MofA Week 1

Welcome to Area Studies in Ethnomusicology: The Arab World

In this class, we'll focus on Music of the Arab World

Alaa Wardi's Evolution of Arab music

Course approaches

• Possible approaches in any course - and corresponding questions...
  • Propositional/interpretive: under what conditions is a statement, X, true? "facts" about the world and its meaning (inductive, scientific/humanistic knowledge, inquiry within a frame)
  • Critical/problematizing: what does X really mean, what is its history, what are the tacit political or economic forces behind its constitution and study? Acknowledging that knowledge is power. (behind every "absolute" "concept" or "fact" is a silent history of power relations...) (interrogating the "neutral" frame)
  • Procedural/experiential: how to do X? (embodied knowledge)
  • Transformative/applied: using X to change the world?... (praxis....social action)
• For example, X = "Music of the Arab world uses microtones"
  • When and where are microtones used? See http://maqamworld.com
  • Why do we call them "microtones" and why study them? What is the Arab world and what power relations does this concept reflect?
  • How to sing them?
  • How can they be used for positive social change - e.g. to induce cultural continuity, or evoke memory?
• Course approach: another way to put it - we will combine understanding and doing
  • Understanding: discursively, experientially, critically...
    • discursive, linguistic, descriptive, propositional, declarative knowledge (cognizing)
    • Non-discursive, pre-linguistic, experiential, bodily, musical knowledge (feeling)
  • Doing: procedural (implicit) knowledge, building on experience
    • Performing (improvising)
    • Creating, composing (editing)
    • Critiquing categories of thought
    • Community Service Learning (CSL): "doing" - students in action, relevant academia, collaborative applied or PAR research, progressive volunteer pedagogy/research towards the broader social good through giving and learning, community commitment and advocacy, engaged knowledge, global citizenship. Entails "commitments to learning, discovery, and citizenship, and to connecting communities..." (View Dean Cormack's speech)

Introductions and preliminaries

• Who are WE - the course members? INTRODUCTIONS all around... Academic interests? Musical skills, living/working/travel experiences? What brings you here? (Please write up a paragraph also on eClass.)
• Some important procedural items...
  • We meet Tuesdays and Thursdays, 2 - 3:20 pm. (You may also like to attend MENAME on Thursday evenings, 6:30 - 9:30. See http://bit.ly/mename )
  • Please do come to class on time, prepared - having completed assignments as much as possible.
  • Please participate actively in discussions
  • Please do not use any electronic devices during the class except to support your participation in the class
  • There are two course websites:
    • the wiki is for the outline and lecture notes: http://bit.ly/maw18 ("music of the arab world 18")
    • eClass is for assignments: http://bit.ly/maw18e Please submit all assignments via eClass
  • Most resources are electronic, but there are also physical books for sale in the bookstore and on Reserve. They are not required, but are useful in building a library.
  • This is a CSL course. We'll learn more about our Aswan project today, and hear from partners in CSL and Egypt on Thursday - please come on time.

Listening to Music of the Arab World (MAW)

• Does MAW cohere? We'll say a set of music coheres if relatively clustered: examples are closer to each other than they are to other music, at least with some statistical reliability. It "sonically coheres" if this clustering depends only on the sound - not on behavior, meaning, history or anything else outside the sphere of sound.
• Let's start with "sonic coherence": listen to MAW and consider the following four aspects. Take a piece of paper and mark four columns for the following, then take notes on each example.
  • Timbre (aspects of sound color, instrumentation, vocal quality)
  • Temporality (aspects of rhythm, meter, tempo...)
  • Tonality (aspects of intonation, scale, tonality)
  • Texture (aspects of layering and relationships of multiple parts)
• Here are some examples to consider:
  • Initial MAW examples
  • A broader MAW Sampler
  • More audio examples are available on University of Alberta Library database: (a) Smithsonian Global Sound; (b) Contemporary World Music; (c) on http://youtube.com, or http://spotify.com

• So...what about coherence?
  • Is "music of the Arab world" a coherent category?
  • Note that this question can be answered by recourse to people: their behavior and talk (discourse - do people use such a category in speech and writing? i.e. Is it "emic"? If so, what does it mean for them?) or by recourse to sound alone (can we list a set of attributes which define such a category?)
  • If we want to answer the question in relation to discourse, then we'd need to do some interviews or read local publications (we'd need to do FIELDWORK which is the basis for most ETHNOMUSICOLOGY)...Along the line we'd also need to decide: how to ask the question in Arabic! (translations are never obvious)
  • If we want to answer in relation to behavior we'd need to do some observing...(more FIELDWORK)
  • Either way, first we'd need to decide: who is an "insider"? Who is an "Arab"?
  • What else would you like to know in order to answer coherence questions...
    • Discourse - how people talk about music in various situations - how do they categorize it?
    • Instruments and playing techniques
    • Performance practices
    • Notation
    • Transmission - pedagogy
    • History - lines of continuity

in sum...what is your view so far?

• What is "music of the Arab world"? Can it be defined by reference to sound alone? Or are other factors required?
• Is it singular, or plural ("Arab musics").
• After doing some more listening, write a paragraph for next time. "What music of the Arab world?"
• Are there narrower categories that are more coherent? (e.g. "Arab music").

Listen, watch, read and develop your ideas...

Consider this interview with celebrated lutenist Simon Shaheen. What features appear to thread Arab musics together?

Unity of Arab music (my list; don't look until you've thought about the issue yourself!

What is Ethnomusicology? (EM)

• Ethnomusic-ology? Or Ethno-musicology? Roots in Comparative Musicology, and a Critique.
• What are the Aims of EM today?
  • propositions: accumulating knowledge
  • procedures: learning how to do something
  • critiques: showing the limits of knowledge, or
  • social transformations: changing the world)
• What are the Methods of EM? Ethnography & fieldwork, historiography & archival work, comparison, analysis, bimusicality...
• Ethnomusicology...
  • Often accompanied with World Music (implying musical diversity), "world music" (marketing gimmick)
  • Ethnomusicology: studying world music in context: culture, society, history
    • semantic networks of symbols: representations, concepts, beliefs (culture, religion, language)
    • social networks of people: relationships, communications, exchanges (society, economy, polity)
    • temporal networks of flow (history)
  • combining: ethnomusic-ology with ethno-musicology (ethnomusic = "world music", implying musical diversity)
  • Ethnomusicology is a kind of Meta-musicology ...in several senses:
    • "beyond" the usual domain of music (western art music) to include all music
    • "beyond" the usual definition of music ("art of tones") to include social/semantic/historical context
    • "beyond" the usual methods (written word and score to fieldwork)
    • "beyond" the usual disciplinary frame (historical, analytical, theoretical) towards culture, society, history (interdisciplinarity)
    • beyond the usual goal of knowledge accumulation, towards applied work.
  • Ethnomusicology is:
    • Theoretical, conceptual
    • Empirical, grounded
    • Critical
    • Applied

ETIC vs EMIC frames: scientific vs local knowledge

• Ethnomusicology tries to remain always sensitive to local knowledge - "ethno-musicology": centered on the EMIC. How do various societies understand and classify their own musics?
• Simultaneously, ethnomusicology wants to construct broader theories and develop comparative data
• Comparative analysis is also crucial to generating interesting questions. Local knowledge is not immediately comparative. To compare requires a consistent FRAME.
• Ethnomusicology also uses broad ETIC terms of analysis to describe multiple dimensions or aspects of music, in an attempt to come to grips with an entire world of music using a consistent terminology , thus enabling COMPARISON, and using critical tools to push towards REFERENCE... while also remaining sensitive to local knowledge and understanding.
• For instance, we can divide all music into "aspects": textual, timbral, temporal, tonal, melodic, textural, formal, emotional/experiential, behavioral/social...
• Ideally the analytical framework should be objective (etic) [is it possible???] but also amenable to local adaptation.
• Such frameworks may allow us to answer questions, such as "does Music of the Arab World (MAW) exist (as a coherent category)?"

Critique and Problematization

• "only that which has no history can be defined" (Friedrich Nietzsche (d. 1900), Genealogy of Morals)
• Academia is as much about asking questions as answering them - and often the former is more important.
• Bear in mind the following distinction when considering any text: between a text as SOURCE and REFERENCE:
  • REFERENCE: what is true. (ETIC) [thought question: is anything ever absolutely true? is there etic knowledge?]
  • SOURCE: what some historically and culturally embedded actor said/wrote/sang.... (EMIC)
• SOURCE vs. REFERENCE
  • Reference: containing truth statements about the world
  • Source: containing statements which may not be true, but that will teach us something when placed into context
  • That context is typically implicit; the critique makes the implicit explicit.
  • Example: Richard Wallaschek's book on Primitive Music tells us about music of the world, but tells us even more about the author's world of the late 19th century.
  • Claim: everything in the world is a SOURCE. We turn SOURCE into REFERENCE through the process of CRITIQUE:
    • Making assumptions explicit.
    • Adding enough qualifying, conditioning, contextual information to make sense of it.
    • That which is untrue in general may be true in relation to a context.
    • The goal of critique is to excavate that context: the author's life and times, and society, for instance.
• PROBLEMATIZATION: Abstract concepts ("Arab music") seem innocuous enough - they're not explicitly claiming anything...but implicitly, they are social constructions, and components of a broader world-view. Usually we consider that critique applies to statements ("music in Egypt was much better before 1975"), but concepts must also be critiqued. When we PROBLEMATIZE we critique a CONCEPT - examining its contingency as a social construction, turning it into a question (where does it come from? why purpose does it serve? who posed it and why? what does it do to those who use it?), delegitimizing its "naturalness" in favor of social constructedness...it becomes a problem to be investigated as SOURCE. E.g.: "Arab Music"
• When reviewing a reading in your SC papers, attend to each work (including both statements and concepts) both as REFERENCE and as SOURCE: summary/scope + boundaries/limits/relationships

What is the Arab world? A critical perspective...

• We should address a key question: what is the Arab world today, or in the past, and (emically) from whose perspective, where, and when? There are many possible definitions: territorial/political, linguistic, genealogical, cultural (Wikipedia has even cited one of my definitions!), all linked to the issue of who is an Arab, which tends to be highly situational and performative. Not everyone who claims to be an Arab speaks Arabic - and vice versa.
  • Map of the Arab League countries. Google map of Middle East
  • Eickelman on ethnicity and cultural identity
  • Barakat on Arab identity
  • Problematizing concepts
  • (Cautiously) defining concepts.

What is ethnomusicology of the Arab world?

• Course title: "Area Studies in Ethnomusicology: The Arab World" = Ethnomusicology of the Arab world.
• From our discussions so far, you should be able to answer the following:
  • What is "ethnomusicology"?
  • What is "ethnomusicology of the Arab world"? = "contextual study of music of the Arab world"?
  • What is "music of the Arab world"?
  • What is "the Arab world"?
  • What is "Arab"?
  • What is "Music"? (emic or etic?)
  • What can ethnomusicology contribute (and for what?)

Reviewing course requirements and outline

• Course outline
• CSL component: AMP project (http://bit.ly/AMP-Egypt)
• Homework for next time