El Mastaba Project

This project aims to promote the development of a stable, tolerant, pluralistic, diverse, democratic civil society in Egypt through the arts, by supporting El Mastaba, a prizewinning Cairo-based organization devoted to Egypt’s rich folk music tradition, through documentation, performance, and teaching.

We seek to help El Mastaba realize its powerful social potential by helping them in building a well-documented, publicly accessible digital multimedia repository.

Music is never merely an end in itself. Its power can be turned towards myriad social, political, and economic functions in any society, a fact well-known to ethnomusicologists, as well as musicians themselves. Beyond profit and politics, such power may be harnessed towards general social progress.

El Mastaba has been effectively working since 1995 to develop music as a catalyst for social change, and promotion of a stable, democratic, civil society in Egypt. Beyond preservation or dissemination, El Mastaba takes an active role towards social progress through education, performance, and awareness-raising at the grassroots level, including activities for children as well as media production. El Masataba was already active for many years before the revolution, not just researching, recording and presenting community music genres (“folk”) in concerts and published recordings, but also revitalizing a broader “music society” that harmonizes through performance participation, by creating and sustaining a number of music groups, and especially by involving children.

During the revolution itself El Mastaba’s many performing groups (12 in all, including groups especially for children) took on an active musical role in Tahrir Square, raising awareness about social injustice and the need for change (see http://bit.ly/snarvid, in which they are featured).

Now, more than ever, with Egypt’s body politic in a molten and fragmented state, El Mastaba is needed to help advance the process of building a civil society. Their massive media archive supports and documents their work, and its careful preservation and accessibility is essential to their mission.

Through metadata documentation, permanent data archiving, and digital dissemination, we propose to establish a partnership with the University of Alberta/CCE by supporting El Mastaba on two levels, local and global:

• assuring a stable permanent platform for El Mastaba’s precious archive, in support of their local

educational and social initiatives, towards a stronger, more stable Egypt, and

• raising awareness and concern about Egypt internationally.

El Mastaba comprises a set of groups, published recordings, and an extensive archive, and is active in cultural education as well as performance. The archive, however, is at present dangerously susceptible to loss—many recordings are not backed up offsite, or at all — is inaccessible to the general public, and is incompletely documented. El Mastaba wishes to make this rich resource available to a broader public, both in Egypt and internationally.

A number of new NGO arts organizations have sprung up in Egypt of late, but many appeal mainly to the educated and intellectual middle classes. El Mastaba is uniquely positioned due to their focus on performing arts, and their grassroots activism, building from rural and working classes upwards.