Ethnomusicology

A Contemporary Reader

Jennifer C. Post

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136089626
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Ethnomusicology

Ethnomusicology: A Contemporary Reader is designed to supplement a textbook for an introductory course in ethnomusicology. It offers a cross section of the best new writing in the field from the last 15-20 years. Many instructors supplement textbook readings and listening assignments with scholarly articles that provide more in-depth information on geographic regions and topics and introduce issues that can facilitate class or small group discussion. These sources serve other purposes as well: they exemplify research technique and format and serve as models for the use of academic language, and collectively they can also illustrate the range of ethnographic method and analytical style in the discipline of ethnomusicology. Ethnomusicology: A Contemporary Reader serves as a basic introduction to the best writing in the field for students, professors, and music professionals. It is perfect for both introductory and upper level courses in world music.

Part I
Commodification and Consumption

1

Sultans of Spin

Syrian Sacred Music on the World Stage

Jonathan H. Shannon

Understanding the transformations of culture in an age of transnational connections (what in the past decade has been both celebrated and maligned as “globalization”) has been at the forefront of critical anthropological scholarship for over a decade (Featherstone 1990, 2002). Transnational musical genres, often collected under the category of world music and world beat, provide the soundtrack to these processes and transformations—from Franco-Maghrebi raï, sonically marking and challenging the contradictions of postcolonial North African diasporas in France (Gross et al. 1996; cf. Schade-Poulson 1999), to “Pygmy Pop,” bridging the rain forests of New Guinea and the transnational flows of pop music and culture (Feld 1996a), among myriad other examples. Choose pretty much any area of the world, and no doubt artists from there will be performing their “world music” somewhere in the global ecumene. In the seemingly unending quest for new sounds for new times, widely disparate styles and genres of music are increasingly caught up in transnational processes of commodification, distribution, and consumption by much wider audiences than those of their “authentic” homes. What is an “authentic homeland” for genres and styles that increasingly are produced not only in the transnational circuits of migrants and performers, but for these circuits? What constitutes “style” in a globalizing aesthetic discourse? How are categorical distinctions produced and marked in the emerging world music market, and how are these distinctions appropriated, reconfigured, and challenged by artists in performance?

These important questions, among others, beg ethnographic investigation. Yet, to date, musical analysis of globalization and the global analysis of music have remained in the quiet margins of anthropological literature despite recent writings by anthropologists and ethnomusicologists that have encouraged a largely tone-deaf anthropology to listen to how global cultural flows are sonically charged and mediated (Erlmann 1999; Feld 1995, 1996b, 2001; Guilbault 1993a). If we are to understand what Veit Erlmann terms “the global imagination” characteristic of cultural production in an era of globalization, we need an ethnography that seeks “why and in what way peoples measures of the real, the truthful, and the authentic change and through which discursive and expressive genres and by which technological means they create a sense of certainty about the world in which they live” (Erlmann 1999, 3–4). This article is an ethnographic exploration of the ways the authentic and the real are mediated and constituted in the global imagination through musical performance. Rather than promoting certainty about the world, this example reveals the sites of performance and consumption of world music to be “heterotopic” (Foucault 1986), that is, fraught with disjunctures between the competing authenticities and realities promoted and consumed by artists, audiences, and culture brokers operating within the shadows of the transnational music industry.

I analyze the performance by Syrian ensembles of the musical and kinesthetic elements of the mawlawiyya (or “Whirling Dervish”) dhikr, which draws its spiritual heritage from the teachings and practices of Jalal al-Din Rumi.¹ In Syria, especially in Aleppo, a number of contemporary ensembles perform material adapted from the mawlawiyya dhikr, including its songs and particular dances. The mawlawiyya rite is not commonly practiced in Syrian mosques today and few Syrians listen to this variety of music, either at home or in mosques. However, elements of the mawlawiyya spiritual-musical tradition can today be found performed on stages and in restaurants in Syria, across the Arab world, and now abroad on international stages where it is presented for global consumption as world music. The performance of this variety of music in transnational circuits helps to legitimate the idea of a category of “sacred music” while simultaneously producing the idea of an authentic “local” musical culture. Following Timothy Mitchell's exploration of representational practices that underlie—and undermine—modern subjectivities (Mitchell 1991, 2000), I use the concept of the “world stage” to examine how musical performance practices that are represented as authentic local spiritual traditions obtain their authenticity and locality through their enactment and staging in global performance contexts. The performance of “sacred” music on the world stage requires a conceptual differentiation of “sacred” from “nonsacred” musical genres, and their promotion as distinct “styles” of world music.

If musical aesthetics is based on the naturalized or iconic associations of stylistic patterns, as Steven Feld (1994a) has argued, then the aesthetics of world music styles such as sacred and Sufi must be sought in how such styles are constructed and naturalized in representational practices and processes of commodification and consumption in global political and cultural economies. I analyze how style emerges as a naturalized category in world music discourses, and how artists, agents, concert promoters, and journalists construct such styles as “sacred” and “Sufi” within the wider relations of power and associated representational practices of the world music industry. The result of these processes of differentiation and commodification is the reconfiguration of concepts of both local and global identities, as well as new understandings of style.

Syrian Sacred Music—Al-Kindi in New York City

It was a cool March evening in New York as I stepped out of the subway on my way to the recital hall. I had received a call a few weeks earlier from my Syrian oud (lute) teacher—the master performer and teacher Muhammad Qadri Dalal—notifying me that he and the group with whom he tours, the Ensemble al-Kindi, would be performing in New York. The Ensemble al-Kindi (see Figure 1.1), led by the Swiss-born qânûn (lap zither) player Julien “Jalaleddine” Weiss, who resides part of the year in his home in Aleppo, is among Syria's most well-known orchestras today. Aleppo is famous in the Arab East for its long tradition of tarab music,² but it is also known as the second city, after the Turkish city of Konya, for the practice of the mawlawiyya or mevlevi Sufi rite, named (like Weiss) after Mawlana Jalal al-Din Rumi. This was to be, however, their first concert in New York.

As the performance hour approached, the trickle of aficionados in the hall became a swarm of people lining up outside the doors for a rare chance to hear the Damascene munshid Sheikh Hamza Shakkur perform “Sufi songs” with the accompaniment of the “Whirling Dervishes” (darâwîsh) from the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus. The audience included U.S. and Arab fans of Arab and world music, music critics, and their friends. By 8:00 p.m. the hall was packed—some six hundred and fifty souls gathered for an evening of instrumental and vocal pieces that the program said derived from Syria's mawlawiyya repertoires. The lights dimmed and a representative of the World Music

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Figure 1.1 Ensemble al-Kindi, New York. March 12, 2001. Photo: Jonathan H. Shannon.

Institute, the evening's primary sponsor, took the stage and introduced the ensemble. In addition to welcoming us, the representative noted that the show would not have any intermissions but would rather consist of a series of interrelated suites of songs from Syria's “Sufi music” repertoire. Finally, this individual added, “Because this is sacred Music, you should refrain from applauding during the performance.” The implication was that this music—sacred music—demanded a different kind of reception from what usually happens in the performance of tarab-style Arab music—that is, the shouts, sighs, gestures, and applause that constitute the conventional responses of the tarab culture and which index both the quality of the performance and the emotional states of the performers and the audiences (Danielson 1997; Racy 1991,2003; Shannon 2003a).

I found this remark strange because in my experience Aleppine performers and audiences do not usually distinguish between sacred and nonsacred performance genres in this manner, even in the context of the mosque or Sufi lodge (zâwiya), in which audience participation is pretty much mandatory and one finds similar responses to what happens in tarab performances. Furthermore, much of the repertoire, both vocal and instrumental, is shared between sacred and nonsacred domains, undermining any strict distinction between sacred and profane repertoires. At any rate, the performance began with this admonition and after perfunctory introductory applause we settled in for an evening of sacred music.

Unfortunately for the speaker, a number of audience members arrived late and missed the introductory admonition to silence. Because a high percentage of the latecomers were Arabs or Arab-music enthusiasts, and because the music was very engaging, as a consequence they reacted to the performance as any good and skilled Arab listener would: with shouts of Allâh, aywa!, yâ salâm!, and yâ ‘anî! as well as applause after moving vocal phrases and skillful improvisations.³ In response, some of the more punctual audience members responded with shushes and arched eyebrows: I heard some people behind me whispering to a latecomer to “Be quiet! This is Sufi music—You're not supposed to clap.” I was reminded of Syrian connoisseurs of European music who would shush their uninitiated friends when they applauded between the movements of a symphony at concerts in Syria (of course the same thing happens in the United States). I too felt restrained, wanting to react to the playing but wondering if perhaps Sheikh Hamza or Julien Weiss had told the concert organizers that applause was not appropriate in the “Sufi” context, and that they were only passing on the artists’ preferences in trying to restrict the audience's responses. And so went the concert: What to my ears were beautiful performances by the artists, met with hesitant reactions from a mostly silent audience.

After the show, I went back stage to congratulate the artists on a good concert. I especially praised the nây (reed flute) player, who had played several moving taqâsîm, or improvisations. After exchanging pleasantries he asked me if the sound quality had been poor or his playing off, since no one reacted to his solos, which I had interpreted as highly skilled. I assured him that his playing had been great. For his part, Dalai, accustomed to critical acclaim wherever he performs, was unimpressed by the silent New York audience. His response to my congratulations was a laconic “mâshî al-hâl—Whatever. It's over and done with.” Finally Weiss asked me, “What was the matter with the audience? Why were they so quiet? Didn't they like [the performance]?” I told him that we had been told not to applaud or shout during the concert because it was “sacred music.” He and the others to whom I mentioned this fact were surprised; they had given no such indication to the organizers, and for the most part were disappointed that they got what seemed to them to be halfhearted responses: hesitant applause, an isolated yâ salâm!—but not the usual effusive responses they were accustomed to getting in the Arab world, Europe, and elsewhere.⁴

Diverging and Converging Representations of the Sacred and the Local

The admonition “Do not applaud: This is sacred music” can be interpreted as the singular vision of the individual who pronounced it. The remarks about not applauding might ostensibly have referred to an indigenous distinction between sacred and nonsacred genres and what, borrowing from linguists, might be called the “co-occurrence” rules for musical performances: that is, what forms of audience coparticipation are deemed appropriate for specific musical performance contexts (see Ervin-Tripp 1973; Stross 1976). The insights of sociolinguistic research shed light on the ways in which, in musical performance, the audience is a key coperformer (see Duranti 1986; Duranti and Brenneis 1986). In musical performances, audiences and performers (often the same individuals; see Schutz 1977) negotiate the meaning of performance by making what Feld has termed “interpretive moves” (1994b, 85–89) that locate performances in time and place and associate them with generic and stylistic conventions. Among these latter conventions are appropriate co-occurrence or coperformance rules. Can audience members applaud during the course of performance, or must they remain quiet? Is dancing an appropriate mode of coperformance, or is stillness? When we speak of a genre or style of music (classical, jazz, world music), we invoke these types of associations. In the performance of the Turkish mevlevi rituals, for example, audience interaction in the form of applause and vocalizations is deemed to be inappropriate, and the World Music Institute representative probably had Turkish mevlevi co-occurrence rules in mind when introducing the Ensemble al-Kindi, which was performing a related music. Moreover, this individual, accustomed to presenting a wide variety of often very unfamiliar musical cultures to U.S. audiences, advanced a reading of the event as sacred through the warning not to applaud during the performance; invoking a principle of nonparticipation was akin to invoking a genre or style of sacred music. Indeed, for most educated Western audiences, however appreciative of Middle Eastern musical genres, a default coperformance rule might just well be what in the context of European classical music is often a principle of nonparticipation out of respect for the performers and other audience members, as opposed to a rule of respectful applause and shouting associated with the Arab tarab culture that many Arab audience members and others familiar with the tarab culture observed (albeit hesitantly, given the admonition) during the New York City performance.⁵ Hence the admonition to silence may have been the result of a confusion between Turkish and Syrian coperformance rules, and an unspoken and implicit principle of nonparticipation by a respectful if uninitiated New York audience.

In my research in Syria and in my conversations with the artists after concerts in the United States and abroad, I noted that Syrian musicians generally do not distinguish between sacred and nonsacred categories in this fashion. In practice, the sacred-profane distinction tends to refer more to different venues than to different repertoires. Of course there are well-known forms of Islamic chant (inshâd) performed in Syria that are distinct from songs performed in nonritual contexts by their association with prayer, other forms of ritual, and by their lyrics, which refer to Allah, Muhammad, and the prophets.⁶ Yet the lyrics of the “sacred” songs often have both spiritual and profane connotations, as is well known in Sufi poetry and song texts in praise of wine and the beloved...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I Commodification and Consumption
• Part II Cultural Tourism and Travel
• Part III Gender and Sexuality
• Part IV Globalization and Glocalization
• Part V Media, Technology, and Technoculture
• Part VI Nationalism and Transnationalism
• Part VII Place and Embodiment
• Part VIII Racial and Ethnic Identities
• Part IX Social and Political Action
• Glossary
• Research Resources
• Index