalence of religion towards music has several sources, not all of them related to one another. Unlike the Qur’an, the Jewish Bible is full of references to musical instruments (e.g. Psalm cl), and it employs formal genres (e.g. epics) that traditionally require musical performance. In no case is the ambivalence of Middle Eastern religion towards music more evident than in Qur’anic recitation. The Qur’an's criticism of aesthetic forms such as poetry is quite explicit. But within the samā‘ polemic there is agreement about the potential of musical sound to engage a listener's emotions, and this potential extends to Qur’anic recitation. There are two general approaches to the traditions of Qur’anic recitation. The first focusses on religious meaning in the text itself: prosody, clarity and other aspects of meaning that can benefit from skilful recitation. The second focusses on performance: knowledge of music theory and performing practice. Recitation practices, tajwīd, may rely on knowledge of music that is not substantially different from the knowledge of music required of secular musicians, instrumentalists, for instance. The use of maqām is usually quite specific, but the rules for using maqām have nothing to do with extra-musical factors connected to maqām theory. Schools where reciters would learn the rules of tajwīd employ terminology borrowed from music theory. Reception of the Qur’an – in other words, how those listening to a reciter respond to and play a role in moulding tradition – are tied to factors of musicality. Still, tajwīd is never about music, and its meaningfulness is ultimately independent from music, however the listener may perceive the presence of music.
The religions of the Middle East also contain crucial contexts from which music is inseparable. Music and musical performance are determining factors in the communal and spiritual interaction of mystical groups, such as Sufi brotherhoods in Islam or Kabbalists in Judaism. Central to Sufi performances is the practice of dhikr. Although dhikr is generally associated with Sufis, it derives its meaning from religious concepts that unify Islam as a whole. Despite differences in local uses of music, dhikr is conceptually similar in North Africa, Turkey, Iran and Central Asia because of its fundamental efficacy of drawing the faithful closer to experiencing God. The faithful ‘remember’ by constantly repeating the name of God, Allah, which becomes a symbolic act of remembering by performing the object of memory. The solitary dhikr, therefore, occurs when the faithful turns his or her thoughts inwards, concentrating only on the name of God and penetrating beyond the word to the unitary presence of Allah in all things.
Musicality operates within dhikr and other forms of ritual performance in Islam: it facilitates the expression of textual meaning, it coordinates dance and movement, it has specific emotional and psychological effects, it redefines time as ritual experience and it produces physical responses in the body. In the ritualized abrogation of distance between the human and God fundamental to Sufism, music has become an efficacious agent. It is this efficacy, which however does not lend itself to explanation in musical concepts, that gives music such a powerful presence in the musics of the Middle East.
The history of music is interwoven into other historical processes in the Middle East: military and political histories, religious genealogies and histories of science, economic expansion and nationalistic consolidation. Traditional historiographical models, most of which privilege Islam as the determining factor in Middle Eastern history, parse the region's music history into four general periods: a pre-Islamic period; the period of Islam's expansion followed by centuries of a ‘golden era’ (7th–13th century); a long period of cultural stagnation equated with Ottoman imperialism (to the 20th century); and a modern era marked by growing nationalism in counterpoint with Islamic radicalism and conflict with the West.
Music theory and practice accompanied and chronicled the historical processes that framed these periods. As Islam expanded rapidly in the centuries following the Prophet's death (632 ce), music responded to the new political and cultural systems mapped on the Middle East. During the spread of Islam many centralized forms of political and military control developed, and these find a parallel in the growing tendency towards court music, with theories and concepts conveyed in Arabic-language treatises. The effectiveness of Islam's spread, nonetheless, depended on accommodation to local and regional traditions, including local musical practices, and a tolerance for and incorporation of variant traditions.
In general, the history of music in the Middle East follows an alternating pattern of expansion and consolidation, with classical traditions forming around a theoretical core. These then spread to and beyond cultural peripheries, only to enter a new phase of consolidation. The early expansion of Arab musical practices, therefore, was followed by the emergence of Persian musical practices, which in turn led to a shift towards the dominance of Turkish theoretical writing with the rise and expansion of the Ottoman empire until the 17th century. Similar patterns characterized the nationalistic movements of the 20th century, in which the consolidation of national power frequently stimulated attempts to shape, even through legislation, a national musical tradition through the institution of written traditions, musical ensembles and music academies, as emblems of a national music history.
Music historiography was an integral part of the rise of theoretical writing in the Middle East after the spread of Islam. Some scholars, including those working in music and more broadly in the Islamic sciences, accorded music an important position in different forms of historiography. Music might symbolize local practices and hence provide a means of integrating diversity into a history, but it was also a component of the impetus to universalizing that influenced many historians of the Middle East. In his Muqaddima (‘Introduction’, which was to precede a universal history), Ibn Khaldūn (b 1406) mentioned music in the context of a world history, as well as in an ethnographic analysis of different cultures of the Mediterranean world. Historiographically, music is a component at both the core and the peripheries of his 15th-century world.
There are also popular traditions of music history. Music in Sufi brotherhoods, for example, depends extensively on transmission through ritual practice, which in turn elaborates a belief system that grows from a complex genealogy of saints and the historical events associated with them. Sufi performances, of which the most important are dhikr, serve as means of drawing upon the genealogy of past saints by musically narrating a brotherhood or sect's particular history. The 10th-century Ikhwān al-safā‘, who lived in the area near Basra, employed mystical concepts from an early form of Sufism to reformulate Greek, especially Platonic, music theory as a historiographical bridge between classical and Middle Eastern musical thought.
Music history in the Middle East suffers from an interpretative dilemma, generated by European perspectives on musical change. With the rise and decline of the so-called golden era, music history in the Middle East, so these perspectives hold, ceased developing. The absence of harmony and contrapuntal practices, accordingly, has been cited as evidence that musical development simply did not occur and that the music of the Middle East failed to enter a modern era. Such concepts of musical ennui contribute substantially to orientalist interpretations of the Middle East, ranging from those that hold on to the glory of a ‘golden age’ to those attempting to justify European control and colonialism in the Middle East. Music, therefore, enters a historiographical discourse about the Middle East as a place where people and nations have no history. This discourse pervades the entire music history of the Middle East, and modern and postmodern transitions in the region, such as 20th-century nationalism and Islamic radicalism, are frequently taken as additional evidence for these insidious historiographical practices.
With the European Enlightenment in the 18th century a new historiographical impulse was turned towards the music of the Middle East. Enlightenment philologists and early musicologists imagined the Middle East as the source of European music history and as a site of origins and authenticity. In this historiography which increasingly employed organicist and evolutionary concepts, Middle Eastern music cultures, especially those regarded as rooted in religious musics, were regarded as historically more authentic, but also more primitive, and music history in the region was imagined to be static and timeless. Scientific expeditions took place to the eastern Mediterranean, for example that which accompanied Napoleon to Egypt, producing a multi-volume encyclopedia on Egyptian culture, of which the final two volumes by Guillaume Villoteau were devoted to music and musical instruments. They encountered a world thought to be untouched by musical change, despite its vast religious and cultural variety. Whereas the music of the Middle East assumed an important position in the music histories of the 19th century, it increasingly acquired the aura of orientalism. By the beginning of the 20th century, accordingly, the musics of the Middle East very much belonged to Europe's Other.
The rise of the modern nation-state had an enormous impact on music historiography during the 20th century. As the empires that had extended political control of the region – the Ottoman empire, for example, as well as those of the British and French – lost their grip on the Middle East, new national governments arose that sought new ways to articulate nationalism in music. Music academies and the reform of musical practices by governmental edict re-examined the ways musical change had taken place in the history and even prehistory of the modern nation. Musical scholarship in the Middle East itself focussed more on national traditions – Turkish, Egyptian or Tunisian – than on the unity of the entire region.
During the course of the 20th century there were, nonetheless, responses to the nationalist trend, notably the 1932 Cairo Congress on Arab Music. Sponsored by the Egyptian government, the congress invited musicians and ensembles from throughout the Middle East – from Morocco to Iraq – and delegations of musicologists and other musical scholars from Europe. The congress produced diametrically opposed agendas for the future of Middle Eastern music, with Middle Eastern scholars arguing for various forms of modernization, and European scholars urging Middle Eastern cultural ministries to preserve the integrity and authenticity of traditional practices.
The 20th century witnessed the growth of many new media and forms of mediation. The recording industry expanded rapidly in the Middle East, first in the urban centres dominated by colonial or imperial powers, notably Cairo, Beirut and Istanbul, and then in regional and national centres. Because of the importance of live recording during the rise of radio from the 1930s, radio ensembles and regular musical performances provided one of the most important networks for the dissemination of diverse musical traditions and the emergence of new processes of exchange. Radio and recording not only provide the foundation for modern and postmodern histories of popular music, but also a complex set of channels between local musical practices across the region, and between these and the diaspora and refugee cultures outside the Middle East. The recording media not only historicize the past for these cultures, but make it possible for them to participate actively, if from a diaspora, in contemporary political and nationalist struggles.
Within the Middle East there is considerable ambivalence and controversy about the presence of instruments in music and their role in society. Musical instruments in the Middle East may be seen as inhabiting five different conceptual categories. The first of these categories treats instrumental music as an essentially vocal and religious form of expression, hence regarding it with inclusivity and approbation. By extension, instruments can even serve as mediators of and for text and sacredness embedded in texts. In contrast, there is a second, widespread category in the Middle East that regards musical instruments as the antithesis of the sacred, asserting instead that they are associated with cultural activities that are profane, such as dancing. The third category includes the metaphysical attributes of science, which hold that instruments are used to measure and represent a purer, more abstract form of knowledge. Fourthly, there are musical instruments that conceptually belong to an aesthetics of ‘art’, creating distinctions between those instruments that are classical and those that are not. Fifthly, there are instruments derived from and suited to ‘artifice’. This ontological sense of the artificial is most commonly encountered in traditional music, where creating the right sound for the right moment is essential.
The two historically ‘most classical’ instruments in Middle Eastern repertories, which cut across regional traditions and genres, are the ‘Ūd and the Qānūn. Both instruments are chordophones, and both exhibit virtually every one of the metaphysical categories introduced above. The ‘ūd, a five-string lute with a pear-shaped body, provides the basis for Arabic music theory because divisions of its strings generate patterns of pitch and interval measurement. The qānūn, whose name, related to the modern English term ‘canon’, reveals its connection to Pythagorean theoretical speculation, also lends itself to the science of Middle Eastern music theory, especially during the earliest century of its history (as in al-Fārābī's writings of the 10th century). Both instruments demonstrate quite high status in the art musics of the Middle East because of these scientific connections, yet both cross the borders between repertories and genres, in effect centripetalizing the diverse music cultures of the region.
The bowed, spiked chordophone, known as Kamānche or kamanja, possesses a timbral quality that is believed to mimic the voice most closely, and it is therefore a standard member, in one regional variation or another, in ensembles throughout the Middle East. Other instruments also embody concepts of human physicality and serve to embellish vocality. In classical thought the strings of the ‘ūd represent the bodily fluids. The rim-blown flute, Nay, lends itself to a wide range of vocally conceived timbres, largely because of performing practice and despite the diverse materials used to construct the nay, from plastic tubing to bamboo.
Instrumental music may interact with sacred music, enhancing or complementing the sacredness of vocal practices. There are some instruments, especially time-marking percussion instruments such as the mazhar or mizhar (a frame drum), that are permitted in some mosques; Sufi brotherhoods frequently use frame drums in the dhikr ritual performance, and in some Sufi traditions wind instruments (the ney in Turkey) are also used because of the ways they reflect and enhance the physical transformation that accompanies sema (samā‘). Instrumental music represents or participates in everyday practices, that is in the rituals and traditional activities that contribute to a sense of community. The musical life of the marketplace (sūq), for example, includes contexts in which instrumental music has a defining presence. Dance, too, should be included within this second conceptual category, not least because of its link with instrumental music.
Musical ensembles often contain performers who come from ‘outside’ the culture in which they play, or are at least distanced from the contexts in which they play; in many Muslim courts, even into the 20th century, Jewish musicians often dominated ensembles. This also goes for professional musicians, whose specialization in instrumental music marks them as foreign. The aşık in Turkish traditional and popular music moves from one local setting to another, thereby displaying foreignness in each. The amateur status of many instrumentalists in art music is further evidence of the ways in which instrumental music occupies a domain separate from the everyday.
In the traditions of many courts, it was the instrumental ensemble that represented the highest form of art music, a status still evident in the shālgī-baghdādī ensemble of Iraq. In 20th-century attempts to use art music to symbolize the nation, artistic status of the highest order often accrued to the instrumental ensemble, such as the ma’lūf of Tunisia. Instruments acquire modern meanings because of the artifice that accompanies revival and the transformation of functions for contemporary social and political ends.
One of the functions for instrumental music in the modern Middle East is to provide a context for mediation and contact with Western and other musical practices. The mediating functions of instruments derive from the capacity to allow for exchange and adaptation, not least because of their ambiguous position in the metaphysics of music in the Middle East. Western instruments (such as the violin) have, for example, entered ensembles in many repertories, but when they do so, as in many ensembles of North Africa, they generally assume specifically Maghribi functions and express a Maghribi metaphysics of music. This capacity to mediate through indigenization also characterizes the ways in which professional traditional musicians (e.g. the ‘āshiq) employ an instrument such as the Turkish saz (see Bağlama) investing that instrument with new possibilities for cultural translation.
In the popular musics of the Middle East instruments have yet another set of distinctive roles because of the ways they are used to facilitate mediation and change. Instruments serve as the basis for mixing and remixing in popular musics. Popular musics that lie at the core of attempts to foment social change may draw upon the symbolic power of a more classical instrument to empower those attempts, as in the case of the plucked-lute saz in popular Turkish arabesk. By mixing and remixing the instrumentarium, many popular musicians rely on a complex vocabulary of musical symbols that negotiate differences between Middle Eastern and European traditions and underscore the political dilemmas at the contested borders between Self and Other. In popular music of Sephardi and Eastern Jewish communities in Israel, musica mizrakhit, instruments from Arab traditions indigenous to those communities, for example, heighten the political message of easternness. The paradox of such complex meanings in the instrumentarium of popular music is that instruments, which are ontologically questionable in the Middle East, acquire the power in popular music to reimagine and remix the Middle Eastern qualities of music.
The extensive presence of modal and metrical systems historically served as a form of relative unity throughout the Middle East and continues to do so, despite the ways its theoretical and cultural meanings have changed and acquired modern and postmodern functions. Mode has many meanings in the Middle East, but underlying modal thinking is a tendency towards large-scale musical systems corresponding to modal complexes with interrelated parts and the expression of cultural, political, and religious hierarchies through musical form and performance.
Mode represents complex systems of musical identity. In some repertories mode is so extensively systematized that discrete pieces and formal procedures are exchangeable with modal identity. In other repertories mode is much less formalized, providing instead barely more than a skeleton for improvisation or composition. Even if these two conditions suggest a continuum between mode as an actual composition and mode as a framework for improvisation or composition, each modal system in the Middle East can only be understood through the many varieties that such a continuum makes possible.
Mode possesses local functions, even while potentially connected more globally to the entire Middle East, for example through shared Islamic sacred musics and pan-Middle Eastern popular music. In a given music culture mode has vertical meanings, demonstrating the relations between different levels of a social hierarchy or between local traditions and art musics. Modal practice expresses the interactions between cultural core and peripheries, and in different ways it bounds genre, musical form and performing practice.
Middle Eastern modal systems are both similar to and different from those of neighbouring regions, especially the use of mode in Central and South Asia. In the Middle East there are fewer instances of specific references to the extra-musical, as in South Asian rāga, though there remains considerable evidence that Middle Eastern mode possesses meanings that are not strictly musical. The use of microtones to distinguish between different modes is one of the most characteristic aspects of Middle Eastern theory. Metrical systems, like those of South Asia, are additive and logogenic, but even more extensively so. Though some scholars have recently argued that the study of mode in the Middle East is anachronistic and that it places too much evidence on the purely musical, 20th-century music theories reveal instead that mode is used to participate extensively in modernization and nationalization, as well as in the creation of postmodern popular musics.
The history of Middle Eastern music theory begins with concepts of melodic mode in Arab music. The modern term maqām refers to both the larger system of melodic practices in Arabic-, Persian- and Turkish-speaking cultures, and to the entity of a single mode itself. Despite its centrality in Middle Eastern music theories and its extensive history, maqām exhibits more conceptual flexibility and exists in more different forms than the other major modal systems. Interpretations of maqām differ from region to region in the Arab world and among individual performers. There is considerable flexibility and diversity in the identification of a single maqām – a scale with a full complement of notes within the span of an octave or more or a smaller unit, such as a tetrachord, or a melodic motif or a repertory-specific formal procedure – marks performing practice.
Although maqām expresses certain types of hegemony in the Middle East (it provides the modal framework for Qur’anic recitation throughout the Middle East and much of the Islamic world), its own capacity to spill across borders and influence other music cultures (for example those of Greece) is considerable. Because of its historical, conceptual and terminological flexibility maqām also gives shape to local and regional practices. Just as Arab art music in Iraq has special formal and instrumental practices, such as the shālghī ensemble associated with the urban practices of Baghdad, so too are there special compositional and improvisational practices, such as large-scale suites identified by a single maqām and modulations derived from it. Historically, ethnic and religious minorities in Iraq and elsewhere (for example Kurds and Jews) utilized maqām in ways specific to their cultural and musical needs.
Metre in Arab music is generally referred to as īqā‘, a concept that describes the system as a whole and individual metric patterns. In early Arab treatises īqā‘, such as Kitāb al-īqā‘ (‘Book on Rhythm’; no longer extant) by al-Khalīl (718–91), is treated as a component of prosody, and, although metric theory has undergone many changes, īqā‘s still express certain aspects of Arabic poetry. The individual cycles of īqā‘ are additive, meaning that they consist of a composite of discrete units, whose character is determined by the ways in which different percussion strokes represent the sounds and duration and accentuation that more literally or entirely abstractly constitute a given model. In a sense īqā‘ is far less malleable than maqām, and it contributes more to defining the core than the peripheries of Arabic art music.
The modal system of Persian art music, the radif, is the product of a historical trajectory stretching from numerous individual and localized systems, many of them equivalent to and recognized themselves as radifs, to a relatively centralized and standardized modern radif. Still at the beginning of the 20th century, modal practice (as opposed to modal theory) lay in the hands of individual musicians, for whom a repertory and the concomitant performance represented a local tradition, often that connected with a smaller urban centre or court, but also the system of pedagogy necessary for transmitting music orally and aurally. The conceptualization of radif as a centralized system did not fully emerge until the second half of the 20th century, and as late as the 1960s and 70s many musicians and scholars still referred to the radif as if it were a collection of its component modes, that is, as the dastgāh system or concept.
Already prior to the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran the systematization of mode was so extensive that there were several dominant, even canonic, radifs, which anchored art music in Tehran, the seat of national power. Versions were available in printed form, with Western notation modified to accommodate some of the distinctive differences within Persian music, especially microtones and the performing practices used by certain instruments. There are also recorded versions of the radif available on audio cassette.
As a modal system the Persian radif is distinguished by its wholeness, in which the many parts introduce variety and nuance at ever deeper levels but do so by proffering a more refined and complex structure to the whole. The 12 primary dastgāhs that constitute most radifs appear as a set of individual pieces, or gushes, which provide different types of modal/melodic frameworks for any given performance or improvisation. Gushes represent different genres, and each one has certain relative functions within a performance, such as beginning or ending, introducing dance rhythms, or effecting certain possibilities for modulation. Whether a musician plays only a few of the individual gushes or enough to constitute an entire suite for large ensemble, the modal order of pieces is more or less preserved. The radif thus prescribes form in an additive fashion, beginning at the most detailed level.
The Persian modal system is highly hierarchical, and its embodiment of musical authority suggests many parallels to the ascription of authority in Iranian society. The radif also serves as a symbolic site for the interaction of tradition and modernity, that is, for the contradiction of different forms of authority.
Although the Turkish modal system has interacted extensively with Arab, Persian, and European modal systems, makam is distinctive in many ways. Any examination of modern makam practices must take into account a long history of written treatises and various forms of institutionalization. What makam means at any historical moment depends on social, religious and political conditions and on the ways these are negotiated by musical institutions. Already in the 16th century, Persian music took its place as an important activity in the Ottoman court. Throughout the centuries of Ottoman rule, however, modal practices were adapted by religious institutions, which, as in the case of the Mevlevi orders of Islam, were highly centralized and hierarchical, but also generated alternative, even resistive, music histories. When Atatürk established the Turkish Republic in 1923, a modernized theoretical system replaced those that had thriven for centuries in Ottoman courts and Mevlevi ceremonies. Radio and government-sponsored music academies replaced the courts, and music itself was reformed from the inside out, paralleling in its transformation other domains of nationalism and reform, such as the Turkish language.
The use of the concept makam is more restricted in Turkish than in Arabic and Persian art music. Makam more specifically designates melodic mode, especially the nature of melodic material and the ways it is generated through the mathematical division of the strings on musical instruments. Improvisation, or taksim, is related to makam, but it possesses its own body of principles. Similarly, concepts of tempo, rhythm and metre, broadly included under the concept usul, have an integrity quite independent from makam. Performing practice, especially the suite of Turkish music (fasıl) draws from all other areas of Turkish theory, but also interacts extensively with the social, political and religious functions of music throughout Turkish history. Turkish music theory, therefore, is highly developed in several distinctive areas – makam, usul, fasıl – so that any account of one area must also include the others at various levels in order to permit a larger historical picture of Turkish music as a whole.
Unlike art musics in the Middle East, many regional music theories have tended towards neither consolidation nor classicization. There are two traditional ways of viewing local theoretical systems. The first perspective looks from the top down, treating regional systems as variants of the art musics; the second perspective recognizes greater integrity at the local level, treating regional systems as entities unto themselves. The two perspectives have led to quite different, even opposed, interpretations of North African, or Maghribi, musics. Art music traditions have a long history in North Africa, for example, through the medieval exchanges between and among the Muslim, Jewish and Christian cultures of the Iberian peninsula and the western part of North Africa, including modern Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia. A considerable body of Arabic music theory emerged from these western areas of the Islamic world throughout the Middle Ages, much of which characterized the practices of Andalusian art music, one of the dominant traditions in the Islamic world until the dispersion of Muslims and Jews at the inception of the early modern era. As the music cultures of North Africa responded and contributed to the fragmentation of Andalusian art music, local and regional traditions emerged, some of which (for example the ma’lūf of Tunisia) possess an integrated theoretical system of their own. The most important questions are not whether one perspective is more correct than the other – both retain resolute adherents – but how they represent the different historical processes that influenced and are influenced by mode and music theory in the Middle East, and how the various regional traditions choose to represent themselves and why.
Art musics have by no means placed restrictive boundaries around modal practices, and there are numerous cases of modes spilling over into domains outside of art music, especially as responses to modernity. Maqām has historically been one of the unifying factors in the different traditions of Qur’anic recitation throughout the Middle East, thereby serving as a musical means of ascribing religious unity. Many popular musics in south-eastern Europe retain modal structures from Middle Eastern, especially Turkish, musics. Jewish instrumental or klezmer music in lands formerly controlled by the Ottoman Empire (for example in Romania and Bulgaria), not only uses but also recognizes Turkish makam as an element of music theory. The same is true for popular musics in the Muslim and non-Muslim populations of Bosnia-Hercegovina, Albania and Bulgaria. In modern Israel, Arab maqām is traditionally the modal framework for the predominant system of Jewish cantillation and liturgical music, the Jerusalem-Sephardi style. Specific maqāmāt even have extra-musical meanings in the Sephardi Jewish liturgical calendar.
Throughout the Middle East the character and meanings of music differ considerably from place to place. On the one hand, musics may transmit local meanings and may narrate the long history of a single place; on the other, many musics exhibit geographic connections that reveal extensive fluidity and histories ceaselessly in flux. Middle Eastern musics only rarely function to connect rural cultures to the nation-state as, for instance, in Turkey. Instead in a myriad of ways, they respond to and negotiate publicly local historical and cultural conditions, and participate in the local construction of place in a changing and complex region.
Although many genres are identified by place the meanings attributed to them are diverse. Often hybrid genres combining sacred and secular, traditional and popular, oral and mediated traditions, they are performed by professionals rather than amateurs. Throughout the Middle East the music of a single place or community may comprise music of local or regional provenance, music from the ‘outside’ (albeit with some connection to a minority group physically present in the life of the community), music performed by professional musicians as well as religious music performed by local sects and musics mediated and mixed by recording and broadcasting for widespread consumption.
Ethnographic studies and expeditions during the 20th century consistently encountered music cultures that belied European models of isolation and united repertories. Robert Lachmann's study in the 1920s of one of the two Jewish communities on the small Mediterranean island of Djerba, off the coast of Tunisia, failed to uncover isolation and authenticity which might connect modern musical practices to those of pre-diasporic Israel (J1940). The geographical and historical conditions on Djerba were presumably ideal for an isolated music, but instead Lachmann found extensive hybridity. Religious practices were presumably affected by the frequent pilgrimages that brought in traditions from the outside, as well as by exchange with local Muslim communities. Gender distinctions were so extreme that women's and men's genres were given separate categories. Even the two villages investigated by Lachmann and, later, Davis (J1984–5) contained music cultures that were markedly different from each other.
The Turkish village studied intensively by Lakshmi Tewari in the 1970s similarly did not demonstrate isolation, not least because the technologies that brought about hybridization were more developed (M1972). There was no single music shared by the village, but different groups, such as women's or religious groups, had their own musics. The musical practice most broadly shared was that of listening to the radio, which necessarily meant that the village's sense of place was mediated through the mixing of components from urban and national practices.
Performances by professional musicians throughout the Middle East permeate national and local boundaries. One of the forces behind these transgressions is the mobility of these musicians, who may perform from several repertories depending on where and for what purpose she or he is engaged. The chārbeiti (Persian: ‘quatrain’) is a verse form set to melodic types which vary regionally within Persian-speaking societies. In Turkey the aşık is the best-known professional musician to function in this way. Similar types of professional occur elsewhere in the northern Middle East, the ‘āshiq in north-eastern Iran, for instance, incorporates chārbeiti in his repertory. The repertories of professional musicians are sometimes multilingual, often making them emblems of foreignness and otherness, which in turn symbolize the fluidity with which musics move from place to place. When these musics come from the outside, however, this does not necessarily mean they have no local meaning.
Rural–urban distinctions largely break down in the musics of the Middle East; musics are frequently exchanged between urban and rural populations. There are musical traditions that make the rural cosmopolitan (e.g. via trade and migration) and the urban rural (e.g. via mass mediation). Accordingly, popular musics are not easily defined. Popular musics of the Turkish city (for example arabesk) depend on rural workers and the crossing of ethnic boundaries, especially by Kurds from eastern Turkey and the Black Sea region of the north-east. The ethnicity expressed by these musics is fluid and constantly reconfigured through hybridity.
Gender distinctions are present in all musical genres in the Middle East, and the impact of gender on musical identity is often quite extreme, although many genres are shared and sometimes also performance contexts, especially dance-songs. The significance of gender results from the ways it contributes to basic metaphysical notions of what music is and from the connections of gender to the conditions that determine the approbation of music. The boundaries between sacred and secular practices may also mark gender distinctions. The social acceptability of music in the public sphere may depend on the visibility or invisibility of certain aspects of gender. Instrumental music contains sharp gender distinctions, and the emergence of 20th-century popular music often paralleled the transformation of public attitudes towards gender as a component of social structure. To understand the construction of musical identity in the Middle East it is crucial to understand the ways in which music – all musics from the region – represents the meaning and presence of gender in society.
Historically, the musics of the Middle East have been represented as male-dominated practices. In part, this is understandable because of the public nature of many domains of male music-making, in other words the visibility of the music with which men are traditionally associated. The public recitation of the Qur’an or the call-to-prayer five times daily by the muezzin, for example, afford male religious professionals a public role. Neither form of religio-musical practice, however, is specifically restricted to men, at least according to religious tenets alone. The more such practices enter the public sphere, however, the more it becomes difficult for women to participate in them professionally. In the religions of the Middle East, therefore, public music-making often relies on musical specialists, even on a musical ‘priesthood’, to which women rarely have access. Specialization and professionalization are no less evident in classical and popular musics, both of which also take place in a type of public sphere. In the 21st century there are certain types of musical instruments that are almost exclusively played by men, such as those in the classical ensembles of the Middle East. Whereas men dominate many genres of popular and professional folk music, women have made considerable inroads into these domains.
The domains of women's music are generally more private and may be somewhat restricted to the home, the family or a more contained community. It is in these domains, nonetheless, that ritual and rites of passage occur, which often demand of women musicians an extensive knowledge of traditional repertories. Throughout the Middle East women's music spills over into the public workplace, especially in rural and village societies. The musics associated with agricultural practices, for example, may constitute a domain of women's music. Many women's repertories reveal long histories of ethnic and religious exchange. The songs of women in Yemenite- or Iraqi-Jewish cultures, for example, might well contain texts in Hebrew, Arabic and several local Judaeo-Arabic dialects, which together indicate that such songs are not local and restricted to the Jewish community at all. The distinctions between public and private domains of women's music have religious origins, and it is therefore not uncommon to regard women who perform publicly as morally suspect or to mark women performers as culturally ‘other’.
Middle Eastern musical identities do not always fall conveniently into categories of male or female; there are also gendered domains between those more easily identified as male or female. These form because outsiders are active in them, as in the case of rural areas of Turkey in which workers from outside a particular village are active in seasonal labour and accordingly bring with them repertories distinct from local ones. The in-between domain frequently enhances the potential for music and musical identities that are hybrid, especially when it facilitates linguistic and religious border-crossing. It is in the traditionally public domains of hybridity that dance has often taken place, which in turn has made the domains even more complex as gendered spaces, opening up possibilities for musical identities that express diverse forms of sexuality, and affording a public presence to transgendered and transsexual performers. Gender differences in music, therefore, may provide contexts for other types of difference.
Despite the seeming abundance of gender restrictions in the religious musical practices of the Middle East, women do have specific and very significant roles in the musics and musical concepts derived from religion. In Judaism, for example, God is understood to possess both feminine (shekhinah) and masculine (tiferet) attributes and these manifest themselves in religious musical practice. The feminine attribute emerges in some of the most significant ritual practices, notably the welcoming of ‘shekhinah’ as the ‘sabbath bride’ at the beginning of Sabbath services in the synagogue. In Mediterranean Christian cultures, devotion to the Virgin Mary provides the basis for the proliferation of musical and ritual practices dominated by women. In Islam few religious tracts specify roles for women or men. Religious musics, nonetheless, reflect and reproduce many gender distinctions, creating contradictions between religious theory and practice, while giving music an important position in the articulation of gender distinctions.
Women musicians have a very distinctive presence in the history and historiography of Middle Eastern music. Cultural and music historians often use the numerous observations of ‘dancing girls’ in the pre-Islamic Middle East as a means of distinguishing the radical transformation that ensued with the spread of Islam. As contact between Western observers and the Middle East increased during the orientalism of the early modern and modern eras, women were most frequently stylized as exotic and erotic others, dancers and public performers symbolizing a world considered not yet as civilized as Europe. In contrast, very little attention has been paid to the participation of women in local and regional music histories of the Middle East, especially those that provide the basis for venerating and transmitting the genealogies of saints, both in Islam and Judaism. In 20th-century popular music, women singers succeeded in winning a place in the public sphere and transforming the position of women in the Middle East on national and international levels.
Because of the particular forms of boundedness in Middle Eastern societies there is often a gender split between women's (closed) and men's (public) music-making. This split is clearest in religious practices, where men dominate the social and professional organization of music-making, in other words in the mosque or at times of public celebration. The distinction between private and public is further significant because of its impact on the representation of gender in music, both from within the Middle East and from the outside. Women who gain prominence as musicians in the public sphere are often identified as not belonging there. Especially within the aesthetics of radical Islamic groups women are not given a space in the ‘public discourse’ on music at all. The relevance of these exclusionary practices should not be underestimated, for there are foundational texts such as the ahādīth, or commentaries on the life of the Prophet, that generate a rhetoric of gender criticism directed specifically at women in public.
Gender distinctions in the public religious discourse on music notwithstanding, women assumed a much more visible presence in public music-making in the 20th century. Though still rare, women may serve as reciters of the Qur'an and professional performers of religious genres. The Egyptian singer Umm Kulthum acquired her early vocal training in a village Qur’anic school and she did not entirely abandon the performance of musics with sacred themes during a career that led to unprecedented popularity in the Middle East. Popular music in the Middle East, with its history of modern and postmodern nationalisms, is unthinkable without women singers and women stars. At the end of the 20th century the gendered spaces of in-betweenness in Middle Eastern popular musics also became increasingly complex and public, with growing visibility and influence of transsexual and transgendered stars in Turkish arabesk and in international popular music, such as the Israeli transsexual Dana International, who won the Eurovision Song Contest in 1998.
Increasingly during the second half of the 20th century the musics of the Middle East spilled across its borders, internal and external. The conditions of modernity – mass production and consumption, hybridization of styles and repertories, more intensive localization and more extensive globalization – have profoundly influenced popular musics in the Middle East and have expedited their participation in a transnational and international Middle Eastern diaspora. Historically, popular musics have provided conduits for contact between the Middle East and the West, fuelling orientalist and colonialist fantasies, and creating a body of stereotypes that enhanced the aura of otherness that enveloped the Western image of the Middle East. 20th-century popular musics continued to bear witness to this legacy of two-way culture contact, but in the course of the century they increasingly gave voice to the changing conditions wrought by modernity. The Middle East is not simply a station on a global, world-music network as might be suggested by media promotion in the West: its popular musics arise from the region's political struggles and historical transformations, communicating these powerfully on an international level.
In the course of its modern history popular music has interacted in increasingly complex ways with the nation-states of the Middle East. The shifting political landscape of the region produces quite different forms of the nation-state, which in turn expose the contested nature of political and cultural borders in the region. Popular musics, in particular, form along these contested borders, sometimes articulating and buttressing them, at other times crossing and transgressing them. In the 20th century nations dominated by the centralization and nationalization of cultural resources, certain musical repertories and practices achieved a public presence and the concomitant popularity through parallel forms of centralization, for example by consolidating as national repertories of classical and semi-classical music, such as the ma’lūf in Tunisia, or the ensembles performing stylized forms of mūsīqā ‘arabiyya in Egypt. National broadcasting systems and recording companies supported by the state substantially broadened the presence of popular musics in the national public sphere, where they affirmed the cultural divisions of modernity. In contrast, many popular musics in the Middle East have resisted or defied the institutions of 20th-century nationalism. Popular musics of stateless peoples, notably the Kurdish populations of Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran, circulate widely through recordings and radio broadcasts that musically represent the culture and political aspirations of a Kurdish state. The popular musics of modern Middle Eastern nations are often drawn into the complex historical tensions between centralization and fragmentation.
Traditional studies of Middle Eastern popular music have focussed on its great performers and composers, in particular, on its most visible stars, such as Umm Kulthm and Muhammad ‘al-Wahhāb Abd in Egypt, or Fayrüz in Lebanon. The stars of Middle Eastern popular music have enjoyed truly international fame; Umm Kulthum (1904–75) might well have been the most popular singer of the 20th century, both because of her immense influence on the musical life of Egypt and because of the wide dissemination of her recordings in the Islamic world. The attention to stars remains justified, in part, by the distinctive ways in which certain genealogies empowered popular music to represent crucial political and ethnic problems. An extended genealogy of popular singers with Yemenite-Jewish heritages, beginning with Beracha Zephira in the 1930s and continuing with Ofra Haza and Dana International in the 1990s, draws attention to the social and political struggles of eastern Jews (Jews of Sephardi heritage and those from largely Muslim countries in the eastern Mediterranean) in modern Israel. The visibility of Algerian rai stars, such as Cheikha Rimitti in the mid-20th century and Cheb Khaled at the time of heightened violence between nationalist and Islamic forces in the 1980s and 90s, also attests to the powerful role of the popular singer in the nationalist arena.
The growing impact of the Middle Eastern diaspora on international politics generated radically different new frameworks for interpreting Middle Eastern popular music. Guest workers from the Middle East, particularly Moroccans and Algerians in France, and Turks and Kurds in central Europe, shifted the borders of popular music and rendered the relation between music and the nation-state even more complex. Cultural exchange – both conflict and cooperation – underwent various processes of displacement, with diaspora communities throughout the world (for example Palestinians in Detroit or Iranians in Los Angeles) using popular music to forge new identities that spread across the diaspora landscape. Some non-Middle Eastern Muslim communities (such as black American Muslims, or Sufi groups in South and South-eastern Asia) have turned to the Middle East for musical resources, and the global CD marketplace has itself provided the basis for a transnational Muslim diaspora music centred on the Middle East. The expansion of the Middle Eastern diaspora at the end of the 20th century provided a complex framework for the proliferation of popular-music styles and repertories, and globalized their availability in an international marketplace.
The conditions of modernity also created new possibilities for popular musics emanating from outside the Middle East to influence the region and the construction of its diverse identities. American and European popular musics have a considerable presence, and international styles, such as rap and hip hop, influence local musicians and national styles. Interpreted from a historical perspective, rock music has secured its presence in the popular-music culture of the Middle East not unlike many other musics that were ‘foreign’ and ‘other’. There are rock genres that mark the élite status that comes from emphasizing connections beyond the region's borders, for example, to the cosmopolitan centres along the Mediterranean littoral. Rock and rap musicians in some parts of the Middle East also use popular music to articulate and critique more localized, national political dilemmas. The Israeli star Yehuda Poliker, for example, employs rock music to call for open dialogue with Palestinians. Rock music has the potential for levelling many of the class and gender borders marking the traditional cultures of the Middle East.
The historical contradictions between unity and discontinuity in the Middle East are fully evident in popular music. Processes of change, such as the religious radicalism that characterizes many nations, may spawn new popular repertories that cut across national boundaries and attempt to provide a framework for pan-Middle Eastern political consolidation. Popular musics also accumulate around the faultlines of the region, the persistent conflicts between nations at war, or the struggles of peoples and cultures excluded from the sanctioned national identities of modernity. Popular musics may provide heightened forms for nationalist sentiment, and they are among the chief sites for giving voice to resistance movements. Some popular musics may be religiously suspect, but others may provide new possibilities for religious expression. As individual, national and global identities in the Middle East undergo complex processes of change, popular music articulates the shifting borders between tradition and modernity.
See also Arab music; Bedouin music; Central Asia; Kurdish music; Mode, §V, 2; Ottoman music. For religious traditions see Coptic orthodox church music; Islamic religious music; Jewish music; Syrian church music. For individual country articles see Algeria; Arabian Gulf; Egypt; Iran; Iraq; Israel; Jordan; Lebanon; Libya; Morocco; Oman; Palestinian music; Saudi arabia; Syria; Tunisia; Turkey; Yemen.
A General. B Concepts of music. C History and historiography. D Music theory. E Musicians and performing practice. F The Arabic-speaking Middle East. G Persian music. H Turkish music. I North Africa. J Jewish Middle East. K Peripheries and diaspora. L Instruments and instrumental music. M Traditional music. N Popular music.
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