Music in Arabia is a well put together book, offering an intergenerational, multivocal arrangement of short essays that put up many signposts for future research. The introductions to each chapter function as mawwal openings; more than summaries of what is to come, they point out thematic interconnections. This connective tissue reestablishes the maqam, if you will, and creates a useful cross-referencing that allows the reader to move forward while always hearing other voices in the ear. As an outsider to both the Gulf and the study of the music in the region, I found this format to be invaluable.
It is, in fact, this combination of multivocality and interconnection that creates a synergistic whole and sets this anthology apart. From music and identity, whether it be gender, race, generation, nation, sacred practice, or occupation, the seventeen chapters (and here I include the insightful and incisive introduction, afterword, and openings to each chapter) as well as the glossary and online resource at Indiana University, resonate with the kind of call and response and heterogeneity that remain true to the complexities of communities across tradition and transformation. From conch shells and goat skins to YouTube and WhatsApp, this book takes us on a journey where we meet the traditions, the practitioners, the documentarians, the promoters, and the censors of music in Arabia, all against the—if not the melting pot, then the melding pot—backdrop of nation-building in the region. By resisting monolithic, overarching rubrics of conformation and univocality and by juxtaposing local, transregional, and global contributors who are scholars, practitioners, organizers, and producers, the editors subvert the usual anthologized hierarchy. These refreshing proximities reflect what awaits the reader upon entering into music (not the music) in (not of or from) Arabia.
Within its pages, you will encounter ancient communities and their music practices as they get recast within emerging nation states. The place names vary—Arabian Peninsula, Persian Gulf, Arabian Gulf, Arabia—and dueling terminologies are a throughline. Here, the global and the local have been interwoven with ongoing tensions about indigeneity, otherness, asymmetries of class and gender, and a reckoning with regional histories of enslavement of African communities and their music. Throughout the anthology one can detect the challenges of cultural and religious conservatism and attendant codes of privacy, gender, and class as well as the counterpulls of showcasing newly formed “unique” state and shared regional identities. The question of indigeneity and music from “outside” is a recurring theme in the book that is especially problematized in terms of African Arabian music and a reckoning with histories of Arabian enslavers of African communities and post-enslavement asymmetries. Clearly African-rooted music has been appropriated into the region’s national projects, but it is an uneasy fit, and one theme that emerges throughout the book is the state’s official resistance to foregrounding distinctions from national identity.
Importantly, Music in Arabia also raises questions about how heritage gets deployed, appropriated, and foregrounded by leaders in their quest to forge, sustain, and claim national identities while simultaneously working to achieve UNESCO status as safeguarders of cultures that coexisted on the land before the recently drawn state borders. Valuable insights abound on how communities and statecrafters “mix” historic music traditions, which invariably misbehave in terms of national and genre boundaries, into discrete soundtracks for newly emerging nation states. Related questions pertain to the loss of music and dance archives in the region through the devastations of war, colonialism, and conservatism, and to the disciplinary debates about whether music traditions are “lost” or transformed. Or put another way, questions are raised as to whether one can relinquish the impossible task of freezing the past into the present in favor of documenting music traditions that are always in motion. In this case, the use of the term perpetuation, rather than preservation, and the discussion of heritage and inheritance are useful.
The dramatic changes in the role of music heritage among Bedouin, pearl divers, and other local music traditions that came with the discovery of oil is another theme. For example, as petroleum replaced pearls, pearl diver songs transformed from labor songs supporting a “spiritual harmonizing” with the labor, which brought to life the sounds and images of men at work raising sails, to heritage songs, thus illustrating the tensions between music's communal functions and its service to the national project. As the authors illustrate, this privileging of what was considered indigenous musical heritage came at the cost of marginalizing and appropriating Persian, Indian, and African traditions in the region. Paradoxically, some indigenous arts are, at the same time, contested zones that are “endangered” by religious conservatism. In a region that is one of civilization’s many crossroads, the book’s deep dive into the contested zones of heritage and the processes under which heritage is institutionally preserved, transformed, and deployed is instructive.
Another heritage-related theme that emerges in the book is the problem of documentation in conservative cultures. Issues with foregrounding cultural differences while attempting to forge national identity extend to prohibitions concerning women’s performance and presence in public spaces. The role of gender in determining the canon of recorded music and in determining the boundaries of public and private display are discussed, and valuable data on women’s performances, recordings, and even YouTube channels are presented. Discussion of the perils of technologies is another throughline—wax cylinders transferred to DAT and then transferred to CD and now to the cloud. Is it safe? Reliable? Enduring? This flows into another theme in the book—that of the creation of newly formed archives of music and dance throughout the region, and the steps global entities such as UNESCO are taking to preserve traditions.
This anthology breaks new ground in content and form, and the music traditions discussed coexist and co-resist reformatting or the compression needed to fit neatly together. It is an important contribution.
--------
[Review length: 964 words • Review posted on May 6, 2022]