Читать книгу Among the Jasmine Trees - Jonathan Holt Shannon - Страница 11

The craft of singing is the last of the crafts attained to in civilization, because it constitutes (the last development toward) luxury with regard to no occupation in particular save that of leisure and gaiety. It also is the first to disappear from a given civilization when it disinte-grates and retrogresses.

—Ibn Khaldūn, The Muqaddima

Maṭla: The Muṭriba and the Restaurant

Arriving in Damascus one cool November evening in 1996, I found Syria awash in banners celebrating the twenty-sixth anniversary of the “Great Corrective Movement,” a national holiday marking the coming to power of Ḥāfiẓ al-Asad on November 16, 1970.¹ Every plaza in the city center was strung with banners, every fountain was alight with colored lights, and at every major intersection nationalist jingles could be heard crackling from battered speakers dangling from light posts or the facades of buildings. No one seemed to be in a festive mood, however. When I asked my taxi driver what was going on, he turned down his radio, glanced at me in the rearview mirror, then turned the radio back up and continued driving to the hotel.

Later in the evening, as I settled into bed, a young woman vocalist (called, somewhat grandiosely, a muṭriba²) began to sing from the roof-top garden of a nearby luxury hotel, filling the night air with the latest Arab pop hits. Her performance included a rendition of what was easily the most popular song in Syria that year: the Egyptian superstar Amru Diab’s “Ḥabībī yā nūr al-ayn” [Beloved, O light of my eye]—perhaps the most popular Arab song of the 1990s. Her throaty and to my ears melodramatic vocals were enhanced by their passage through an enormous PA system with heavy reverb—I was to learn throughout my stay in Syria that high volume is an important feature of the aesthetics of most live music, the implicit principle seemingly being, “If you can’t feel the sound reverberating through your body, then it isn’t loud enough.” The so-called muṭriba was accompanied by the sound of what has become the standard pan-Arab pop orchestra: the org or synthesizer; the ṭabla (goblet drum) beating out the fast and repetitive baladī beat (sometimes replaced by or even in conjunction with a drum machine)³; and there may have been an electric guitar and bass to round out the ensemble, as is common in hotel lounge bands in Syria, Lebanon, and Egypt. Such groups rarely include the oud (ūd, Arabian short-necked lute) or nāy (end-blown reed flute), instruments more often associated with the classical music traditions of the Arab East. I found the music grating and had a hard time falling asleep, despite my jet lag.

Yusef al-Azmeh Square, Damascus, 1996.

After a mostly sleepless night, I decided the following evening to avoid the well-microphoned muṭriba and head to the Old City of Damascus for some “authentic” Arab music. I also was keen to dine on the justly celebrated Syrian cuisine. My guide book to Syria described the Omayyad Palace restaurant as offering “delicious Syrian food in an authentic atmosphere,” adding that the restaurant featured a live band playing “traditional” music, so I decided to go. Located just steps from the seventh-century Umayyad Mosque, one of the glories of Islamic architecture, the Omayyad Palace takes its name from the Umayyad Dynasty that ruled the early Islamic empire (661–750 A.D.) from its seat of power in Damascus. The restaurant is said be located on the site of the grand palace of the first Umayyad prince, Muāwiyya Ibn Abī Sufyān. All that remains of the palace is its large cellar, occupied by the present restaurant.

Descending the narrow staircase to the restaurant, I find it to be the very picture of authenticity. Stepping through a beaded curtain, I am greeted by a waiter dressed in a fancifully embroidered vest and billowy black pants reminiscent of the folksy shirwāl that peasants wear. As he leads me across the main room to a table, I take in the scene. The walls are constructed of thick black and white blocks of marble reminiscent of the local ablaq (“striped”) style. Various items of “authentic heritage” adorn the walls—large engraved brass saucers, Damascene swords in their bejeweled scabbards, small inlaid wooden frames and mirrors, black-and-white photographs of the Old City. A number of shelves and display cases also exhibit old-style coffee pots, nargīla-s (water pipes), and assorted items such as old glass perfume bottles, ancient oil lamps, miscellaneous old ceramic bowls, and odd trinkets. A sign in English and Arabic reads, “For Display Only”—suggesting that it is a “truly” authentic place, like someone’s home. You can’t buy the décor; in a sense it isn’t even décor.

My table is a low wooden stand inlaid with mother of pearl supporting a brass saucer much like those hanging on the walls. The paper napkins stuffed in a faux inlaid box labeled in English “Damascus” seem to detract from the scene, but I am soon enough distracted from any thoughts of inauthenticity by the waiter’s invitation to go ahead and fill my plate at the expansive buffet. I rise to get my food and notice a dwarf-like man going from table to table with a pot of unsweetened coffee served in small ceramic cups, like that served on special occasions such as weddings and funerals. Returning to my table with a plate piled high with kibbeh (ground lamb and cracked wheat), tabbuleh salad, fatteh (a Damascene dish made of chickpeas and bread), a stack of olives, hummus, pita bread, and a bowl of lentil soup balanced precariously in my hands, I sit and contemplate this culinary paradise. Looking around me, I find a number of families and a small group of tourists who are also eating, their guide books jutting out of their jacket pockets (mine is hidden safely in my bag), and, like me, ogling the place. However, most of the clientele do not seem to me to be tourists, or at least not in the usual sense of foreign visitors. Some seem to be locals, and many in fact are carrying on in Arabic. Over the course of the evening, I learn that the patrons consist largely of Lebanese and elite Damascenes and their friends coming to eat good food and experience an “authentic” atmosphere—just as the guide book says.

Musicians at Omayyad Palace restaurant, Damascus, 1996.

But I am there for two things: the food and the music. Having cleaned my plate and gone back to the buffet for seconds, I return to my table and settle in to hear the music to which I will be devoting my research. My notepad and pen feel itchy in my jacket pocket, but I decide to set anthropology aside and try to just absorb the experience. A group of five young musicians are seated along the back wall before an enormous and gorgeous inlaid wooden chest, a number of swords, and a large golden tapestry depicting a scene of Arab horsemen hanging from the wall behind them. The musicians are dressed in traditional clothing, each wearing an embroidered white abāya or woolen robe, and playing the instruments of the traditional Middle Eastern ensemble (or takht): qānūn (lap zither), oud, nāy, ṭabla, in addition to a vocalist. Not withstanding the garish banner hanging to one side announcing in red and yellow letters “Happy New Year and Marry Christmas” [sic], the scene is entirely “authentic.” To the other side of the ensemble sit two men dressed in flowing white robes with elongated conical brown turbans on their heads; they are the group’s mawlawī or “whirling dervish” dancers, named after the Mawlawiyya Sufi order of the thirteenth-century Muslim mystic Jalal al-Din Rumi.

The musicians are performing a samāī, one of the basic instrumental genres of the traditional Ottoman-Arab repertoire.⁴ I have already learned several and recognize that they are playing one of the “standards” composed by the famous nineteenth-century Ottoman composer Tatyus Effendi. However, I am a little dismayed at the somnambulant performance. The musicians look as if they are asleep and their playing seems mechanical to me, but still it beats hearing the loud hotel singer and her synthesizer accompanist. After the samāī, the ensemble begins to perform a slow muwashshaḥ, a genre of classical poetry of Andalusian origin set to music. The mawlawī dancers rise and begin their unique dance: twirling slowly counterclockwise, their heads tilted to the right, their right arms raised and left lowered at an angle to their bodies. Their loose skirts billow as they spin, faster and faster, while the ensemble plays a steady beat behind them. Yet the dancers too seem tired—bored, even—and I, though fascinated, wonder what on earth Sufi dancers are doing in a Damascene restaurant.

The other patrons, soaking up the sounds like so much sonic décor, busily attend to their dishes and conversations. Every once in a while someone pauses to nod a head or shout a feeble Aywa! [Yes!] or Ah! in the direction of the ensemble. Some of them seem enraptured by the atmosphere, while others are apparently less moved. The gurgling of nargīla-s can be heard coming from the corner where a bunch of men sit and stare off into space.

“Whirling dervish,” Omayyad Palace restaurant, Damascus, 1996.

Sitting alone watching this parody of “tradition,” I feel depressed. Did I come all the way to Syria to conduct research in restaurants listening to this mechanical stuff?

Among the Jasmine Trees explores how musical performance offers a cultural space for the negotiation of modern subjectivities and the construction of modernity in Syria and the Arab world today. The modalities of performing and enjoying music in Syria, diverse and contested as they are, reveal some of the nodes of solidarity and fractures in a society coming to terms with itself and its place in the modern world. In Syria, the concept of “authenticity” (aṣāla) has come to play a particularly important role in precipitating debates, clarifying points of cultural cohesion and conflict, and motivating performances among intellectuals and cultural agents: writers, painters, poets, architects, journalists, playwrights, cinematographers, essayists, and, not least, musicians. What is “authentic” Syrian and Arab art? What is “inauthentic”? Who determines the shifting boundaries between authentic and inauthentic, between culture and vulgarity? In the diverse and overlapping art worlds of contemporary Syria—worlds not unto themselves but participating in a series of loosely defined regional and international art worlds and scenes—debate over cultural authenticity must be understood as an expression of the contradictions of the experience of modernity, contradictions felt across the Arab world today.

In Syria, as elsewhere in the postcolonial world, the arts are an important arena for the struggle over visions of the past, present, and future. These visions—always plural, sometimes incommensurate—have since the 1960s increasingly been articulated in the domain of the arts through discourses of authenticity and authentic culture, often articulated through the notion of a return to heritage (turāth) as the basis for creating a viable modern Arab culture; in this manner, authenticity becomes the marker of an Arab spirit distinct from Western modernities. A common feature of these discourses is their use of a specific language of sentiment and spirit to support claims to authenticity. Such terms as oriental spirit (rūḥ sharqiyya), emotional sincerity (ṣidq), and musical rapture (ṭarab) form part of a critical aesthetic lexicon for evaluating specific artists, works of art, and performances, often in terms of their putative authenticity. The discourses of authenticity and heritage, and the critical emotional lexicon employed to evaluate authenticity, constitute what I am calling the “aesthetics of authenticity” in contemporary Syrian art. Within the framework of this aesthetic sensibility, artists and cultural practices that are thought to be endowed with such emotional qualities as oriental spirit and sincerity, or that produce the experience of ṭarab in audiences—however these terms are understood—are considered to be authentic, whereas those that do not usually are dismissed as inauthentic. The distinction between authentic and inauthentic culture is often but not exclusively articulated in terms of the opposition of authenticity (aṣāla) and modernity (ḥadātha); other common binaries in Syrian critical discourse include Western and Eastern (gharbī/sharqī), modern and traditional (muāṣir/taqlīdī), and new and old (jadīd/qadīm). The fundamental assumption behind these oppositions is that traditional culture is authentic, and modern culture is inauthentic. As I endeavor to show in this work, both “tradition” and “modernity” and the binary oppositions they enable must be understood as products of the rise of modern sensibilities and subjectivities in Syria, as around the world.

Many Syrian intellectuals and artists assert their claims to cultural authenticity and legitimacy through an appeal to particular conceptions of the past—often the distant past (pre-Islamic, even prehistoric)—and heritage. Heritage evokes images of the collections of costumes, folk crafts, and customs that are found in so-called “heritage and folklore” museums throughout the Arab world. In a succinct critique of the notion of heritage in ethnomusicology, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (1995: 169) suggests that the category of heritage usually encompasses “the obsolete, the mistaken, the outmoded, and dead, and the defunct” within a society. The designation of social practice or material culture as heritage, moreover, often “adds value to existing assets that have either ceased to be viable . . . or that were never very economically productive because the area is too hot, too cold, too wet, or too remote” (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1995: 370). My research has shown that in Syria, the broad category of heritage in many instances serves as little more than a catalogue of obsolete and dead cultural traits and artifacts—often those displayed in museums or in gift shops as traditional crafts or lifeways. Yet, in Syria “heritage” (in the form of discourses of turāth) at the same time plays a complex role in contemporary aesthetic and critical discourse, as well as in the constitution of modern Syrian national culture. Of course, not all Syrians would agree on what even counts as heritage. Does it include bodily habits and comportment as well as musical genres? Principles of creative engagement with the world as well as the material products of this engagement? Intellectual achievements in philosophy and science, as well as folkloric understandings of the world? Conceptions of heritage are fluid and frequently contested, and many factors (among them social class, religious and educational background, and gender) delimit how individual Syrians understand heritage and its relationship to national culture.⁵

In general, discourses of authenticity are most prevalent among members of what might be described as the modernizing middle class—those residing for the most part in urban centers and often among the first generation of Syrians having access to higher education. I have in mind “Amjad,” the founder of a small publishing house in Damascus who hails from a peasant family from rural Aleppo and is proud of his strong voice and his ability to sing classical Arabic songs. There is “Nabīl,” a documentary film maker of Palestinian origin who loves the older music, decries the new, and organizes musical appreciation sessions in his small home. “Khalīl,” a dentist, is an avid art lover who plays the oud and gives frequent recitals in Damascus. I think of them in contrast to “Nawfal,” scion of an elite Damascene family who once proudly showed me his collection of over two thousand classical European albums, and smugly pointed out that not one of them was by an Arab artist. Or “Bashīr,” a French-trained architect who is obsessed with Bob Dylan and with what he likes to call “Bedouin blues,” the music of the Syrian desert, but dislikes the traditional urban musics of Aleppo and Syria.

Certain religious elites also promote their notions of heritage, predominantly but not exclusively Islamic heritage, but these tend to have more modernist rather than Islamist leanings. In Aleppo, for example, some of the strongest supporters of the older musical genres come from traditional religious backgrounds; indeed, most prominent musicians have had strong religious training as well (see Danielson 1990/1991; Shannon 2003b). Members of established elite families often have little interest in heritage: they more often engaged me in debates about the merits of Mozart than, say, the Egyptian diva Umm Kulthūm or the great Aleppine composer Umar al-Baṭsh, though, as mentioned, some members of elite religious and other “notable” families do show interest in heritage arts through patronage and attendance at musical performances.⁶ The new political and military elite, many but not all of the now ruling Alawite minority, do not have any generalizable relationship to the “classical” heritage, but many of them utilize discourses of authenticity and heritage in the context of official practices of legitimization and authentication of state power, or to claim a space in urban elite genealogies.⁷ In this way, musical tastes can be understood as indexing social class and status within Syria in complex and contradictory ways.

In the context of what Syria’s cultural and political elite deem to be inauthentic and vulgar aspects of contemporary culture—what critics in the West usually refer to as mass or popular culture⁸—cultural heritage constitutes a discourse of privilege. Syrian culture brokers usually do not categorize popular Arab cultural practices such as story telling and popular medicine as “heritage”; rather, they tend to relegate these and similar practices to the categories of folklore (fūlklūr), popular arts (funūn shabiyya), or the catch-all category “customs and habits” (ādāt wa taqālīd). In Syria, heritage usually is construed as the preserve of high culture, “the best that is thought and known,” in the way that Matthew Arnold defined “culture” (Arnold 1994).

In addition to being a discourse of privilege, heritage also constitutes a privileged discourse, lying at the intersection of aesthetic practices and state ideologies of culture and the arts in Syria, especially in the context of what Syria’s cultural and political elite deem to be inauthentic aspects of contemporary culture (usually what critics in the West refer to as mass or popular culture).⁹ Through state patronage of heritage arts (in festivals and national heritage orchestras sponsored by the Ministry of Culture, for instance), and through less auspicious means of cultural fashioning such as censorship and official cultural review boards, selected cultural practices are projected as valued aspects of Syrian national culture that need to be preserved and defended, while others are prevented from thriving in the restricted public sphere. Many of the Syrian artists I know attempt to negotiate the boundaries between these two arenas of struggle, between the imagined community promoted by the state, and the everyday practices of artistic creation and reception that are often at odds with such imaginings (Anderson 1991).

Competing understandings of heritage and such metaphors as Oriental spirit, emotional sincerity, and musical rapture (ṭarab) articulate a broader concern with formulating the outlines of a modern Syrian national culture engaged with Western discourses of modernity but at the same time asserting cultural difference from if not superiority to the West. Syrian aesthetic discourse articulates notions of modernity and national culture that, while derived to some extent from European ideologies of modernity and the nation, serve as critical alternatives to them—what some scholars are calling a quest for alternative or counter modernities.¹⁰ Musical aesthetics thus comes to engage with broader debates over culture and the nation. Syrian artists and intellectuals construct and promote a sense of difference from the West through a discourse and particular critical aesthetic lexicon of the emotions. Such concepts as ṭarab, for example, express and enact conceptions of the self, community, and nation that pose a counter-narrative to European Enlightenment ideologies that stress the autonomous rational self. Instead, Syrian artists promote forms of modern subjectivity that are anchored in a domain of authentic spirit and sentiment, though for many it is not so much a matter of emotionality versus rationality, but of rationality tempered with sentiment—indeed, made more humane by it.

In many ways, Syrian and other Arab discourses of emotionality also can be read as responses to if not reappropriations of Orientalist depictions of the Arab peoples as hopelessly mired in their emotions, irrational, and childlike. As has been argued in the context of modern Arabic poetry (DeYoung 1998), the appropriation of colonial and Orientalist discourses of the emotional Arab by such Arab poets as Badr Shākir al-Sayyāb, for example, can be understood as a strategy for transcending colonial and Orientalist discourses to assert an emotionality that, far from being an impediment to social and cultural progress and modernity, can be a strong foundation for an Arab modernity and modernism.

As Partha Chatterjee has argued (1993), the construction and indeed investment in the distinction of two separate realms—the material and political versus the spiritual and cultural—is a common feature of anti-colonial and postcolonial nationalisms in a variety of contexts. Unlike Chatterjee, I want to emphasize that in the context of modern Syria, the features of the so-called “spiritual” or “cultural” domain and indeed the separation of material from spiritual realms is highly contested, subject to changing dynamics, and is not always the brain child of the indigenous elites (such as the Tagores in the case of India). Rather, in the case of Syria it is defended chiefly by new entrants to Syria’s precarious middle class, by conservative elements of the traditional elite (the “notable” families in particular), and by some political elites disaffected by what they perceive to be the failures of modern Arab society. The Syrian state, for its part, co-opts many of the discourses of authenticity among middle-class intellectuals, artists, and others for use in its own ideologies of modernization and modernity—in the case of the present regime, ideologies that aim to construct Syria as the home for Arab secularism, pan-Arab socialism, and as the caretaker and promoter of Arab and Islamic cultural heritage; hence the value and importance for the state of promoting national folklore and classical traditions in the construction of an official Syrian national culture. Therefore we must strive to understand such practices as painting and music and related aesthetic discourses of emotionality and authenticity both in terms of how they express and enact competing conceptions of modernity and how they ultimately are situated within the context of ideologies of the postcolonial nation-state.

People and Places

My initial intention was to research the performance practices and aesthetic discourses of musicians in Aleppo and Damascus. “Musician” (mūsīqī) does not in any sense constitute a unified professional category, and in fact many musicians had other work, day jobs through which they earned a living and by which they referred to themselves: teachers, shop owners, in some cases engineers, dentists, economists. Some—usually the best—referred to themselves as “artists” (fannānīn sing. fannān) to avoid the social stigma associated with musicians in Syria as in many Arab and Islamic lands.

Most professional or full-time musicians in Syria are not members of elite families, and many do not have a university or even high-school education. Moreover, musicians, I found, are not always the most self-reflective artists and often have difficulty talking about their craft in the same way that poets, writers, and painters, for example, often discourse at length about their work. Only those with considerable formal training in music talk about their music and music making in a systematic way; others prefer to just perform and let the music speak for itself, which it usually does more clearly than words anyway. Therefore, in addition to my work with musicians I also worked with those who would consider themselves to be intellectuals and members of the artistic elite: writers, poets, dramatists, actors, architects, film and television directors, journalists, and art critics.

As I explore in chapter 1, music enjoys an ambiguous status in Muslim society, at once intimately involved in some spiritual practices and reviled by some as unorthodox or dangerous. Moreover, today musicians occupy a very low position on the status hierarchy in Syrian society as elsewhere in the Arab and Mediterranean world, and few professional musicians are from elite Syrian families, though many members of elite families have training in Arab music. This is especially true of more culturally conservative families, including those having strong ties to the religious establishment. Yet, these individuals maintain music as a hobby while pursuing careers in medicine, law, and business. If pursuing a professional career in Arab music might be an inappropriate if not scandalous choice for the elite, specialization in other artistic domains—theater, painting, cinema, for example—would carry fewer risks of opprobrium; many Syrian fine artists and authors (both men and women) hail from elite families.

For members of the modernizing middle class, those newcomers to the emerging Syrian public sphere of galleries, poetry readings, literary salons, and discussion circles, music and the arts are not only possible career choices (though with little financial remuneration), they are arenas of great debate about the current and future direction of Arab and Syrian art and society. Therefore my research sites, aside from lessons, recitals, concerts, and the homes of musicians, were the hangouts of the intellectuals: cafés in Damascus and Aleppo, the fine arts club in Damascus, intellectual and literary salons, public lectures, and private gatherings. In other words, this is by no means a study only of musicians or of working-class artists. Rather, I focus on how a certain set of intellectuals and artists and cultural agents of the middle and elite classes create works of art, attempt to understand their contemporary cultural and social significance, and articulate visions for the future. Hence I would not expect the aesthetics of authenticity that I describe here for these cultural agents—their “structures of feeling,” to use Raymond Williams’s phrase (1977)—necessarily to correspond to that of villagers, Bedouin, or the urban working classes, or others not engaged in these kinds of cultural practices and productions.

Moreover, my research was conducted almost entirely among men. I never met a single professional woman instrumentalist or composer, though there are several well-known female vocalists and many women study, compose, and teach music, and play instruments—with rare exception they do not play them professionally or publicly (an all-female Arab music ensemble from Syria’s premier conservatory performs at international festivals, and women instrumentalists specializing in European art music are much more common). The absence of female musical artists is in contrast to much of the history of Arab music, in which women instrumental performers and especially vocalists were not only common but highly valued (see Danielson 1991, 1997, 1999; Van Nieuwkerk 1995). I did have numerous conversations and interviews with women journalists, writers, researchers, music teachers, and others interested in and knowledgeable about Arab music and Arab heritage in general, but all of my lessons and the majority of my research contacts were with men. This research bias reflects conceptions of gender relations and appropriate conduct prevalent within Arab and Muslim society, which often strictly enforces gender segregation. As a man, I was unable to attend all-women’s performances and celebrations, many of which feature musical performance and song (I describe some based on written sources below). This is not to deny the centrality of prominent Syrian women intellectuals, painters, authors, theater directors, and actors in the shaping of the course of modern Syria, and in the articulation of modern subjectivities; yet the dominant discourses of modernity in Syria tend to be patriarchal. Needless to say, other researchers might make fruitful studies of female artists and of how women listen to and engage with Arab music. Not only does this relative absence of women in the musical sphere reflect the dominance of men in nearly all forms of public discourse in Syria, it also reveals how music making and discourses of sentiment and emotion in Syrian music are vehicles for the construction of masculinity.¹¹

Furthermore, my interaction with non-musicians often led to debates about my research project on Arab music in Syria and the question of authenticity. As I explore later, many asked if there indeed is such a thing as “Arab” music? Is there a “Syrian” music? If so, how is it different from “Arab” music? What is authenticity? These questions and others upset many of my assumptions about authenticity and culture in Syria, and trying to answer them enriched my research. Often my interlocutors compelled me to choose sides in the debates I was addressing in my research about authenticity and vulgarity. As I relate in the following chapter, one prominent artist challenged me to choose which of two worlds I would move in as a researcher, referring not so much to two social classes or two musical genres but to two visions of culture and modernity: a vision of a spirit-infused authentic and modern culture, versus a nostalgic vision of a traditional culture overrun with the excesses of vulgarity and banality. I chose the former, as will become clear throughout this work. Certainly, many of my own biases against much of what is produced in the contemporary musical market today were confirmed through my interaction with like-minded cultural agents, though some were nicely overturned as well. I fully recognize that my position put me at odds with the majority of Arab listeners, for whom the modern song is an integral and enjoyable part of daily life. Yet my views aligned nicely with those of many of my informants, for better or for worse, and allowed me to be accepted as serious (what “serious” person would devote years to studying the modern pop songs?). My position also prevented me from addressing certain questions or blinded me to certain ambiguities, though I hope at least some of these ambiguities will become apparent in this work.

Local, Regional, and Global Contexts

Because performing and listening to music do not occur in a vacuum, isolated from the social and cultural contexts in which artists and audiences engage in aesthetic experiences, I strive to situate debates and contradictions regarding authenticity and music in the context of the other arts in Syria, as well as in the general context of daily life in a changing and complex cultural landscape. My intention is as much to raise questions about what Steven Feld (1994b) calls “cross-modal homologies” of different aesthetic modes of attention as it is to provide an outline for examining how Syrian intellectuals and artists of diverse backgrounds articulate their understandings of modernity and authenticity (see also Feld 1990, 1996)

It is important to note that Syrian artistic production and reception simultaneously participate in local art worlds and regional aesthetic circuits. This is especially the case with the engagement of Syrian art and artists in artistic markets and circles that encompass Lebanon and Egypt. Beirut, a mere few hours drive from Damascus (including the inconvenient border crossing and numerous check-points), hosts a far more vibrant artistic and cultural life than Syria today, partly as a result of its self-constructed role as a cultural broker between East and West, and partly due to historical political-economic circumstances. Syria’s best artists perform and exhibit in Beirut, while selected Lebanese artists will do the same in Damascus or Aleppo, though usually the orientation (not to mention aspirations) of Lebanese artists lies distinctly to the North and West: Paris, London, and New York. But because of the historical ties of Lebanon and Syria (indeed, the official Syrian line is that Lebanon remains a province of Syria, and Syria exercises decisive influence in contemporary Lebanese politics), there has been and remains a great amount of cultural flow between the metropolitan centers of Syria and Lebanon.

Whereas Lebanon can be thought of as the dressier younger sister of Syria, Egypt dominates Syria and the other Arab countries in the total quantity—if not always the quality—of its artistic production.¹² Long considered to be the cultural capital of the Arab world, Egypt has been a source of inspiration for a number of Syrian artists, both in terms of providing subject matter (for instance, themes from ancient Egyptian art) and as a center for study at Egypt’s fine arts academies and conservatories. While Egyptian performance halls and galleries do not regularly feature Syrian artists aside from superstars like vocalist Ṣabāḥ Fakhrī, Egyptian artists both well-known and emerging make the rounds of Syria’s halls, clubs, and galleries. In the old days, as Syrian musicians often told me, Syria was the cultural standard, and the great Egyptian artists—Sayyid Darwīsh, Dāwūd Ḥusnī, Muḥammad Abd al-Wahhāb, Umm Kulthūm, and others—not only would perform in Syria but would receive the critical acknowledgment from Syrian connoisseurs that would enable their rise to stardom in Egypt and regionally, if not internationally. Today the balance is reversed, and Syrian artists, like many from around the Arab world, yearn to move to Cairo to secure commercial success, or retune (literally and figuratively) their musical styles to fit those popular in the Egyptian market.¹³

However, for many artists and intellectuals, Egypt symbolizes vulgarity and decadence. Many consider Cairene cinema and television, while still the regional leader in production output, to be coarse, melodramatic, even vulgar (see Abu-Lughod 2000, 2004; Armbrust 1996). In terms of music, the Egyptian star Amru Diab’s “Habībī yā nūr al-ayn” is just one of a flood of Arab pop music hits coming from Egyptian (and, more recently, Gulf and Lebanese) studios that many Syrian artists and critics label cheap and vulgar.¹⁴ A common criticism of these newer styles of song is that they are too Western, meaning that they utilize instruments, rhythms, melodies, and systems of intonation characteristic of Euro-American pop music and so-called World Music.¹⁵ The synthesizer (org), while a vital component of nearly every club and lounge ensemble in Syria as in Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine, and the Arab-American communities in the United States (Rasmussen 1996), is excoriated routinely by partisans of cultural purism and heritage as inauthentic, inappropriate, and unabashedly vulgar. One older Syrian musician and composer decried its usage in modern Syria as contributing to “auditory pollution.”

Yet, a moment’s reflection raises the question: If these songs are so vulgar, why do they remain so popular around the Arab world and in Syria? Critics are quick to point out the general “debasement” (inḥiṭāṭ) of contemporary Arab culture as the context for the production and reception of these “vulgar” songs. The overwhelming popularity of this music among the growing youth population in Syria—as mentioned, upwards of 50 percent of the population is fifteen or under—suggests that criticism of popular culture reflects an Arnoldian bias against “low-brow” culture from the standpoint of “high-brow” culture. As I noticed on many occasions, many critics of these so-called vulgar songs listen privately to what they may excoriate publicly (see Ghuṣūb 1992), indicating that these “vulgar” songs are popular not only with Syria’s youth, but with a broader segment of society—including haughty cultural elites.

Adorno (1976: 69) writes that every genre bears the mark of the contradictions that exist in society as a whole. Contemporary Arab popular music bears clear marks of the many contradictions and ambiguities of contemporary Syrian society: its uncertain search for authenticity, the often banal admixture of old and new, local and foreign. Seen in the light of contemporary cinematic conventions, clothing styles, architecture, drama, and literature, which often borrow heavily from Western conventions even when cast in local idioms, it comes as no surprise that contemporary music too adopts freely from Western models. At the same time, much of the local pop music also manages to retain elements of local conventions, especially folk music and what in general terms is described as shabī or baladī music and culture, the popular music and culture of peasants and urban poor.

Moreover, the notion that the pure Arab musical tradition has been sullied by the incursion of Western music and popular culture, a common sentiment among Syrian intellectuals, does not accurately describe the rise of the modern pop song and the dynamics of the interaction of Arab and Western musical cultures (see Frishkopf 2003). In light of these discourses of decline and corruption, it is instructive to read mid-twentieth-century criticism of artists who by today’s standards are considered exemplars of valued musical aesthetics but who in their own time were criticized widely as vulgar. A prime example is Abd al-Ḥalīm Ḥāfiẓ, decried in his early days as vulgar but later lionized as a valued propagator of the older musical aesthetics.

For example, in a 1954 editorial entitled “The Cheap Songs” [al-aghānī al-rakhīṣa] that hints at Abd al-Ḥalīm and others, Rātib al-Ḥuṣāmī, then Director General of the Syrian Broadcast Authority, argued that the songs of his day were: “of the cheap variety that have no meaning and no content and that cultured people reject, but which are requested by a large portion of the general population . . . the majority are nothing more than debased words drowning in love, desire, ardor and passion!”¹⁶

He goes on to excoriate what he terms love songs that have no connection with Arabic literature, especially poetry, and are little more than “unacceptable and unreasonable prattle” (al-Ḥuṣāmī 1965:1).¹⁷ Yet, fifty years later, many contemporary listeners consider these songs to represent “authentic” Arab music and “Oriental spirit”—especially when compared to what is heard on the air-waves today. The “prattle” of yesterday has become the cherished “heritage” of today.

Matters of taste aside, the centrality of Cairo (and to a lesser degree Beirut and the Arabian Gulf) for contemporary Syrian arts problematizes the commonly held assumption of the predominant influence of Western European and American culture on the Arab world. Moreover, while many of Syria’s prominent older artists studied at European academies, more-recent generations of Syrian artists, writers, and musicians (not to mention engineers, doctors, and architects) are more likely to be graduates of institutes and universities in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Moscow, Budapest, Sofia, Prague, Kiev, and Dresden have been as important to the younger generation of Syrian artists and intellectuals as Rome and Paris were to an older generation. Of course, few would pass up the opportunity to study in Paris, Rome, Berlin, Florence, and Madrid, and many prominent Syrian and other Arab artists in fact can be found in these cities today. However, these opportunities have been relatively scarce. Connections with Eastern Europe have been stronger because of military and economic cooperation between Syria and these countries since the late 1950s. For this reason, Eastern European conceptions of folklore, nationalism, and authenticity have had important influences on the visions of authentic culture of contemporary Syrian artists who studied at academies in Prague, Budapest, Bucharest, Warsaw, Moscow, and Sofia (see Rice 1993).¹⁸ New York and Los Angeles have drawn relatively few Syrian artists and intellectuals (though many doctors and engineers). For postcolonial Syrian artists and intellectuals, then, the international refers to a complex network of political, cultural, and intellectual centers ranging from the Levant and Arab world, to Eastern Europe, and South and East Asia. Western European cities, though they may figure prominently in rhetorics of the international, are for most Syrian artists of secondary importance, while New York and Los Angeles hardly figure at all, except as performance venues for singers.

Performance and the Performance of Authenticity

A commonplace in anthropology and performance studies is that aesthetic concepts and the discourses of society and self that they engage do not exist independent of their particular performative contexts; that is, they arise or emerge in the context of performance (Bauman 1977, 1986, 1992; Bauman and Briggs 1990; Hymes 1975; Kapchan 1995). Moreover, aesthetic concepts and discourses are themselves performative, that is, they participate in the constitution of the contexts and performance situations in which they emerge and do not merely reflect them. In linguistic terms, we can understand aesthetic discourse as a metalanguage that refers to the indexical and pragmatic processes of context marking, framing, and creation (Crapanzano 1992; Silverstein 1976). Performance serves as a central organizing motif in this work, and I strive to discuss aesthetic practices and discourses as they arise in specific performance situations. Yet, performance can mean a number of very different things: music making, poetry readings, colloquial speech acts and genres, and so on. Beyond the particular acts and events of performance, I address performance as a mode of being and as a strategy of framing and differentiating diverse modes of practice and being (Bateson 1972; Bell 1992, 1997; Erlmann 1996; Goffman 1959; Schechner 1985). Therefore performance, when understood as a particular strategy of acting, can include a much wider range of behaviors and contexts than what we normally understand to be “performance.” This is especially the case in the performance of emotion and sentiment in discourse and in the gestural economy of Syria’s music cultures in which the intersubjective and reflexive characteristics of performance as a strategy are most apparent (see Kapchan 1995). Indeed, emotion if not emotionality is in many ways the centerpiece of the aesthetics and kinesthetics of musical and other modes of performance in Syria, and this accounts for the centrality of sentiment in what I am arguing are the outlines of a Syrian alternative modernity.

In the Syrian aesthetics of authenticity, aesthetic judgments are based first and foremost on the degree to which any given cultural object is considered to be authentic (aṣīl). Criteria of authenticity (aṣāla) include an object’s relationship first and foremost to the Arab cultural heritage—itself a manifold of conflicting terms and concepts. The criteria of authenticity are filtered through the dialectics of local and the international, the city and the country, center and periphery, the modern and the traditional; conceptions of the self, the emotions, creativity, and the imagination; discourses of religion, language, and identity; and the reality of politics and patronage. It is this complex web of interrelated discourses and practices that I explore through analysis and interpretation of important currents in contemporary Syrian music. Modeled in some ways on a musical mode, which allows modulation to related modes, this ethnography modulates to themes that elucidate the depth and potential of the primary theme of authenticity—modernity, emotion, memory, and temporality are among the collateral themes.

Borrowing from the conventional structure of the genre of instrumental improvisation called the taqsīm, I open each chapter with a maṭla or opening evocation of the main theme of the chapter. These evocations are meant to provide a sense of the place of research, my positionality with respect to my interlocutors, and some of the central questions of the research—and just as often the assumptions that my research overturned or qualified. I conclude each chapter with a qafla or closing statement, much as a musician will close an improvisation with a closing cadence. The qafla reflects on the themes explored in the body of the chapter and invites the reader to pursue related themes in the following chapters. In this fashion, the separate chapters are linked not so much by a single recurrent theme as by a montage of related themes linked through what Wittgenstein (1953) termed a “family resemblance” to the main problematic of authenticity and modernity in Syria.¹⁹ By using the strategy of montage, I attempt to have the text reinterpret in words the sense of listening to the music, though of course any such attempt is limited by the incommensurability of language and music. Moreover, like the music, in which musical process reflects both the inherent potentiality of a given musical mode but also the artist’s mood and motivations, this ethnography reflects my own personal experiences and moods and motivations as an enthusiast of the music and culture, and as an ethnographer.

In writing, I have adopted a number of narrative strategies that suggest some Syrian forms of cultural expression. These include a heavy reliance on anecdote, for much of what I learned about cultural life in Syria was taught to me by my friends and acquaintances through the medium of the well-phrased anecdote. “Let me tell you a story . . .” (baḥkīlak iṣṣa. . .) was a common way for people to tell me about certain customs or practices, musical or otherwise.²⁰ I will have recourse throughout this work to tell a number of my own anecdotes as well as stories others told me in an attempt to capture this important mode of cultural transmission. Another strategy is the use of linguistic and etymological evidence for certain claims and interpretations. Etymological and linguistic evidence is certainly important in Arab-Islamic culture generally, since it goes to the heart of such matters as the interpretation of sacred texts and conceptualizations of pan-Arab nationalism based on linguistic unity (see Hourani 1983). Yet, Syrians also use such evidence in the context of play and humor, and also with a certain amount of irony—especially in non-sacred domains. The richness of the Arabic language, its combination of classical, standard, and colloquial dialects, allows for continuous invention, metaphor, and word play, despite or even in confrontation with more literalist (even “fundamentalist”) interpretations and interpretive stances.²¹

It is also worth remembering that ethnography is the result of a largely collaborative process of research. I was in Syria not only to receive knowledge from informants but to engage in scholarly debate and research with them. Many of the musicians with whom I studied and performed also consider themselves to be scholars and researchers; some present papers at international conferences and write articles and books on their music. Acknowledging the mutual constitution of knowledge in fieldwork helps overcome the tendency in anthropological and ethnomusicological research to construe the informants as Others residing in some Other time, namely, “tradition,” even when they are engaged in what we characterize (caricaturize?) as a “struggle for modernity” (Fabian 1983; see also Blum 1990: 417–19). My participation in this process was as a co-researcher, lover, and novice performer of the music, and certainly as a junior partner in the overall efforts of a certain group of artists and intellectuals to understand and document the richness of their music. Nevertheless, I participated as one who potentially might “discover” something, and so many of my interlocutors exposed this expectation—or ridiculed it—by asking me, “What have you discovered?” (shū iktashaft?). My simple performances and demonstrations on the oud, my interviews and public lectures, and my lessons and interactions with so many musicians all attest to the mutuality of this process. I mention this not to trumpet my own achievements—modest as they were—but rather to raise the question of how our complex and compound identities as researchers imply a different sort of practice of anthropology, one closer to the practices of artists and musicians themselves, who often stress “complementarity” (Blum 1990: 418; Turino 1990: 409–410) and not the subject-object division common in so much traditional ethnography.

Therefore I strive to keep the voices of my interlocutors in the foreground in order to emphasize the collaborative nature of the research. As I have written this manuscript, at each turn I asked myself, “What would so-and-so say?” “Is this in line with what I learned in Aleppo?” and so on. At the same time, we need to follow Vaclev Havel’s advice (cited in Blum 1990: 418) to “distrust words,” especially when they come from those occupying positions of power who construe themselves as centers of truth. Certain of my interlocutors occupied positions of authority and had strong connections to local centers of political power. Others less well-connected also occupied certain positions within Syrian society that conditioned their forms of discourse and practice. All of them articulated ideological stances that need to be taken into account. So it is not merely a matter of giving voice to a multiplicity of actors but of contextualizing these voices in the overall fabric of Syrian society in which musical and other cultural practices are made meaningful.

Qafla

In the following chapters, I explore the question of modernity through analysis of discourse about authenticity in contemporary Syrian music. Chapter 1 provides an overview of debates over musical authenticity in Syria, and outlines the major genres of Arab music performed in Syria today as well as the primary performance venues. I discuss some of the contexts and strategies of learning music in Syria and show how the local “cassette culture” (Manuel 1993) plays an important role in defining conceptions of musical and cultural authenticity. In chapter 2, I trace a genealogy of some of the keywords in debates about modernity in the Arab world, namely modernity (ḥadātha), authenticity (aṣāla), and heritage (turāth), drawing on accounts from nineteenth-century Egypt and Syria, as well as more recent writings from Syria, Lebanon, and Morocco. I examine the complex ways in which these terms find expression in twentieth-century Syrian musical discourse and practice, and argue that these debates in music participate in the composition of different visions of a Syrian alternative modernity. In chapter 3, I discuss some of the temporal and spatial dimensions of the aesthetics of authenticity in contemporary Syrian art worlds and examine how the idea of origin operates in constructions of tradition, heritage, identity, and authenticity in four narratives of the origins of Arab music. In chapter 4, I continue the discussion of musical origins with an exploration of a domain that many Aleppine musicians asserted was an origin of both their musical traditions and their own involvement with the music: the Sufi dhikr, the ritual invocation of God. I analyze dhikr both as a ritual context and as an art world in which conceptions of authenticity and personhood are conceptualized, invoked, and enacted. Moreover, I examine the role of temporality and modes of body memory in structuring the experience of transformation and transcendence in the dhikr and suggest how this relates to the construction and social reproduction of embodied experiences of moral and musical selfhood in Aleppo.

In chapter 5, I explore the waṣla or musical suite as the paradigmatic authentic genre of secular Arab music in Aleppo. I discuss three key terms in the critical aesthetic lexicon of “authentic” Arab music—melody (laḥn), lyrics (kalimāt), and voice (ṣawt)—and show how these critical-musical terms gloss emotional states that play a defining role in the constitution of authentic aesthetic experience. In chapter 6, I further explore the concept of ṭarab and argue that, like other terms in Aleppine discourses of music and emotion, ṭarab serves as a metaphor for the social context of performance and is one strategy for the presentation of positively valued conceptions of the self in the context of performance. Finally, I end this work with an examination of the concept of “Oriental spirit” in Syrian aesthetics and of how spirit and emotion perform and improvise on visions for an alternative modernity in which emotionality and sentiment are seen not as impediments to progress, but as the very substance of modern Syrian subjectivity.