Palestinian Arab Music: A Maqâm Tradition in Practice, by Dalia Cohen and Ruth Katz, is an ambitious study of 600 performances by Arab Israeli singers who were recorded in the 1960s specifically for this project.[1] The book is of value for its comprehensive and exacting measurements, calculations, and categorizations of what, to this reviewer’s ears and eyes, is a wonderful collection of some of the major genres of Palestinian sung poetry. While the book demonstrates the “precision ethnomusicology” of two of the field’s productive scholars, both of them women and professors emeriti from Hebrew University, its publication in 2006, without proper contextualization by either the authors or the editors, seems anachronistic.
As the authors point out, the singers are bearers of a tradition that is hundreds of years old; many believe, somewhat romantically, that these musical and poetic styles, or styles very similar to these, date to biblical times. Their useful literature-review points to the work of numerous scholars, Arabs, Israelis, and Europeans, who have been keen to document a dynamic living tradition that may well have roots in antiquity.[2] As the authors mention more than once, this repertoire may be a continuation of “the Song of Songs,” and their efforts to measure melodic, formal, and textural parameters in order to rediscover the relics of the land of the Bible resonates with the positivist and comparative work of musicologists and scholars of literature interested in other ancient and medieval poetic traditions.
For readers unfamiliar with Arab folk music of the Eastern Mediterranean Arab Near East, also known as the Levant or the area once comprised by Greater Syria, this collection and its analysis may seem obscure and archaic. For listeners or scholars who have some familiarity with Arab folk music or a connection to Syrian, Lebanese, Palestinian, and Jordanian cultural events, however, this collection is a treasure trove. Indeed, the sung folk poetry of the region is an old tradition but it is also one that is ongoing and that has become urbanized, gaining new meanings in a variety of contexts and for a variety of populations. The genres collected, measured, and analyzed by Cohen and Katz, namely, ‘ataba and mijana, shruqi, zajal, mu‘anna, haddadi, dabke, and mhorabe, are still popular musical fare at wedding celebrations, most notably in the large and diverse Palestinian Diaspora where they can be sonic markers of specific ethnic identities. Sung folk poetry has conveyed national identities among Eastern Mediterranean populations since at least the early 1960s when the urbanized folkloric music of Lebanese singer Fayrouz and her creative team featured not only these authentic genres but also newly composed pieces that were informed significantly by these very styles. In the contemporary moment, the Palestinian music and dance troupe Al-Funoun re-works this repertoire as art music for performance in the homeland and Diaspora. Finally, the music that was frozen in time for this study with the help of tape recorder and melograph has, during the forty years that it has been scientifically scrutinized, also been the music of social and political commentary and indeed resistance for generations of Palestinians who continue to live under Israeli occupation.[3]
One of the most valuable aspects of this work is the collection itself, a sample of which is included on the accompanying CD. In an age where prohibitive publications costs are pushing expensive media packages aside or moving them onto the web, we must congratulate the University of Chicago for publishing the CD. Performers and aficionados of this music will be keen to listen to the twenty-eight performances (selected from the original 600 analyzed) and to pour over the documentary material for each recording, which includes song texts in Arabic, in transliteration, and in translation, along with detailed musical transcriptions. Each recording sounds as though it was “collected” outside of any traditional context. We hear, primarily, solo singers, unaccompanied by instruments and with no commentary and no ambient noise. Furthermore, each performance only includes a few verses, either because that is all the singer was asked to perform or because the performances were edited. Were this repertoire heard in the context of a wedding or one of its many sub-rituals, or at another festive event, performances would likely last much longer than the duration of the average recording on the compact disc, as singers would have kept dancers dancing and tailored their performances to the audience and context. While only the ‘ataba and mijana are linked in this study, in live performance, separate poetic genres are often enchained resulting in long dynamic suites that build in intensity.
The book is also of value to students and scholars of the humanities and social sciences for its reflection of an earlier period of intellectual history. The authors’ framework of logical positivism is ensured by their methodology of quantitative research and scientific analysis. The precise measurements made by Dalia Cohen and Ruth Katz were aided by the melograph, a version of which they invented in 1957 at Hebrew University, contemporaneous with the melograph at UCLA and the work of Charles Seeger, one of the ethnomusicology luminaries to whom the volume is dedicated (John Blacking is the other). The graphs created by the melograph enabled scholars to indulge even more deeply in the tone-to-tone analysis that was characteristic at that time, inadvertently inviting an even larger chasm between the researcher and her subject. Time-consuming tabulation by the research team of the data collected in three survey questionnaires—the first, with fifty-seven questions, focuses on the “informants and their attitude toward the material studied”; the second, with thirty questions, focuses on “the text”; and the third, with 128 questions, focuses on “musical parameters”—reminds younger researchers with a reflexive stance involved in cultural interactions how many different approaches there are to musical description. Fascinating are the many ways these songs are measured: intervals are counted and their frequency compared; density, duration, and scatter of individual pitches are measured and graphed; and even melisma is weighed and charted. One of their hypotheses, that informants with more education, those who are more musically “aware,” will produce performances that are more complex in terms of the density of melisma and the frequency of larger intervals, is tested but yields only tenuous results. The complexity of a singer’s rendition of a song corresponds only slightly to education level. On the other hand, researcher assumptions regarding intonation, as expressed in the chapter “Pitch and the Maqâmât,” are proven by test results revealing that singers with the least exposure to musical education and “awareness,” the “musically ignorant,” produce intervals with the largest deviation from the norms of Western music. Given the motivations and methodologies of this project it is difficult to assess whether or not the researchers’ questions coerced the data or whether the data actually suggested answers to questions like these.
Although these ethnomusicologists worked with human subjects, their informants are invisible, objectified, and not considered to be sources of knowledge. Rather, Palestinian Arabs produced data that was then subject to the scientific methods of the laboratory and its technicians. While fascinating from an historical perspective, the work, if it is taken as a representative example of the field in 2006 (the year when it was published), is dangerously misleading. It is curious that the authors themselves or the editors at the press did not include an introduction placing this work in its historical context. The book is a startling reflection of the kinds of inequalities that were rampant between these researchers and their informants, particularly the assumption that ethnomusicology was always an exercise of “studying down.” The work is completely bereft of the ethnographic description, participant observation, and collaborative work that characterize ethnomusicology and its related disciplines, folklore and anthropology, today.[4]
The authors alert us to the radical changes experienced by Palestinians at the time of their research: “The 1960s were watershed years in Israeli Arab society. The establishment of Israel transformed the cultural and socioeconomic conditions under which this group lived. When the State of Israel was declared in 1948, the villages lost a considerable part of their land to confiscation and expropriation” (13). The authors mention the destabilization of an agrarian way of life, seclusion from the rest of the Arab world due to Israel’s closed borders, and the continuous erosion of extended family networks, along with the waning of patriarchal leadership, as symptoms suffered by their subjects. The authors make no mention of the intensification of these conditions over the past half-century, of their implications in the global arena, or that these very conditions are exacerbated by inequalities inherent in studies like this one. This stance, perhaps acceptable in the 1960s, is an anomaly in contemporary scholarship on Middle Eastern music and culture, and it makes the work’s dismissal of the singers themselves and any agency they might have with regard to their own music and their own traditions, sting all the more.
NOTES
[1] Arab Israelis are Palestinians, both Muslim and Christian, who ended up living in Israel rather than in Gaza or the West Bank following the establishment of Israel in 1948.
[2] While the bibliography includes works that were published up to the 1990s, it is curious that none of the many publications by Dirgham Sbait, a specialist on this topic, are mentioned.
[3] For information on this music as performed in the Arab Diaspora see works by Anne K. Rasmussen. Information on Lebanese singer Fayrouz is widely accessible. For information on El Funoun see http://www.el-funoun.org/. On Palestinian music and social protest see David A. McDonald (2009), “Poetics and the Performance of Violence in Israel/Palestine,” Ethnomusicology 53/1: 58-85.
[4] While the authors acknowledge that “performers themselves, as categorized by extra musical factors [i.e. age, education], necessarily provide an important point of departure for the discussion of the musical material” (23), their seemingly complete dismissal of the singers as a source of authority on their own performances is startling. See their discussion of the (non-scholarly) work by Saud al-Asadi, a Palestinian poet, singer, and author and its surprising correspondence to their findings (17).
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[Review length: 1673 words • Review posted on January 22, 2011]