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

Course introduction

• Welcome
• Course participants
• Course tools: wiki, moodle
• Course approach
  • Understanding
    • linguistic, declarative knowledge (cognitive)
    • Non-linguistic understanding (affective)
    • procedural knowledge
  • Critiquing
• Ethnomusicology
  • 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)
• Ethnomusicology of the Arab world?
  • What is "ethnomusicology of the Arab world"?
  • What is "music of the Arab world"?
  • What can ethnomusicology contribute (and to what?)

Problematizing a concept: "Music of the Arab world"

What is music of the Arab world?

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

• Audio examples on CD

• Video examples on youtube

• Video examples on DVD

(x4ng)

Ethnomusicology of the Arab world: analysis

• Broad terms of analysis, in an attempt to come to grips with an entire world of music...
• Try to fill in the following for next Tuesday...

MA Textual

MA Timbral

MA Temporal

MA Tonal

MA Melodic

MA Textural

MA Formal

MA Emotional

MA Behavioral

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?

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

Course outline

An overview of what's to come...