MofA Week 1: What is “music of the Arab world”?

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Course introduction

  • Welcome
  • Course participants
  • Course tools: wiki, eClass
  • Course approach
    • Understanding: discursively, experientially
      • discursive, linguistic, descriptive, propositional, declarative knowledge (cognizing)
      • Non-discursive, pre-linguistic, experiential, bodily, musical knowledge (feeling)
    • Doing: procedural (implicit) knowledge
      • Performing (improvising)
      • Composing
      • Critiquing
  • Ethnomusicology
    • Meta-musicology as musicology...in 3 senses:
      • "beyond" the usual domain (western art music)
      • "beyond" the usual method (written word and score)
      • "beyond" the usual disciplinary frame (historical, analytical, theoretical) (interdisciplinarity)
    • Theoretical, conceptual
    • Empirical, grounded
  • World music, worlds of music
  • Area studies
    • in general
    • in ethnomusicology
    • and "Arab"
  • Problematizing, critiquing
    • "only that which has no history can be defined" (Friedrich Nietzsche (d. 1900), Genealogy of Morals)
    • etic and emic
    • source and reference
    • problematization: turning a concept into a problem (from the implicit to the descriptive/definitional to the undefinable!)
    • writing a critique: summary/scope + boundaries/limits/relationships
  • Ethnomusicology of the Arab world?
    • What is "ethnomusicology of the Arab world"?
    • What is "music of the Arab world"?
    • What is "the Arab world"?
    • What can ethnomusicology contribute (and for what?)

Problematizing concepts: "Music of the Arab world"

What is music of the Arab world? What is the Arab world? Problematizing concepts

Defining concepts.

Empirical investigations

Listen, watch, and develop some theories...

Ethnomusicology of "Music of the Arab world" and "the World of Music"

Listening examples:

  • The Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv 1900-2000
  • The music of Egypt

Unity in Music of the Arab world?

Category of "Arab music" - is it coherent? Note that this question can be answered by recourse to discourse (do people use such a category? (Is it "emic"?) If so, what does it mean for them?) or by recourse to sound (can we list a set of attributes which define such a category?)

Let's take the latter approach, considering objective audio-visual data presented in class. What features recur? Try to fill in the following list by editing the following pages, before reviewing my own list below. (Emotional and behavioral features require that you watch the music - via video.)

  • Musical audio examples. Note that these mp3 files contain metadata (download the files and inspect using iTunes or another program).
  • Audio examples on CD (to be played in class)
  • Video examples on DVD (to be played in class)

Ethnomusicology of the Arab world: analysis

  • Ethnomusicology uses broad terms of analysis to describe multiple dimensions or aspects of music, in an attempt to come to grips with an entire world of music... One can divide all music into "aspects": textual, timbral, temporal, tonal, melodic, textural, formal, emotional/experiential, behavioral/social...
  • Let MA = "Arab music" (Arabic: "al-musiqa al-`arabiyya")
  • Question for investigation: Does MA exist as a coherent category?
  • Method: empirical study and analysis - What does the sonic empirical evidence suggest?
  • Based on your listening (using the foregoing links, or other materials at your disposal), to what extent can you characterize Arab music according to the following musical-social aspects? Please edit each wiki page adding your signed comments for next Tuesday, Sep 21...

Aspects:

MA Textual (aspects of text, poetry, linguistic meaning)

MA Timbral (aspects of sound color, instrumentation)

MA Temporal (aspects of rhythm, meter, tempo...)

MA Tonal (aspects of intonation, scale, tonality)

MA Melodic (aspects of modality, melodic patterning, improvisation)

MA Textural (aspects of layering and relationships of multiple parts)

MA Formal (aspects of large-scale structure)

MA Emotional (the feeling and experience of music, as inferred from behavior)

MA Behavioral (the social aspects of the performance - including audience and performer actions and interactions)


Thought questions:

  • To what degree do these features gather musics of the Arab world?
  • To what degree do these features exclude musics of other worlds?

Is "music of the Arab world" an objectively coherent category? What about "Arab music" - can a satisfactory definition be established, independent of discursive use?

in sum...


Course outline

An overview of what's to come...

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