From a very early period the term ‘Palestine’ was applied to a coastal region of the eastern Mediterranean roughly corresponding to the land now forming Israel (see Jewish music, §II). Its boundaries were imprecise and fluctuated over the centuries. Palestine was under Ottoman rule (1517–1917) and then under British mandate from 1920 until the creation of the state of Israel in 1948.
Most Palestinians (about 90%) are Sunni Muslim; others are mainly Christian. Palestinian peoples are found in parts of Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, Jordan (see Jordan (i)), Lebanon, Syria and diasporic communities in other regions. Under the 1993 Oslo Agreement, a small proportion of historical Palestine was returned to Palestinian control.
CHRISTIAN POCHÉ
The traditional music of the Palestinians is related to Middle Eastern Arab music in its language, forms, melodies, dances and musical instruments. The art music is generally similar in form to Arab art music, with an additional legacy of Ottoman influences found elsewhere in the Middle East. The rural folk music shares regional similarities with the sung verse styles widespread on the eastern Mediterranean coast, including Syria and Lebanon. Inland, the southern region bordering the Negev desert is dominated by the music and dances of the nomadic Bedouin tribes, which are part of the wider musical culture of the North Arabian peninsula.
The city of Jerusalem thus forms the meeting-place of three musical worlds: the Mediterranean, the Arabian peninsula and the Syrian plateau. As a religious and cultural centre, Jerusalem has played a highly significant role in Palestinian history for many reasons. The co-existence of three monotheistic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, developed a cosmopolitan spirit that has left its mark on local musical practices.
Many special features distinguish Palestinian music: the intonation of local dialects, certain idioms and customs, and specific aspects of many religious festivals. Examples are the Muslim children’s songs (hawwāya or maddāha) sung during the month of Ramadan as they go from door to door begging for sweets or coins, and the Christian dance-song for the feast of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary (15 August), performed by men in a semicircle in front of the basilica of Nazareth.
Pilgrims and missionaries to Jerusalem provide the earliest information about religious and secular musical activities in Palestine. A travel account by the 5th-century Spanish nun Egeria, Itinerium Egeriae, describes Christian psalmody and chant as observed in Jerusalem. Egeria especially noted the division of the choir into two groups (antiphons). This division, still found in certain Eastern (Orthodox) churches, has passed into local Islamic usage. In Jerusalem the recitation of the mawlid (ritual celebrating the Prophet Muhammad’s birth) contains verses sung antiphonally; this is unusual in Muslim culture, where mawlid style is usually responsorial.
Early texts provide pronouncements on the practice of music by principal religious figures. In his Panarion, Epiphanius, the 4th-century bishop of Gaza, compares the aulos (reed-pipe) to a serpent demon. A Muslim legist, Ibn Qaysarānī (b Jerusalem, 1058), wrote the Kitāb al-samā‘ (‘Book on listening [to music]’) on the admissibility of music. Ibn Ghānim al-Maqdisī (1514–95/6) violently condemned any leanings towards music in his Masāyid al-Shaytān wa dhamm al-hawā (‘On the Traps of Satan and the Censure of Passion’), written in Jerusalem.
The various Christian communities and their liturgies were important in the musical life of Jerusalem. These included the Armenian, Coptic, Ethiopian and Roman Catholic (‘latīn’) liturgies performed in their various languages. Franciscan and Dominican monks trained local musicians to provide music for the religious services, and the musical techniques of the West were most readily adopted by the Arab Christians practising the Latin rite (see §3(ii) below). Christians of the Greek Orthodox Church, on the other hand, have probably best preserved the customs connected with local history.
In terms of Palestinian selfconsciousness, 1917, the end of Ottoman rule, was a less significant date than 1948. The creation of the state of Israel caused many Palestinians to leave their native land, taking refuge in neighbouring countries, especially Jordan. The resulting war and exodus slowly forged a new concept of cultural and musical thought, and from that time onwards a national feeling developed, especially after the wars of 1967 and 1973 between Israel and the neighbouring states of Egypt, Syria and Jordan – this despite the fact that Palestinians are called Arab by Israeli authorities and their music considered Arab music rather than Palestinian music.
Radio Jerusalem was inaugurated in March 1936, with its importance for local music broadcasting.
The music of rural areas is well preserved and firmly established. It is basically the music of song and dance, mainly in the bayyātī mode, corresponding to the great repertory of sung verse found all along the eastern seaboard of the Mediterranean. It is chiefly performed at festivals or marriages, even giving rise to certain particular zaffa (wedding procession) types. Among the most common genres of poetry is the melismatic ‘atābā, freely improvised in stanzas of four or eight lines with a metrical syllabic refrain and known as mījānā (in certain localities pronounced mayjānā). The traditional qasīda known as the shurūqiyyāt is a long monorhymed poem. The hidā, an open-air responsorial song, is always accompanied by the sahjih dance. A genre little performed elsewhere, the far‘āwī, is an improvisation on one or two lines of verse sung alternately by two singers, often during processions.
Dances usually accompany these poetic genres, the best known being the dabka or chain dance, either for men only or for men and women. It is widespread throughout the Middle East and has been adopted into Israeli folklore under the name of dabkot. The dahhiyya, a dance for men advancing towards a woman soloist brandishing a sword, is performed by the Bedouin tribes of the Negev. Within rural music, wind instruments predominate: the mijwiz, a single-reed clarinet with double pipes and six holes; the arghūl (locally pronounced yarghūl), a single-reed clarinet with double pipes of unequal length; the shabbāba (locally pronounced shibbābeh), a reed flute with six holes. Accompaniment is provided by a pottery drum or the darbukka metal goblet drum (locally pronounced dirbakka). The recitation of Bedouin poetry is accompanied by the one-string rabāba fiddle. The long-necked buzuq lute with two double strings, brought into the area by the Gypsies of Jordan, is less frequently found. Although there is evidence that the tanbūra lyre was played at the beginning of the 20th century, it has now disappeared from Palestinian tradition. (See also Bedouin music.)
In his The Land and the Book, the American missionary William Thompson provided an account of Palestinian urban music in the last quarter of the 19th century. Music was played in cafés, sung to the accompaniment of the qānūn (plucked zither), kamanja (violin), ‘ūd (short-necked lute), duff (frame drum) and nay (rim-blown flute). This classic set of instruments making up the takht chamber ensemble is the basis of Middle Eastern art music and to a lesser extent of Palestinian music today. Elsewhere in the Arab world the takht ensemble tended towards disuse during the 20th century, superseded by the larger firqa orchestra in which violins predominate. (See Arab music, §I, 6(iii).)
The art music practised in Palestinian areas is part of the general Middle Eastern tradition. For a number of reasons, it has not followed the modernization process prevalent in the rest of the Arab world to the same degree but reflects a more traditional spirit. A kind of musical suite performed in Nazareth, an important Palestinian city within the state of Israel, and also found in Aleppo (see Syria, §3), consists of a string of melismatic mawwāl improvisations linked to metrical song in the local dialect. It is part of the local tradition known as nasrāwiyyāt (‘of Nazareth’).
Distinguished Palestinian instrumentalists are the ‘ūd players Simon Shaheen (b Tarshiha, Galilee, 1955), who emigrated to the United States, and ‘Ādil Salāmā (b Nablus, 1966), who emigrated to Great Britain and represents the Baghdad school (see Iraq, §II, 5). Salim Sahab is also an important musician and conductor. Another important Palestinian musician who emigrated is Nabil Azzam, who left for America in 1982. The arrival in 1948 of Arabic-speaking Jews expelled from Iraq transplanted the Iraqi maqām style to Tel Aviv (see Israel, §III, 2).
Most contemporary Palestinian composers in Western-style music had their first musical education in the Catholic Church of the Holy Land. Their writing is often tinged with academicism, with a predominantly Italian influence. Salvator Arnita (b Jerusalem, 1916) won a competition in Lebanon with his Allegretto pastorale per oboe e archi (1965). Augustin Lama was organist of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem and director of the Schola Cantorum of the Holy Land from about 1940.
Yūsuf Khashū (1927–96) is particularly notable. He was Lama’s pupil and succeeded him as organist in Jerusalem in 1942, but he was forced to go into exile in 1948, finally settling in Jordan. He composed a large body of music in 19th-century style, and his fourth symphony for large orchestra, the Jerusalem Symphony, was composed after the 1967 war. Habīb Hasan Tūma (1934–98) composed contemporary music and in later years turned to ethnomusicology. He settled in Germany in 1963.
The National Conservatory of Music at Birzeit University in Ramallah is an important symbol of Palestinian nationalist pride and cultural endeavour. It was founded in 1995 and includes a department of Arab art music. Inside Israel there are instances of Jews and Arabs coming together musically, as in the mixed Bustan group (see Israel, §III, 2).
The ensemble al-Funūn al-Sha‘biyya al-Filastịniyya (Palestinian Popular Arts) was founded at el-Bireh in 1979 with a view to staging musical events tracing local life or history in operetta style as practised in Lebanon. The group produced original compositions such as Marj ibn Amīr (1989), a historical chronicle of a Palestinian village under British occupation.
The prolific group Al-Āshiqīn emerged in the late 1970s and achieved fame all over the Arab world with their politically based work. Another popular group, A‘rās, was founded in Damascus in 1977 and is currently based in France. The creation of the Sabreen ensemble in Jerusalem around 1980 provided Palestinians with a group on the international model. Sabreen performs modern poetry by Palestinian authors, but without heavily emphasizing the theme of armed struggle. The ensemble aims for musical fusion on both the instrumental plane (where guitar, double bass and Western percussion combine with the ‘ūd and long-necked buzuq lute) and on the rhythmic plane, which borrows from reggae and other styles. Their singer, Kamīlya Jubrān, has artistic roots in Arab art music and accompanies herself on the buzuq. The result is something entirely new in the Arab world.
Palestinians who left home have worked in the field of popular music in their countries of adoption. Yūsuf Batrūnī worked in Damascus from 1950 on the transcription into Western notation of fashionable songs, which were published in Syria. Sabrī Sharīf (b Haifa, 1922) was director of Radio Sharq al-Adnā, founded around 1952 in Beirut, and then artistic director to the prolific Lebanese composers, brothers ‘Āsī and Mansūr Rahbānī; ‘Āsī Rahbānī's wife, the internationally famous singer Fayrūz, has also championed the Palestinian cause. The singer Rīīm Yūsuf Kilānī (b Manchester, 1963) has parental roots in Nazareth and Jenin; her repertory is based on direct contact with traditional singers both in Nazareth and in the refugee camps of Lebanon.
Political impetus in recent Palestinian music falls into three key stages. After the 1967 war, the spirit of resistance and struggle became a theme in a vocal genre labelled ughniyya siyāsiyya (political song), a term retained in the Arab world at large. This ideological stage did not remain static. Its development was accelerated by concern with studying local Palestinian traditions and a move towards collecting the entire corpus of sung music. Here the original words were sometimes replaced by other more revolutionary texts calling on audiences to join in the struggle.
The 1975 Lebanese war marked a second phase of political development in music. Non-Palestinian musicians supporting the cause of armed struggle became involved in the strongly ideological movement. They were well served by the fine work of the Palestinian poet Mahmūd Darwīsh, most of whose poems have been set to music over the last decades. Works by Lebanese composers include Marcel Khalifé’s Ahmad al-‘Arabī (c1985) and Ziyād Rahbānī’s Ahmad al-Za‘tar (c1980). Moroccan compositions are Ahmad Essayad’s Identité (1977), a dodecaphonic work for chamber ensemble, and Nāss al-Ghiwān’s Sabra wa Chatila, describing the massacres perpetrated on the inhabitants of the Palestinian camps at the gates of Beirut in 1982. For many people, the celebration of Palestine in song became a symbol of emancipation and commitment, reflecting a modernist state of mind, especially as the movement clearly went beyond the purely Palestinian context, extending to the Arab world and affecting Arab intellectuals.
The third phase evolved after 1985. Some people turned away from politically motivated efforts to represent the struggle in music, concentrating instead on songs about the land and its fertility, romance and dreams. At the time of writing, this trend is represented by the popular groups Sabreen and A‘rās. (See also Arab music, §III).
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Min Sijn ‘Akka [From Acre Prison], perf. al-‘Ashiqīn (1975)
Nawsrawiyyāt, perf. Y. Matar, Khill LP DIK 12180 (1988)
Marj ibn Amir [Pastures of Amir], perf. F. al-Funūn al-Sha‘abiyya al-Falastiniyya, Palestinian Popular Arts (1989)
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Aghānīna al-nasrawiyya [Our songs from Nazareth], perf. B. Sakhnini and others (1995) [incl. notes]
Al Quds fil-bal [Jerusalem in my heart], perf. Fairuz, Voix de l'Orient VDL CD 510 (1997)
Traditional Music and Song from Palestine, coll. F. al-Funūn al-Sha‘abiyya al-Falastiniyya, Palestinian Popular Arts (1997) [incl. notes]