Music and Cultural Diplomacy in the Middle East: Geopolitical Re-Configurations for the 21st Century 3031362780, 9783031362781

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Music and Cultural Diplomacy in the Middle East Geopolitical Re-Configurations for the 21st Century Edited by 

Maria M. Rijo Lopes da Cunha · Jonathan Shannon Søren Møller Sørensen · Virginia Danielson

Music and Cultural Diplomacy in the Middle East

Maria M. Rijo Lopes da Cunha Jonathan Shannon Søren Møller Sørensen  •  Virginia Danielson Editors

Music and Cultural Diplomacy in the Middle East Geopolitical Re-Configurations for the 21st Century

Editors Maria M. Rijo Lopes da Cunha Institute of Arts and Cultural Studies University of Copenhagen København, Denmark Søren Møller Sørensen Institute of Arts and Cultural Studies University of Copenhagen København, Denmark

Jonathan Shannon Department of Anthropology Hunter College New York, NY, USA Virginia Danielson Watertown, NY, USA

ISBN 978-3-031-36278-1    ISBN 978-3-031-36279-8 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36279-8 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: tunart/ Getty Images This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

Note on Transliteration

For Arabic, we have relied on the International Journal for Middle Eastern Studies (IJMES) transliteration guide as a general approach. We have not, however, employed diacritical markings except in quotations when they are used in the quoted source. For quotations in Persian, we have followed the convention of indicating long vowels with a macron over the letter, using kh rather than x, sh rather than ş, ch rather than ç, and gh rather than γ. In general, we try to convey the sound of spoken standard Persian as closely as possible. For Turkish and Kurmanji, we have used the Latin alphabet renderings officially adopted for those languages, though in Kurmanji we reflect the colloquial pronunciation and popular written rendering of several terms (granî, kemaçe). For Balochi, we use the same logic we have with Persian. There is a near universally adopted (among Baloch) Latin rendering of Balochi, but since the discussion of Baloch music and culture is interwoven with Persian terminology, we opted not to introduce yet another transliteration system. Overall, we adhere to the romanized versions of names that the individuals have chosen for themselves or that have become commonly used (e.g., Prince Mohammed Mohiuddin). Similarly, we have used place names that have common romanizations (e.g., Cairo).

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Acknowledgements

The editors would like to thank The Danish Institute in Damascus for funding the international conference that launched this book, and particularly to directors John Kuhlmann and Ingolf Thuesen, who believed in the relevance of our undertaking. We are also grateful to the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies at the University of Copenhagen for hosting our project. Hazem Jamjoum, Nadeem Karkabi and Yonatan Mendel, Ulrike Präger, Melissa J. Scott, and Christopher Witulski offered insightful presentations and commentary during the conference but were unable to contribute to the book. Needless to say, we are grateful for the diverse perspectives that the authors of the present essays have brought to this volume and to our shared thinking about the potential roles of music in cultural diplomacy. We appreciate their intellectual contributions as well as their patience with us. We would also like to thank Lauriane Piette and the Editorial Board, Arunaa Devi, Nobuko Kamikawa, and other behind-the-scenes helpers at Palgrave Macmillan for their advice and continuous help throughout the process. We benefited from their suggestions and also from those offered by our anonymous reviewers. Virginia Danielson, Jonathan Shannon, and Søren Møller Sørensen would like to express enormous gratitude to Maria Rijo de Lopes da Cunha for leading this project from its earliest stages, for her constant intellectual inspiration, and for her skilful management all of us so well throughout the process of producing this book. vii

Contents

1 Introduction:  Music and Cultural Diplomacy in the Middle East—Geopolitical Reconfigurations for the Twenty-First Century  1 Maria M. Rijo Lopes da Cunha Part I Music as Cultural Diplomacy: History and Historiographic Perspectives  23 2 From  the Ottoman Twilight to the Roaring Twenties: The Early Career of Sharif Muhiuddin Haidar 25 Gabriel Lavin 3 Strike  an Elizabethan Pose: Early Music Diplomacy— Queen Elizabeth I’s Clockwork Organ Gift to the Ottoman Court 51 Hooda Shawa Part II Musical Diplomacy: Migration, Diaspora, and Deterritorialised Power  69 4 Melodies  Heard and Unheard: The Promise and Limits of Cultural Diplomacy Through Music 71 Jonathan H. Shannon ix

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Contents

5 Cultural  Diplomacy Despite the State: Mobility and Agency of State and Amateur Musicians in Turkish Classical Music Choirs 93 Audrey M. Wozniak 6 Shahnameh in the Classroom: Iranian Music and DIY Cultural Diplomacy in the UK123 Laudan Nooshin Part III Soft Power in State, Statecraft and Music-Making 147 7 Umm  Kulthum and Cultural Diplomacy in Egypt149 Virginia Danielson 8 Performing  Soviet Cultural Diplomacy: “Western Art Music” and Musicians in Cairo 1955–1970163 Salwa El-Shawan Castelo-Branco 9 Musical  Diplomacy in Mandate Palestine from 1936 to 1948179 Issa Boulos Part IV Affective and Sensorial Diplomacy in Transnational Spaces 219 10 Music  as Cultural Diplomacy: Analyzing the Role of Musical Flows from the Arab Levant to New Cultural Poles in the Arab Gulf in the Twenty-First Century221 Maria M. Rijo Lopes da Cunha 11 Arabian  Violence: Censorship in Morocco’s Techno Underground241 Jillian Fulton-Melanson

 Contents 

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12 Musical  Delineations of a PostNational Space for National Struggle: Hazara, Kurdish, and Baloch Cases261 George Murer 13 Epilogue:  Cultural Diplomacy, Some Discontents283 Yudhishthir Raj Isar Index295

Notes on Contributors

Issa Boulos  was born in Jerusalem and is an international award-winning composer, lyricist, songwriter, researcher, and educator. His compositions are commissioned and performed by nationally acclaimed orchestras and ensembles, including original scores for award-winning documentaries, plays, feature films, and musicals. He holds a BA and an MA in Music Composition and a PhD in Ethnomusicology. He plays ‘ud and buzuq and performed and led musical ensembles in the US, Palestine, and worldwide. Salwa  El-Shawan  Castelo-Branco  is Professor Emerita of Ethnomusicology, founder and former Director of the Instituto de Etnomusicologia, Centro de Estudos em Música e Dança, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal, and former President of the International Council for Traditional Music (2013–2021). She received her doctorate from Columbia University; taught at New York University (1979–1982); was a visiting professor at Columbia University and Princeton University; is Tinker Professor at Chicago University and Overseas Visiting Scholar at St. John’s College, Cambridge University; and carried out field research in Portugal, Egypt, and Oman, resulting in publications on cultural politics, musical nationalism, identity, music media, modernity, heritage, and music and conflict. Virginia Danielson  is an Associate of the Harvard Music. She wrote the award-­winning monograph “The Voice of Egypt”: Umm Kulthum, Arabic Song and Egyptian Society in the 20th Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997) and served as co-editor of The Middle East, volume xiii

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

6 of The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music (New York: Routledge, 2002) as well as Music in Arabia: Perspectives on Heritage, Mobility, and Nation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2021). Jillian  Fulton-Melanson  is a Course Director at York University. She holds a PhD in Social Anthropology and has training in sensory anthropology, sound studies, ethnomusicology, education, and music performance. Her research interests are situated within electronic music communities in the SWANA region that have sonic branding that speaks to social issues such as colonialism, Orientalism, nationalism, and violence. Yudhishthir Raj Isar  is the Education Director of the Aga Khan Trust for Culture. He is Emeritus Professor of Cultural Policy Studies at The American University of Paris; and Distinguished Scholar at the European University Institute, Florence, 2018–2019. His professional life has straddled several domains of cultural theory and practice, notably cultural policy, cultural diplomacy, and cultural advocacy; he has published widely in these fields. In 1995–1996 he was the Executive Secretary of the World Commission on Culture and Development. Gabriel Lavin  is a scholar, musician (guitar, oud), and educator based in Brooklyn, NY. He holds a PhD in Ethnomusicology from the University of California, Los Angeles (2023). He has lived and performed extensively throughout the Arab world, while his research takes music and media as a lens to study global histories of the Middle East and Indian Ocean region, with a particular focus on the Gulf and Arabian Peninsula. George Mürer  is a music researcher and ethnographic filmmaker with a concentration on flows of musical/poetic expression, regional identity, and popular culture and media across geographic circuits comprising Kurdistan, Iran, Afghanistan, Balochistan, Central Asia, Anatolia, Arabophone West Asia, North Africa, the Gulf, and the Indian Ocean region. He is working on a book project alongside a number of articles and documentaries and teaching at Hunter College. Laudan  Nooshin  is Professor of Music at City, University London, UK. Her research interests include urban sound studies, music and sound in Iranian cinema, sound in heritage and museum spaces, music and gender, music and youth culture in Iran, and creative processes in Iranian music. She has published widely and is writing a book on the sounds of Tehran for a project supported by The Leverhulme Trust, https://www. sonictehran.com/.

  NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS 

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Maria Rijo Lopes da Cunha  is an ethnomusicologist whose scholarship examines the creation of contemporary music genres in the Middle East emphasizing the intersections of decolonial studies, digital cultures, and cultural theory. She was a postdoctoral fellow of the University of Copenhagen (2019–2021; 2022) and holds a PhD from School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) (2019). She has several peer-reviewed publications in high-ranking journals, a forthcoming monograph on contemporary Arab music, a second monograph on music and geopolitical global orders (Palgrave Macmillan, tbc), and served as lead editor for the present volume. Jonathan Shannon  is Professor of Anthropology at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, CUNY.  He specializes in the cultural politics of music in the Arab world and Mediterranean, with a focus on Syria, Morocco, Spain, and the Syrian diaspora in Turkey and Europe. He is the author of Among the Jasmine Trees: Music and Modernity in Contemporary Syria, Performing al-Andalus: Music and Nostalgia Across the Mediterranean and A Wintry Day in Damascus: Syrian Stories. Hooda Shawa  is Palestinian-Kuwaiti based in Kuwait. She holds an MA in Cultural Studies from Kuwait University with a focus on East-West cultural exchange. Hooda is the founder of TAQA Productions, a theatre company in Kuwait. She received the Sheikh Zayed Book Award for Children’s Literature in 2008 for The Birds’ Journey to Mount Qaf. She was the winner of Kuwait’s Children’s Literature Award in 2017 for her historical fiction YA book The Elephant’s Journey. Audrey Wozniak  is an ethnomusicologist and musician who writes about discursive and material constructions of kinship and the state, particularly in diasporic contexts. Wozniak has conducted extensive fieldwork in Turkey since 2015 and is an accomplished violinist performing Western and Turkish classical music. She has published academic and journalistic writing in Music & Politics, Urban People, Applied Linguistics Review, China Dialogue, and ABC News. Her publications and performances can be found at www.audreywoz.com.

List of Figures

Fig. 2.1

Fig. 2.2

Fig. 2.3 Fig. 6.1 Fig. 6.2 Fig. 6.3 Fig. 7.1 Fig. 7.2 Fig. 9.1 Fig. 9.2 Fig. 9.3 Fig. 9.4 Fig. 9.5 Fig. 9.6

Statement (August 9th, 1916) written and signed by Muhiuddin’s father in Medina, urging Hejazis not to join Sharif Husayn’s revolt and thus align themselves with British colonial designs. (University of Leiden Or. 12. 982) Photos and illustrations of Muhiuddin from The New York Herald Tribune, 1924. The oud is Muhiuddin’s own illustration, depicting the instrument he brought to New York made by the Nahat family of Damascus 78 rpm releases by Sharif Muhiuddin produced by Columbia (left, 1928) and Maloof (right, 1925). (Courtesy of Mohammed Al-Mughni and Ahmad AlSalhi) Workshop at Ashmole School, November 2011 Rehearsal, 23.5.2012 Artwork from the project. ‘Simorgh’ by Oscar Murphy, Lee Manor Primary School, south London Umm Kulthum performing in Abu Dhabi, 1971 Umm Kulthum in a rural area of Egypt with a water buffalo, 1960s. This image reinforces her Egyptian identity Trajectories of diplomacy Jericho entertainment by the Palestine Broadcasting Service. Arab Legion Band. March 6, 1940. (American Colony, 1940) The Palestine Post, March 7, 1940, 2 Yallı̄ Zaraʿtū il-Burtu’ān. Music by Muhammad ʿAbd al-Wahab, lyrics by Bayram al-Tūnisı̄ . Transcription by Issa Boulos The religious song “Mı̄lād al-Ması̄ḥ” (Birth of the Messiah). (Ford 1913) “Dūlāb Huzām.” Transcription by Issa Boulos

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38 44 128 131 133 152 154 187 188 189 190 197 201 xvii

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List of Figures

Fig. 9.7 Fig. 9.8 Fig. 9.9 Fig. 10.1

Ostinato on jūrjı̄na rhythm “ʿal yādı̄ ” melody. Transcription by Issa Boulos Ḥubbı̄ nı̄ Yā Sit al-Dār. Transcription by Issa Boulos Photo from Rehearsal of iMedea on 11 March 2020. (Photo credit, my own)

202 204 207 230

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Music and Cultural Diplomacy in the Middle East—Geopolitical Reconfigurations for the Twenty-First Century Maria M. Rijo Lopes da Cunha

Diplomacy has been headlining news since the start of 2022. As the tensions between Russia and Ukraine have escalated to war, US and European diplomacy have been called into action in vain attempts to prevent the outbreak of major conflict at Europe’s edge. While European and United States (US) leaders discuss geopolitical, military, and economic alliances, people’s concerns focus on the seemingly trivial but truly fundamental elements of quotidian life, such as safety, health, food, and employment. In Europe, the possibility of a new Eastern European migratory wave shapes popular sentiment in relation to emerging tensions. Given that the already extensively displaced Middle Eastern migrant populations continue to pose significant and unresolved challenges to many countries, an influx of

M. M. Rijo Lopes da Cunha (*) Department of Arts and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 M. M. Rijo Lopes da Cunha et al. (eds.), Music and Cultural Diplomacy in the Middle East, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36279-8_1

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displaced Ukrainians risks further provoking right-wing populist political parties with their anti-migration, xenophobic, and nationalist-protectionist agendas. The current conflict echoes the Cold War, the defining context of the post-WWII era. It was during the Cold War (1947–1991) that cultural diplomacy emerged as an effective tool of diplomacy. It emerged from the premise that art, language, education, and culture can offer potentially more significant means of contact and communication to reach across political, economic, military, and ideological divides. According to Patricia Goff, cultural diplomacy sits on the same spectrum of “ideation approaches” to diplomacy as “soft power, branding, propaganda, and public diplomacy” (Goff 2013). Cultural diplomacy is, therefore, directly linked to soft power—what Joseph Nye (1990) described as “co-optative” power, “getting others to want what you want” (Nye 1990, 166–167) by means of “cultural attraction, ideology and international institutions” (ibid.) in a way that finds less resistance than hard diplomacy. Important to our discussion, cultural diplomacy is a relational tool deployed by large to small units, be it states, communities and individuals, to establish a long-term capacity of influence. A small but growing body of academic literature describes how and why music has been a key component of cultural diplomacy throughout time (Fosler-Lussier 2012; Ahrendt et al. 2014; Prevost-­ Thomas and Ramel 2018). Power is primarily, as Nye emphasized, a relationship that requires contextualization to be best understood. The shift from the 20th to the twenty-first century ushered in a series of transformations in centers of power as well as in the understanding of power itself, which went from being ‘capital-rich’ to ‘information-rich’ (Nye 1990, 164). Subsequently, centers of power moved from the national-state to private transnational actors, from geographically bounded to flowing globally through open channels of online communication and from being material-based, favoring countries and geographies with greater material resources and infrastructures, to being immaterial, favoring the ideological, affective communities that can be harnessed through the immaterial digital infrastructures of online communication. A chief objective of cultural diplomacy is the deployment of soft power. Importantly, Ang et al. remark that soft power was not conceived to be deployed instead of hard power but rather alongside it. In this sense, soft power was designed to show how a country’s “project is not simply a question of culture, but rests also on ‘its political values […] and its

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foreign policies” (Nye 1990, 196  in Ang et  al. 2015, 367). In a later article, Nye advanced the notion of ‘meta-soft power’, a term that speaks of a nation’s capability for self-criticism as a part of what renders it internationally attractive, legitimate, and credible (Nye 2015  in Ang et  al. 2015, 367). Danielle Fosler-Lussier’s Music in America’s Cold War Diplomacy (Fosler-Lussier 2015) was the first volume to provide a detailed examination of how music and musicians served as agents of cultural diplomacy. Sponsored by the US Department of State, such “cultural presentations” (Fosler-Lussier 2015, 19) as music and sports were initially “imagined [by government officials] as a one-way instrument by which the United States could exert influence on other countries” (ibid., 21). These “cultural and information” programmes functioned as so-called ‘exchanges’ whereby the US, according to a 1953 State Department International Information Administration (IIA) pamphlet, poured its “ideas and values into the minds of the foreign public, making them more receptive to U.S. policy objectives” (ibid., 22). As Fosler-Lussier highlights, this interpretation of cultural diplomacy reinforced a ‘top-down’ approach in which the only ‘bottom-up’ reading was to “see an intensive process of negotiation and engagement” (Ibid., 25). Either reading is limited and contentious. It implies not only a hierarchical organization to the processes of cultural diplomacy but also one centered on the nation-state that reinforces a ranking between nations and, subsequently, between geographical regions with the nexus of US-Europe-UK at the helm, ‘from the West to the rest.’ Throughout the twentieth century, processes of globalization led to a decentralization of power, the rise of a more complex system of international relations, and the role of cultural diplomacy in international affairs. At the end of the twentieth century, discourses often revolved around a return in the twenty-first century to a ‘multipolarity’ of power and “return to a balance among a number of states with roughly equal power resources” (Nye 1990, 155). Nye anticipated this multipolarity arising from greater “economic interdependence, transnational actors, nationalism in weak states, the spread of technology, and changing political issues” (Nye 1990, 160). Importantly, he noted the rise of private actors operating across borders, ranging from large corporations to political groups to which we can add the boom of digital online communication and the emergence of networked communities that complexify power relations between state and non-state actors. The issue is how these “more complex coalitions”

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(Nye 1990, 156–157) of power facilitate new forms of identity, affective community, as well as political and economic interests. Mid-twentieth cultural diplomacy initiatives anticipated the creation of new artistic, ideological, and affective communities since they led the development of personal contact, ‘relationships’ and ‘sense of connectedness’ between musicians, which would have been impossible otherwise. As Fosler-Lussier stated in relation to Cold War cultural diplomacy, the “function of musical presentations was not merely to interest people in U.S. cultural products and ideological values; often the music was subsidiary to the relationships that were created” (Fosler-Lussier 2012, 56). Musical exchanges during the 1960s, even if promoted by the State Department, made musicians wonder “about their place in the Cold War conflict, seeing themselves not just as individuals but a part of a global situation, bit players on a world stage” (Fosler-Lussier 2012, 58). American musicians also enriched their own music with “repertoires, broadening the range of musical idioms available to their American audiences” (Ibid.) During the 1990s, cultural diplomacy was defined as the processes whereby national governments, through diplomatic actions, resorted to culture as a means for advancing national interests. The twentieth century iteration of cultural diplomacy referred to “the processes occurring when diplomats serving national governments took recourse to cultural exchanges and flows or sought to channel them for the advancement of their perceived national interests” (Ang et al. 2015, 366). However, as the twenty-first century approached, cultural diplomacy became closer to a “floating signifier,” part of a semantic constellation that can be used in “partial or total replacement” with “foreign cultural relations, international cultural relations (ICR), intercultural exchange or international cultural cooperation” (Ang et al. 2015, 367). Iterations of cultural diplomacy during the 2000s implied a discursive expansion in relation to public diplomacy (Cull 2006, 2009; Ang et  al. 2015). Such expansion begets a type of “citizen-oriented form of diplomacy” since the target of such initiatives “are no longer other governments so much as national and global audiences and publics” (Ang et al. 2015, 368). This also implies an expansion of geographical focus to a transnational level, as they aim to simultaneously engage governments, their agencies, civil society, and private stakeholders, contributing to a blurring of the lines between cultural and public diplomacy (Cull 2009). While both public and cultural diplomacy are rooted in nation-state interest, the outcomes of cultural diplomacy go far beyond national

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interest, aiming toward establishing “a foundation of trust between peoples, providing a positive agenda of cooperation in spite of policy differences, creating ‘a neutral platform agenda of cooperation for people-to-people contact’” (Ang et  al. 2015, 369). In their article “Cultural Diplomacy: Beyond the National Interest”, Ang et al. (2015) refer to cultural diplomacy as a ‘semantic constellation’ that occupies a “discursive field centrally focused on a concern with the management of the problematic relationship between the nation-state and its others in the international arena” (Ibid.) This volume contributes to the unraveling of such semantic constellations in the Middle East through a rich variety of case studies. Cultural diplomacy in the twenty-first century, likewise, has become a complex, non-linear concept that continues to gain traction among policy makers, cultural practitioners, and scholars alike. This is due to the increase in interconnectivity and interdependence of the world where the power of the nation-state is eroded. According to Arjun Appadurai, “nation-states are still the primary actors in the international political arena, but their sovereign status has been steadily eroded by globalizing forces which have heightened the transnational—and often disjunctive—flows of people, products, media, technology, and money” (Appadurai 1996 in Ang et al. 2015, 371). This decline in governmental power both at home and abroad has consequences for cultural diplomacy as being dominated by “transnational flows of culture, which are beyond the control of governments and may or may not be in line with their definitions of national interest at all” (Ibid.). Throughout this volume, we see how multiple forms and hierarchies of agentive power can coexist, conflate, or contradict national interests in cultural diplomacy initiatives. In the twenty-first century, the notion of soft power has become a highly mutable policy concept mobilized by a variety of agents in a multitude of contexts. In Asia, and particularly in East Asia, there is an ongoing soft power operation based on shared values, multilateral approaches, and regional roles, where 09 65738754‘soft power is conceived as a fundamentally relational concept”. Clarke argues that Nye’s perspective of soft power implies a “‘agent-centered’ (van Ham 2010, 8), top-down view of liberalism” that departs from the stance that sharing values is both possible and mutually beneficial (Clarke 2016, 165). This normative approach based on shared values contrasts with the notion of a type of affective style of soft power proposed by Nye, which bases itself in a nation’s capacity for attraction. Despite a general skepticism of soft power’s ability to evade

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nation-centric strategies to foster multilateral understanding, there is a consensus on the power of contemporary networked media cultures in enhancing intercultural understanding. This phenomenon is highlighted in several chapters in this volume, such as the discussion of the use of music to attract tourism in Morocco (Fulton-Melanson, this volume). The shift in the global balance of power away from its traditional centers is clear through the assessment of the cultural diplomacy literature. China’s ‘Going Global’ initiative has been described as a defensive and compensatory mechanism to counter the negative perceptions of the country’s global ambitions (Ang et al. 2015, 374). Scholars such as Sun note the soft power asymmetries in the mediasphere in reporting cultural diplomacy from China and those from Western countries (in Ibid.). However, as Sun points out, this may stem from a sense of grievance by China toward what it perceives as being Western domination of global narratives—of political, economic, and cultural power. For South Korea, cultural diplomacy played the role of advancing strategic and economic goals through the pursuit of cultural recognition “equivalent to its rising economic status, and later at advancing the recognition—and marketing—of its cultural goods and services, notably those associated with the ‘Korean wave’ (hallyu)” (Kang in Ang et  al. 2015, 374). On the other hand, Hall and Smith (2013, Ibid.), argue that the ‘soft power rat race’ led to fighting over national cultural supremacy, subsequently leading to a hardening of international relations in the Asia region. The underlying appeal of cultural diplomacy for governments is that policy makers depart from uncritical assumptions about the role of culture and communication in societies. A critical approach to the notion of culture determines that it is a dynamic concept that escapes reification or commodification, as attempted in most state-funded cultural diplomacy initiatives. Additionally, the communication of culture is never a linear, one-way process; instead, it is dependent on context for the creation of its meaning and is therefore a problematic vehicle for communicating national values (Ang et al. 2015, 375). Therefore, “‘any claim of a straightforward relationship between the role of cultural products in cultural diplomacy policy and soft power outcomes’ needs to be treated with skepticism” (Clarke 2016, 8 in Ang et al. 2015, 375). Cultural diplomacy has a particular appeal to middle powers, that is, countries that hold significant political, economic, cultural power and influence but are not superpowers. The examination of cultural diplomacy in the Middle East uncovers just how the middle powers of the region use

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culture to leverage influence at a regional or international level by mobilizing networks as structures of governance, organization, and foreign policy. Kahler examined three forms of networks that enable middle powers to expand their influence and grasp opportunities that would be unattainable were countries to operate individually. Namely, transgovernmental networks (TGNS), Transnational Civil Society and NGOs. These networks afford a degree of ‘centrality to middle powers but, as Kahler states, the questions of whether these effectively enable countries to move up on the global influence ladder. In this volume, we explore the role of music, as a form of expressive culture, in enabling middle powers to redress asymmetries of geopolitical power relations. Musicians can operate as agents negotiating social, economic, and cultural capital (Bordieu 1985) in artist-­led cultural diplomacy initiatives. The examination of the role of culture in leveraging influence on middle powers is one that remains underexplored and one that this volume attempts to tackle by focusing on the Middle Eastern region. Cultural diplomacy is not a linear field of study but rather a messy landscape that is rarely a surprise, given that it departs from a multiplicity of assertions about culture—what it is, what it is for and what it does. As a field, cultural diplomacy lacks a set of clear policies and strategies on the use of music and art at large as tools in which success can be easily assessed. Equally, it is “prone to a disorganized coexistence of divergence rationales” (Ibid.) emerging from the coexistence of various “conceptions of ‘culture’ and varying aims and types of instrumentalization, and a range of institutional locations” as well as the “a multiplicity of relationships with non-state cultural bodies” (Ang et  al. 2015, 375). In addition, today’s intense multidirectional global flows of information pose significant challenges to construing a singular cohesive national narrative for cultural diplomacy proposes or others. However, such disparity and ‘incoherence’ might just be what makes for effective cultural diplomacy (Ibid.). In fact, the existence of contemporary cultural diplomacy might just be dependent upon an understanding of culture as an ongoing process from which personal, communal, contextual, environmental, and economic meanings can emerge. This proposal aligns itself with that advanced by multiple cultural studies and international relations scholars (Clarke 2016; Ang et al. 2015; Zaharna et al. 2013, etc.) What cultural studies emphasize in the discussion of the use of artistic expressions in cultural diplomacy is that the feature of modern art as being reproducible (Benjamin, 2008) lends it to be “reused, reinterpreted in a

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myriad of different ways, often recontextualized by users in their own particular circumstances” (Clarke 2016, 151). Clarke adds: some artistic practitioners have a more straightforwardly instrumentalist view of their engagement with institutions of cultural diplomacy, which they recognise primarily as sources of much needed funding, which will allow them to pursue projects of personal value to them which they can also present in cultural diplomacy terms with little compromise on their part. The key point here is that cultural productions is bound up for these participants with questions of identity, and that the policy goals provides a context within which that sense of self must be negotiated; potentially […] smuggling new agendas to the work which were not intended either by the policy maker or the commissioning institution. (Clarke 2016, 161)

From the part of policy-makers, culture serves to “boost the economy” while nurturing positive perceptions of a given country abroad (Otmazgin 2012, 53). Clarke argues that soft power is “noticeably vague” (Clarke 2016, 162), but the notions of its utility vary according to the need for allocation of resources for its promotion. Adding a cultural studies perspective to the study of cultural diplomacy opens the way to new questions as well as new dangers. Namely, while cultural products are encoded with specific messages, audiences are free to interpret them freely, which provides a “celebratory validation of the creative power of the apparently powerless” (Clarke 2016, 164). This begs the question as to why governments continue to invest time and resources in policies that escape their control and evade their aims. Constructivist approaches to cultural diplomacy see a potential in cultural diplomacy not so much lying “on the acceptance by others of the values transported in the sending nation’s cultural products, but rather on the creation of shared identities in the process of cultural transmission and dialogue” (Clarke 2016, 165). The value of cultural and public diplomacies stems from the emergence of collective identities, perhaps the most important social fact proposed by constructivist theories within cultural studies. According to Villanueva Rivas (2010), “identities and interests of actors [are] ‘socially construed’ but also that they share the stage with a whole host of other ideational factors emanating from people as cultural beings. A core feature of cultural and public diplomacies may be precisely the construction of collective identities of peace, understanding and diversity at the international level”

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(Villanueva Rivas, 2010  in Clarke 2016, 166). However, it is highly unlikely that a ‘transfer’ of values, aesthetics and identities can occur unidirectionally without affecting both parties involved in the process. It is more plausible that artistic interactions between both parties through cultural diplomacy initiatives give way to the emergence of new collective identities. The rapid increase in online exchanges of information through digital platforms ushers in new facets for cultural diplomacy. In the age of global flows, cultural products are deterritorialized artistic expressions of global culture, rendering the location of culture hard to trace at both ends. In the same vein, when producing, sharing, consuming, or streaming artistic works online blurs the “terms of shared formation of values and identities between cultural practitioners and audiences” (Clarke 2016, 167). Hence, as Clarke argues, twenty-first century cultural diplomacy is embedded in the paradox whereby there are greater resources for sharing national ideals and values as a means of establishing long-term influence, yet these online cultural diplomacy initiatives are “marginal, at best” (Clarke 2016, 167). How states can best yield those resources remains unclear (Ibid.) The answer to this paradox requires, in my view, a deeper engagement of ethnography. Following Ang et  al., I argue that the ethnography of cultural diplomacy initiatives allows one to assess “the on-the-ground processes generated by cultural diplomacy” (Ang et al. 2015, 377). Equally, the examination of open-ended, indeterminate exchanges fosters a focus on the fine-grain, cosmopolitan dynamics of cultural diplomacy, as shown by Roesler’s examination of the Asialink program in Australia (Ibid.) In addition, it is when artistic bleeding out of frame in cultural policy occurs that person-to-person contact can transform into “enduring collective memory”, as Loewe’s study of the 1950s British-Commonwealth Colombo plan has demonstrated (Ibid.). These out-of-frame conditions for interpersonal artistic exchanges foster the emergence of global communities of ideas, affect, technology or knowledge. Polyvocality becomes, thus, the quintessential marker of twenty-first century cultural diplomacy. In its current iteration, it emerges through the engagement of a plurality of voices that can, without controlling, participate in the diversification of the channels for cultural diplomacy. It is important to note that the diversification of channels does not equate to democratization or equality but rather increased resources and infrastructures of access. As Ang et  al. aptly point out, the examination of these processes reveals how “‘the national interest’ emerges not as a top-down

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target imposed by government decree, but as a generative mechanism for overcoming narrow or exclusionary notions of the nation, in favor of more relational and open understandings” (Ibid.). In sum, it is by focusing on the processes of formation of cultural relations, whether within or outside an institutional framework, that renders cultural diplomacy significant in the twenty-first century.

Polyvocality in Twenty-First Century Diplomacy: Key Topics and Contributions of This Volume The contributions included in this volume reflect the theoretical and methodological proposal for a polyvocal understanding of cultural diplomacy in the twenty-first century. This polyvocality is expressed by the engagement of a wide range of methodological tools and theoretical approaches to cover a vast geography that entails both the Middle East and Middle Eastern diasporas in Europe and USA. Despite such diversity, underpinning all essays is a critical approach to the role of music in cultural diplomacy that looks beyond tropes to examine the agency of musicians themselves in establishing long-term relationships with other musicians, communities or even state institutions that can be identified as soft power. Invariably, authors have found that musicians’ agentive power—as well as their immediate circle consisting of concert promoters, agents, administrators, music amateurs and audiences—has remained hitherto untapped. This volume addresses scholarly literature in the fields of music, cultural anthropology, geopolitical international relations, and diplomacy. The understanding of cultural diplomacy offered by the rich chapters included in this book is a critically engaged one committed to the dismantling of long-standing tropes associated with it. Our authors perceive cultural diplomacy as a constellation of cultural actions among nations, imbued with different types of representative power, each having its degree of efficiency, that have the “potential power of culture to mediate often tense political fields” (Shannon, this volume), a tool for internal (national) and external (external perceptions), transformation of the nation (Boulos, this volume), or a type of cultural exchange “intended to cultivate attraction to their home country or, at least, positive and sympathetic views” (Danielson, this volume). Cultural diplomacy is understood as not resting entirely within the domain of the state or acting as a single instrument leading to straightforward outcomes of soft power (Wozniak, this volume)

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and frequently having unintended consequences (Danielson, this volume). These out-of-frame constellations of actions are whereas authors agree, the effective potential for cultural diplomacy is fully fulfilled through the global communities of ideas, affect, technology or knowledge it engenders. The discussion of cultural diplomacy inevitably brings about long-­ established tropes expressed in the notions of flow, exchange, bridge building and mutual understanding. Authors in this volume have deftly demonstrated, in multiple ways and through a wealth of case studies (Shawa, Fulton-Melanson, Murer, Boulos, Wozniak, Shannon), how these have served to preserve hegemonic, colonial, and postcolonial, economic, and epistemic dominance by the countries in the global north of those in the global south and of ethnic or racialized others. Traditional cultural diplomacy (and perhaps diplomacy at large, given the continuous conflict in Palestine, Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc.) reinforces its own fault lines by prioritizing nationalistic agendas that seek to advance their interests in a global geopolitical and economic system that, simultaneously, does not recognize, or forthrightly delegitimizes, the agentive power of individuals, communities and audiences involved in such actions. As Jonathan Shannon argues in his chapter, the “promise of sonic engagement and bridge-­ building at the heart of these soft power melodic initiatives often falters in the face of the reality of hard power alignments of actual hard power diplomacy”, frequently giving way to “unequal exchange, restricted flows, and exclusionary practices” (Shannon, this volume). A cautiously critical approach to the power of music in cultural diplomacy initiatives percolates in the essays that form this anthology. Authors are aware of the unmet promises, the (semi) hidden agendas and how music and culture, at large, has been branded by nations to advance economic, political, and hard power agendas. Simultaneously, hope lies in the potential for polyvocal, decentered, artist-led initiatives to communicate, connect and forge aesthetic, social, political, and economic sensibilities, be it individual or communal ones. In fact, cultural diplomacy is, as Patricia Goff described, “in its very nature, contingent” (Goff 2013). This element of contingency is the binding element of bottom-up, citizen or artist-­led cultural diplomacy initiatives since, as Rancière has highlighted, contingency is at the heart of the political (in Claviez 2016, 52). Literary scholar Thomas Claviez, in his work The Common Growl: Towards a Poetics of Precarious Community, highlighted how all contingencies provide the “common ground, shared history or destiny” (Claviez 2016, 43) upon which communities (conceived as polis) can set a narrative of belonging

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that distinguishes it from other communities (Ibid.) However, as it is described by the case studies forming this volume, twenty-first century communities have contingency etched onto their own fabrics. They are, in other words, what Thomas Claviez described as “metonymic communities” contiguous in sharing the “sheer space of the earth surface” in which the contingent that used to be on the outside is also on inside (Claviez 2016, 46). As several authors point out (Danielson, Murer, Shannon, Lavin, Wozniak, Rijo Lopes da Cunha, Nooshin), the communities that are the core of the cultural diplomacy actions described in this volume are frequently transnational, deterritorialized or reterritorialized. They consist of an assemblage of individuals, networks, information, resources, and affective-aesthetic proclivities (see Ho and McConnell 2019; El-Shawan Castelo-Branco, this volume and Wozniak, this volume). Throughout this volume, the role of music as cultural diplomacy in displacement and migratory contexts emerges frequently. The examination of the conditions of displacement and diaspora for musicians is frequently accompanied by notions of exploitation, marginalization, economic insecurity, and war. These are the circumstances that have underpinned many of the global flows, both within and outside, the Middle East. It is against this backdrop of infrastructural collapse of material or immaterial (economic, social, cultural, and political) entities that part of the region (Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Lebanon, Turkey, and Iran) has been forced to move or find occasional work in Gulf countries, Europe or the USA. As Murer points out, in his chapter dedicated to the post-­ national spaces of the Hazara, Kurdish and Baloch people, music as culture in circulation aids the formation of organic and cohesive communities dispersed across geographical divides and national borders. Importantly, he argues, music serves such communities to assert themselves as “collective affiliations that dwell in post-national frames that disrupt the logic of nation as an enclosed, governed territory” (Murer, this volume). In this way, musicians’ agentive power serves to create new spaces for the reconfiguration of selfhood in relation to the notion of nationhood to enhance the reach of deterritorialized power and global citizenship. In contexts of displacement music enables new perspectives on national identity, which is understood both within and outside as well as challenging the borders of the nation-state. The notions of national identity and nationhood run throughout this volume alongside border regimes. In traditional cultural diplomacy contexts, the agentive power of cultural exchange lies within the state,

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although artists also carry their own interests simultaneously. Agency and power are located within a borderized entity conceived, problematically as Fulton-Melanson argues, as heterogeneous. The issue of whose power or agency is mobilized in the context of artist-led or community-led cultural diplomacy actions is far more complex. Nooshin examines a collaboration of a collective of academic, non-state actors and local communities in the UK to promote Iranian culture through one of its most famous epic Shahnameh and, in this way, bypass national narratives while seeking “common ground” across the geographies and border-regimes of Iran and the U.K. Danielson demonstrates that star artists with the stature of Umm Kulthum carry their own power, agenda and representation in an entirely independent fashion. Despite this, as Danielson notes, star artists contribute to the leveraging of positive views, level of attractiveness and socio-political and economic potential of the nation they, sometimes unwittingly, represent. A bottom-up cultural diplomacy centered upon transnational, deterritorialized, and heterogeneous communities entails an understanding of border regimes that goes beyond the division of a line in the sand separating between nation-states. It is worth, however, detaining ourselves for a moment on the notion of bridge. It appeared systematically throughout the essays, yet it always assumed multiple meanings. In Fulton-Melanson’s essay on the EDM music scene in Morocco, the notion of bridge emanates directly from the state, mediating between what Morocco is—a multiethnic, heterogeneous socio-cultural fabric—and the idealized, fictionalized version portrayed for the attraction of tourism by nation branding governmental strategies. This aligns with the notion proposed by Shannon that bridge building can only arise from a position of power “to invite a crossing over, but usually via processes of accommodation to existing epistemic frames” (Shannon, this volume). This accommodation implies that such a conceptualization of ‘bridge-building’ is a barrier to even exchanges, promoting “one-way streets [emphasis mine] leading to cultural appropriation and commodification by powerful interlocutors” (Ibid.) To Wozniak, the bridge is a state of being assumed by a diasporic subject that mediates between memories of homeland, realities of host country, and a third space in which diasporic selfhood lives. Underpinning this volume is a notion of border that is multiple (borders), in motion, a site of contestation and movement that is not confined to divisions of geographical space (see Nail 2016). In Gabriel Lavin’s account of the musical life of Sharif Mohamad Muhiuddin Haidar Targan

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(1892–1967), borders are, simultaneously, ontological but also historical. As his career develops through the last decades of the Ottoman empire and the ‘Roaring Twenties’ following the First World War, Lavin states “his global legacy somewhat clouded by the national political and cultural borders present today” (this volume). In Lavin’s case, national, cultural, musical, and geographical borders are diluted, reconfigured, and embodied in the life and music of Sharif Muhiuddin Haider himself. In Fulton-­ Melanson’s chapter, borders take a step further from the ontologic to the intersensorial realm. EDM musicians from Morocco inhabit a “Temporary Autonomous Zone TAZ”, a liminal space in which they carve out their artistic acts of socio-political expression, away from state surveillance on the archetype of the “exemplary-citizen” (Fulton-Melanson, this volume). Last, in Issa Boulos’ chapter on “Musical Diplomacy in Mandate Palestine from 1936 to 1948”, borders assumed greater complexity: they are colonial, geographical, and historical but also dynamic borders of selfhood. In his examination of music as a means for transformation in Palestine “internally and externally”, Boulos highlights how the burden of crossing epistemological, cultural, and political borders fell solely upon Arab-Palestinians, as they negotiated life under British colonial socio-political structures to Western musical systems and to communicate such ‘accommodations’ on the radio (such as the PBS and the NEBS). Epistemological debates percolate through discussions of twenty-first century cultural diplomacy in postcolonial spaces such as the Middle East. Traditional cultural diplomacy initiatives are, for the most part, facilitated by those (nations, regions) in positions of power, thus leading to “processes of accommodation to existing epistemic frames” (Shannon, this volume). This epistemological conditioning resonates with Boulos’ assertion that the burden of cultural diplomacy during the Palestinian Mandate (1936–1948) lay solely on the shoulders of the Arabs who, under colonial rule, were forced to make Palestinian epistemologies and comply with British ones. In recent years, music projects have sought “to delink music from major western macro-narratives by seeking a ‘third way’ (Mignolo 2013, 131)” either by the revival of Nahḍa music or by embracing global cosmopolitan worldviews (Rijo Lopes da Cunha, this volume). A fundamental epistemological change in reference frame is examined in Castelo-­ Branco’s essay on Soviet-Egyptian diplomacy during the Cold War (1947–1991), in which the USSR attempted to offset Western foreign policy, interest, and influence to “configured a new cosmopolitan dynamic” in Egypt as well as the wider Arab region.

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Decolonialism implies, as Walter Mignolo highlights, an epistemic disobedience by the rejection of Western-dominated knowledge paradigms in attempts to readdress the inequitable epistemological balance of cultural exchanges. Rijo Lopes da Cunha suggests that Lebanese Two or The Dragon project can also be understood from a decolonial perspective in which the rejection of knowledge paradigms or epistemic disobedience is directed toward both Western and Arab epistemes while embracing a global cosmopolitan perspective (Rijo Lopes da Cunha, this volume). Shannon’s radical proposal for intersecting “cultural jamming” (following Le Vine 2017) and “dissensus” formulated by Jacques Rancière holds a new potential meaning for cultural diplomacy (Shannon, this volume). This proposition entails a struggle for asserting voices often excluded from the public sphere and partaking in the commons (after Claviez). These bring hope for the role of music in processes of change, political participation and deterritorialized agentive power. It shows why polyvocal, artist-­ led, decentered, contingent cultural encounters are more efficient in creating the epistemic conditions that cultural diplomacy indicatives frequently promise, but only marginally deliver, of cultural encounters, participative coexistence, and community building. It is here, through polyvocal and artist-led initiatives, that this volume returns to cultural diplomacy a sense of promise, hope and solidarity. As Danielson demonstrates in her essay on the diplomatic power of Umm Kulthum’s series of concerts after Egypt’s defeat in the 1967 war, star performers of such stature frequently mobilize their power certainly to advance their own agendas. However, other agendas can coexist unitingly as they did in the case presented: by engaging in international tours, Umm Kulthum garnered positive attention as well as financial support to help with the reconstruction of Egypt after the war (Danielson, this volume). This chapter emphasizes a notion also present in several other chapters (Boulos, Shannon, Wozniak, Castelo-Branco, Nooshin), namely, that the coexistence of several hierarchies of power and interests is part and parcel of cultural diplomacy, and it is, perhaps, at the messier edges of organized events that the potential true musical connection, more equitable exchange, epistemic readjustments, and long-term engagement is realized. The diversity of this volume reflects the paradigm that also occurs in wider academic literature in which the language of cultural diplomacy is interspersed with affective language. For example, Nye states that shifts in the balance of power are often accompanied by anxiety and tension (1990; emphasis added). In addition, the diffusion of centers and technologies of

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power leads to new forms of vulnerability and “trade-offs among policies [that] are designed to deal with different vulnerabilities” (1990, 158). He later notes the “frailty of allies” of the US and the “sacrifice of economic interests in the efforts to contain Soviet menace” (1990, 159–160). This use of affective language is perhaps explained by his affirmation that “[p]ower is a relationship [emphasis mine]”, which, as such, requires context” (ibid.) but is also fraught with contingencies. Even the very notions of forms of power that are soft and hard are sensorially enticing. In this volume, affective language is equally present in several essays. Wozniak speaks of the tension between Turkish state musicians as they seek opportunities to relocate abroad. In Fulton-Melanson’s essay, tension emerges from the encounter between authorities and musicians when the former cancel EDM events while also adding that Moroccan “individuals perform in order to navigate the state’s multidirectional, intersensorial presence of power” (Fulton-Melanson, this volume). Power is, thus, not just affective but sensorial. The notion of support, however, is for the most part not associated with affective language but, rather, with economic sustainability. Discussions of cultural diplomacy in this volume always appear inevitably linked to economic systems and financial artistic sustainabilities. Cultural diplomacy initiatives have always been closely associated with a greater earning potential for musicians involved. Danielson points out how Umm Kulthum’s performances in 1967 garnered finance (money and gold jewelry) that reverted toward efforts to rebuild Egypt after the war. Murer and Rijo Lopes da Cunha discuss economic insecurity as a driving motor for musicians to engage in work abroad or even to migrate. Wozniak speaks of the fraught relationship of Turkish amateur choirs in the diaspora with Turkish national institutions from which it seems impossible to obtain financial support. Shannon exposes the financial and logistical obstacles posed to Syrian musicians to travel to Spain, leading instead to Spanish musicians relocating to Aleppo. Fulton Melanson, on the other hand, discusses Moroccan state national branding strategies, in which the relationship between utopian nationalism and marketing is portrayed to enhance the country’s general economic appeal, particularly by attracting tourism. In fact, the development of what Okano-Heijmans (2013) terms economic diplomacy appeared as a response to shifting international politics, economic and security challenges as well as technological developments enabling a growing number of avenues for participation in cultural diplomacy.

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Structure of the Volume This anthology is divided into four sections. It calls upon a plurality of voices, methodological practices, theoretical perspectives and writing styles, mostly academic but also essayistic. In this way, it reflects the reality of 21st cultural diplomacy, that is, a polyvocal practice with varying aims, processes, and outcomes. Part I titled Music as Cultural Diplomacy: History and Historiographic Perspectives (provisional title) might appear, at a first glance, as paradoxical in a volume dedicated to twenty-first century cultural diplomacy. However, cultural diplomacy in the Middle East is a historic practice. Therefore, we have chosen to focus on the proposal of Constantinou and Der Derien of “diplomacy as a reflective praxis” (2010, 29) to afford us the perspective, precedent, and efficacy of levels of efficacy and sustainability (understood as, long-term duration) of the type of decentered, artist-led, non-institutionalized cultural diplomatic practices he proposes in this volume. This section starts with Gabriel Lavin’s essay on the role of Sharif Mohammed Muhiuddin Haidar (1892–1967), a key Arab music innovator whose career developed in the timespan between ‘twilight of the Ottoman Empire’ to the ‘roaring twenties’ and between the Arab world and the USA. Hooda Shawa’s contribution relies heavily on historical and literary sources to assess historical music exchanges from a literary lens. It describes the musical gift from British Queen Elizabeth to the Imperial Ottoman Court of Sultan Mehmed III in an effort of diplomatic rapprochement between Britain and the Muslim world of the sixteenth century. Hooda Shawa unveils how cultural diplomacy has been practiced for centuries, well before it was identified and named as such. Her essay examines the gift of an automated musical clockwork organ by English Queen Elizabeth II in 1599 to Sultan Mehmet the III of the Ottoman Empire. Shawa argues that this gift played a crucial role in forging political alliances and crucial economic, commercial and trade relations while reigning in on global medieval power dynamics. Part II, titled Musical Diplomacy: Migration, Diaspora, and Deterritorialized Power (provisional title), emphasizes the shift from national interest diplomacy toward global politico-economic interest diplomacy. Jonathan H.  Shannon’s chapter examines the potential and limitations of twenty-first century cultural diplomacy, proposing a radical reconfiguration of cultural diplomacy practices. Efficient cultural diplomacy intersects the notions of “cultural jamming” (Mark Le Vine) with

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those of dissensus (Jacques Rancière) in a way that enables meeting in the public sphere of plural, musical, non-hierarchized voices that enable the surging of new forms of culture that go beyond the hybridization of styles. Audrey Wozniak’s essay Cultural Diplomacy Despite the State: Mobility and Agency of State and Amateur Musicians in Turkish Classical Music Choir examines the agentive power of Turkish choirs (koro) while proposing the notion of diasporic diplomacy. Wozniak argues that Turkish state musicians have extremely limited agency and artistic freedom due to the tenure, salary and standing of their jobs. Amateur choir music in the diaspora, however, is widespread and imbued with great agency as cultural representatives of a more heterogeneous version of Turkey, including Kurds. These choirs perform a variety of popular and folk repertoires that appeal and replicate that of diasporic communities. Laudan Nooshin’s The Phoenix of Persia: Cultural Diplomacy or Cultural Expediency?’ analyzes the potential of scholar-artist-led collaborations in the UK in contributing to alternative perceptions of contemporary Iran among school children, educators, and audiences. Through extensive documentation, the essay details in depth three initiatives aimed toward children: an orchestral piece by composer David Bruce and storyteller Sally Pomme Clayton entitled the Price Zal and the Simorgh and based on a story from the Iranian epic Shahnameh written by Abul-Qâsem Ferdowsi (904–c1025 CE); they create a children’s picture book with music also based on the Shahnameh. The Phoenix of Persia was published by Tiny Owl in May 2019 with a Shahnameh resource box that schools could borrow freely. Part III, Soft Power in State, Statecraft and Music-making (provisional title), explores the relationship between individual musicians and the state while questioning whose agentive power is at play in cultural diplomacy actions. Virginia Danielson’s opening chapter examines the relationship between Egyptian star performer Umm Kulthum and the Egyptian government by analyzing the case of the concert series that followed the Arab defeat of 1967. The essay demonstrates that in cases of artists with the stature of Umm Kulthum, the agency they mobilize may be “entirely their own”, and cultural diplomacy leveraging of the nation occurs as a contingency or unintended consequence of the artists’ own stature. Castelo-­ Branco’s chapter examines the under examined cultural relations between the Soviet Union (USSR) and Egypt during the Cold War (1947–1991). It demonstrates how Soviet-Egypt cultural diplomacy promoted national ideology and anti-colonial and imperial struggles and established an

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iteration of socialism in postcolonial Gamal Abdel-Nasser’s Egypt. The Soviet Cultural Centers, particularly those of Cairo and Alexandria, as well as the national Conservatoire of Music, were the loci for such cultural diplomacy through the creation of spaces in which “encounter and sociability” could forge interpersonal long-term influence at ideological, aesthetic, personal and societal levels.The agentive power of cultural policy makers Tharwat Okasha and Aziz el-Shawan, who were also pianists, composers, and the author’s father, vividly illustrate how artist-led cultural diplomacy operated in restructuring Egypt’s cultural programme during the 1960s and 1970s. Issa Boulos’s essay on musical diplomacy in Mandate Palestine from 1936 to 1948 examines the agentive power of Palestinian musicians working for broadcasting stations (such as PBS) under colonial rule. It determines that the ‘burden’ of cultural diplomacy fell solely on the shoulders of Arabs. However, these efforts shaped music practices in the Arab Levantine region (al-Mashriq) for several decades. Part IV, entitled Affective, Sensorial and Economic Diplomacy in Transnational Spaces, emphasizes the agency of deterritorialized, reterritorialized, and migrant musicians, highlighting economic underpinning and intersensensorial responses to such circulations. Maria Rijo Lopes da Cunha’s essay Music as Cultural Diplomacy: Analyzing the Role of Musical flows from the Arab Levant to New Cultural Poles in the Gulf in the Twenty-­ First Century examines the flows of musics, musicians, aesthetics, and ideologies between Arab Levant and the Arab Gulf while examining artist-led cultural initiatives against the notion of economic diplomacy within the region. It argues that a mix of transregional and cosmopolitan music cultures are mobilized, capitalized, and branded to forge aesthetic, emotive and artistic communities. These communities attempt “to circumvent the ‘hard borders’ that delimitate artistic practices in top-down traditional cultural policy and diplomacy frameworks” (Rijo Lopes da Cunha, this volume). Jillian Fulton-Melanson’s “Arabian Noise: Social Violence and Indeterminacy Performed in Morocco’s Techno Underground” examines the tensions between nation branding agendas and artistic freedom. It argues that EDM musicians present a heterogeneous view of Morocco that complexifies the state’s branding to enhance the economy through the tourism industry. Musicians create a third space (Temporary Autonomous Zone, following Hakim Bey, 1990) to enable intersensorial, socio-political expressions otherwise censored by the government. George Murer’s essay “Musical Delineations of a Post-National Space for Nationalist Struggle: Baloch and Kurdish Cases’ ‘ examines the agentive

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power of deterritorialized and multisited communities. It argues that ‘music as culture in circulation’ empowers the sense of nationhood and communal identity and enables the self-imagining of ‘global citizenry’ among geographically dispersed, frequently marginalized peoples who are exploited at the mercy of prevailing narratives of economic, social, and geopolitical systems.

References Ahrendt, R., et al., eds. 2014. Music and Diplomacy from the Early Modern Era to the Present. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Ang, Ien, Yudhishthir Raj Isar, and Phillip Mar. 2015. Cultural Diplomacy: Beyond The National Interest? International Journal of Cultural Policy 21 (4): 365–381. Appadurai, A. 1996. Modernity at large: Cultural dimensions of globalization, public worlds. Vol. 1. Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press. Benjamin, Walter. 2008. The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. United Kingdom: Penguin Books Limited. Bordieu, P. 1985. The Social Space and the Genisis of Groups. Theory and Society 15, 723–744. Springer. Clarke, D. 2016. Theorising the Role of Cultural Products in Cultural Diplomacy from a Cultural Studies Perspective. International Journal of Cultural Policy 22 (2): 147–163. Claviez, T., ed. 2016. The Common Growl: Towards a Poetics of Precarious Community. New York: Fordham University Press. Constantinou, C., and James Der Derian, eds. 2010. Sustainable Diplomacies. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Cull, N.J., 2006. ‘Public diplomacy’ before Gullion: The evolution of a phrase. CPD Blog April 18. Available from: http://uscpublicdiplomacy.org/ blog/060418_public_diplomacy_before_gullion_the_evolution_of_a_phrase Cull, N., ed. 2009. Public diplomacy: Lessons from the past. LA: Figeroa Press. Fosler-Lussier, D. 2012. Music Pushed, Music Pulled: Cultural Diplomacy, Globalization, and Imperialism. In Diplomatic History, vol. 36, 1. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2015. Music in America’s Cold War Diplomacy. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Goff, P. 2013. Cultural Diplomacy. In The Oxford Handbook of Modern Diplomacy, ed. A. Cooper et al. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Hall, Ian, and Frank Smith. 2013. The struggle for soft power in Asia: Public diplomacy and regional competition. Asian Security 9 (1): 1–18.

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Ho, E.L.E., and F.  McConnell. 2019. Conceptualizing ‘diaspora diplomacy’: Territory and populations betwixt the domestic and foreign. Progress in Human Geography 43 (2): 235–255. Le Vine, M. 2017. “Putting the “Jamming” into Culture Jamming: Theory, Praxis, and Cultural Production during the Arab Spring.” In Culture Jamming: Activism and the Art of Cultural Resistance, ed. Marilyn DeLaure and Moritz Fink, 113–132. New York, USA: New York University Press. Mignolo, W. 2013. Geopolitics of sensing and knowing: On (de)coloniality, border thinking, and epistemic disobedience. Confero 1 (1): 129–150. Nail, T. 2016. Theory of The Border. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Nye, J. 1990. Soft Power. Foreign Policy, (Autumn), No. 80, Twentieth Anniversary, 153–171. Slate Group. ______. 2015. Is the American century over? Political Science Quarterly 130 (3), (Fall 2015): 393–400. Okano-Heijmans, Maaike. 2013. Introduction. In Economic Diplomacy: Japan and the Balance of National Interests. Leiden: Brill. Otmazgin, N.K. 2012. Geopolitics and Soft Power: Japan’s Cultural Policy and Cultural Diplomacy in Asia. Asia-Pacific Review 19(1): 37–61. Routledge. Prevost-Thomas, C., and Frederic Ramel, eds. 2018. International Relations, Music, and Diplomacy: Sounds and Voices on the International Stage, The Sciences Po Series in International Relations and Political Economy. Palgrave Macmillan. Rivas, C.V. 2010. Cosmopolitan constructivism: Mapping a road to the future of cultural and public diplomacy. In Cultural Diplomacy, Winter 2010., ed. K. Keith et al. Issue 3. van Ham, P. 2010. Social power in international politics (1st edn.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203857847. Zaharna, R., et al., eds. 2013. Relational, networked, and collaborative approaches to public diplomacy. The connective Mindshift. London: Routledge.

PART I

Music as Cultural Diplomacy: History and Historiographic Perspectives

CHAPTER 2

From the Ottoman Twilight to the Roaring Twenties: The Early Career of Sharif Muhiuddin Haidar Gabriel Lavin

Introduction Sharif Mohamad Muhiuddin Haidar Targan (1892–1967) was one of the most important twentieth-century musical educators, innovators, and performers throughout Turkey and the Arab world, yet almost no comprehensive studies of his early career have been published in English (Abbas 1994; Breaux 2019; Cevher 1993; Chabrier 1978; Işıktaş 2018, 2020). This lacuna is surprising given that Muhiuddin actually lived in the United States for almost a decade between 1924 and 1932. He worked in New  York City as a professional musician playing the oud and cello, recorded for major record companies such as Columbia, and appeared on early American radio programs. In fact, he was likely the first person to introduce mass American audiences—that is, audiences outside Middle

G. Lavin (*) Brooklyn, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 M. M. Rijo Lopes da Cunha et al. (eds.), Music and Cultural Diplomacy in the Middle East, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36279-8_2

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Eastern immigrant communities—to the oud through a performance on national radio in 1928. After leaving America in 1932, Muhiuddin helped found and direct the first modern music conservatory in Baghdad, Iraq, during 1936 (Iannuzzelli 2019; Hassan 2022). There, among his many students were the famous brothers who would help define a modern Iraqi school of oud playing, Jamil and Munir Bashir. Although Muhiuddin was born and raised in Istanbul until he left for America in 1924, it would take over two decades before Muhiuddin permanently moved back in 1948. After doing so, he lived the rest of his days there and married one of the most famous singers in modern Turkey, Safye Ayla. This also appears to be when he adopted the Turkish name of his mother’s family, Targan, appended to the Arab family name of his father. Muhiuddin’s multiethnic upbringing and prestigious education in Istanbul, including private music studies and a degree in international law, was thanks to the position of his father, Sharif Ali Haidar. Ali Haidar hailed from the Dhu Zayd branch of the Hashemite bloodline, a noble Arab lineage traced directly to the Prophet Muhammad that historically ruled the city of Mecca in the Hejaz region of Western Arabia. Throughout history, men and women of the Hashemite families held the Arabic title “Sharif” or “Sharifa” to mark their descent from the Prophet, which granted them immense spiritual and political authority. During the nineteenth century, the Ottomans conspired to uproot the powerful Dhu Zayd patriarchs from Mecca and replant them in Istanbul to help consolidate authority over the semiautonomous Hejaz, which, although formally under Ottoman rule, was a highly contested region during this time. During the First World War, Muhiuddin’s father was appointed by the Ottoman government to be Grand Sharif of Mecca. This was because the standing Sharif of Mecca, Husayn Ibn Ali Al Awn, defected to the Arab revolt with encouragement from the British. During 1916 and 1917, Muhiuddin and his older brother, Abd al-Majid, accompanied their father to the Hejaz and lived in Medina while Ottoman forces waged war against Arab revolutionaries led by Sharif Husayn, T. E. Lawrence (of Arabia), and Abdulaziz Ibn Al Saud, the future founder and king of modern Saudi Arabia. After the war, as the curtain of the Ottoman empire was split into a patchwork of states and colonial mandates and his family fell from influence after the consolidation of the Republic of Turkey (1923) and Saudi rule in the Hejaz (1924), Muhiuddin relocated to an entirely different part of the globe. He took up residence in an apartment in the

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upper-­west-­side of Manhattan in the summer of 1924 and would live there for nearly a decade working as a professional musician. As the ever turbulent twenty-first century necessitates taking stock of current geopolitical reconfigurations throughout the Middle East, it also offers an opportunity to re-examine those of the past. Opening a biographical window into a formative era for the region culturally and politically, this essay traces Sharif Muhiuddin’s career as he went from the fading courtly spheres of the world’s last Muslim empire to a city that defined American modernity during the roaring twenties. While existing literature on Sharif Muhiuddin engages nationally oriented discussions about music primarily in Turkey and Iraq, this essay explores how Muhiuddin’s early career was shaped by elite and global cosmopolitan circles of imperial diplomacy during the last decades of the Ottoman empire, enabled by his descendancy from the Prophet Muhammad and historic familial ties to the Islamic holy land. Muhiuddin’s father, who held a title of prestige unparalleled except for that of the Sultan, occupied a central place within Ottoman courtly spheres of diplomacy receiving foreign dignitaries at their home in Istanbul, including many musicians on international tours. Such relationships cultivated by Ottoman diplomacy and Hashemite prestige retained their bonds after the breakup of the empire and led Muhiuddin to New York City, where he became known as a musical virtuoso and Arabian “Prince” hailing from Mecca. As this essay will explore, Sharif Muhiuddin’s career began in a household connected to a great position of authority in Islam and to an Ottoman imperium that maintained substantial diplomatic ties with Western Europe. As such, he cultivated his musical craft in a world that was only beginning to be discreetly divided between the Arab, Turkish, Western, and Eastern cultural distinctions that so often frame both the scholarly study and politicization of music today. This is exemplified by the fact that, rather than identifying himself with a particular nation, Muhiuddin’s connection to the Hejaz and the city of Mecca was the anchor of his musical identity as an oudist and classical cellist in 1920s America. Furthermore, Muhiuddin’s multiethnic family became increasingly trapped and divided by Arab and Turkish ethno-nationalism during this time. Like so many of whom historian Michael Provence (2017) has called “the last Ottoman generation,” the cosmopolitan imperial fabric that characterized Muhiuddin’s family life was ultimately split by the post-First World War formation of the modern Middle East, thus rendering his family history and musical legacy somewhat clouded by the political and cultural borders of today. However,

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many of these did not exist during the first decades of his life, while social connections enabled by his Hashemite pedigree helped him forge a remarkably global career in a time when modern international borders started tightening their grip. As such, a study of Sharif Muhiuddin’s early career is yet another reminder that prescriptive distinctions such as “Western,” “Islamic,” “Arab,” or “Turkish,” whether used to define the parameters of diplomacy or the boundaries of musical and cultural difference, are destabilized when pitted against the vicissitudes of time and thus obscure as much as they illustrate the complex lives of musicians and their work.

From Mecca to Istanbul Sharif Muhiuddin’s move to America in 1924 signaled the end of the Ottoman twilight as much as it did Hashemite rule in the Hejaz and the end of an over century-long history of struggle between the Dhu Zayd and Al Awn families, the latter who would ultimately find favor with the British and subsequently rule the Hashemite monarchies of Iraq, Jordan, and, briefly, Syria. Indeed, 1924 marks the beginning of the Saudi conquest of the Hejaz led by Abdulaziz Ibn Al Saud (Ibn Saud) who deposed his former ally Husayn Ibn Ali Al Awn, the ruler of the Kingdom of the Hejaz since the end of the First World War and father of the future kings of Iraq and Jordan, Faysal and Abdullah. Afterwards, despite recommendations on the part of varying Muslim political organizations that Muhiddin’s father Ali Haidar should be reinstated as Grand Sharif, Ibn Saud later appointed his son Faisal Al Saud as ruler of Mecca: an unprecedented historical move that gave a non-Hashemite authority control over Islam’s holiest city. Ibn Saud also imposed puritanical Wahabi rule over the Islamic holy land, which led to the desecration of graves of the Prophet’s family and other holy shrines throughout the region (Lowe 2020; Rutter 2015). Music and singing were also outlawed, leading to the public smashing of phonograph records, banning of music that for centuries accompanied the mahmal that transported the Kaaba’s covering (kiswah) from Egypt, and even the whipping of those caught singing while herding livestock (Urkevich 2015, 1–13; Thesiger 2007, 247–248). Yet the 1924 Saudi invasion and permanent occupation of the Hejaz was not the Wahabists’ first rodeo. In fact, the reason Sharif Muhiuddin was born and raised in Istanbul and not in Mecca was because his family was uprooted after the first Saudi-Wahabi invasion, c. 1803-1811, of the

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Hejaz during the Napoleonic Wars. Muhiuddin’s great-great-grandfather, Ghalib Musad Dhu Zayd, was Grand Sharif at the time, ruling from 1788 to 1813. Although briefly tolerating Saudi rule, which later during the 1920s saw the desecration of sacred gravesites and the outlawing of music, Sharif Ghalib eventually conspired against the Wahabi intruders. He aided the infamous Ottoman governor of Egypt Muhammad Ali who launched an invasion of the Hejaz with his sons Tusun and Ibrahim Pasha in 1811 to expel the Saudis. The Egyptian assault culminated in the destruction of the Saudi-Wahabi empire (now considered the first Saudi state) in the Nejd region of central Arabia and its capital Diriyah in 1818. Afterwords, the first Saudi-Wahabi ruler and ancestor of the current Saudi royal family, Abdullah bin Saud Al Saud, was later taken to Istanbul and publicly executed for crimes inspired by radical beliefs derived from the puritanical reformer Muhammad Ibn Abd al-Wahab, after whom the term “Wahabism” was coined. The reverberations caused by the first Saudi invasion of the Hejaz perked the Ottomans’ awareness of the region’s global strategic importance as the geographical heart of Islam and as a gateway to the Indian Ocean and British India. After a failed invasion of Egypt, even Napoleon Bonaparte had his sights drawn to the Hejaz during the first Saudi occupation, viewing Wahabi aggression there as aiding his aspirations of routing the Ottomans in Arabia and the British in India. After occupying Egypt in 1798, Napoleon tried several times to establish direct communication in writing with Sharif Ghalib but to no avail, hence his later attempts to establish contact with the Saudi-Wahabis (Blin 2020). Given Sharif Ghalib’s power, Muhammad Ali took no chances after reclaiming Mecca from the Wahabis. In 1813, Muhammad Ali deceived and imprisoned Sharif Ghalib in Mecca and shipped him off to Istanbul and then to Salonica (Thessaloniki) before ordering his assassination along with his eldest sons in 1816 (Stitt 1948, 25). Thereafter, Ghalib’s youngest son and Sharif Muhiuddin’s great grandfather, Abd al-Mutalib, was briefly appointed Grand Sharif, but he was eventually removed during political chaos that ensued through the 1820s. Interestingly, it was the eldest daughter of Sharif Ghalib, Sharifa Muzeymeh, who began to manipulate Hejazi politics when she inherited half of her father’s wealth after his assassination, a sum that was claimed to be valued at 2,000,000 pounds. According to Muhiuddin’s family history relayed by George Stitt (1948), it was she who brought the Al Awn family to power, obliging Muhammad Ali to appoint her henchman Muhammad Ibn Al Awn, “her slave and devoted admirer,” to be Grand Sharif in 1927 in order to bring peace to

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the Hejaz (26). Although Stitt assumed no records of Sharifa Muzaymeh existed, the nineteenth-century Meccan historian Ahmad Zayni Dahlan wrote about her in his Compendium of the Rulers of the Holy City from the Time of the Prophet to the Current Era ( 1888), including how Muhammad Ali sent imprisoned members of the Dhu Zayd family back to Mecca at Sharifa Muzaymeh’s bidding (300). Dahlan’s history also suggests that it wasn’t atypical for a woman to wield considerable power in Arabia during this tumultuous time. He wrote of a warrior princess named Ghaliah, “renowned for her bravery in battle,” who governed the emirate of Turabah and commanded a contingent of Wahabi lords and disaffected allies of the betrayed and murdered Sharif Ghalib together in fierce resistance against Tusun Pasha’s Egyptian forces, resulting in one of the worst Ottoman defeats of the campaign (308). In any case, Meccan politics for much of the nineteenth century thereafter was defined by the Ottoman authorities swapping the Dhu Zayd and Al Awn families in and out to help consolidate their authority over the Hejaz (see Lowe 2020). After the Ottoman government formally retook control of the Hejaz from Egypt in 1840, Muhiuddin’s great grandfather Abd al-Mutalib was reinstated as Grand Sharif from 1851 until 1856, after which he was deposed for having supported a rebellion against the Ottoman authorities (Freitag 2020, 58–61). In fact, that rebellion was instigated by the Hejazi merchant class due to Ottoman efforts, under British pressure, to curb the slave trade in Arabia (58–61). Indeed, Sharif Muhiuddin was brought up in a household with Circassian and Afro-­ Hejazi slaves, while the Dhu Zayd family line had long been borne by Circassian female slaves who were manumitted upon marriage. As indicated by Archibald Roosevelt Jr. (Roosevelt Jr 1988, 192), Muhiuddin’s future wife, Safye Ayla, was descended from Black Hejazi slaves who were settled and manumitted in Istanbul during the late Ottoman period. Given his short tenure as Grand Sharif, Abd al-Mutalib was obliged to raise his children in Istanbul, including his son Jabir, Muhiuddin’s grandfather. Abd al-Mutalib had a special liking for Jabir’s first son Ali Haidar (Muhiuddin’s father) and chose him as his successor should the family be reappointed to rule Mecca. When Abd al-Mutalib was again appointed Grand Sharif from 1879–1882 due to Ottoman fears that the Al  Awns were conspiring with the British (fears that would come to fruition with the Arab revolt in 1916), Ali Haidar accompanied his grandfather and lived in Mecca for a few years: one of only two brief periods Muhiuddin’s father was to reside in their homeland (Buzpinar 2005; Stitt 1948, 49–54).

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However, with the reinstatement of the Al  Awn line’s rule of Mecca in 1882 with Sharif Awn al-Rafiq, Muhiuddin’s family by the early twentieth century became relatively disconnected from the Hejaz, having adapted to an imperial lifestyle under the watchful eye of the Ottoman authorities at their estate in the Çamlıca district of Istanbul. Nonetheless, the matriarchs of Muhiuddin’s family, such as Sharifa Muzeymeh, continued to administer and control the family estates in Mecca, which provided considerable remittances for the Dhu Zayd patriarchs and their families who were confined to Istanbul. This was especially so after the First World War as the Ottoman institutions that supported the Sharifate families were dismantled, and so much so that it is likely that Muhiuddin’s move to New  York City in 1924 was financed by capital gained from family estates in Mecca, which were ultimately appropriated by the invading Saudi forces after his arrival in the United States. Nevertheless, it is thanks to a legacy of powerful Sherifate women of Dhu Zayd that we can reconstruct such a detailed picture of Muhiuddin’s family history, including their life of diplomacy at the Ottoman twilight. A particularly important source is the memoir Arabesque (1944) written by Muhiuddin’s younger half-sister, Sharifa Musbah Haidar. Although not written for a scholarly audience, Musbah’s memoir provides vivid insights into her childhood and coming of age during a turbulent time, including her family’s appreciation for the arts and music, and often by directly citing sources from her family’s archive.

Imperial Cosmopolitans While confined to Istanbul, Muhiuddin’s father and grandfather were given esteemed positions in the Ottoman government. Ali Haidar served as Minister of Endowments (awqaf ) and as leader of the imperial Senate before he was appointed Grand Sharif of Mecca (Haidar, 1944, 58–59). His first wife, Sabiha Targan, was a Turkish woman from an illustrious family with whom he had four sons, Muhiuddin being their second. Later in life, Ali Haidar fell in love with the family’s English tutor, Fatima (Isabel) Dunn, whose father was an Irishman from London employed by the Haidars. Isabel converted to Islam upon accepting Ali Haidar’s hand in marriage as a second wife, claiming to be the first European woman in history to marry into a Hashemite family and adopting the name Fatima. The head of the family in Mecca at the time, Sharifa Aza, who had taken over the Dhu Zayd estates after Sherifa Muzaymeh died, traveled from

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Mecca to Istanbul to honor the union. According to Musbah ( 1944), her mother Fatima mostly replaced Sabiha Targan as head of the household, and Muhiuddin would refer to her as “mother.” Fatima Dunn also began a tradition of celebrating Christmas in the Sharifate home, with Sharif Ali Haidar taking as much pleasure in stuffing his daughters’ Christmas stockings as he did teaching them how to recite the Quran (33, 57). Embedded within a royal Ottoman society that was connected to the courtly world of the Habsburg-Lorraine and other European monarchs, Sharif Muhiuddin’s home in Çamlıca was something of a cultural pivot point between Islamdom and Western Europe and a roadway for foreign dignitaries and artists. Guests included everyone from the then Sharif of Mecca, Husayn Ibn Ali Al Awn, to touring musicians from the Austro-­ Hungarian empire, the United States, and elsewhere. Even beyond its more formal character, diplomacy between different cultures and intellectual traditions seems to have been a way of life at the Haidar house, reflected in language, education, clothing, food, and hobbies such as painting and music. Having become disillusioned with politics during the First World War, Muhiuddin’s uncle Jafar Haidar immersed himself in music, eventually becoming an accomplished violin maker during leave in Italy after the armistice. Indeed, the family worried how he would get around speaking only Turkish and Arabic, the two main languages of the family besides the English spoken by Fatima and her daughters, Musbah and Safyneh (169). Ali Haidar also increasingly immersed himself in the arts after the war, becoming an avid painter with guidance from a Russian teacher, a certain Professor C.  Feldman, who would eventually settle in New York and reconnect there with Muhiuddin, who was himself an avid painter (Stitt 1948, 264–265). Their house was one of polyglots, with English, Turkish, French, Persian, and Arabic teachers visiting Çamlıca weekly. While Muhiuddin had an English teacher from India named Ali Asgar Efendi, his sisters were taught English by Alice Novotny, the daughter of an Ottoman aristocrat and of “English, Italian, and Hungarian descent.” Amin Efendi, the family Turkish teacher, was originally from Baghdad and had been secretary for their great grandfather Abd al-Mutalib when he was Grand Sharif in Mecca. Their French teacher, Mlle Boutan, would on Thursdays be accompanied by “a Hungarian girl called Eva,” who would teach Musbah and Safyneh dances like the gavotte while Mlle Boutan would play the piano (Haidar, 1944, 52–53). The aunties of the household had reservations about their nieces learning to dance together as a male-female

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couple. They seem to have been the primary Arabic speakers in the household other than Jafar and Ali Haidar, as native Hejazi women who moved to Istanbul after marrying one of the Dhu Zayd patriarchs (45). During the war and following increased political, military, and economic intercession between the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires, Istanbul was entertained by the latest talent from Central and Eastern Europe. In 1916, the Viennese composer Franz Lehar and his orchestra, frontlined by a singer named Milovitch, “feted and admired by German officers and Turkish Beys,” made a series of performances in Istanbul’s Petit Champ Theater. Yet the operettas were by no means new to Musbah, who became an accomplished pianist, “for the music of Lehar was admired and played in every harem, where we would dance to his valses with each other” (98). As Musbah noted in her memoir, many of the family music teachers were Jewish, including music professionals who had fled to Istanbul from Russia after the Bolshevik revolution (230, 242). As Sharif Muhiuddin would later tell The New York Times, he studied cello with a pupil of the famed Bohemian cellist David Popper, learning fingerboard techniques that he would apply to the oud.1 Uncle Jafar, their brother Muhammad, and Musbah herself took violin lessons with a Greek musician employed by the family, M. Antoineadias. Jafar sponsored Antoineadias to travel to Europe to study music, and he subsequently played a key role in bringing touring musicians to the family estate in Çamlıca, organizing impromptu private concerts that were enjoyed by the entire family (Haidar, 1944, 168). Among such musicians was the renowned Polish-American pianist Leopold Godowsky, a good friend of Fatima and Sharif Ali Haidar (18, 238). In fact, it was none other than Leopold Godowsky who was Muhiuddin’s impetus for later traveling to New York City. The Haidar family’s passion for music also propelled them into the world of late Ottoman courtly and classical music. In 1924 after Sharif Muhiuddin settled in New York, the New York Herald-Tribune published a feature article on him, which reported that he had taught himself the oud while growing up in Istanbul starting at the age of eight, thus around 1900 (Pratt 1924). Muhiuddin would later study oud with the renowned Udi Ali Rifat Çağatay and even learned theory from the famous Ottoman musicologist Rauf Yekta Bey before starting to compose études for oud in 1919 that combined his knowledge of both European and Ottoman traditions (Karaca 2001). As Bilen Işıktaş has noted, along with musical guests such as Leopold Godowsky, the Haiders also hosted the renowned Tanburi Cemil Bey, one of the most famous composers of the late Ottoman period

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whose compositions are widely played in conservatories throughout the Middle East today and for whom Muhiuddin would play the cello during the Bey’s visits to Çamlıca (Turan 2020). Sharif Muhiuddin would go on to play Tanburi Cemil Bey’s compositions on the oud for audiences in New York City along with various pieces on cello by Western composers: one of the first instances where Ottoman and European classical music were featured on the same program in the United States (Işıktaş 2020). Ottoman military brass bands and Janissary groups were also an integral feature of Ottoman aristocratic life. While the family waited out the war at an estate in Aley just outside Beirut, Musbah ( 1944) recalled that a local brass troupe of approximately forty men attached to her father’s entourage would play daily in the courtyard, although their rendition of Chopin’s Marche Funèbre was less than bearable. Luckily, Sharif Muhiuddin was present after having accompanied his father to Medina and returned to Aley to wait out the war with the family. Muhiuddin talked to the band leader, “explaining that the piece was a Marche Funèbre, and that it should therefore be rendered slowly, quietly, with great feeling and dignity.” He bought new instruments for the entire band and with his world-class musical training straightened them out: Muhiuddin gently but firmly explained, advised, and praised, till at the end of a few months the improvement in the band was unbelievable. Instead of having to listen to each afternoon a programme of unearthly sounds, all Aley promenaded up and down below the terraced gardens to hear several pieces extremely well played. (116–117)

However, imperial cosmopolitanism started to run its course by the end of the war. The Haiders thought their journey through greater Syria would have ended in Mecca, but they soon found themselves on an arduous train ride back to Istanbul from Beirut with retreating Ottoman and German forces. Adding to their wartime troubles, Ali Haidar came under increasing scrutiny from the Ottoman government with the onset of the Arab revolt. During his time in Medina and Aley, and despite his appointment as Grand Sharif, as an Arab, he was treated with suspicion by his Ottoman superiors who, influenced by the nationalist ideologies of the Young Turk Revolution, ordered him a security detail composed strictly of Turkish officers to spy on him (114). At the same time, people throughout greater Syria and the Arabian Peninsula showed great reverence for Ali Haidar. His Hashemite

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standing granted him the reverence of Arabs from all walks of life at a time when Arab political leadership was uncertain. This included everyone from Maronite monks on Mt. Lebanon to the Emir of Hail in the Arabian Peninsula, and even the great Ibn Saud, who, before deciding to join the Arab revolt, wrote a letter of support to Sharif Ali Haider while he was living in Medina with Muhiuddin (137, 132, 93). A more sinister reverberation of ethno-nationalism, in Aley, the Haidars adopted a destitute Armenian family who had fled Anatolia during the genocide, who remained with them until the formation of the Republic of Turkey in 1923 (141). The Haidars nonetheless remained loyal to the Ottoman government until its dissolution, with Ali Haidar seeing British colonial designs surrounding Sharif Husayn as a much less desirable future for Arabs and Muslims worldwide. Indeed, he expressed as much in a statement given in Arabic to the people of the Hejaz during the war, urging them not to join the Arab revolt and thus give the British, the “enemies of Islam,” inroads to the Holy Hejaz, especially after they had colonized almost every other major Muslim polity from India to the Arabian Peninsula and Africa (Fig. 2.1). However, after the war, and given the political irrelevance of the Sharifs in the new secular republic led by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and the cancellation of their government pay, the Haidars were forced to start selling off their possessions, while Sharifa Aza’s estates in Mecca became one of the only sources of revenue for the family (207). Muhiuddin’s father began planning to resettle the family in the Hejaz, where their family still held property, but they were eventually forced to resettle in Beirut. His sons also started to go their separate ways, with Muhiuddin deciding to move to the United States in June 1924. As Ali Haidar wrote in his diary before Muhiuddin departed: Mohiuddin came into my study and informed me that he wished to leave for America. How strange it is that the more I pray we be kept together, the more do we seem to separate. I realize, however, that his decision is only common sense. What can he do here? We no longer have any value in this country, nor is there any respect for the House of the Prophet. (Stitt 1948, 275)

Despite Muhiuddin’s family tribulations, the legacy of his Hashemite pedigree opened a path to America. Being a living descendant of the Prophet Muhammad, an Arabian Sharif or “Prince,” and an acclaimed musical virtuoso gave him a grand presence on radio bulletins, record labels, and concert programs throughout New York City.

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Fig. 2.1  Statement (August 9th, 1916) written and signed by Muhiuddin’s father in Medina, urging Hejazis not to join Sharif Husayn’s revolt and thus align themselves with British colonial designs. (University of Leiden Or. 12. 982)

To the Big Apple “Something New In Melody Comes to Town” read the title of a New York Herald-Tribune article written by Marie Pratt, who reported on a gathering of musicians that occurred in June of 1924 at the residence of Leopold Godowsky in Manhattan. “From the ancient city of Mecca comes a new genius to New York, a distinguished guest welcomed by the masters of music of the West, and whose advent it is said by some critics will mark a renaissance in the melodies of the Orient of much importance to all students of the musical art and its many votaries” (Pratt 1924).

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“The importance of this gathering can hardly be overemphasized,” Pratt continued, not in the least because some of the most renowned performers of Western classical music in the United States had gathered to welcome Sharif Muhiuddin. Among the others were violinists Fritz Kriesler, Jasca Heifitz, and Misha Elman, who at the party were treated to an oud recital given by Sharif Muhiddin that lasted over two hours, where he played an oud made by the renowned Nahat family in Damascus–perhaps where he purchased it on his way back to Istanbul from the Hejaz a few years earlier (Fig.  2.2). Misha Elman requested an encore of Muhiuddin’s original caprice-rhapsody and wanted to know if it could be transcribed for violin, but Godowsky insisted that it would be “a technical impossibility to reproduce upon the violin the melodies they just heard.” As such, Pratt reported on Muhiuddin’s technical innovations for the oud, noting that “the method of fingering and striking the strings is so complicated as to be dazzling. It is claimed that the sheriff has done for the oude [sic.] what Paganini did for the violin–made possible its universal use as a solo instrument” (Pratt 1924). Muhiuddin told his audience that his innovations made the ud “perfectly adaptable to Western music” even though it was best suited to “oriental” melodies. Indeed, such a gathering was a segue from Muhiuddin’s life during the Ottoman twilight, when he had gotten to know Leopold Godowsky in his own home at Çamlıca as a young boy. Muhiuddin seems to have made significant further impressions on the Polish-American pianist during the 1920s, who dedicated his 1927 arrangement of Franz Schubert’s “Hedge Rose” to “Prince Mohamed Muhiuddin” (Godowsky 1927). It appears that his upbringing at the Dhu Zayd residence in Çamlıca was a doorway to more elite American political circles as well. After his arrival in 1924, Muhiuddin told The New  York Times that he had been hosted by the sons of former United States President Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt, Archibald and Kermit Roosevelt: I have always planned to visit America, and now at last I have been able to realize this most cherished wish. Although I have been here but a short time I already have had an opportunity to appreciate in full your proverbial hospitality and have not enough words of thanks for my American friends, ­especially to Mr. Kermit and Mr. Archie Roosevelt, for the most cordial reception they have given me.2

As Archibald Roosevelt Jr., who would go on to serve as a CIA operative in Baghdad and Istanbul, recalled of Muhiuddin from his childhood:

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Fig. 2.2  Photos and illustrations of Muhiuddin from The New  York Herald Tribune, 1924. The oud is Muhiuddin’s own illustration, depicting the instrument he brought to New York made by the Nahat family of Damascus

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We all loved Prince ‘Mooi,’ as we called him […] my father made him feel at home, taking him out in his sailboat and singing “Abdullah Bul-Bul Ameer,” one of the ditties in the Groton School songbook dating back to the time of the Russo-Turkish wars of the late nineteenth century. […] most of the time he spent playing his oud, the Middle Eastern lute, which he hoped to popularize in the United States. I could hear him play mysterious oriental tunes in the evening in the guest room, and sometimes we would sit together on the porch and talk, after a fashion, about his homeland. My father managed to get him a show in Carnegie Hall, but unfortunately, in that day before microphones, the oud just didn’t make enough noise and Prince Mohiuddin eventually went home to Baghdad, where we were to meet many years later. (Roosevelt Jr 1988, 14–15)

As Richard M.  Breaux (2019) has noted, Muhiudin’s arrival in the United States was precisely at a time of increasing legal discrimination against immigrants from former Ottoman territories with the Johnson-­ Reed Act of 1924. Nevertheless, Muhiuddin’s imperial diplomatic connections, which helped cultivate a socially and musically virtuosic persona, apparently offered him a relatively easy passage through the immigration system with connections to elite families such as the Roosevelts, while he was frequently invited to attend horse shows and illustrious banquets for politicians, foreign dignitaries, police commissioners, and others throughout the New  York City metropolitan area. Yet contrary to Archibald Roosevelt Jr.’s recollection, music entertainment during the roaring twenties was literally defined by the invention of the electric microphone, which facilitated Muhiuddin’s performances for early radio stations and American record companies. One of the most striking aspects of the extant primary sources concerning Sharif Muhiuddin’s career in the United States is that, like Marie Pratt’s article for the Herald-Tribune, they all emphasize his Hashemite identity and his connection to the city of Mecca, hardly ever mentioning the fact that he was born and raised in Istanbul. The exotic title of Sharif or “Prince” was perhaps well timed for audiences in New York during the roaring twenties, a place and time that would define American modernity. Much of this modernity was characterized by a consumer culture that fetishized exotic stereotypes of foreign peoples and places, with orientalist imagery and motifs becoming lucrative marketing strategies, not to mention the proper noun “Mecca” becoming a synonym for popular consumer destinations (Edwards 2000). Orientalist trends were also reflected in the performing

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arts with New York groups such as the Denishawn Dancers, whose leader Ruth St. Denis’s choreography was, among many things, inspired by caricatured  advertisements of the Egyptian Deities cigarette company (St. Denis 1939). Ever since the theatrical troupe led by Syrian playwright and songwriter Abi Khalil al-Qabani captivated the American imagination at the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, circus-like performances of “hoochiecoochie” belly dancing and exotic portrayals of harem life were widespread in the United States by the time Sharif Muhiuddin arrived (Khalaf 2018). The purchase of orientalist tropes in American entertainment culture was contemporary with demeaning tropes regarding African Americans and other minority communities in the 1920s, which was both the Jim Crow era and a period of heightened French and British colonization in Palestine, Syria, and Lebanon: former Ottoman lands. Thus, it is no coincidence that American pop music writers such as Abner Silver and Alex Gerber wrote music that played into both orientalist and black-face minstrel trends, including the songs “Give Me the Sultan’s Harem, Won’t You Give That Harem to Me” (1919) and “Who Discovered Dixie” (1919). There is undoubtedly a correlation between the global rise of ethno-­ nationalism, state bureaucracies increasingly organizing governance on principles of racial discrimination, and stereotyping in modern entertainment as mutually reinforcing phenomena, a dovetail that shaped modern notions of musical cultures based around autonomous ethnic identities. In a sense, a career that mirrored Sharif Muhiuddin’s during the 1920s was that of Ruth St. Denis, an American pioneer of modern dance whose caractured performances of “traditional” Japanese, Egyptian, and Indian peoples–which often involved recoloring her skin–were received with resounding applause when the Denishawn Dancers toured Asia during the 1920s, including by the renowned Indian nationalist Rabindranath Tagore (St. Denis 1939, 267). While Armenian, Jewish, Arab, Greek, and Turkish immigrants to America from the Ottoman empire during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries brought rich musical traditions with them, the global purchase of orientalist caricature and fantasies of harem life in staged performance created a diverse marketplace that a range of artists of varying backgrounds exploited, including many Middle Eastern immigrants (Rassmusen 1992). Sharif Muhiuddin would have been acquainted with Ruth St. Denis, as they both performed at the same event on multiple occasions after the Denishawn Dancers returned from their tour of Asia. One was a reception commemorating the ascension of King Fuad of Egypt in October 1930 at the Hotel Ambassador, where Muhiuddin played a number of pieces on cello.

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In her memoirs, Musbah Haidar ( 1944) railed against the commercial purchase of orientalism in the West. “The Westerner’s mind runs riot when it thinks of Eastern Harem life!” she wrote. “Scandal mongers and sensation writers who could NEVER penetrate into that well-bred and exclusive circle have written highly-coloured versions of Harem life, which could have only existed in their fevered imaginations.” Had any Westerner actually been given the near-impossible privilege of visiting an Ottoman harem, where highly educated polyglot women played Chopin on the piano and dined on the finest Middle Eastern and European cuisines, “they would have then seen for themselves how false and exaggerated their ideas were of ‘Life Behind the Veil’!” (167). And yet, Sharif Muhiuddin’s family history perhaps more aptly explains why he consistently identified as an Arab from the city of Mecca, rather than the title being merely a production of America’s orientalist gaze. Given that his family was undermined and coerced from Istanbul by the modern Turkish ethno-state, Muhiuddin perhaps had few other places to call home when he moved to New York, not to mention that the family estates in Mecca were one of their only sources of revenue at the time. The memory of being stationed with his father in Medina during the First World War was also undoubtedly fresh in Muhiuddin’s mind. Furthermore, and unlike artists who exploited the popular purchase of orientalism, Muhiuddin seems to have spent most of his efforts performing the oud and cello in social circles such as those described by Marie Pratt in the Herald-Tribune: practitioners and audiences of modern European classical music, while primarily collaborating with musicians who were European and Middle Eastern immigrants. Thus, like his family’s previous life in Çamlıca, Muhiuddin’s Dhu Zayd pedigree continued to offer access to the social spheres of classical music while being a mark of royal prestige at events and concerts in New York City. During December of 1928 and 1929, Sharif Muhiuddin performed two historical debuts at Town Hall in Manhattan featuring performances that were perhaps the first time American audiences were introduced to the oud on a stage of that size. Built in 1921, Town Hall was also a center for the Women’s Suffrage movement and a hub for The League of Political Education. Other performers at the Town Hall in the late 1920s included Paul Robeson, Andres Segovia, and Pablo Casals. In addition, the venue hosted Muhiuddin twice during December of 1928 and 1929, who played a dual program featuring both cello and oud while accompanied by Emmanuel Bey on piano. “Arabian Prince in Recital. Mohi-ud-din, Son of

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a Former Emir of Mecca, Delights Audience,” read a review in The New York Times of his December 1928 performance. “His most interesting exhibition” of the show, which included cello pieces by Camile Saint-­ Saens, David Popper, Bach, and others, was Muhiuddin’s original solo compositions performed on the oud, including his “Capriccio,” “Samai Farahfazeh,” and “Running Child.”3 For his December 1929 performance at Town Hall, Muhiuddin also performed Tanburi Cemil Bey’s “Samai Shad Araban” on the oud and Leopold Godowsky’s “Larghetto Lamentoso” on the cello: the music of two composers equally important to the development of modern European, Turkish, and Arabic conservatory music whom Muhiuddin knew on a personal basis.4 As a cellist, Muhiuddin took countless gigs with various groups in venues throughout New  York, collaborating mostly with European immigrant musicians. He performed as a guest artist for the New York Chamber Music Society founded by Carolyn Beeb and became close to Ottokar Cadek, the Society’s first violinist (see Kozenko 2013, iv–v).5 Muhiuddin also performed for church benefit concerts organized by the St. Marks Professional Woman’s Club as well as at the memorial service for late great Arab-American novelist Khalil Joubran in 1931.6 He also founded his own group, “The Muhiuddin Trio,” which included pianist Karel Leitner from Czechoslovakia and violinist Sandu Albu from Romania, who would later teach for a time at the music conservatory Muhiuddin helped establish in Baghdad. Muhiuddin, Sandu, and Karel performed at various venues and occasions, including at an exhibition for Czechoslovakian folk art at the Brooklyn Museum and live on WGBS radio for the United Hospital Fund.7 As an active musician in 1920s America, Sharif Muhiuddin’s career directly intersected important developments in the early history of American radio broadcasting, including some of the earliest music entertainment programs featured on NBC (National Broadcasting Corporation), where he performed cello selections by Dvořák in 1927.8 In addition to the Muhiuddin Trio’s performances on air, Muhiuddin also joined the Ben Barzelay Trio for a broadcasted performance at the Lewisohn Free Chamber Music series at Hunter’s College, an influential live concert series in New  York City during the 1920s broadcasted by RCA (Radio Corporation of America). “These foreign musicians rank among the finest in the country” stated The Boston Globe about the Trio’s performance.9 Muhiuddin was also likely the first person to play the oud on American national radio, performing in 1928 for The Music Map of the World

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program on WRNY’s Edison Hour, considered to be a groundbreaking radio station and program during the late 1920s. The Music Map was an early precursor to world music, and during the 1920s was considered the first broadcast program attempting to introduce wide American audiences to music from around the globe.10 A solo performance by Muhiuddin of six oud compositions was featured on the day The Music Map showcased music of “the Near East.” It was a program that otherwise featured orientalist repertoire performed by the Edison Ensemble by composers such as Rimsky-Korsakov, Tchaikovsky, and Strauss. Similarly, the program notes, written by musicologist George W. Chadwick and published by the Edison Company, reflect more widespread orientalist views of the Near East in American popular and scholarly consciousness that fetishized difference. In short, “Near Eastern” music was ironically described as a product of the ancient past and having no formal methods of transmission.11 However, many reviewers in the press stated that Muhiuddin’s performance was the only authentic aspect of the program, while others characterized his musical innovations on the oud as an improvement on the lute, rather than being an archaic “origin” of the Western instrument.12 Another important dimension of Sharif Muhiuddin’s American career was his performances for early American record companies. Between 1925 and 1927, Muhiuddin recorded approximately fourteen 78 rpm records with Columbia and the Maloof company, the latter owned by a famous Syrian-American pianist named Alexander Maloof who also achieved widespread notoriety during the early twentieth century (Breaux 2019). Ostensibly because of his association with Alexander Maloof’s record label, which he made recordings for in early 1925, the continued importance of his Arab Hashemite title, and perhaps even because he made the recordings using his Nahat oud from Damascus, the Columbia company placed Sharif Muhiuddin in their “Syrian-Arabic” catalog when he recorded for them in 1927, rather than in their “Turkish” catalog (Spottswood 1990, 2488–2489). “Prince Muhammad Muhiuddin” is written in Arabic on the labels of both his Columbia and Maloof releases  (Fig. 2.3). These were sold at record stores such as that of A.  J. Macksoud at 88 Washington Street in Southern Manhattan and advertised to dealers nationwide in trade publications such as The Talking Machine World (1928): “Prince Mohiuddin, a lineal descendant of Mohammed, is recording exclusively for the Columbia Syrian-Arabic catalog. He plays native airs on the oud, a sort of mandolin”.13

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Fig. 2.3  78  rpm releases by Sharif Muhiuddin produced by Columbia (left, 1928) and Maloof (right, 1925). (Courtesy of Mohammed Al-Mughni and Ahmad AlSalhi)

Conclusion: Obscured by Nations “Everything in life is transitory,” reads an inscription on a tomb in Thessaloniki containing the great Sharif Ghalib, Muhiuddin’s great-great-­ grandfather and a man who was sought by Napoleon Bonaparte and later dispatched by Muhammad Ali (Stitt 1948, 25). Indeed, it was the continued transitory fortunes of his family legacy that obliged Muhiuddin to leave America in 1932. As noted above, throughout the 1920s, there was written and vocal support on the part of various Muslim political organizations that Sharif Ali Haider should be reinstated as Grand Sharif of Mecca, thus restoring the former glory of Sharif Ghalib (Stitt 1948, 282–283). In December 1924, The New York Times published an article on the future of global Muslim political leadership while consulting the newly arrived Muhiuddin, who told reporters he was certain that his father would be appointed as Emir of Mecca and was looking forward to returning to the Hejaz to help initiate reforms inspired by his experiences in America.14 However, in 1926, after leaving Istanbul with the intent to attend the first Islamic World Congress at Mecca and move their family there, Ali Haidar was ultimately denied entry to the Hejaz by the nascent Saudi government, which by then appropriated the Dhu Zayd family estates and was taking no chances of letting them resettle (Musbah, 1944, 56–57). When

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he left Istanbul never to return, Ali Haidar was accompanied by a police escort so he could wear the traditional garb of the Meccan Sharifs, as all “traditional” Islamic garb had been outlawed by the secular Turkish state. When arriving in Egypt to continue down the Red Sea to Jeddah, he was nearly denied entry by British customs officers, who accused him of being a Bolshevik. “I am a Hejazi” was his response to their accusations (Stitt 1948, 294–297). Upon his arrival in Jeddah, Ali Haidar was not even permitted to deboard the steamship (297). The experience of his father represents how Muhiuddin’s family fabric, nested within the cosmopolitan spheres of Ottoman imperial diplomacy, became trapped and divided by geopolitical reconfigurations during the formation of the modern Middle East. Ali Haidar’s tribulations over his clothing in Istanbul and denial of entrance at Jeddah are also symbolic of how their family became trapped between the hardening ideological borders of the modern world: the cultural orthodoxies of ethno-nationalism and religious fundamentalism. If 1926 marks the year that Ali Haidar vacated Istanbul only to be denied entry to his ancestral home in Mecca, then it also, not coincidentally, marks the year that Sharif Muhiuddin filed a Declaration of Intention with the U.S.  Department of Labor to become a citizen of the United States and thereby renounce “forever all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty, and particularly to the present government of Turkey” (Breaux 2019). Muhiuddin’s two younger brothers remained in Istanbul and accepted Turkish citizenship, while his older brother, Abd al-Majid, became the minister to the Court of St. James for Transjordan, later the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. The century-long squabble between the Dhu Zayd and Al Awn families had come to an end, and Muhiuddin cultivated a relationship with his distant cousins ruling Iraq after he left the United States, accepting an invitation from king Ghazi Bin Faisal to help establish and direct the first modern national music conservatory in Baghdad during 1936. While hopes of helping his father pioneer education and reform in the Hejaz were never realized, Muhiuddin certainly did so in Iraq and then later in the Republic of Turkey, where he resettled in 1948. Sharifa Musbah Haidar eventually settled in London, became an author, and accepted British citizenship. Sharif Ali Haidar, the last Ottoman emir of Mecca, died from bronchitis beside Fatima Dunn in Beirut in 1934. Instead of becoming an American citizen, Muhiuddin appears to have departed New York in 1932 to be with his father in Lebanon as his health declined, thus concluding his early career from the Ottoman twilight to the roaring twenties.

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Perhaps it is ironic that Sharif Muhiuddin’s early career, and indeed much of his family history, would become obscured by modern nations, for he himself believed in enlightenment ideals regarding the universality of the arts as a transcendent force. As such, I conclude this essay with a statement Muhiuddin dictated to The New York Times after arriving in the United States in 1924, which illustrates his philosophy: To my mind, art is above everything else. It has always been superior. Far from having patrons, it has servants. Before art there are no kings, presidents, princes or noblemen. Everyone who needs art loves it and serves it. Although at one time kings and princes were the exclusive servants of art, it should be a source of rejoicing to know that now its power and appeal have become general. I hope that a time will come when all of humanity will become the real servants of art, for then alone will it have reached the peak of progress.15

As someone raised as one among princes and noblemen, who, in less than a decade, went from standing with his father in Medina during a war that would determine the fate of the Islamic holy land and the wider Middle East to performing as a musical virtuoso in concert halls and studios throughout New York City, it seems that many things in life except the arts were indeed transitory for Sharif Muhiuddin. Acknowledgements  I am indebted to Ahmad AlSalhi, Lisa Kozenko, Muhammad al-Mughni, and Temma Hecht for their help in procuring primary sources for this article. I also extend my gratitude and thanks to Bilen Işıktaş, Scheherezade Qassim Hassan, Simone Salmone, Jonathan Ward, Richard M.  Breaux, Münir Beken, and A. J. Racy.

Notes 1. “A Descendant of Mohammed Lives in New  York City,” The New  York Times, August 24th, 1924, 8. 2. “A Descendant of Mohammed Lives in New  York City,” The New  York Times, August 24th, 1924, 8. 3. “Arabian Prince in Recital,” The New  York Times, December 14th, 1928, 37. 4. “Prince Mohi-ud-din Heard on Oud,” The New  York Times, December 11th, 1929, 34.

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5. I thank Liza Kozenko for providing me with the Chamber Music Society’s Sunday Salon’s program from 1926. 6. “Church Women Hold Benefit Musicale,” The Brooklyn Citizen, March 15th, 1929, 3; Brooklyn Life and Activities of Long Island Society, May 4th, 1931. 7. The Brooklyn Museum Quarterly, 14:1 (January, 1927), 31; “Display Ad 45,” The New York Herald-Tribune, January 5th, 1926, 20; “Radio Review, Ben Gross Announcing,” Daily News, January 28th, 1930, 30. 8. “Czecho-Slovakian Program Tomorrow at 12:15 p.m.,” Courier News, February 11th, 1927, 16. 9. “Radio Program Schedule for Today,” The Boston Globe, December 23rd, 1925,18. 10. “Sherif On the Air,” The Brooklyn Citizen, February 19th, 1928, 9. 11. The Music Map of the World (New York, NY: The New  York Edison Company, 1928), 14–15. 12. ‘Sherif On the Air,’ The Brooklyn Citizen, February 19th, 1928, 9. 13. ‘Featured Sonora Line,’ The Talking Machine World, April 1928, 70. 14. “Congress of Islam May Re-Establish Caliphate,” The New  York Times, December 7th, 1924, 12. 15. “A Descendant of Mohammed Lives in New  York City,” The New  York Times, August 24th, 1924.

References Abbas, Habib Zahir. 1994. Al-Sharif Muhi al-Din Haydar wa tilamidhatuhu: dirasah, mudawwanat, tahlil. Baghdad: Dar al-Hurriyah lil tiba‘ah. Blin, Louis. 2020. France and the First Saudi State. Qira’at No. 14 (January). King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies. Breaux, R.M. 2019. Prince Mohiuddin: King of New York and the King of the Modern Oud. Midwest Mahjar, July 15. Accessed June 26, 2022. http://syrianlebanesediasporasound.blogspot.com/2019/07/prince-­mohiuddin-­king-­ of-­new-­york-­and.html. Buzpinar, Ş. Tufan. 2005. Vying for Power and Influence in the Hijaz: Ottoman Rule, the Last Emirate of Abdulmuttalib, and the British. The Muslim World 95 (1): 1–22. Cevher, Muharrem H. 1993. Şerif Muhiddin Targan: hayatı, besteciliği, eserleri. ̇ Izmir: Ege Üniversitesi Basımevi. Chabrier, Jean-Claude. 1978. Un réformateur du ‘Ū d: Şerif Muhiddin. In Quand le crible était dans la paille: Hommage à Pertev Naili Boratav, ed. M. Nicolas and R. Dor, 133–150. Maisonneuve et Larose. Dahlan, Ahmad Ibn Zayni. (1888 [h. 1305]). Khulasat al-kalam fi bayan umara’ al-balad min zaman al-Nabi ila waqtina hadha. Al Gamaliya, Egypt: al-­ Matba‘a al-Khayriyya.

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Edwards, Holly. 2000. A Million and One Nights: Orientalism in America, 1870–1930. In Noble Dreams, Wicked Pleasures: Orientalism in America, 1870–1930, ed. Holly Edwards. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press in Association with the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute. Freitag, Ulrike. 2020. A History of Jeddah: The Gate to Mecca in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Godowsky, Leopold. 1927. Schubert Songs. New York: Carl Fischer Inc. Haidar, H.R.H. Princess Musbah. 1944. Arabesque. London: Hutchinson & Co. Hassan, Scheherazade Qassim. 2022. The Social Space of Music Traditions in Baghdad Before and After Destruction. Ethnomusicology 66 (1): 1–20. Iannuzzelli, F. (2019). The Origins of the Iraqi Oud Generation. Musilogue, (February), 1–11. Accessed December 16, 2021. http://musilogue.com Işıktaş, Bilen. 2018. Peygamber’in Dahi Torunu: Şerif Muhiddin Targan. Istanbul: ̇ Istanbul Bilgi Üniversitesi Yayinlari. ———. 2020. Şerif Muhiddin Targan: A Virtuoso Who Joined East and West on the Same Stage at the End of the Nineteenth Century. In The Relationship Between Art and Politics in the 19th Century Ottoman Empire: Institutionalization, Change, and Continuity, ed. Ayşegül Komsuoğlu, Hikmet Toker, and Federica Nardella. Istanbul: Istanbul University Press. Karaca, S. (2001). Şerif Muhiddin Targan. CD Liner Notes. Kaf Müzik. Khalaf, Taysir. 2018. Min Dimashq ila Shikaghu, Rihlat Abi Khalil al-Qabani ila Amrika, 1893 (From Damascus to Chicago, Abi Khalil al-Qabani’s Journey to America, 1893). Abu Dhabi: Dar al-Suwaydi. Kozenko, L. 2013. The New  York Chamber Music Society, 1915–1937: A Contribution to Wind Chamber Music and a Reflection of Concert Life in New  York City in the Early 20th Century. PhD dissertation, City University of New York. Lowe, Michael Christopher. 2020. Imperial Mecca: Ottoman Arabia and the Indian Ocean Hajj. New York: Columbia University Press. Pratt, M. (1924). Something New in Melody Comes to Town. The New  York Herald-Tribune, August 24, SMA7. Provence, Michael. 2017. The Last Ottoman Generation and the Making of the Modern Middle East. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rassmusen, Anne K. 1992. ‘An Evening in the Orient’: The Middle Eastern Nightclub in America. Asian Music 23 (2): 63–88. Roosevelt, Archibald, Jr. 1988. For Lust of Knowing: Memoirs of an Intelligence Officer. Boston: Little Brown and Company. Rutter, E. 2015 [1928]. The Holy Cities of Arabia. Arabian Publishing Ltd. Spottswood, Richard K. 1990. Ethnic Music on Records: A Discography of Ethnic Recordings Produced in the United States, 1893–1942: Volume 5: Mid-East, Far East, Scandinavian, English Language, American Indian, International. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

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St. Denis, Ruth. 1939. An Unfinished Life, An Autobiography. Brooklyn: Dance Horizons. Stitt, George. 1948. A Prince of Arabia: The Emir Shereef Ali Haider. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd. The Music Map of the World. 1928. The New York Edison Company, pp. 14–15. Thesiger, Wilfred. 2007. Arabian Sands. New York: Penguin Group. Turan, N.S. 2020. The Prodigious Descendant of the Prophet: Şerif Muhiddin Targan, Modernization, Individualization, Virtuosity: An Interview with Bilen Işıktaş. Maydan, January 29. Accessed January 4, 2022. https://themaydan. com/2020/01/the-­prodigious-­descendant-­of-­the-­prophet-­serif-­muhiddin-­ targan-­m odernization-­i ndividualization-­v irtuosity-­a n-­i nter view-­w ith-­ bilen-­isiktas/ Urkevich, Lisa. 2015. Music and Traditions of the Arabian Peninsula: Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Qatar. London: Routledge.

CHAPTER 3

Strike an Elizabethan Pose: Early Music Diplomacy—Queen Elizabeth I’s Clockwork Organ Gift to the Ottoman Court Hooda Shawa

In 1599, England’s Queen Elizabeth I dispatched a most unusual present to Sultan Mehmet III of the Ottoman Empire. The present, sent onboard the merchant ship, The Hector, was a golden jewel-encrusted automated musical clockwork organ. At sixteen feet high, the clockwork organ was an ingenious piece of craftmanship and automaton engineering. Built by an English musician and organ-maker named Thomas Dallam, the organ was a self-playing automatic device assembled with a chiming clock, mechanical singing birds and rotating statues. Strategically placed in its center was the bejeweled and diamond- dripping figure of the benefactor of the spectacular gift, a mechanical figure of Queen Elizabeth I, surrounded by a celestial constellation of eight rotating figures (Mole 2012, 161). To ensure that the diplomatic gift arrived in perfect working conditions and to present and perform the clockwork organ gift in a grandiose ceremony

H. Shawa (*) TAQA Productions, Kuwait City, Kuwait © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 M. M. Rijo Lopes da Cunha et al. (eds.), Music and Cultural Diplomacy in the Middle East, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36279-8_3

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in the presence of the Sultan and the court, Thomas Dallam was accompanied by an engineer, a carpenter, and a painter (16). Drawing on Thomas Dallam’s personal diary, which provides a colorful first-person account of his eventful journey from London to Istanbul (1599–1600), this paper explores an episode of early Anglo-Islamic musical encounters and cultural exchange in the sixteenth century. Reflecting on Anglo-Ottoman interactions, the clockwork organ gift presents a pioneering example of musical and cultural diplomacy, highlighting how political alliances were forged, power dynamics were mediated, and strategic economic, commercial and trade relationships were orchestrated. Queen Elizabeth’s mission of mediating with the Orient through music in the early modern era defies the orientalist discourse that would later frame nineteenth century East–West interactions. As a royal state gift, the clockwork organ was used to promote England’s global ambitions through the dramatic presentation of an instrument described as “a great and curious present” (Mole 2012, 5). A triumphant showcase of cultural and musical diplomacy, the English monarch’s state-­orchestrated musical performance at the prestigious and powerful Ottoman Court, reinforces both the power and the pitfalls of politicizing through music.

Elizabeth’s Clockwork Organ, an Automaton of Wonder Throughout his diary, Thomas Dallam refers to the clockwork organ as the ‘organ’, and I use the term intermittingly with ‘automaton’ to describe the clockwork organ as a self-automated object embodying an innate time-keeping mechanism as well as robotic and mechanical technology. The term “automata” is elaborated in Medieval Robots: Mechanism, Magic, Nature, and Art in the Middle Ages (Truitt 2015), charting the development of automata in the Middle Ages, starting with the coinage of the word “automate” by French Renaissance writer Françoise Rabelias in Gargantua to denote a machine with a self-contained principle of motion (97) to surveying automata associations with robotics, science, and craft in the Middle Ages. According to Truitt, “Arabic and Greek courts were known for their automata, which employed a combination of hydraulic, pneumatic, and mechanical technology” (481). The earliest detailed description of an automaton in the Latin West, as Truitt explains, is a water clock sent by the Abbasid Caliph Harun al-Rashid to the Frankish

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Emperor Charlemagne in 807 A.D. Demonstrating, the “artistic and technological superiority of the caliph’s court” (481). The clepsydra, or water clock, is described in the Frankish annals as follows: …contrived by mechanical art, on which the course of the twelve hours was marked by a clepsydra, with the right number of little bronze balls, which would fall into a basin when the hour was complete and make it sound. It also had the same number of horsemen, and they would, through twelve windows, come forth at the end of the hours. With the force of their exit, they would close the proper numbers of windows, which had before been open. (Truitt 2015, 481)

Moving ahead a few centuries, the Latin tradition in European cities and centers produced large, complex astronomical clocks and automata of moving, singing, and speaking figures, as Truitt writes: …in monastery churches, cathedrals, and public squares. Artisans and engineers began to create richly ornamented self-moving machines that incorporated human and animal figures as centerpieces for courtly pageantry or for the glory of the Church. During this period, the elaborate of mechanical devices such gears, levers, and counterweights permitted the fabrication of increasingly complex mimetic machines. (Truitt 2015, 218)

Just as Harun al Rashid’s Abbasid precious water-clock gift was designed to elicit wonder in Charlemagne’s court, Queen Elizabeth’s elaborate musical clockwork organ, as well as the subsequent talking statues, mechanical animals, clocks, and self-moving automata manufactured in Renaissance European cities and courts, were built with the intention to evoke awe. The protocol of gift exchange was an essential part of diplomacy, as Doris Behrens-Abouseif (2014) points out in her exploration of Mamluk Sultanate gift exchange culture, in which dynamics of “power, legitimacy and self-representation” (30) were consolidated between monarchies. Ruling from Cairo (1250–1517), the Mamluk Sultans’ luxurious displays of gift-giving established a celebrated reputation for the Sultanate from Europe to the Far East. Gifts included sending silks, jewellery, and exotic animals to far-flung courts worldwide. However, as Abuseif points out, ultimately, diplomatic gifts served “immediate and strategic interests” (30). Elizabeth’s gift, in this light, held its own strategic and hidden agenda: to seek an alliance with the Ottoman empire against a common enemy, Catholic Spain.

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Background Context: England Turns Turk Failing to secure the pope’s consent to divorce his wife, the Spanish Catherine of Aragon, in order to marry Anne Boleyn, the future mother of their daughter, King Henry VIII established himself as the head of the Church of England. After the death of King Henry (reigned 1509–1547) and the death of his two heirs, his son Edward, then his elder daughter, Mary, the young Princess Elizabeth, assumed the throne in 1553. Facing a turbulent England and a hostile Europe offset by her father’s break with Rome, a Papal Bull was issued against Queen Elizabeth, declaring her excommunication from the Catholic Church. Ever the astute monarch, Queen Elizabeth reached out be to forge alternative alliances and political allies beyond a hostile Europe. Across the Mediterranean lay the Ottoman Empire, the strongest and most powerful superpower of the region, ruled by Sultan Murad and then followed by his heir, son Mehmed III, enticing the English Queen to forge a politically and commercially driven alliance with the Muslim East that bypassed Catholic Europe. This Anglo-Ottoman rapprochement had a historical precedent, as Jerry Brotton (2016) writes in This Orient Isle, stating that cordial Anglo-Ottoman relations had been initiated during King Henry’s reign. A connoisseur of Turkish fashion, King Henry’s Tudor court amassed a collection of Turkish goods: silks, velvet robes, fabrics, cushions, and carpets that decorated Tudor palaces and dictated courtly fashion (8). It was during Elizabeth’s long reign that diplomatic and trade missions underwent an aggressive mercantile enterprise campaign, as merchant ships sailed across the seas to secure lucrative capitulations and trade rights, entering Elizabethan England into a fruitful and longstanding relationship with the Islamic world: the Barbary states in North Africa (modern-day Morocco), the Ottomans (modern-day Turkey) and the Safavid empire (modern-day Iran). Powerful mercantile charted companies were formed by royal command with the monarch profiting from the revenues of the joint-stock enterprises. Queen Elizabeth assigned merchants, emissaries, and diplomats and granted privileges and trade monopolies to her close coterie of privy council gentlemen, landed gentry, and merchant adventures overseas. Companies such as the East India Company, the Muscovy company, the Barbary Company, and the Levant Company established bustling headquarters in trading city centers worldwide. Venice, Aleppo, and Istanbul became flourishing trading posts securing lucrative trade profits

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for the shareholders of the companies, including the sovereign (Picard 2003, 235). To ensure the smooth continuation of profitable English trade concessions with the Ottoman empire and to fend the advances of competing European rival courts to the sublime porte, Elizabeth’s ambassador in Istanbul Edward Barton recommended that a “Curious gift” be sent to the Imperial Ottoman Court. The gift, a royal commission of a fabulous clock-organ automata, was assigned to master artisan, musician and organ-­ builder, Thomas Dallam of Lancashire. The automaton was required to awe and impress the “Grand Signior.” The story of this exchange remains relatively untold, as Brotton (2016) asserts, a story in which cultural diplomacy is expressed through the harmonizing role of music amidst a complex, turbulent, and conflict-ridden political arena (73). As a newly crowned Protestant ruler of England in 1599 amidst “a predominantly Catholic Europe” (Brotton 2016, 73) and navigating the labyrinth of contested European political and religious sectarianism, Queen Elizabeth pushed forth an aggressive foreign policy to establish trade with Constantinople (76). Her coterie of privy counsellors, such as her spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham, viewed allegiance with the Ottomans as a profitable venture, as Brotton explains: “The Ottomans were a powerful empire sympathetic to Protestants that needed to arm and clothe its armies: they were obviously crying out for two of England’s staple commodities: cloth and guns” (78). A flurry of letters between the two courts demonstrates Elizabeth and her counsellors’ shrewdness in establishing links between Islam and Protestantism: Elizabeth by grace of the most mighty God, the only Creator of heaven and earth, of England, France, and Ireland Queen, the most invisible and most mighty defender of the Christian faith against all kind of idolatries, of that live among the Christians, and falsely profess the name of Christ, unto the most imperial and most invincible prince, Zuldan Murad Chan [Murad III], mighty ruler of the kingdom of Turkey, sole and above, the most sovereign of sovereign of the East Empire, greeting, and many happy and fortunate years. (Brotton 2016, 98)

The letter opens with Elizabeth unabashedly aligning her Protestantism with the first cornerstone of the five pillars of Islam, the ‘Profession of the Faith’ (Shahadah), which reiterates that there is no god but God. This opening disclaimer cunningly differentiates her religion from the

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‘idolatries’ of others, those who ‘falsely profess the name of Christ,’ meaning her Spanish Catholic foes. As Brotton (2016) writes, after this opening, the Queen’s letter, “got down to business, asking for trading privileges to be “enlarged to all our subjects in general,” and agreeing that Turks should be allowed “to come, and go to and from us and our kingdoms” (98). The queen’s efforts to support, sponsor and secure lucrative commercial monopolies of Eastern commodities such as saltpetre, sugar, spices, and cloth; pursue the safe passage of cargoes and ships; negotiate trade commissions and tax privileges; ensured profitable ventures for her and her investors, merchant adventures, and sponsors, positioning herself as a pragmatic, global, profit-driven Tudor monarch CEO, not far from the machinations of an aggressive multinational company in the present times. As Brotton (2016) writes, By the late 1580s, hundreds perhaps thousands of Elizabethan merchants, diplomats, sailors, artisans, and privateers were plying their trade throughout the Islamic world, from Marrakesh and Constantinople to Qazvin in Persia. (Brotton 2016, 135)

It is within this cosmopolitan milieu that the 300-ton Levant Company vessel, the Hector, sailed the sea from England to the holy city of Byzantium, now Istanbul, carrying the precious present, what diarist of the time, John Chamberlain, excitedly described as “a great and curious present is going to the Grand Turk, which will scandalize other nations, especially the Germans” (Brotton 2016, 226).

When Dallam Played the Organ Automaton at the Grand Court According to Thomas Dallam’s diary, it was a fine September day in 1599 when he and a retinue of diplomats, merchants and courtiers arrived at the Seraglio (Topkapi Palace) amidst a pageantry of pomp and finery. Dallam describes the procession at the Ottoman court as follows: They rode in gold lame coats. Twenty-eight more went to foot in Blue Turkish style gowns with green silk capes in the Italian style. I wore a handsome cloak of French green. (Mole 2012, 67)

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Dallam then proceeds to set the scene of the imminent concert with much drama; he describes the arrival of the Sultan in a splendid “golden caique” by water (Mole 2012, 70). Dallam witnesses the sudden assembly of four hundred people appearing from a locked hall, all waiting to see the much-awaited gift. When the Sultan finally takes his seat on a great throne, a commanding silence prevails. It is at this precise moment that the magic of music takes place: First, the clock struck twenty-two. Then a chime of sixteen bells started to play a four-part melody. When they had finished, two figures standing on the second story holding sliver trumpets raised them to their lips and sounded a tantarra (fanfare). Then, the music started with a five-part song played twice. At the top, the organ, which was sixteen feet tall, there was a holly bush full of blackbirds and thrushes that sang and flapped their wings when the music was over. There were various other movements that amazed the Sultan. He asked the Kapi Aga if it would repeat the performance. He replied that it would in an hour’s time. (Mole 2012, 70)

The effect of the grand performance, with mechanical singing birds and performing robot-like figurines, enchanted the Sultan so much that he requested a private encore, much to the chagrin of the English ambassador who was waiting outside. As the flabbergasted Dallam was called back to repeat the performance, Sultan Mehmed expressed his pleasure by gifting Dallam a handful of gleaming gold coins. Dallam remained in Istanbul as he was called upon to move the organ and adjust its settings (Mole 2012, 73). Dallam was also granted the privilege of an illicit visit near the Seraglio’s Harem quarters, where he spotted thirty of the Sultan’s concubines playing ball in the palace’s courtyard. Despite being persuaded to stay in Istanbul and enticed with copious amounts of gold and silver, as well as the generous offer of marriage to two wives and a number of concubines, Dallam demonstrated an adamant wish to return to England. Feigning an excuse that he already had a wife waiting back, and after a few skirmishes with the Sultan’s eunuchs, the organist managed to sail for England in December 1599. Laden with reciprocal gifts to Queen Elizabeth from Mehmed’s mother, Sultana Safiye, Thomas Dallam remained in England for the rest of his life. He married, had six children, and lived an illustrious life building organs (Mole 2012, 99).

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Self-Fashioning and Constructing the Cult of Elizabeth An astute and fashion-conscious Queen, Elizabeth carefully curated her image for global consumption. As Matthew Dimmock writes in Elizabethan Globalism: England, China and the Rainbow Portrait, “the queen’s carefully modulated image was instrumental in communicating her fame to “euerry forraigne Nation.” “Her image, adorned by jewels and rubies” was carried by her diplomatic emissaries, merchant adventurers, and sponsored travelers on global expeditions (Dimmock 2019, 236). Whether seeking passages to the New World, China, far-flung islands such as the Molucca, Java, and Indonesia, or sending letters and gifts to sultans, emperors, and tsars to advance her trading treaties and companies, merchant adventures, and profitable ventures, Queen Elizabeth fashioned her image brand to create a cult of Elizabeth as a work of wonder. Festooned in luxurious fabrics, bedecked in iridescent jewels and glistening pearls, voluptuous gowns, elaborate ruffs, and plumed feathers, Elizabeth’s portraits exuberate statecraft, confidence, power, and wealth. Dressed to impress, portraits known as the Armada portrait, the Rainbow Portrait, and the Ditchley Portrait, to name a few, were painted to communicate a meticulously curated image of self-aggrandizement. The Rainbow Portrait, a painting attributed to Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger, showcases an otherworldly Queen, wearing an exquisitely embroidered gown adorned with a mantle of flaming orange satin embellished with surreal-like Daliesque patchworks of floating eyes and ears, symbolizing the monarch’s all-seeing, all-hearing powers (Fig. 1, Gheeraerts, Marcus n.d.). The orange background of her satin mantle enhances the gleaming and glittering effect of gold thread and opulent jewellery. The image emanates an aura of regal power and opulence, reflecting what Dimmock coins “Elizabethan English globalism” to describe an image of a “universal Elizabeth” of “international renown” (Dimmock 2019, 118). He writes: She is of and in the world, wearing the material products of global exchange, festooned in curious figures, patterns and rare colours that seem to lionize the supra-Christian alliances and new commercial realities of the latter half of her reign. (Dimmock 2019, 118)

This cultic Elizabeth is endowed with ordained powers and imbued with what Roland Barthes refers to as “the semiotics of the shower of

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gold” in describing the tradition of using gold to reinforce the power dynamics of court ceremonies (Hall 1997, 110–11.) Gold, as Barthes states, introduces a “theatrical function” and establishes a scenography of “power, wealth; the imperial rite” (Hall 1997, 111). Elizabeth’s semiotics, I argue, are amplified by the power of music, as represented in her spectacular gift to the Ottoman Empire Commissioned by the Governor of the Levant Company. The elaborately carved instrument featured a golden statue of Elizabeth strategically placed atop the clockwork organ, shining as a celestial sun: The base was carved oak. Above it were gilded and painted panel arches. On each side of it were two smaller panel arches, with sixteen fluted and carved pillars. After the second frieze, which was of carved oak, there was a key board. Above was a dial marked with twenty-four hours. There were four towers, one in each corner, each tower supported by sixteen pillars, the whole supported by sixteen pillars, and the whole surmounted by a vase and crescent. In the center of the platform on which the towers stood was a figure of Queen Elizabeth, adorned with forty-five precious stones including diamond with forty-five precious stones including diamonds, emeralds, and anrubies. Encircling her Majesty were eight other figures. On top of everything was a cock with a pyramid on each side and finished with a gilded crescent. (Mole 2012, 101)

The abundance of the culturally strategic carved and gilded crescent motifs embedded in the automaton’s decorative design presents a clever homage by the Elizabethan court to their eastern interlocuters. The crescent, a visual religious symbol of Islam, also features prominently atop a plumed headdress of Queen Elizabeth in the Rainbow Portrait. Currently housed in Hatfield House, Hertfordshire, the diamond, ruby and pearl crescent is prominently perched on the Queen’s headpiece, maybe another self-fashioning maneuver by the Queen to consolidate Anglo-Ottoman relations: It [the crescent] closely resembles the description of the crown studded with pearls and rubies gifted to Elizabeth by Safiye Sultana [Mother of Sultan Mehmed III]. A few years, in 1605, Sultan Mehmed III presented another Ottoman-made crown to another Protestant monarch who sought alliance and protection, in this case Stefan Bocskai of Transylvania, whose armed opposition to Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II led him to be crowned King of Hungary by the Ottoman Grand Vizir. (Dimmock 2019, 244)

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Queen Elizabeth’s meticulously orchestrated image as projected in the Rainbow portrait, regally enrobed in an orange-gold mantle embellished with surveillance symbolism of ears and eyes, showcases the epitome of what Stephan Greenblatt has described as “privileged visibility,” “self-­ fashioning” and a projection of royal power in a dynamic and reciprocal relationship between monarch and subject (Dimmock 2019, 108). Elizabethan’s myth-making of visual imagery continued to be reproduced in the Elizabethan era, and another portrait called The Ditchley Portrait, by Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger (circa 1592), currently hangs in the National Portrait Gallery, London (fig. 1). One of the most iconic images of Elizabeth I was commissioned by Sir Henry Lee in 1592 as part of the lavish entertainments created in honor of her visit to his residence, Ditchley house. A full-length portrait shows the queen in a shimmering white brocade gown standing on top of the world on a map of England. Three Latin inscriptions on the painting read “She can but does not take revenge,” “in giving back she increases,” and a sonnet that describes “the sun, a symbol of the monarch” (npg.org.uk). The cosmic symbols of the Elizabethan cult in her elaborate portraits, as well as the carefully curated oriental fashion references of the Islamic crescent, were mirrored in Thomas Dallam’s intricately designed and manufactured self-automated organ/automata device, as described in his diary: In the middle part of the instrument behind the dial and pipes were nine separate mechanisms, the first being a cock showing the progress of the sun and the moon, positions of the planets. The second was a man in armour, standing on one of the towers, who struck a bell every quarter of an hour. The third was another man in armour on another tower who struck the twelve daytime hours. The fourth was a cock who fluttered his wings and crowed on the hour. The fifth was a chime of bells that could be set to play at any hour. The sixth was for these figures to pay homage to Her Majesty and for her to acknowledge each one by raising her scepter. The seventh was for two trumpeters to lift their trumpets to their mouths and sound them as often as needed. The eighth was for the head to open its mouth and roll its eyes on the hour. The ninth was for an angel to turn an hourglass on the hour. (Mole 2012, 98)

The presentation of a musical automaton version of an English queen at Topkapi Palace, at the court of the most powerful Islamic empire of the time, must have elicited wonder and awe. A coupe-de-force of state

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diplomacy, the spectacular musical organ espoused an Elizabethan worldview of an age that combined science, music, and astronomy in perfect harmony. Newly discovered ideas, such as the sun, not the earth, being the center of the solar system, and the concept of correspondences between the planets and stars and human lives, were paramount in the Elizabethan age. Dallam’s description of the organ’s constellation-like mechanism reiterates the Elizabethan belief in the effects of the celestial stars on earthly matters. It could also be viewed as a manifestation of the neo- platonic concept of the Music of the Spheres, as coined by the Greek cosmology and philosophy, believing that the spheres make musical heavenly sounds as they move in their orbits and constellations. Although Dallam does not give a description of the musical repertoire played at the Imperial court, his account of the automaton’s operation suggests the generation of a musical soundscape of oscillating stars. The orbiting silver statues circumnavigating the central figure of the Sun-Queen Elizabeth project a spectacular display that positions the English monarch at the center of the universe. What better testimony of the presentation of that much awaited climactic encounter between the Sultan and his royal musical gift, than a first-­ hand account of Dallam himself as documented in his travel journal. The Sultan’s reaction of awe and astonishment at the grandiosity of the ceremony is palpable: I went through the door and was astonished by what I saw. I came in, to the right of the Sultan about sixteen paces away. He did not turn his head to look at me. He was magnificently regal, but it was nothing compared with the retinue that stood behind him, a vision that made me think I was in another word. The Sultan sat still, looking at the Present in front of him, while I stood dazzled by the people behind him, four hundred of them. Two hundred were his principal pages, the youngest sixteen years, some twenty and some thirty. They were dressed in calf length coats and matching caps of gold lame, with long pieces of silk around the waist for a bet and knee-length red Cordovan leather boots. Their heads were shaved except for a lock of hair like a squirrel’s tail behind the ear. (Mole 2012, 71)

Dallam’s painstaking attention to detail and colourful description of the pomp and circumstance of the Ottoman reception sets the scene for the moment everyone has been waiting for, the grand performance in

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front of the Sultan. Dallam unfolds a breathtakingly animated account of the occasion: When I got near the Sultan, I bowed my head down to my knees, without my cap falling off, turned my back on him and touched his knee with my breeches. He sat on a rich throne. On his thumb was a diamond half an inch square, at his side beautiful scimitar, a bow, and a quiver of arrows. He sat behind me so he could not see what I was doing. He stood up, and the Kapi Aga moved his chair so he could see my hands. As he stood up, he could not help pushing me forward, since he sat so close to me. I thought he was drawing his sword to cut off my head. (Mole 2012, 74)

Once again, Thomas Dallam demonstrates an astute flair for heightened dramatic tension. The passage alludes to the drama and potential danger of this incredible encounter. The regal demeanor of the Sultan offsets his excitement to see Dallam perform and observe his hands. The tension, however, is amplified by Dallam’s fear of being decapitated, an unlikely event given the extravagant assembly for the occasion as he has described. Dallam’s raconteur, I suggest, demonstrates a witty and slightly comical side to his character as he embellishes the moments before his performance with dramatic descriptive discourse. His allusion to his hands shifts the spotlight from narrating the “Other” to internalizing the “Self” in an incident of self-fashioning. For one fleeting moment, he, the mere commoner, Thomas Dallam of Lancashire, shines amidst all the grandiosities of courtly pageantry in the presence of the “Grand Seignior,” also known as the “Sultan of the World”. For a fleeting moment, he positions himself as the lone bright glaring star in the spotlight amidst a splendid spectacle of power, pomp, and pageantry. The master engineer and device-­ maker demonstrate a brilliant instance of role reversal; it is the Sultan, who gets up from his throne, star-struck as a little boy, to observe the musical automaton in action. The reader of Dallam’s colourful journal waits with bated breath to read what happens next. Dallam further describes his premier debut at the palace: I stood there playing until the clock struck. I bowed as low as I could and stepped away with my back toward him. As I was picking up my cloak, the Kapi Aga came up and told me to go and put the cover on the keyboard. I went near the Sultan again and bowed and shuffled backward to my cloak. When they saw me doing this, they all laughed. I saw the Sultan hold his hand out behind him full of gold, which the Kapi Aga took and gave to me.

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It was forty-five sequins, more than two hundred pounds. I was taken out the way I came, not a little pleased with my success. (Mole 2012, 79)

Although Dallam politely declined the Sultan’s offer of gifting him two wives, two concubines from his Harem, or the most two beautiful virgins in the country, as an incentive to remain in Istanbul, he did manage to get a sneak peek of the Harem worthy of inclusion in his travelogue. Invited to the Seraglio, he partakes in an act of voyeurism “while walking in a little square courtyard.” The sight to behold, as he spots a vision through a grating on two walls, which he describes in glee (Mole 2012, 74): Through them I saw thirty of the Sultan’s concubines playing ball in a courtyard, at first, I thought they were young men but then I saw their hair hanging down their backs in plaits with tasses of little pearls, and other obvious signs, and I realized they were women and very pretty at that. They wore little gold lame skull caps. Around their necks were pretty pearl necklaces and jewel pendants and jewel earrings. They had loose coats like a soldier of red or blue satin tied with a chord of the opposite colour. You could see their thighs through the calf length cotton trousers, snow white and fine as muslin … I stood so long looking at them that the cadet who was showing me around lost his temper. He looked angry and stamped his foot to make me come away, which I was very reluctant to do as it was a lovely sight. (Mole 2012, 75)

What Could Have the Musical Performance Included? Although Dallam’s diary does not disclose details of the type of music played at the court, examples of music of the Tudor period include an array of songs, dance music, Galiards, Pavans, and Fantasias that provide a repertoire that might have amused the Sultan and his court. In her article An Organ’s Metamorphosis, Jennifer Wood states examples of keyboard music of the time that include composers of English organ music William Byrd, John Bull, Orlando Gibbons, Peter Philips, Thomas Tomkins, and Christopher Tye (Wood 2015, 102). According to Dallam’s diary, the premiere of the compositional tour de force concert included a dramatic score that began with a bang of a striking clock, setting in motion sixteen chiming bells and a four-part song while two rotating silver figurines (automatons) blew trumpets

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performing a tantarra (fanfare). The conclusion was a five-part song accompanied by birdsong and fluttering of the wings of mechanical blackbirds and thrushes perched in a holly bush atop the device (Mole 2012, 68). What could the five-part song Music for the noble classes of the Ottoman court have included? The repertoire that would have been familiar to an Elizabethan audience would have included a range of styles by Tudor composers of the age, such as melodic Pavans and robust Galliards. Examples may have included enthusiastic intense notes of a fantasia of John Bull, La Volta by William Byrd, the enigmatic anonymous piece called The Kynges Morisco referencing the Sultan of Morocco, or possibly a boisterous Hunting Galliard by Thomas Tomkins. Collections of a wide selection of keyboard music from the Early English Virginalist school by composers of the Tudor period are to be found in a number of source collections, such as the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book (Wood 100). As Hugh Miller states in John Bull’s Organ Works, English composer John Bull was a favourite composer to the Queen, recognized for his “virtuosity” and “brilliancy” in his virginal compositions (Miller 1947, 25). Whatever the chosen repertoire programmed by Dallam for the delight of the Grand Sultan, it was deemed a superb performance that impressed the Sultan and his court. One can imagine the royal audience on an autumnal September day in 1599 Istanbul, perched in the lush gardens of Topkapi palace overlooking the gleaming Bosporus, being transported on a multisensory journey to the mossy green woods of Tudor England as Dallam operated his wondrous automata. With its ingenious display of science and musical splendour, mixed with surprise and dramatic transformation, the audience must have delighted with its orbiting planetary and star constellations, its rotating statues of armored knights and winged angels, its warbling birds and crowing cocks. Even the likeness of Her Majesty the Queen making a grand royal entrance by raising her gilded scepter must have appeared as an astounding expression of royal power, rulership, and governance. Queen Elizabeth had the astuteness and acumen to send an exquisite example of mechanical engineering, innovation and craftsmanship that would surpass the gifts of competing political rivalries. As Wolfram Koeppe states in Clocks and Automata: The Art of Technological Development, diplomatic gifts to the Ottoman court were often presented and “many clocks formed part of the annual tribute from the Habsburg dynasty to the sultan in Constantinople were made in Augsburg” (Koeppe 2019, 199). The Queen’s gift needed to delight and impress not only its intended recipient,

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the Sultan and his court; however, as a mechanical marvel, its spectacular effect also needed to outshine previous diplomatic gifts, as well as those received from competing ambassadors. Indeed, a reading of Dallam’s account confirms that the musical encounter at the Ottoman court was a triumphant success; trade capitulations were granted, and Queen Elizabeth found an ally in the Ottoman court until the end of her reign. Through Dallam’s wondrous act of theatrical presentation, automaton pyrotechnics, and musical prowess, the gift proved to be an undefeatable act of musical diplomacy.

The Destiny of the Organ, England Turns Away After the death of Sultan Mehmed III in 1603, his successor, Sultan Ahmed I (reigned 1603–1617), supposedly demolished the musical clock because, as (Fetvaci 2012 [2019]) points out, the Sultan viewed moving statues as “idols that must be destroyed” (118). An account of the organ’s destruction at the hand of the Sultan himself is described in the Turkish chronicles Zubdetu’t-tevarih as an act of iconoclasm conducted by Sultan Ahmed I, citing a reference saying, “Like Ibrahim the Friend of God he destroyed that assembly and razed those idolatrous images to the ground” (Wood 2015, 96). While assumptions of rising zealous religious piety during Sultan Ahmed’s rule may partially explain Sultan’s Ahmed defiant reaction and abhorrence of figurative representation, this claim contradicts the Sultan’s patronage of a wide range of artistic productions, traditions and practices during his reign. Sultan Ahmed’s commission of an elaborate picture album known as the album of the World Emperor (n.d.) contains, as Fetvaci describes, thirty-two folios of figurative paintings, calligraphy, and illumination demonstrating the complexity and ambiguity of iconoclasm claims (2012, 27). A more convincing reason, in my opinion, seems to be the burgeoning fault lines in Anglo-Ottoman relations in the postElizabethan age, instigating a shift of English commercial and political interests toward new allies in Europe. After the death of Queen Elizabeth in 1603, her successor, James I, initiated a chapter on diplomatic relations with previously ostracized European powers. Known as the ‘Somerset House Conference’, the Anglo-European peace treaty is documented in a portrait that currently hangs in the National Portrait Gallery, London (Fig.  2, Anonymous n.d.).

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The painting depicts the end of the Anglo-Spanish war after twenty years of hostilities as members of delegations from the English and Hispano-Flemish sides face each other across a long table. Ironically, the Ottoman party is missing from the negotiating table, albeit in the form of a lavish Oriental (Turkish) carpet that is spread atop the table (npg.org.uk). The advent of this new era necessitated an alternative positioning in the post-Elizabethan world with a shift in strategic alliances. The clockwork organ automata, a sacrificial offering in the emerging political climate, may have been the scapegoat of the dénouement of Anglo-Ottoman cultural diplomacy. The death of both the English Queen and the Ottoman Sultan Mehmet the third, ironically in the same year (1603), closed a chapter of dramatic Anglo-Ottoman musical interactions in the sixteenth century that would not take place again until the nineteenth century.

Music, Diplomacy and Power Organ and harpsichord music may conjure up liturgical melodies that are more attuned with solemn fugues and virginals from a bygone past. However, as the story of the wondrous clockwork organ’s journey from West to East has demonstrated, this spectacular instrument has also been a bearer of surprises and wonders, as well as showcasing the power of political showmanship and the cultural breadth of the age. The performance of the organ automaton at the Ottoman court must have appeared to be a futuristic piece of wizardry, misunderstood at the time perhaps, and treated as a cultural anomaly. As an avant-garde artist, Thomas Dallam was venerated by one Sultan, but his art soon lost favor with another. The loss of this remarkable piece of musical automaton ingenuity, an emblem of East and West rapprochement through the interlude of music, is irrevocable and unfortunate. Dallam’s role as a performer, musician, and arbiter of musical diplomacy, as his lively journal reveals, reflects his interest in describing the cultural context in which his music was performed and how it was received by the intended audience. As a political interlocuter, through the soft power of music, his account presents a unique example of musical diplomacy between Elizabethan England and the Islamic world that reinforces the mediating role of music in an often-contested space between East and West. While power relations in the nineteenth century have often been defined by Edward Said as a dominant West versus a subjugated East, as

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argued in his seminal work Orientalism, this paper suggests an alternative narrative to polarized views of East–West relations. The fascinating story of Elizabeth’s gift revisits a forgotten episode of early diplomatic and cultural rapprochement between England and the Islamic Ottoman empire in which musical interactions played an important and vibrant role in shaping and forging strategic political alliances and state policies. Paradoxically, the trajectory of this early state-sponsored Anglo-Ottoman musical diplomacy is also a reminder of the fickle and transient nature of musical diplomacy between state interlocuters. Political alliances swiftly realign according to shifting geopolitical configurations, as demonstrated by England’s post-­ Elizabethan return to a newly founded Eurocentrism, while the burning and destruction of the clockwork organ by Sultan Ahmed I ushered a political rift toward the Ottoman empire’s former ally, England. State cultural and musical diplomacy, as this paper suggests, cannot be disassociated from the changing political world and its power dynamics, and musical exchange, often described as transcending cultures, is albeit intertwined with complex political and historical circumstances. As present-day political developments in a globalized world continue to demonstrate, there is no such thing as permanent enemies or permanent friends; however, the wondrous essence of music, as a transformative tool, remains as constant as the northern star.

References Behrens-Abouseif, Doris. 2014. Practising Diplomacy in the Mamluk Sultanate: Gifts and Material Culture in the Medieval Islamic World. I. B. Tauris & Co. Ltd. Kindle. Brotton, Jerry. 2016. This Orient Isle: Elizabethan England and the Islamic World. Penguin. Dimmock, Matthew. 2019. Elizabethan Globalism: England, China and the Rainbow Portrait. London: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. Fetvaci, E. 2012 [2019]. The Album of Ahmed 1. Ars Orientalis 42: 127–138. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43489770 Fig. 1, Gheeraerts, Marcus. n.d. Queen Elizabeth I (‘The Ditchley Portrait’), Oil on canvas, 1592, National Portrait Gallery, London. https://www.npg.org. uk/collections/search/portrait/mw02079/Queen-­E lizabeth-­I -­T he-­ Ditchley-­portrait?search=sp&sText=Ditchley+Portrait+by+Marcus+Gheeraerts +&rNo=0.

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Fig. 2, Anonymous. n.d. The Somerset House Conference, Oil on canvas, 1604, National Portrait Gallery, London. https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/ search/portrait/mw00166/The-­Somerset-­House-­Conference-­1604. Hall, Stuart, ed. 1997. Representations: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. London: Sage Publications. Koeppe, Wolfram, ed. 2019. Making Marvels: Science and Splendor at the Courts of Europe. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Miller, H. 1947. John Bull’s Organ Works: Music and Letters. Oxford University Press, Vol. 28 (1): 25–35. www.jstor.org/stable/854709. Mole, John. 2012. The Sultan’s Organ: London to Constantinople in 1599 and Adventures on the Way. Fortune Books. Picard, Liza. 2003. Elizabeth’s London: Everyday Life in Elizabethan London. London: The Orion Publishing Group Ltd. The Album of the World Emperor: Cross-Cultural Collecting and the Art of Album-­ Making. n.d. Princeton University Press. Kindle. Truitt, E.R. 2015. Medieval Robots: Mechanism, Magic, Nature, and Art. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Wood, J. 2015. An Organ’s Metamorphosis: Thomas Dallam’s Sonic Transformations in the Ottoman Empire. Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 15(4): 81–105. www.jstor.org/stable/jearlmodcultstud.15.4.81

PART II

Musical Diplomacy: Migration, Diaspora, and Deterritorialised Power

CHAPTER 4

Melodies Heard and Unheard: The Promise and Limits of Cultural Diplomacy Through Music Jonathan H. Shannon

Introduction The growth of interest in cultural diplomacy—the use of cultural tools to promote diplomatic goals—acknowledges at once the potential power of culture to mediate often tense political fields and the failure of traditional diplomacy to achieve its goals alone. While on the one hand we can celebrate examples of cultural diplomacy in such areas as gastronomy, music, theater, and cinema, among other forms, on the other hand we should be careful to note that these varieties of “soft power” (Nye 1990) are typically meant to advance the goals of nation-building and are deeply implicated in neo-liberal practices of consumption. Moreover, they are often implicated in hegemonic and even chauvinistic nationalist ideologies, including those reinforced by “hard power.” In the end, the promise of intercultural

J. H. Shannon (*) Department of Anthropology, Hunter College, CUNY, New York, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 M. M. Rijo Lopes da Cunha et al. (eds.), Music and Cultural Diplomacy in the Middle East, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36279-8_4

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harmony risks devolving into unproductive dissonance. These contradictions should come as no surprise given what scholars have noted for decades now concerning the operations of culture in an age of globalization (Appadurai 1990, Featherstone 2020, Lechner and Boli 2020, among others). In this review, I examine the contradictions of musical diplomacy through a brief analysis of one case study: Andalusi musics across the Strait of Gibraltar, the basis of prior research (Shannon 2015). In relating this case to other efforts at musical diplomacy, I will argue that the promise of “sonic engagement” and bridge-building at the heart of these soft power melodic initiatives often falters in the face of the reality of “hard power” alignments of actual hard power diplomacy. Moreover, while these projects aim to form connections, promote intercultural exchange, and build bridges, they often serve interests that are aligned against their ostensible goals and aspirations, resulting in unequal exchange, restricted flows, and exclusionary practices. These may include tokenism, exoticism/Orientalism, and sentimentalism as well as overt forms of exclusion. One might claim that they do so most when the epistemic fault lines between potential collaborators are most evident. The realization of these limits should not detract from the potential power of music to create new realities on the ground. However, it serves to remind us of the ways music is by force embedded in wider political and economic and social contexts that often resist change. To create conditions for productive engagement and more lasting cultural diplomacy requires, I suggest, not more state-driven, top-down efforts at promoting tolerance and understanding but rather sets of grassroots musical practices that point more toward disruption than toward cooperation. Borrowing from Mark LeVine’s (2017, 2022a) riff on Naomi Klein’s (2000), I propose that “culture jamming” offers one way of attempting to navigate the pitfalls of musical soft power, bringing the perspectives of musical performance and performativity to what Jacques Rancière calls “dissensus” to suggest that musical diplomacy, to be effective, must be a radical, democratic process of empowering voices rather than a hierarchical process of incorporating them into existing epistemic frames. I will conclude with some remarks on how my current research among Syrian migrant musicians in Istanbul and Berlin illustrates the utility of the combination of “culture jamming” and dissensus to create conditions for more reciprocal musical exchange and potentially more democratic participation through revoicing among migrants in an often hostile European context.

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Background: Soft Power, Hard Interests The essays in this volume focus extensively on the role of music in cultural diplomacy in the Middle East and North Africa region. Cultural diplomacy refers to a variety of practices and perspectives that aim to produce “purposeful cultural cooperation” among peoples at the national or subnational levels (Ang et al. 2015, 366). The ideal of cultural diplomacy is the promotion of an “unfettered, perhaps even reciprocal” exchange of ideas and values (Fosler-Lussier 2012, 53). This marks a change from an earlier era of “gunboat” diplomacy toward what US Ambassador to the UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield famously called “gumbo diplomacy”; culture (in this case, cuisine) serves as a means for bringing people together to achieve political goals. Music fits very nicely into this ideological framework of cultural exchange as a model for peaceful conflict resolution, despite the persistence of actual structural conditions of inequality and even oppression, leading some to dismiss such efforts as “disco-ball diplomacy” (Bannerman 2012); that is, all show and little substance.1 As a result, scholars have shown the many possible roles that music can play in promoting diplomatic goals, often as a tool to promote and extend other soft power initiatives tied to nation-building and, as often, regional and international interests. As is well known, culture has often not only been used as a tool to promote intercultural exchange but has also been used to advance nation branding for the purposes of promoting tourism and foreign direct investment in many emerging nations and has also been weaponized to promote broader political agendas, for example, during the Cold War. Earlier and well-studied efforts of the former include the American Jazz Ambassadors program, which sent such luminaries as Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, Duke Ellington, and Randy Weston around the world to promote American culture through the performance of jazz (von Eschen 2009; Monson 2007). It was not lost on many of these performers that they were sent to represent abroad the benefits of democracy and capitalism in a society that granted them very unequal access to both. Dancer/choreographer/anthropologist Katherine Dunham also traversed these tense fields in her work in Europe, Africa, and across Latin America. Her overtly political and anti-racist productions such as “Southland” and “Strange Fruit” got her into hot water with the US Department of State, which did not see her critical approaches to such topics as advancing US foreign policy goals; as a result, she was never chosen officially to represent the United States

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abroad (Hill 1994, 6).2 We might also think about the role of literature and literary festivals, translations, and prizes in promoting cultural diplomacy, although while the lasting resonance of such authors as Hemingway might reveal the strength of this approach, the case of Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988) shows that the situation is not always so straight-­ forward, either for readers or authors, as Asad (1993) demonstrated in his critique of the use of literature in the UK (including Rushdie’s infamous work) as an instrument for maintaining British “core values.” More recent experiments in soft power include what scholars call (inelegantly) “gastrodiplomacy,” or culinary cultural diplomacy that has been harnessed to promote nation building through food (e.g., Farina 2018; Rockower 2020; Zhang 2015). Beginning in 2001, the Thai government sponsored the creation of several thousand Thai restaurants around the world in the interest not only of promoting Thai cuisine but also of enticing European and American travelers hungry for more to visit Thailand and spend their hard currencies there (Lipscomb 2019). Other nations that have embarked on similar models include Korea, Mexico, Peru, among many others. Sports has been a fertile ground for soft power, the obvious case being the Olympic Games but also cycling (e.g., Fry 2015 on the “Lance Armstrong effect”). However, while the Olympic games might promote international cooperation through sport, at the same time, they promote chauvinistic nationalist zeal, often tied to corporate sponsorship. World’s Fairs create the same dynamic of celebration of diversity and nationalist exclusion (let alone imperialist desire; Della Coletta 2016; O’Farrell 2020; Mitchell 1991; Smits and Jansen 2012). Because the planning and implementation of many US cultural diplomacy efforts, including the famous Jazz Ambassadors program, were aimed at extending US influence and imperial power (Fosler-Lussier 2012, 54), claims for the efficacy of cultural diplomacy must then be balanced by an awareness that these various initiatives were often and remain embedded in national and global political economies.3 The musicologist Danielle Fosler-Lussier argues that, in fact, attention to the practice of musical diplomacy “on the ground” can reveal how power is exerted through music, not necessarily how music or musicians exert power within larger political fields (2012, 55). Like gastronationalism, musical nationalism (often the starting point of musical diplomacy) promotes what can be analyzed as touristic, exoticizing or Othering enactments of culture, and, at worse, atavistic, or chauvinistic cultural performances. In all these examples, the interests of artists and activists, on the one hand, and

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nation-states, on the other, may be at odds, and soft power is negotiated through processes of selection, legitimation, and promotion but also exclusion, marginalization, and neglect.

Musical Forms of Cultural Diplomacy There are many examples of recent musical projects that aim to promote greater awareness and acceptance of cultural difference and connection. Among the most prominent are Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Project, the Barenboim-Said West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, and many other musical and philanthropic initiatives around the world. Like food, music is a cultural and embodied substance that can bring people together through listening to and performing music together, what Small (1998) refers to as “musicking.” Music festivals, from WOMAD to the Fes Festival of World Sacred Music, among many others, can promote communities of listeners or what Kapchan (2008a) calls “literacies of listening”; the ear, both as a physical organ and as a metaphor for listening, can be an agent of moral and ethical transformation (see also Hirschkind 2006, 2021). Morocco’s current “culture of festivalization” (El Maarouf 2016; Dines 2020; Fulton-Melanson, this volume) reveals some of these dynamics at play. However, whether this ethical listening creates new moral and political subjectivities among listeners, especially those outside the culture of origin, remains an open question. For example, I am not sure what deeper understanding of Moroccan ‘Aissawa performance by audiences at the Fes Festival of World Sacred Music. The jazz saxophonist Rick Margitza told me that he felt he gained little understanding of Moroccan culture from his performance at the Gnawa Festival in Essaouira since he said he was told to just show up with his horn and play whatever; for him, there was little to no cultural exchange on the stage, and almost none off it (personal communication, 2004).4 Conceptual Problems: Tristes Tropes Many of these musical engagements and initiatives are based on three main tropes: flow, exchange, and bridge-building. The notion of flow assumed greater currency in the aftermath of Arjun Appadurai’s influential essay (1990). However, there are many conceptual problems with the idea that cultural diplomacy creates conditions of cultural flow among parties (especially parties to a conflict). The anthropologist Anna Tsing (2000)

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has argued that scholars who study culture tend to valorize cultural “flow … but not the carving of the channel” that enables the flow (p. 330; cited in Fosler-Lussier 2012, 55) Political interests (national, regional, imperial) fostered the creation of the global ties that enable flows, but usually of resources from peripheries to metropoles, according to Tsing, and not the reverse: they are unequal exchanges (see also Tsing 2011). Anthropologist Stuart Rockefeller further notes that the ideology of cultural flow recapitulates the epistemic foundations and self-understanding of capitalist society; it is in other words a folk theory of how political economy operates in the modern world, analogous to the “invisible hand” of the free market (Rockefeller 2011). Despite the promise of equal exchange, many musical collaborations, such as economic exchanges in the capitalist system, are not reciprocal but unevenly structured to create a semblance of equality while leveraging and in many cases exacerbating difference. Similarly, there are many difficulties with the metaphor that musical interactions can build bridges and promote intercultural connection. Certainly, cultural bridges can be built through musical exchanges. I recall a singularly pleasant moment in a Damascene restaurant in the late 1990s when some French trombonists who had performed at the French Cultural Center showed up and informally played along with the house Arab ensemble, who chose tunes in Maqam Nahawand (similar to a C harmonic minor scale) that allowed them to blend in with the oud, qanun, and violin; it was at times awkward (I have not since heard trombones performing in a traditional Arab ensemble!), but it worked, mainly due to the shared melodic frame of the maqam and the generosity of the musicians. I sensed in those exchanges that there were moments of musical connection and deeper understanding for both the French and Syrian artists, but their playing together was not part of an official program. One might indeed pose the question: to what degree was the success of this encounter a result of it not being a part of an official engagement but rather a serendipitous byproduct of one? At the same time, these same encounters can also raise bridges (as in draw-bridges) between participants and between cultures, offering what are often at best one-way streets leading to cultural appropriation and commodification by powerful interlocutors, rather than reciprocal exchange among putative equals. In addition, the very notion of bridge-­ building arises from a position of power—to invite a crossing over, usually via processes of accommodation to existing epistemic frames. In the

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Mediterranean, this has usually meant adding elements of Middle Eastern and North African musics to existing European musics, creating musical hybrids that carry the name “Mediterranean” but are usually expressions of Eurocentric understandings of the Mediterranean region as one of cultural admixture and hybridity that serve European ideologies of selfhood, as noted by scholars as diverse as Plastino (2003), Bromberger (2007), and Chambers (2008). Cultural Diplomacy Through Music in Spain: Prospects and Pitfalls In what follows, I examine one case of purported cultural diplomacy through music, pointing to the promise (the melodies heard) as well as the limits (the melodies unheard) of this model. I focus on musics from the Western Mediterranean region, specifically those claiming origin and/or inspiration from the musical legacies of al-Andalus. In Performing al-­ Andalus (2015), I explore the intricacies of how the Andalusi cultural legacy is deployed by various actors around the Mediterranean in the quest for cultural tolerance (often captured by the term convivencia) and for profit. Much of this predated the creation of the Fundación Tres Culturas/ Three Cultures Foundation5 in 1999, but this state-driven initiative, cosponsored by the monarchs of Morocco and Spain, created the broader infrastructure for the performance of an Andalusi heritage that was thought not only to capture the essence of medieval convivencia but to pave the way for contemporary versions of living together via—you guessed it—creating the conditions for musical flow, cultural exchange, and the building of bridges among peoples once united but rent asunder by ancient politics. There was and remains great promise in these initiatives, and the Fundación has mounted exhibits, hosted concerts, and promoted the publication of texts that explore the Andalusi legacies in interesting and often revealing ways (related initiatives continue to uncover and explore the Islamic roots of Madrid, the histories of contact and influence across the Strait of Gibraltar, the “dos orillas” or two banks or sides of al-Andalus until the 12th C.). The Foundation also created the conditions for the renewed academic study of the presumed medieval convivencia and its possible modern correlates through funding initiatives, academic programs, and conferences that promoted the growth of networks of scholars and artists in Spain, Morocco, and beyond dedicated to the study and

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performance of the cultures of al-Andalus. In this way, culture (in general) was part of a toolkit for promoting broader national and regional interests, and music was among the more prominent and promoted tools used (along with architecture). Artists such as Omar Metioui, Begoña Olavide, Carlos Paniagua, among many others, rhetorically evoked the power of music to transcend boundaries and borders: of the self, of nations and regions, even of history itself. For them, music’s presumed border-­ breaking and bridge-building powers result from the fact that music requires listening and co-performance; you have to engage with an Other as a co-human being to truly connect and make music together. In Metioui’s discourse (personal communication, 2004), musical collaboration promises to heal historical and contemporary wounds by connecting peoples, thereby spanning boundaries at once historical, cultural, and imaginative. For Olavide, Paniagua, and those on the European side of the Strait, performing Andalusi music was a means for reconnecting with one’s own legacy while also forming deeper ties with neighboring civilizations; indeed, Olavide and Paniagua would eventually relocate to Tangier for several years to explore these possible connections more deeply. For audiences in Morocco, Spain, and elsewhere, the musical cultures of al-­ Andalus and the notion of playing together held the promise of translating experiences across or around barriers. However, there are clear limitations to this approach. For one, the idea of medieval convivencia is itself a modern construction, if not a myth. Coined by Américo Castro in his classic 1948 España en su historia (Castro 1948, 1971), it was a way of reimagining the Spanish present through recourse to an ideology of mutual living together in the past that acknowledged the Jewish and Muslim presence in Iberia, rather than explaining it away as a historical aberration. In an interview in the inaugural issue of the magazine of the Granada-based Fundación El Legado Andalusí, the Lebanese novelist Amin Maalouf asserted, “We know that [the idea of convivencia] is a myth, but in history there are symbols, and to be honest we must recognize that such coexistence between the three religions was marked by tensions, conflicts and even violence, but it has been an important foreshadowing of what we might expect for the future” (Tapia 1999, 18, cited in Viguera Molins 2006, 153–154; my translation). Even if we accept this myth, the essentially top-down model of cultural policy that promotes the “three cultures” ideology flattens an historical field that was and remains unequal.

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For his part, Eduardo Paniagua, founder of the Pneuma record label, issued a recording Puentes Sobre el Mediterraneo (Bridges over the Mediterranean, 2005) that echoes this idea as well: the Mediterranean as a space of bridges and cultural confluences. However, as French anthropologist Christian Bromberger notes (2007), the notion of the sea as a cultural bridge constitutes one of the main gatekeeping concepts of the anthropology of the Mediterranean. Closer examination of the bridges formed through music reveals that they usually offer only one-way access: that is, they offer a bridge for European artists and consumers to come to North Africa and the Middle East, but almost never the reverse. Although Metioui, who has studied in Belgium, speaks three languages with ease and is a successful pharmacist, has little difficulty securing a visa to Europe, his fellow Moroccan musicians, who are less cosmopolitan, find it almost impossible to travel to Europe (legally, that is). The North African and Middle Eastern musicians who perform in Granada tend to be recent immigrants who have settled there more or less permanently or are undocumented, but not visiting artists; only Arab star musicians, including the Iraqi ‘ud player Naseer Shamma, and those sponsored by their home governments, including the Syrian ‘ud player Waed Bouhassoun, are permitted to travel. Others must submit to a tedious and costly application process with no guarantee of being granted a visa. On at least two recordings for Pneuma of the Syrian Al-Turath Ensemble, Paniagua and Metioui found it more expedient to travel to Aleppo for the recording rather than bring the Syrian artists to Spain, which would have been difficult not only financially but logistically because European work and tourist visas were then and remain seldom granted to Syrian artists. Even pre-COVID, musical sounds (and even European musicians, as in the case of Olavide and Paniagua moving to Tangier) could travel across barriers, thereby raising hopes for international understanding and peaceful coexistence. The promise of sonic collaboration has only increased today with new opportunities for virtual performance and collaboration that do not require physical travel—a point especially relevant for musicians from outside the Schengen Area for whom travel to Europe is restricted. Digital collaborations among artists traditionally excluded from Europe, including many from the Middle East and North Africa, have formed important horizontal, “South–South” ties that challenge traditional models of musical performance. The bridges erected and performed by previous generations of musical collaborations often also served to reinforce barriers, whereas digital tools hold the promise to transcend them. However, the extent to

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which newer forms of musical and artistic collaboration not only build bridges but also advance meaningful avenues for cultural diplomacy remains to be demonstrated. This is because the very idea of bridges, such as that of the “three cultures” of the Mediterranean, serves an important political and rhetorical function: to manage the relations among European, North African, and other nations. For European political leaders keen on defusing the tensions surrounding Islam and Islamophobia in a selective “Fortress Europe,” the rhetoric of al-Andalus has become a proxy for a project of managing difference. The notion of convivencia and the trope of the Three Cultures of the Mediterranean have increasingly been invoked to promote pluralism, mutual understanding and tolerance in Europe, while at the same time, European leaders have tightened immigration quotas and greatly securitized their borders.6 Faced with a refugee problem of unprecedented proportions, especially in the aftermath of the Arab Uprisings and increasing immigration from North and Sub-Saharan Africa, and more recent refugees from Ukraine, calls both for opening and tolerance and acts of closure and intolerance have only intensified. Selective anti-immigrant sentiment is on the rise in much of Europe and the United States, leading to Fortress Europe (and Fortress America/MAGA) mentalities and programs. However, Europe is a fortress only for those racialized subjects who reside in nonpreferential regions, typically those outside the Schengen Area although in effect including most of Africa and Asia, but, tellingly, not other European nations. New technologies of surveillance and control, including the FRONTEX and Eurosur initiatives, are merely the flip side to discourses of convivencia and the multicultural and tolerant projects of al-Andalus (Andersson 2012, 2022). In other words, these projects of Andalusian multicultural tolerance are proxies for mostly European concerns with the management of internal and external Others (see also Hirschkind 2021; Rogozen-Soltar 2012a, 2012b, 2017). In the context of the new Mediterranean, with its shifting and securitized borders (Andersson 2014, 2022; Suárez-Navaz 2004), European leaders hope that by containing and controlling the discourse, they might contain and control the populations. The recurrent failures of these policies notwithstanding (see inter alia, Hannoum 2020; McMurray 2001; Ticktin 2011, 2014), the project of “Europe” rests on unequal imaginings of citizenship and belonging and unequal enforcement of regimes of exclusion; the repatriation of Syrian migrants from Scandinavian countries, the vicissitudes of integration of Syrian and other migrants into German society,

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and the relative ease of integration of Ukrainian refugees across Europe are recent examples of the racializing politics at the heart of the project of Europe.

From Convivencia and Tolerance to Culture Jamming Looking back at this case study (which clearly includes a variety of initiatives at all levels), we can see some lines of promise for intercultural communication (“melodies heard”). In some cases, performing music together does promote a sense of (momentary) social and cultural tolerance and togetherness. There can be a sort of musical convivencia as well, even if this concept is largely mythological (Machin-Autenrieth 2020). However, the different approaches, from state-sponsored to grassroots, often produce mixed results, and all share certain elements that undermine the promise of sonic engagement (“melodies unheard”). These include tokenism, exoticism, cultural appropriation, stereotyping, and a sentimental “feel-goodism,” which, like “clicktivism,” seems powerful but usually is not. The flows and exchanges promised in these encounters are uneven, and the bridges built for some are walled-off avenues for others, often spanning deadly aquatic cemeteries for many of their compatriots.7 These ideologies best serve European self-making, in which the mirror of multiculturalism has its limits when confronted with the Other.8 At the same time, it is worth pointing out the agency that many of the North African artists in Spain exercise, often creating beautiful musical exchanges, even cashing in on their cultural capital even if this sometimes means playing “the Moor” in the ongoing pendulum swings of maurophobia and maurophilia in the Western Mediterranean.9 More recent initiatives in digital co-performance across divides also show both the drive and creativity of artists around the Mediterranean to create music together and the importance of collaborations between grassroots, national, and regional agencies to pull this off.10 However, does all of this interchange, however uneven, produce the desired results: tolerance, mutual understanding, and musical and intercultural convivencia? Žižek reminds us that the notion of tolerance, especially espoused in American-style multiculturalism, is a shallow form of respect for otherness that does not actually engage with the deeper issues

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of cultural variation, ethics, and human dignity (Žižek and Daly 2004, 122–123). In fact, according to Žižek, a superficial respect for cultural difference and tolerance of otherness is based in the treatment of others as abstractions, not as actual people—that is, as people occupying the position of Other in an abstract way, “as if they were already dead” (Žižek and Daly 2004, 117). Similarly, Janet Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini, in a study of sexual difference in the American legal context, argue that tolerance usually signifies “a grudging form of acceptance in which the boundary between ‘us’ and ‘them’ remains clear, sometimes dangerously so” (2004, 52). In many musical exchanges under the rubric of “cultures of tolerance” and convivencia, the Arab and North African participants in European curated projects are often musical tokens, at best thought to be authentic carriers of tradition, but more often quite literally instrumentalized as representatives of their “culture” via their performance (and metonymic identification with) regional instruments such as the ‘ud or qanun. Rarely are they featured for their individuality artistry.11 We might even read this as a musical extension of Mbembe’s insights about necropolitics, the capacity of governments to “to define who matters and who does not, who is disposable and who is not” (2003, 27). Tolerance, for Žižek as for Jakobsen and Pellegrini, is a mechanism for distancing oneself from others, not engaging with them. We can see how the more superficial intercultural engagements and musical tokenism promote the treatment of musical others (Arabs, North Africans, etc.) as abstractions and can be a form of musical necropolitics.12

Culture Jamming and Musical Dissensus If the idea(l) of convivencia is undermined by exoticism, prejudice, and possibly necropolitics of European states, where does this leave scholars of music who might nonetheless believe in the power of music to effect positive change? In the spirit of Émile Habibi’s pessoptimist (1985), all is not lost, nor are these types of musical collaborations fruitless. The arts can play important roles in promoting social movements. Musicians, as Cornel West put in in describing John Coltrane, can be not only thermometers who give readings of social temperatures but also serve as thermostats who have the power to raise the temperature (in Schienfeld 2017). However, as lovers of music and as performers and listeners, I fear scholars often overstate the case for music in the absence of analysis of larger sets of

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political economic contexts in which these practices occur (including actual “hard power” diplomacy). In Performing al-Andalus (2015), I drew on Pauline Oliveros’s notion of “deep listening” (2005) to suggest that such listening to and with music might be one way to promote mutual, reciprocal understanding. While I still believe in the utility of this concept, I also have come to understand its naiveté: deep listening requires the precondition of the possibility for reciprocal listening in the first place, something likely not to be found in most musical exchanges held up as models of intercultural bridge-­ building. To enact dialog through musical exchange requires a voicing of subjectivities that, as I have suggested, are limited or squelched in current political-economic structures of great disparities in access to power (what I call the necropolitics of musicking). In a spirit of experimentation, I want to suggest a possible resolution to the dilemma of melodies heard and unheard by joining two analytical concepts: the notion of culture jamming, especially as reformulated by Mark LeVine (2017, 2022a, 2022b), and that of dissensus, as formulated by Jacques Rancière (2010). As initially articulated, culture jamming was a way to resist consumer culture by hacking, jamming, and otherwise disrupting the usual forms of communication, often using memes to subvert corporate ideologies (“subvertising”). As explored by Naomi Klein in No Logo (2000), it is now a principal practice of anticorporate globalization and anti-consumerist activists around the world. Historian and musician Mark LeVine reformulated the term to align it with what musicians understand by the term jamming: getting together and making music. In LeVine’s work, culture jamming is participatory and collaborative, and it is playful. However, it is also radical. For LeVine, culture jamming, ideally “bring[s] artists from different cultures together to create new forms of culture that were not merely hybrids of existing forms and practices, but something new, greater than the sum of their parts” (2017, 114). This coming together should do more than just wage “semiological guerrilla warfare” … but rather attempt to create new ways of conceiving the world that move toward systematic, revolutionary change” (2017, 117). In his now well-known Heavy Metal Islam (2005, 2022a) and in his follow-up study, We’ll Play Till We Die (2022b), LeVine explores this potential in the metal scenes of the Muslim world, revealing not only that “they” do not hate us but that critical grassroots efforts can indeed effect societal and political change. A true culture jam would, in his view, be a collaborative work of coauthorship in which the scholar (in LeVine’s case, the

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scholar-artist) would serve as a producer (facilitator) who brings together groups of artists, activists, and scholars who would not normally have the chance to be in dialog with each other, let alone with an audience (LeVine 2017). Cultural jamming would open a space for alternative voicings that, in LeVine’s framework, can be empowering, even radically so. This is made clear in his most recent work (2022b), in which he explores the transformative power of extreme youth music (EYM) in the context of repressive regimes in the Muslim world. Although he does not draw on Rancière, LeVine nonetheless demonstrates the dissensual potential of music, even (or especially) underground music. For Rancière (2010), true politics resides not in the consensus-building activities of presumed equals but rather in what he calls “dissensus,” that is, the struggle for asserting voices in the context of public debates in which they are typically excluded from the commons. Democratic debate presumes equals when in fact the societies that valorize such debate are characterized by often intense social stratification. Moreover, Rancière argues that the struggle for voice in the public sphere is also an aesthetic struggle, since “it sets out to challenge the received perception of social reality, and to offer alternative expressions for a new perception; thus, art accomplishes the same task as politics, namely, to reorganize the accepted perceptions of reality” (Deranty 2003, 137). Where LeVine calls for forms of musicking that promote new ways of conceiving the world to enable systematic, revolutionary change, these new forms would also imply what Rancière calls the “redistribution of the sensible” (partage du sensible), both a division of and a sharing of ways of being and perceiving in the world, of creating the common sensible, and the commons. In this sense, combining LeVine’s version of musical culture jamming with Rancière’s notion of dissensus provides us with a potentially powerful tool for harnessing the collaborative promise of music with the prospects for social change. This is a more radical notion than deep listening, but it both requires a certain amount of empathy at the heart of deep listening and produces the preconditions for deep listening. In this dissensual view, acknowledging and even embracing the epistemic fault lines, even the epistemic violences that mark and promote cultural difference, might open avenues toward their resolution. The idea of a dissensual culture jamming as form of radical academic-­ musical roundtable will strike some readers as elitist, even Eurocentric; it would be not too far from the European-curated musical collaborations I described (and to an extent decried) above. However, in my current

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research with Syrian migrant musicians in both Istanbul (Shannon 2022) and Berlin (Shannon n.d.), I see this very phenomenon emerging: a coming together of diverse voices to promote not so much mutual tolerance or new versions of medieval convivencia/coexistence13 but a demand for respect and acceptance of alterity.14 Many Syrian musicians (and artists working in other mediums) I met in Berlin have engaged in very public performances, exhibitions, and collaborations, often in high profile venues, to highlight not only their situation as displaced persons and migrants but also to assert their agency and creativity in a German context that typically assigns them the role of victims grateful for German hospitality. In my current research (Shannon n.d.) I focus on how artists such as Wassim Mukdad and Mohammed Abu Hajar are redefining the German public sphere and moving the needle on the discourse of “integration.” They not only perform—Mukdad on ‘ud in a variety of ensembles, Abu Hajar as a rap artist—they also make claims to new multicultural German commons that they have played a central role in forming; rather than accommodating their works to existing epistemic frames (for example assimilationist), they work to expand such frames and even to challenge or subvert them through their performance practice. While initially these and other Syrian artists collaborated with German and other European artists who had privileged access to institutional support and the public sphere—and, importantly, to a public voice—increasingly these Syrian artists are demanding and gaining that privilege themselves, adding their voices to debates about contemporary German and European society that converge on earlier ideals of the public sphere in the Habermasian sense. It is a far cry from the tokenism and exoticism (or Orientalism) that characterizes much musical collaboration in the Western Mediterranean and that characterized many musical interactions in Germany in the early stages of migration. Instead, these Syrians are establishing new frameworks that enable more equal partnerships, asserting their voices (metaphorically and often quite literally in the form of song) in the public sphere.15 They are also doing so with their bodies, enacting a new distribution of the sensible (the sensed, the common sense, and the knowable) in Germany and increasingly across Europe and beyond. The very embodied nature of musical performance facilitates this, but even the mere presence of Syrian and other migrant bodies in German public spaces is at once a point of contention—as with the outrage over the presumed rampage of sexual harassment by Arab migrants in Cologne on New Year’s Eve, 201616—and an opportunity for

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a dissensual practice creating a new commons and thereby a new common sense. These sorts of efforts, often exploring newer and hybrid genres, offer the best prospects for dissensual culture jamming, not only because of their global currency but also because they are more deeply embedded in youth cultures (see Fulton-Melanson, this volume). Given the demographics of Syrian migrants in places such as Germany, where nearly 2/3 of asylum seekers in 2021 were age 25 and younger (Statista 2021), if there is to be meaningful change, it will need to come from these generations and not from the old guard, who often talk about change but indulge in the tokenism and even exoticizing practices discussed above and change little. Moreover, culture jamming offers the promise of a more grassroots form of cultural agency that, by forging horizontal ties among partners, stands a better change of creating the conditions for meaningful change. In this way, cultural jamming can be an unofficial, soft power avenue toward promoting cultural diplomacy and true mutual understanding (if not tolerance) but outside (or at least parallel to) the official channels that more frequently support cross-cultural initiatives. While funding is an obvious need for any meaningful collaborations to take root and proliferate, engaging in the direct, person-to-person relationships that culture jamming requires and reproduces offers a better change to create a true commons, to allow for dissensual, even radical, reimaginings of home and belonging, and the borders that currently delimit them by giving voice to difference, thereby transforming melodies unheard to those heard and shared more broadly. Artists such as Mukdad and Abu Hajar are showing how individual acts of resistance and creative agency might offer avenues for deeper, even radical transformation.

Conclusion To conclude, I have argued that musical performance has the power to effect change by creating opportunities for meaningful cultural exchange that can act as a soft power tool for cultural diplomacy (what I call “melodies heard”). However, at the same time, it is important to acknowledge the limits of this power. In fact, varieties of tokenism and exoticism that characterize many intercultural musical performances might not only mitigate music’s bridge-building potential but actually reinforce boundaries and prevent mutual understanding (what I call “melodies unheard”). I call for attention to a more radical form of collaboration that posits musical

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partners more as equals to enable grassroots “culture jamming” that has a greater potential to produce positive social and political change than traditional top-down or European-curated collaborations. Syrian migrant musicians in Berlin illustrate the utility of the combination of “culture jamming” and dissensus to create conditions for more reciprocal musical exchange and potentially more democratic participation through revoicing among migrants in an often-hostile European context. Moreover, dissensual culture jamming creates the conditions for more meaningful engagement among coperformers and potentially offers better opportunities for cultural diplomacy. More work needs to be done to assess the viability of a dissensual model of musical performance as a radical democratizing force, and the works in this volume and ongoing research among underground and migrant musicians globally point the way.

Notes 1. The term was first used to describe the contradictions of holding the 2012 Eurovision Song Contest in Baku, Azerbaijan, which at the time had a reputation for authoritarianism and censoring of the arts. “Disco-ball” diplomacy, then, would be another form of white washing of ugly political realities. 2. According to Hill, “[i]n 1954, the José Limón Dance Company was chosen as the first State-sponsored dance touring company to perform in South America” (Hill 1994, 6). 3. See also the work of Nissim Otmazgin (2008, 2021) on Japanese soft power initiatives in East Asia and Southeast Asia. 4. Kapchan (2020, 2008b) refers to the promise of a “festive sacred” as one goal of such international music festivals like the Gnawa World Music Festival in Essaouira. However, she notes that this requires a process of fetishization and commodification that invites alternative interpretations of experience. 5. http://tresculturas.org/. 6. This is without taking into consideration whether medieval convivencia was so tolerant, and, even if it were, whether it could or should offer a model for twenty-first century forms of belonging. For more on this debate, see Shannon (2015). 7. The International Organization for Migration estimates that since 2014 over 45,000 migrants have died, with Mediterranean Transit Migration (MTM) accounting for more than 20,000 migrant deaths; https://www. iom.int/news/rising-­m igrant-­d eaths-­t op-­4 400-­y ear-­i om-­r ecords-­ more-­45000-­2014. Accessed April 5, 2022.

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8. See Dainotto (2007) for an excursion into 18th and 19th ideologies of European identity that inform contemporary debates. 9. As an example, an Algerian shop worker I met in Granada often worked at Moros y Cristianos festivals, dressing as a “Moro” and selling crafts from North Africa. 10. One example of such collaboration is the Medinea Network (MEDiterranean INcubator of Emerging Artists), founded by the Festival d’Aix-enProvence and supported by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union. Medinea brings together musicians from around the Mediterranean region to collaborate on projects with the goal of promoting “a fertile intercultural dialog between Mediterranean countries” (https://medinea-­community.com/). 11. Plastino (2003) notes this phenomenon at play with the emergence of “Mediterranean music” in 1990s Italy. 12. In more succinct form, necropolitics is what Presti calls the right and power to kill exercised by nation-states (2019, 1349). A necropolitics of musicking would investigate how government initiatives create the conditions for voicing or silencing communities through support or suppression of musical activities. For more on necropolitics in the context of European regimes of migration control in the Mediterranean region, see Presti (2019, 2020). For more on musical forms of necropolitics, see work by the organization FreeMuse (https://freemuse.org/). 13. With respect to migrants this is variously referred to as göç hoşgörü (migrant welcome) or uyum (integration) in Turkey, and integration (assimilation) in Germany. See Ayhan (2014), Holmes and Castañeda (2016). 14. The acceptance and embrace of alterity is reminiscent of Édouard Glissant’s embrace of the “opacity” of the Other in the archipelagic thought he promotes in such works as The Poetics of Relation (1997). 15. For example, see “Sahara” (2018) by the Ajam Quartet (formerly called the Berlin Oriental Group), and “Abu Hajar—Muhkim Tanzili” by Abu Hajar/Mazzaj Rap (2020). 16. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-­europe-­35231046.

References Abu Hajar/Mazzaj Rap. 2020. Abu Hajar—Muhkam Tanzili. YouTube video, 3:55, uploaded by, March 20. https://youtu.be/1MUhCXb54ns. Andersson, Ruben. 2012. A game of risk: Boat migration and the business of bordering Europe. Anthropology Today 28 (6): 7–11. ———. 2014. Illegality, Inc.: Clandestine migration and the business of bordering Europe. University of California Press.

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———. 2022. No go world: How fear is redrawing our maps and infecting our politics. Berkeley: University of California Press. Ang, Ien, Yudhishthir Raj Isar, and Phillip Mar. 2015. Cultural diplomacy: Beyond the national interest? International Journal of Cultural Policy 21 (4): 365–381. Appadurai, Arjun. 1990. Disjuncture and difference in the global cultural economy. Theory, Culture & Society 7 (2–3): 295–310. Asad, Talal. 1993. Genealogies of religion: Discipline and reasons of power in Christianity and Islam. JHU Press. Ayhan, Kaya. 2014. Türkiye’de Göç ve uyum tartışmaları: Geçmişe dönük bir ̇ bakış. Idealkent 5 (14): 11–28. Bannerman, Lucy. 2012. The power of disco-ball diplomacy; As Baku prepares to host the campest party in pop, Lucy Bannerman asks what the legacy of Eurovision will be for Azerbaijan. The Times (London), May 25. www.thetimes. co.uk/article/the-­power-­of-­disco-­ball-­diplomacy-­xc6x9fdx3pl. Bromberger, Christian. 2007. Bridge, wall, mirror; Coexistence and confrontations in the Mediterranean world. History and Anthropology 18 (3): 291–307. Castro, Américo. 1948. España en su historia: cristianos, moros y judíos. Grijalbo Mondadori. ———. 1971. The Spaniards: An introduction to their history. University of California Press. Chambers, Iain. 2008. Mediterranean crossings: The politics of an interrupted modernity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Dainotto, Roberto. 2007. Europe (in theory). Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Della Coletta, Cristina. 2016. World’s fairs Italian-style. University of Toronto Press. Deranty, Jean-Philippe. 2003. Jacques Rancière’s contribution to the ethics of recognition. Political Theory 31 (1): 136–156. Dines, Nick. 2020. Moroccan City Festivals, cultural diplomacy and urban political agency. International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 34: 471–485. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10767-­020-­09390-­4. El Maarouf, Moulay Driss. 2016. Po(o)pular culture: Measuring the ‘shift’ in Moroccan Music Festivals. Journal of African Cultural Studies 28 (3): 327–342. Farina, Felice. 2018. Japan’s gastrodiplomacy as soft power: Global washoku and national food security. Journal of Contemporary Eastern Asia 17 (1): 152–167. Featherstone, Mike. 2020. Problematizing the global: An Introduction to global culture revisited. Theory, Culture and Society 37 (7–8): 157–167. Fosler-Lussier, Danielle. 2012. Music pushed, music pulled: Cultural diplomacy, globalization, and imperialism. Diplomatic History 36 (1): 53–64. Fry, Craig. 2015. Has Lance Armstrong’s impact in cycling and beyond been a net positive. The Conversation, July 18. https://theconversation.com/has-­lancearmstrongs-­impact-­in-­cycling-­and-­beyond-­been-­a-­net-­positive-­44886. Glissant, Édouard. 1997. Poetics of relation. University of Michigan Press.

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Habiby, Emile. 1985. The secret life of Saeed, the Pessoptimist. Trans. Salma Khadra Jayyusi, and Trevor Le Gassick. London: Zed Books. Hannoum, Abdelmajid. 2020. Living tangier: Migration, race, and illegality in a Moroccan City. United States: University of Pennsylvania Press. Hill, Constance Valis. 1994. Katherine Dunham’s Southland: Protest in the face of repression. Dance Research Journal 26 (2): 1–10. Hirschkind, Charles. 2006. The ethical soundscape: Cassette sermons and Islamic counterpublics. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2021. The feeling of history: Islam, romanticism, and Andalusia. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Holmes, Seth M., and Heide Castañeda. 2016. Representing the “European refugee crisis” in Germany and beyond: Deservingness and difference, life and death. American Ethnologist 43 (1): 12–24. Jakobsen, Janet, and Ann Pellegrini. 2004. Love the sin: Sexual regulation and the limits of religious tolerance. Beacon Press. Kapchan, Deborah. 2008a. The promise of sonic translation: Performing the festive sacred in Morocco. American Anthropologist 110 (4): 467–483. ———. 2008b. The festive sacred and the fetish of trance. Performing the sacred at the Essaouira Gnawa Festival. Gradhiva. Revue d’anthropologie et d’histoire des arts 7: 52–67. ———. 2020. The fetish of trance: Performing the festive sacred at the Essaouira Gnawa Festival of world music. Hesperis Tamuda 55: 31–49. Klein, Naomi. 2000. No logo: Taking aim at the brand bullies. Toronto: Knopf. Lechner, Frank J., and John Boli, eds. 2020. The globalization reader. New York: John Wiley & Sons. LeVine, Mark. 2005. Why they don’t hate us: Lifting the veil on the axis of evil. Exford: OneWorld. ———. 2017. Putting the “jamming” into culture jamming: Theory, praxis, and cultural production during the Arab spring. In Culture jamming: Activism and the art of cultural resistance, ed. Marilyn DeLaure and Moritz Fink, 113–132. New York, USA: New York University Press. ———. 2005/2022a. Heavy Metal Islam: Rock, resistance, and the struggle for the soul of Islam. University of California Press. Updated Edition, 2022. ———. 2022b. We’ll play till we die: Journeys across a decade of revolutionary music in the Muslim world. University of California Press. Lipscomb, Anna. 2019. Culinary relations: Gastrodiplomacy in Thailand, South Korea, and Taiwan. The Yale Review of International Studies, March. http:// yris.yira.org/essays/3080. Machin-Autenrieth, Matthew. 2020. The dynamics of intercultural music making in Granada: Everyday multiculturalism and Moroccan integration. Ethnomusicology 64 (3): 422–446. https://doi.org/10.5406/ ethnomusicology.64.3.0422.

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Mbembé, J-A., and Libby Meintjes. 2003. Necropolitics. Public Culture 15 (1): 11–40. McMurray, David A., ed. 2001. In and out of Morocco: Smuggling and migration in a frontier boomtown. University of Minnesota Press. Mitchell, Timothy. 1991. Colonising Egypt: With a New Preface. Berkeley: University of California Press. Monson, Ingrid. 2007. Freedom sounds: Civil rights call out to jazz and Africa. Oxford University Press. Nye, Joseph S. 1990. Soft power. Foreign Policy 80: 153–171. O’Farrell, Holly. 2020. “A New and Curious Route to Cairo”–World’s fairs and the stereotyping of the middle east (1851–1893). IAFOR Journal of Cultural Studies 5 (1): 65–79. Oliveros, Pauline. 2005. Deep listening: A composer’s sound practice. IUniverse. Otmazgin, Nissim. 2008. Contesting soft power: Japanese popular culture in East and Southeast Asia. International Relations of the Asia-Pacific 8 (1): 73–101. ———. 2021. An ‘East Asian’ public diplomacy? Lessons from Japan, South Korea, and China. Asian Perspective 45 (3): 621–644. Paniagua, Eduardo. 2005. Puentes Sobre el Mediterraneo (Bridges over the Mediterranean) CD. Pneuma PN-800. Plastino, Goffredo. 2003. Inventing ethnic music: Fabrizio De André’s Creuza de Mä and the creation of Musica Mediterranea in Italy. In Mediterranean mosaic: Popular music and global sounds, 267–286. London: Routledge. Presti, Laura Lo. 2019. Terraqueous necropolitics. ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies 18 (6): 1347–1367. ———. 2020. Like a map over troubled waters. (Un)Mapping the Mediterranean Sea’s Terraqueous Necropolitics. E-flux Journal 109. https://www.e-­flux. c o m / j o u r n a l / 1 0 9 / 3 3 0 8 0 0 / l i k e -­a -­m a p -­o v e r-­t r o u b l e d -­w a t e r-­u n mapping-­the-­mediterranean-­sea-­s-terraqueous-­necropolitics/. Quartet, Ajam. 2018. Sahara. YouTube video, 6:06, February 4. https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=Vp42i5FMgqE. Rancière, Jacques. 2010. Dissensus: On politics and aesthetics. Bloomsbury Publishing. Rockefeller, Stuart Alexander. 2011. Flow. Current Anthropology 52 (4): 557–578. Rockower, Paul. 2020. A guide to gastrodiplomacy. In Routledge handbook of public diplomacy, ed. Nancy Snow and Nicholas J.  Cull, 2nd ed., 205–212. New York: Routledge. Rogozen-Soltar, Mikaela. 2012a. Ambivalent inclusion: Anti-racism and racist gatekeeping in Andalusia’s immigrant NGOs. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 18: 633–651. ———. 2012b. Managing Muslim visibility: Conversion, immigration, and Spanish imaginaries of Islam. American Anthropologist 114 (4): 611–623.

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CHAPTER 5

Cultural Diplomacy Despite the State: Mobility and Agency of State and Amateur Musicians in Turkish Classical Music Choirs Audrey M. Wozniak

“We are just an amateur choir,” said the organizer of Zurich Türk Musiki Cemiyeti, “but we try to present a professional event.”1 He had repeated this line many times over the course of a weekend of rehearsals for the public-facing concert to demure much-deserved congratulations. Given the logistics of inviting musicians from five countries as well as ensuring the presence of multiple state representatives, his efforts seemed nothing less than herculean. Indeed, after securing funding from the Republic of Azerbaijan’s State Committee on Diaspora Affairs and the Friendship and Culture and Solidarity Society of Swiss Azerbaijanis, he had managed to bring together his amateur Turkish classical music choir of Switzerland-­ based Turks as well as a Grammy Award-winning Turkish opera tenor soloist, a master ney player from Ankara, the former ud player of the Presidential Classical Turkish Music Choir in Istanbul, Western classical

A. M. Wozniak (*) Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 M. M. Rijo Lopes da Cunha et al. (eds.), Music and Cultural Diplomacy in the Middle East, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36279-8_5

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musicians from Turkey’s Mersin State Opera and Ballet as well as Dusseldorf’s Deutsche Opera Rhein and Zurich’s Tonhalle-Orchester, and myself (a curious oddity as a Turkish-speaking American violinist and ethnomusicologist trained in Western and Turkish classical musics). Rather than the choir’s usual performance of light Turkish art song by its amateur singers with accompaniment from musicians tenured in (and flown in from) Turkish state ensembles, this program was dedicated to the 100th anniversary of the Turkish Republic as well as the 100th anniversary of the birth of Azerbaijan’s third president Heydar Aliyev (“the founder of modern Azerbaijan”) and sought to present a more “high art” concept through Western orchestration of folk songs beloved in both countries. After the disastrous earthquakes in southeast Turkey in February 2023 and the subsequent state-enforced cancellation of performance events in Turkey for a period of national mourning, the event organizer quickly salvaged the early March concert by reframing it as a memorial and fundraising concert for the victims, substituting mournful nationalism-laden songs in place of the more upbeat “entertainment”-oriented crowd pleasers. At the fully packed concert, the Azerbaijani ambassador to Switzerland as well as the deputy chairman of Azerbaijan’s State Committee on Diaspora Affairs were given places of honor in the front row and called to the stage for speeches that affirmed Turkish-Azerbaijani friendship as well as the solidarity of the Turkic world (while also alluding to recent contentious geopolitical conflicts with Armenia). At the catered post-concert soirée after a powerful performance that had received a standing ovation, a film crew conducted interviews with musicians and audience members (“for our [the Zurich choir’s] archives, and to submit to [Turkish news agency] Anadolu Ajansı”). By the end of the day, the Azerbaijani news outlet Globalinfo.az had published a write-up with event photos, and soon after, the concert recording was edited, mixed, and promptly uploaded on YouTube. Toasts in Turkish and Russian at the celebration dinner that evening with the musicians and sponsors affirmed the concert’s success and the participants’ friendship and loyalty to one another; the many winks, whispers, and handshakes interspersed between loud toasts soon intimated that a repeat performance in Baku, Azerbaijan, was in the makings. During the concert, it had become clear that the choir leader’s plea for the amateur singers to not bellow their lines had somewhat fallen on deaf ears; however, what resounded more strikingly was that, in terms of strategically navigating organizational, political, and bureaucratic channels, the organizer was anything but a novice.

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Introduction The emergence of the choir (koro) as an ensemble format for performing the musical traditions of Turkey was formally institutionalized in 1975 through the foundation of the Istanbul State Classical Turkish Music Choir.2 Its founder, Nevzat Atlığ, lobbied for the creation of this inaugural state choir dedicated to Turkish classical music3 following the request of the prime minister at the time Bülent Ecevit that he organize an ensemble to send to the Soviet Union to represent Turkey. In the subsequent years, the establishment of nearly two dozen more state ensembles dedicated to the musical traditions of Turkey ushered in the concept of musicians as civil servants (devlet memuru), effectively creating a new class of respectable musicians socially empowered by their positions as artists of the state and economically empowered with tenured salaries and pensions. The Turkish National Radio and Television (TRT) cadre system coupled with the founding of music conservatories dedicated to Turkish music further entrenched a system of “state artists.” Currently, hundreds of musicians are employed in the 19 state musical ensembles under the auspices of the Republic of Turkey’s Ministry of Culture and Tourism; these include choirs in Istanbul, Ankara, Izmir, and many other Turkish urban centers that variously perform an extensive repertoire that includes Sufi music, chamber music of the Ottoman court, light Republican-era art song, and folk music from around the region.4 Unlike choirs associated with Western classical music or Christian worship contexts, Turkish music choirs feature both singers and instrumentalists. The vocal section typically includes men and women, who are not singing interlocking harmonies (as in a Bach chorale) but rather all singing the same melodic line in unison. Instrumentalists perform a wide variety of instruments associated with Turkish musical traditions such as ud, kanun, and violin; in the case of certain amateur choirs, it is also common to see non-traditional instruments on stage, including electric keyboard, bass guitar, and even drum set. These instrumentalists perform the same melodic line as the singers, embellishing with characteristic ornamentation to create a heterophonic effect. One might expect these state musicians to be Turkey’s de facto “musical cultural diplomats,” engaging Turkish and foreign populations domestically and abroad. However, early twenty-first century ethnography suggests that musicians tenured in state choirs often find their musicianship stifled and their agency limited, as their affiliation binds them to

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bureaucratic decision-making processes and internal politics; they generally do not have agency over performances within their ensembles and can face major obstacles organizing artistic projects outside of their ensembles, particularly abroad. Moreover, although state choirs offer prestige and job security to musicians tenured in their ranks, they often experience underwhelming audience turnout, oftentimes performing to near-empty halls. In contrast, Turkey’s thousands of amateur choirs typically enjoy much greater audience attendance than do state choirs. Amateur Turkish music choirs exploded in number in tandem with the rise of state choirs over the last quarter of the twentieth century; historically and presently, amateur choirs in Turkey serve as important sites of musical transmission and community-­building. Amateur choirs also accompanied waves of Turkish migration abroad, starting from the 1950s, particularly to Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom but also to other European countries, the United States, and Australia. Nonetheless, amateur choirs confront the frequent stereotype that they are “old lady social clubs” (to paraphrase many of my interlocutors) performing more popular music and not giving high-quality musical performances. While amateur Turkish music choirs in diaspora are decidedly grassroots organizations that largely do not receive substantial (if any) governmental support from their country of operation or Turkey, they frequently engage with government institutions in both places to facilitate their events. They bring coherence to and command visibility for their local diasporic communities by creating the circumstances for cultural and political representation. In turn, choirs sustain their activities by drawing upon the donations, goods, and services they garner from members’ and audiences’ interpersonal and institutional networks. Importantly, these choirs serve as important outposts for state musicians in Turkey, who utilize official invitations from amateur diasporic choirs to gain performance opportunities abroad. In many ways, these often-overlooked choir members parallel the “hidden musicians” Ruth Finnegan (2007) describes in her study of amateur musicians in Milton Keynes, UK: [A] consistent—if sometimes changing—structure lies behind these surface activities. The public events…that in their various forms are so typical a feature of modern English life, are part of an invisible but organised system through which individuals make their contribution to both the changes and the continuities of English music today. (4)

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This chapter seeks to demonstrate that diasporic amateur Turkish music choirs are in many ways effective agents of cultural diplomacy, seemingly occupying a liminal space between states and people as well as between Turkey and the rest of the world. I argue that considering amateur choirs’ various modes of engagement helps to disrupt notions of soft power as a force which states can apply linearly to clear effect. I seek to demonstrate how the relational networks on display and behind the scenes at amateur Turkish music choir concerts upset a clear boundary between the work of state and non-state actors, as well as the dichotomy itself. I go even further to argue that members of amateur choirs can often be more effective agents of cultural diplomacy than can the actual “state musicians” who are government officials representing the Ministry of Culture and Tourism. Although the choir members engage a variety of state and non-state actors and enhance the political visibility of their transnational communities, there are nonetheless limits to the extent diasporic amateur choirs can “bridge” political borders, a tension that has increasingly emerged as Turkish musicians seek more permanent (if scarce) opportunities to relocate abroad.

A Note on Methodology This chapter relies on the in-depth ethnography and archival research I have been conducting with Turkish classical musicians in Istanbul and other cities of Turkey and its diaspora abroad since 2015 as a part of a broader research project on the emergence of the choir as an ensemble format in Turkish classical music. Much of my work has been informed by my direct participant-observation as a violinist with roughly a dozen amateur and professional Turkish music ensembles over the past eight years. Being both a performer and researcher enriched and complicated my ethnography, as my positionality in relation to my interlocutors was constantly in flux. My ethnographic analysis is also substantially informed by the hundreds of hours I have spent observing and interviewing self-identifying professional and amateur musicians in various urban centers of Turkey as well as the United Kingdom, Germany, Belgium, Switzerland, the United States, and Australia, both in person and virtually via Zoom. Additionally, I utilize primary and secondary archival sources, including manuscripts, research and newspaper articles, performance recordings, concert programs, and material artifacts, drawn from Turkish film and media from the early twentieth century through the present.

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Cultural Diplomacy, Diaspora, and Turkish Music Choirs Conventional wisdom about cultural diplomacy historically emphasized the idea of “soft power” (Nye 1990), which included state-led efforts to use “cultural presentations” in areas such as music and sports to influence rather than to coerce foes and forge alliances (Fosler-Lussier 2015, 19). Such understandings of cultural diplomacy tended to inscribe diplomacy as a linear top-down instrument and the sole purview of the state (Nicolson 1939; Satow 1922; Watson 1984). From arranged marriages between royal families to musical ensembles sent to the courts of ruling elite, and although cultural exchanges between governments with the intention of political effect have been documented for thousands of years, scholars often point to the United States government’s concerted efforts from the Cold War era onward to illustrate deliberate strategic efforts that shaped modern notions of cultural diplomacy. The American government’s financing of composers, music festivals, and research institutes abroad (Brody 1993) after World War II as well as the Department of State’s financing and organization of the Philadelphia Orchestra’s visit to Beijing shortly after the US’ denouement with China in 1972 (Liu 2021) are just two of many instances of deliberate campaigns to bolster the American image abroad. Beyond funding major military and infrastructural development in Turkey following approval of the country’s request for inclusion in the Marshall Plan, the American government’s financing of the Istanbul Hilton Hotel was a strategic act that signaled American hegemony. It “promised an experience of America” (Wharton 2004, 22), which, in the words of Conrad Hilton, “spells out friendship between nations which is an alien word in the vocabulary of the Iron Curtain” (35; see also Adalet 2018). In more recent years, scholars have proposed new approaches that recognize cultural diplomacy as neither the sole domain of states nor a contained instrument of straightforward soft power outcomes (Clarke 2016, 8 in Ang et al. 2015, 375). As I will argue in the context of Turkish state choirs, state musicians’ frequent lack of agency reinforces how those apparently deemed “state actors” are not always the most effective arbiters of cultural diplomacy. Looking more broadly for agents of cultural diplomacy offers a way of grasping the tremendous power individuals and organizations can have in creating political impact.5 Such new approaches also help to illuminate the “messiness” of cultural diplomacy, attempting to

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validate the existence of actors with liminal political subjectivities as well as the non-linear and ambiguous impacts of their interpolations. The terminology scholars have developed to write against and expand traditional notions of diplomatic relations, from a “global heteropolarity” (Constantinou and Der Derian 2010, 18) to polylateralism (Wiseman 2004, 2010), center the multiplicity of actors and political outcomes on various local and global scales. Following Ang et al. (2015), in this article, I adopt an understanding of cultural diplomacy as “a messy landscape, rather than a coherent body of policies and strategies that can readily be evaluated in terms of its success or otherwise for a given nation-state” (375). Just as consideration of actors who are “between and betwixt” state and non-state positionalities help to enrich understandings of cultural diplomacy (Turner 1967 in Ho and McConnell), examining patterns of transnational mobility over time demonstrates the entanglements that emerge when attempting to narrate diasporas in terms of ties to nation, state, and culture. Of the 5 million Turkish passport holders living outside of Turkey, the overwhelming majority live in Germany, where the approximately 3  million Turks and Germans of Turkish descent constitute roughly 5 percent of the country’s population (McFadden 2019, 72). Following the small-scale migration of a few thousand skilled workers to West German factories starting in 1957, multiple European countries in the region created temporary migrant “guest worker” programs designed to recruit Turks (as well as nationals from North Africa, Southeast Europe, and the Balkans) as cheap labor to mitigate labor shortages and fuel European countries’ economic expansion. Even after the formal end of the guest worker programs, Turks immigrated widely throughout continental Europe through “chain migration,” as workers sent for their relatives still living in Turkey and permanently settled in the countries employing them (Kesici 2021; Greve 2003). In 2019, the Turkish Foreign Ministry tabulated the population of Turkish nationals living abroad, with the largest tallies including 700,000 in France, 500,000 in the Netherlands, approximately 300,000 each in Belgium (Tecmen 2020, 7) and the US, 250,000 in Austria, 150,000 in Australia, and 130,000 in Switzerland (Erdem 2019).6 By comparison, in the UK, the size of the Turkish population is an estimated 500,000 people, most of whom reside in London (Eren-Nijhar 2017, 21); this diasporic community consists of many Turks from Cyprus who migrated to the UK in large numbers particularly during the 1950s Cyprus Crisis and to a lesser extent migrants from southeast Turkey

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(particularly of Kurds and Alevis) fleeing political conflict and violence in the 1990s.7 The identity of the so-called Turkish diaspora can vary tremendously from country to country, as within each community, one can find substantial diversity in terms of ethno-religious identity, language(s) spoken, national and geopolitical ties, and motivations for migration; second- and later-generation descendants of migrants often experience even greater plurality of identity as they negotiate their relationships to their countries of birth and the country of their ancestors. Attempting to delineate a singular and unified Turkish diaspora belies this diversity as well as disconnects between different populations within the so-called community. Nonetheless, while the degree of integration diasporic amateur Turkish music choir members feel to their countries of residence varies from context to context, the communities these choirs engage tend to display high levels of connection to Turkey, whether through consumption of Turkish media, continuing to return annually over holidays to visit family, or, as in the case of this analysis, learning and performing musical traditions associated with Turkey. One observes parallels between diasporic amateur Turkish music choirs and the African home associations in Britain described by Mercer and Page (2010) in that “they provide mutual support for a known and imagined community, and they provide a space for debate about the right and good way to live together as a diaspora community” (127; Mercer et al. 2009). Scholars of cultural diplomacy in diasporic contexts have studied how states call upon diasporas for political impact (Gamlen 2018; Ho et  al. 2015; Dickinson 2014) as well as how diasporas seek to influence states to serve their own political agendas (Smith 2003; Tomiczek 2011; Berkowitz and Mügge 2014). In this exploration, I draw upon the concept of a diaspora diplomacy “composed of states, non-state and other international actors that function as constituent components of assemblages, connected through networks and flows of people, information and resources” (Ho and McConnell 2019, 250). Diaspora associations can variously reproduce and reinforce state power (Dickinson 2014; Ho and McConnell 2019) or contribute to producing “deterritorializing forms of power” (Ho and McConnell 2019, 250). In this sense, the various actors that converge within diaspora unsettle efforts to clarify distinctions between the domestic or foreign, a phenomenon Latha Varadarajan (2010) terms “the domestic abroad”; in a similar vein, György Szondi (2008) and La Porte (2012)  utilize the term “intermestic” affairs to describe how the

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concerns of communities in diasporas often engage and juxtapose international and domestic issues. Kay Kaufman Shelemay’s (2022) description of the “sentinel musician” who “migrated to new locales, establishing transnational networks, founding new institutions, and undertaking numerous initiatives in community building” (xxv) in the case of musicians of the Ethiopian diaspora parallels the ways in which musicians of diasporic amateur Turkish music choose animate communities in their countries of residence and engage in transnational relationships with state and non-state actors. I contend that diasporic amateur Turkish music choirs provide an ideal case study for understanding how seemingly informal forms of music-­ centered engagement can simultaneously mediate flows of people and power, managing, and shaping cultural diplomacy often more effectively than apparent state actors. At the same time, the constellations of relationships that underpin the activities of these choirs seem variously more or less formal and have more or less public visibility, illustrating how such interpenetrating flows of people both engage and circumvent state power.

State and Amateur Turkish Music Choirs The radio organizations that were the precursors to Turkish National Radio and Television (TRT) created institutionalized employment opportunities for musicians that laid the groundwork for the idea that music could be a respectable professional pathway in Turkey. State ensembles’ kadro (cadre) systems afforded musicians the ability to attain civil servant status, which entailed a stable salary, pension, diplomatic passport, and significantly higher social standing than that of commercially employed musicians. The early 1990s saw the rapid expansion of state ensembles, as satellite cities in Turkey such as Samsun, Diyarbakir, and Edirne formed their own Turkish classical music choirs and ensembles under the auspices of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism. Many critics saw these peripheral choirs as strategic political attempts to gain popular support in the region by creating a means for the politically well-connected to add friends and relatives to the government payroll as choir musicians (regardless of whether they were qualified or even participated in the ensembles). The practice of using political influence through a system of favors and pulling strings, derogatively referred to as torpil (a slang term that literally means “torpedo”), continues to play a significant role in mediating the experiences of state musicians. For the musicians who were able to make inroads as musical civil servants for TRT or other state ensembles, securing

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a position hardly means the end of having to navigate the nebulous inner workings of a seemingly highly bureaucratic structure that operated based on relationships and influence. Nearly all state musicians I interviewed relayed either their own or their colleagues’ dissatisfaction with the organizational structures of their ensembles, expressing frustration at the jealousy and two-facedness (iki yüzlülük) in their work environments that emerged substantially due to the uneven application of arbitrary policies. Multiple state musicians lamented that the personal loyalties and grudges of a high-ranking cultural bureaucrat had inhibited their ability to transfer to other state ensembles in one case, despite the musician’s spouse and child living in a different large city with a state ensemble that wanted the musician to transfer there. Achieving tenured kadro status can be infuriatingly elusive for those who lack connections. While in theory, a competent player should be able to attain kadro status after roughly five years of working on a freelance contract (sözleşmeli), in practice ambiguous bureaucratic procedures and interpersonal ties dictate when an audition process (sınav) will be held and whether the entrant will be able to succeed. One musician who worked at TRT in Ankara as a freelancer for 17 years as well as in a wide variety of internationally based world music projects told me, “I entered the sınav five times, but I wasn’t allowed to pass (geçirilmedim). They told me I should have, but that I wasn’t connected to any tarikat (Islamic sect), politician, party, or other group, so there was no one to help me.” Some complained that those who had gotten in through torpil rather than talent were dragging down the quality of the overall group, demoralizing their more talented colleagues who had earned their spots through exceptional performance on the ensemble’s entrance exam. Equally discouraging is the fact that state choirs’ concerts are often very poorly attended; in the case of multiple concerts I have attended, the musicians on stage may very well equal or outnumber the audience members. Multiple state musicians with whom I spoke attributed audience attrition to younger generations’ disinterest in the musical style as well as the fact that their state ensembles were dedicated less to musical creativity and more to serving a “museum” function. Additionally, state musicians’ ability to work and perform outside their primary ensembles, including performing on or recording their own albums, appearing in concerts, and touring abroad, requires gaining permission for such outside engagements; this is conditioned on remaining in good standing with the decision-makers at multiple levels of

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administration and governance as well as one’s own colleagues. In addition to a lack of artistic control they exercise over the musical output of their own state ensembles, to perform in a concert abroad, state musicians must obtain an official invitation letter and then secure permission from their ensemble director, the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. A musician’s explicit identification as a member of or sympathizer with apparently oppositional or counter-cultural political groups (or even simply personal animosity) can be grounds for withholding permission. This has had a chilling effect on musicians’ willingness to express personal and political affiliations, especially to initiate independent musical projects with potentially broader reach to domestic and foreign audiences alike. As a result, while in name, they are civil servants of the Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism, most state musicians do not see themselves as in a position of agency to shape or execute cultural diplomacy. The musicians of amateur Turkish music choirs, by contrast, are much greater in number and, more importantly, not subject to the same strictures of what many of my interlocutors have criticized as short-sighted bureaucracy and institutionalized political corruption. Calculating the exact number of amateur choirs is impractical, if not impossible, due to their informal organizational structure. There is no single organizing body that oversees or even tallies amateur choirs. Determining what counts and does not count as an amateur choir is difficult, as some may appear to essentially be a group of friends that gets together to sing on occasion yet has no publicly visible organizational presence. Others may apparently disappear after a concert and fail to reappear for a long hiatus, bringing into question whether they are truly active ensembles and thus should be counted. Nonetheless, many estimate that there are conservatively over 3000 amateur choirs within Turkey’s urban centers, including those organized around municipalities (belediye), affinity and charitable associations (dernek), foundations (vakıf ), and workplaces. Amateur choirs have also emerged in Turkish diasporic communities abroad: Berlin has upward of 20 amateur choirs, Paris has around five, London has four, the Netherlands has three, other German cities, Austria, Switzerland, and Australia have at least a few, and Belgium and Boston each have one. To comprehend the ubiquity of amateur Turkish music choirs, it is perhaps more effective to observe their density and specificity of cause. One very small community center (essentially a repurposed apartment) in

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Istanbul hosts seven different choirs’ rehearsals during weekdays. While some choirs are named for the directors who founded them (such as the Ferhat Sarmusak Turkish Music Choir) or musical modes (makam) found within the Turkish music theory system (such as Saba Turkish Art Music Choir), others named for their members’ affinity or affiliation can seem exceedingly specific, as demonstrated by the names of a few choirs listed below: • Kayseri Province Mutual Aid Society Turkish Music Choir • Zonguldak Karaelmas University Turkish Classical Music Choir • Samsun Metropolitan Municipality Turkish Art Music Choir • Iş̇ bank Pensioners Association, Ankara Branch, Turkish Art Music Choir ̇ • Izmir Society of Mechanical Engineers Turkish Classical Music Choir • Turkish Parliamentarians Association Turkish Art Music Choir • Women Physicians Education Support Foundation Ankara Turkish Music Choir • Turkish Petroleum Corporation (TPAO) Turkish Classical Music Choir • Republic of Turkey Ministry of Treasury and Finance Turkish Art Music Choir An important distinguishing feature of amateur choirs is that they are voluntary and thus rely in large part on members’ regular dues (aidat) for participation. The activities of these choirs are typically more than simply rehearsals and concerts; members often participate in social activities during and outside of musical engagement, such as a social tea break during rehearsals and get-togethers and celebrations for personal events and religious holidays. In some cases, particularly for choirs affiliated with a charitable organization, participation will entail outreach and education, such as fundraising for certain causes or performance for schools. Demographically, although Turkish amateur choirs tend to be mixed in terms of their participants, singers tend to skew heavily toward middle-­ class middle-aged or older women who are housewives or have retired.8 Participants tend to extol the opportunity for socializing (sosyalleşme) their ensembles afford, describing their ensembles as “families” and attesting to the therapeutic effects of participation. Amateur choir concerts are generally packed and energetic events, as the audience (primarily friends and

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family of choir members) commonly engages through singing and clapping along to a well-known repertoire.

Amateur Turkish Music Choirs in the Diaspora In Turkish diasporic contexts, this social aspect of choirs takes on even greater significance because of the sense of community it creates for participants who carry their own or inherited memories or imaginations of a memleket (homeland) to which they variously have ties but in which they do not reside. Ahmet Kaya (2007) describes how German-Turk “transmigrants” actively contribute to the German business sector and civil society while also exercising significant influence on the “social, political, economic, and cultural spheres of life in Turkey” (498). Sociologists Semra Eren-Nijhar (2017) and Nevin Şahin (2009), who have worked with Turkish diasporic communities in London and Berlin, respectively, describe their interlocutors’ complex relationships to both their country of residence and Turkey. Many of Eren-Nijhar’s interviewees, who have lived in London for decades after migrating (many from Cyprus) but do not feel they are able to assimilate into “British society,” refer to their Turkish while also considering themselves “Londoners” or “citizens of London.” In contrast, Şahin’s interviewees are young women primarily born in Germany who are descendants of Turkish migrants; they describe “Berlin as the city of birth and a city of Turkey as the city of origin, memleket” (2009, 43). Many of my interlocutors, who are drawn from multiple diasporic populations in countries including the UK, Germany, Belgium, and Switzerland, describe their positionality as that of a bridge, a metaphor Kaya (2007) utilizes to describe German-Turks as residing in a “separate space…where diasporic subjects, bricoleurs, cosmopolitans, and hybrids dwell” (494). He writes, “agents of this transnational space…can practically and symbolically travel back and forth between their countries of destination and origin” (498). Rather than imagining Turkish migrants and their descendants as caught between polar identities of host and home country, I find that many perceive that they occupy a sort of bridge of their own creation. I argue that recognizing this “third space” (Bhabha 1990), which empowers them to exercise agentive power in multiple geopolitical arenas, is essential to understanding their effectiveness in facilitating acts of cultural diplomacy. Choirs in diaspora are not homogeneous, whether in terms of the repertoire they perform, language(s) in which they operate, or demographics

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of their participants and audiences. One choir in Berlin is dedicated to the “classic” repertoire of Turkish classical music,9 comprises first-generation Turkish migrants who immigrated in the mid-to-late twentieth century, new migrants from Turkey who have recently relocated for work or study, and to a minimal extent non-Turks; it does not draw significant participation from the German descendants of previous Turkish migrants. By contrast, the choir director in Belgium I interviewed reported that approximately 40% of his choir’s participants are Balkan Turks (from ex-­ Soviet countries such as Bulgaria, Hungary, and Albania) who migrated 15–20 years ago after the fall of communism; 40% are “Turkish Turks,” a figure mostly comprised of those born in Belgium to migrants from Turkey (especially the Anatolian region of Afyon) and to a lesser extent “expats” from Turkey who have come for employment; and the remainder are from minority populations in Turkey. His choir performs a much more varied repertoire consisting of works of Turkish art, folk, and popular music. One choir director in Switzerland describes his ensemble’s repertoire as classical and neoclassical while describing a different Swiss choir as primarily dedicated to “eğlence” (entertainment) music. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the discrepancies between choirs in terms of membership and musical activity mean that they do not necessarily engage in lateral collaborations. A choir director in Germany said that his efforts to create an overarching organizing body for diasporic amateur choirs fell apart because “everyone wants to be under their own tent.” Indeed, I have observed that in multiple cases, new amateur choirs have been born out of interpersonal disputes between members of an existing choir, and choirs in the same region often speak about each other in terms of rivalry, demeaning others’ repertoire selection, rehearsal dynamic, strength of performance, or other aspects. Nevertheless, some have cooperated successfully, even despite tremendous geographical distances. A choir in Belgium provides the instrumental musicians for another choir in Paris, choirs in Zurich and Berlin with similar repertory preferences are planning a joint concert, and a choir leader in Australia led regular Zoom rehearsals for another choir in Germany during the pandemic despite the significant time difference. Diasporic choir meetings and events are both products of the networks of migrants and their descendants as well as structures that bolster those networks, affording a community to articulate itself as a cohesive (if not bounded) entity and an occasion for its members to recognize themselves and each other as belonging to it. Whether for a Turkish migrant whose

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family has resided in Germany for decades or the recent migrant to London who has come for higher education, participation in a choir enables members to network, share information, and develop a sense of their relationship to Turkey and/or Turkishness, all of which are particularly important in the context of the frequent marginalization of Turkish migrants and their descendants in various European contexts. While some choirs such as the Berlin Klasik Türk Müziği Derneği, the Belgium-based Intermelodi Turkish Music Choir, and Switzerland’s Zürich Türk Musiki Cemiyeti are veritable institutions that employ regular teachers, in some cases offer courses and certificates of achievement to participants and host regular performances, many other diasporic choirs operate on a very ad hoc basis.10 Nonetheless, even those ensembles that may on the surface appear to be little more than social groups often prove exceedingly self-­reliant and organizationally adept come concert time, renting out and filling major performance venues in urban metropolises, hiring sound technicians and speaker systems, recruiting corporate sponsors, liaising with local politicians, and organizing social media promotion and write-­ups of concerts and events. A significant portion, if not the entirety, of this organizational feat draws on participants’ connections and relationships with their broader community; with members’ dues (aidat) typically covering only a portion of operating expenses, choirs’ ability to stage events and be viable long-­ term frequently relies on using their members’ networks (often with other members of the broader Turkish community) to access sponsorships as well as goods, services, and venues, often at a reduced cost: one choir member may use their company to make a donation to the ensemble, another may recruit the local Turkish language media outlet to cover the event, while yet another may use their employment at a school to access a free rehearsal space. Choirs frequently invite and mediatize the attendance of politically significant figures at their concerts; such invitations serve as a means of both securing distinction for the ensemble and articulating the choir’s broader community as a politically relevant contingency. Concert write-ups in the Londra Gazete, a bilingual Turkish and English newspaper serving the Turkish, Kurdish, and Turkish Cypriot communities in London, and Pusula Swiss, a media outlet for Turkish speakers in Switzerland, help to illustrate: Established in 2012, as a leading Turkish music choir in the UK, Vatan Kültürel organised an unforgettable evenign [sic] for music lovers which

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strived to fundraise for disabled kid’s [sic] future treatments…. Taking place at the Bromley Civic Centre of South London, many distinguished guests like Northern Cyprus Representative Zehra Başaran, ambassadress Esra Bilgiç, Northern Cyprus Education and Culture Attache Gülgün Özçelik, Leyla Kemal [President of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus Committee on Turkish Cypriots Living Abroad] and many more were seen at the colourful concert. (Londra Gazete 2017) Prominent figures of Turkish-speaking societies such as the Turkish Embassy in London Commercial Counselor Aytuğ Göksu and British Kemalist Thought Association President Jale Özer attended the very packed concert.11 (Londra Gazete 2016, translation from Turkish by author) The concert was attended by Deputy Consul Gözde Akal, representing our ̇ Consulate General in Zürich, wife of our Ambassador to Azerbaijan Izulat Alakbarova, Swiss Turk Society President Suat Şahin, Schaffhausen Member ̇ of Parliament Ibrahim Taş, important figures from the business world, various representatives of foundations, and our citizens.12 (Pusula Swiss 2022, translation from Turkish by author)

During concerts, choir leaders take the opportunity to publicly recognize such notable attendees, seating them in the front of the hall and acknowledging them in front of the audience. One interlocutor in the UK explained that British Labour Party MPs’ attendance of past concerts was due to their party’s strong ties to the Republican People’s Party (CHP) in Turkey. Media coverage documenting such figures’ presence further memorializes the concerts as events of both cultural and political significance. Interestingly, in rehearsals, I regularly hear comments from members affirming that their ensembles “are not political” and that they gather due to their “love for the music”; in practice, however, rehearsals and concerts are regular occasions for affirming nationalist and/or Kemalist sentiment, honoring political figures, and expressing stances on a variety of geopolitical issues and relationships. While choirs do not deliberately create long-­ term strategic agendas for advancing diplomatic policy and political ideologies, the platforms for such expressions they create nonetheless reflect members’ and audiences’ priorities, concerns, and value systems. The presence of MPs and ambassadors at concerts may galvanize the appearance that diasporic amateur choirs can easily collaborate with governmental branches in their country of operation. In fact, the extent to which a diasporic choir receives government funding from the country in

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which it is located is dependent on the availability and accessibility of funds as well as the ability of a choir’s directorship to integrate into the country’s social and political climate by building the necessary relationships and developing enterprising projects that serve that government’s broader interests. Many diasporic choirs are registered or partner with foundations registered nationally as charitable organizations to receive donations; nonetheless, most do not receive major ongoing support from either the government of the country in which they operate or that of Turkey. A choir director in Switzerland reported that his ensemble received no support from the Swiss or Turkish governments. In the case of the lack of Swiss government funding, he explained that because the choir’s activities are not one-off projects every 10 years but rather consist of ongoing lessons and concerts (“like a school”), it is much more difficult to secure public grants for arts and culture. A choir director in Germany found that accessing government funds for his ensemble’s activities had been impossible; another choir director commented that the partisanship between local political parties created extra obstacles in the German context: “They need to research the needs of the region and shape their projects accordingly.” A choir director in Belgium who has greater success receiving support from the Belgian government attributes this to his own aptitude for navigating bureaucracy (“I have official documents everywhere…I find someone who will open the door from the inside”). He also posits that Brussels’ position as an international city at the heart of the European Union as well as a strong social safety net contributes to the state’s willingness to fund artistic projects representing migrant populations. Given the prominent role diasporic choirs play in transmitting an aspect of Turkish culture as well as animating community identity for many of the millions of Turkish migrants and their descendants abroad, one might expect that the Turkish government would seek to facilitate choirs’ cultural activities abroad, particularly given the economic and political power of many of these contingencies. Indeed, the Presidency for Turks Abroad and Related Communities (Yurtdışı Türkler ve Akraba Topluluklar Başkanlığı, or YTB), a division of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism established in 2010, is expressly dedicated to coordinating activities for Turks and their relatives living abroad as well as strengthening economic, social, and cultural relations between the countries in which they reside and Turkey. Moreover, Yunus Emre Institutes (Yunus Emre Enstitüsü, or YEE), Turkish language and cultural centers founded as a governmental non-profit since 2007 under the auspices of the Turkish Ministry of

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Culture and Tourism, in diasporic Turks’ countries of residence would seem to be natural partners for choirs abroad organizing rehearsals and concerts largely oriented toward local Turkish communities. In practice, many diasporic choirs whose directors I have interviewed do not perceive the Turkish government, and more specifically the YTB and YEEs, as an accessible or reliable source of material support for their activities abroad. While the enterprising choir director in Belgium I spoke with has had success receiving funding from the YTB to organize a youth choir (gençler korosu) abroad, another choir director in Germany expressed frustration that he had not received a single response despite years of attempting to contact the YTB for similar projects. When I asked about a collaboration with the local YEE, one choir director in Switzerland quickly ruled out the possibility (“We don’t have a relationship with the Yunus Emre Institute”), while another in Germany asserted that choir activities do not suit what he perceived as YEE’s focus on language and religiously oriented programming. His choir had requested permission to use a room at the local YEE for weekly choir rehearsals but saw their request denied apparently due to the meeting time being later than the YEE’s working hours. He also reported that a colleague who directs a choir in a different city of Germany had submitted a formal request to the Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism to invite state musicians for their concert; apparently, the Ministry had approved the colleague’s request but stipulated that his choir pay the Ministry 2000 Turkish lira per state musician (separate from the musicians’ compensation for the performance). My interviewee was surprised to learn this because his own choir had never encountered such a requirement when hiring state musicians through the Ministry: My friend said this, I don’t know, I haven’t heard anything else like this. If these things are happening, it’s a huge stumbling block. Another thing, also about bilateral relations [innuendo for relationships and influence]—if your relationship with the administration, let’s say the TRT administration, is good and you make a request, they’ll send you [musicians], but if you are, how shall I say it, an oppositional sort, you will struggle to gain permission…while one will get quick approval, the others will have to wait quite a lot.

His comments echo many of those of both amateur and state musicians with whom I have spoken; they have described both how influential

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connections significantly ease the process of organizing collaborations and events, as well as how lack of connections (or worse, antagonistic relationships) can render such organization impossible.

Channeling the Flow of Turkish State Musicians Receiving direct material support from government entities can prove elusive for diasporic amateur choirs; nevertheless, because of their frequent reliance on imported professional instrumental accompaniment in their concerts, amateur choir organizers are pivotal in mediating the flow of Turkish state musicians abroad in conjunction with the Turkish government. Some diasporic amateur choirs rely on locally based musicians to perform as instrumentalists in their concerts, but due to the lack of adequate local musical talent, many choirs will hire state musicians from Turkey for these performances; until recently, a choir in Switzerland recruited not only instrumental musicians but also their choir’s conductor from Turkey’s Presidential Classical Turkish Music Choir, flying him to Zurich for rehearsals every two weeks. Choirs also frequently invite singers who are state musicians to perform as soloists with their choirs, dedicating a portion of their concert to their ensemble repertoire and the remainder to the guest soloist. While fully tenured state musicians have “green” passports issued to high-ranking civil servants and their families and thus do not require visas to travel to the European Union, to perform abroad, they must receive permission from their own state ensembles, the Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.13 Diasporic amateur choir directors are essential facilitators of the Turkish cultural industry abroad, as they formally invite state musicians, arrange all aspects of their travel, accommodation, remuneration, and performance, and liaise with the local consulate or embassy to lodge an official request for approval by the multiple ministries and ensemble administrators in Turkey. At first glance, performances with amateur choirs abroad may hardly seem compelling to musicians of Turkey’s most prestigious state ensembles. However, state musicians who wish to perform outside of Turkey face numerous obstacles in addition to the multi-level administrative approval process described above. The highly restrained performance practices and ağır (heavy, serious) repertoire conventional in many state ensembles dedicated to Turkish classical music draw a niche listening audience: even for Turkish or Turkish heritage audiences, this genre is often an

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acquired taste that many scorn because they associate it with urban elitism, neo-Ottoman values, and/or religious conservativism. Furthermore, there is not at present overwhelming demand for Turkish classical music among non-Turkish international audiences; it is not a well-known entity within (nor does it easily lend itself to) “world music” genres frequently defined by “exotic” pumping beats. Furthermore, organizing concerts abroad poses great logistical challenges for state musicians, who may not have sufficient language skills and/or contacts abroad to arrange venues and promotion. Diasporic amateur choirs thus serve as essential intermediaries between state musicians and audiences abroad; in orchestrating these movements, they enable state musicians to gain prestige and benefit economically. In state musicians’ artist biographies, they typically list performances abroad with amateur choirs alongside their concerts in Turkey’s most renowned venues. For state musicians describing their performance careers, it does not particularly matter whether one performed in Royal Albert Hall or a humble suburban church in north London—the fact that one toured abroad in the UK is a status marker in and of itself. (Conversely, some amateur choirs receive invitations to perform in choral festivals in Turkey, as featuring a choir from abroad also lends “color” and prestige to the festival in Turkey.) Performing abroad in countries with much stronger currencies than the Turkish lira also presents opportunities for Turkish ̇ musicians’ significant financial gain. Clarinetist Ismail Bergamalı, a tenured member of TRT Izmir, apparently reported that due to the limited ̇ scope of the music industry in Izmir, “instrumentalists from Izmir frequently came to concerts in Germany because this was the only way to earn a living for them” (Şahin 2009, 28). As a result, amateur choirs, even those that are comprised of extremely novice musicians, are often able to feature some of the most prominent names in Turkish classical music in their concerts, whether it be Melihat Gülses performing with Hoş Seda Korosu in a local north London parish church or three renowned vocalists and five virtuoso instrumentalists from TRT performing with the Orhan Mercan Turkish Art Music Lovers Choir at a Ramada Hotel in Frankfurt. Accepting performance invitations from amateur choirs abroad can also lead to additional future opportunities for state musicians. Amateur choir directors abroad can often organize workshops, seminars, and concerts for state musicians, introduce them to other local organizers and musicians, and invite them back for future concerts with the choir. Recently, in the case of several state musicians, amateur choir directors abroad in Germany

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and the UK have been actively working to help them secure artist visas that will enable them to migrate to the country on a more permanent basis. As a result, diasporic amateur choir directors often field inquiries and requests from musicians in Turkey seeking performance opportunities abroad. Nearly all of the choir directors abroad I interviewed referred to themselves as a “bridge” between Turkey and their local communities, a position they do not take lightly but whose limits they also view with a certain realism. In the words of an amateur choir director in Germany: We are trying to be a bridge, even if a small one. But there is a reality, since recently there have been many people searching, many people who want to come, especially including very important names in Turkey. But believe this—there is not a broad market for Turkish music. I regret that most of all. A very important voice from Turkey mentioned that they wanted to move here, asking, “If I come, can I work?” I said, “There’s no place like that. You would have to come here and work at a restaurant, and I don’t see that for you.” There is no such music hall, no such thing. Actually, for all other types of music there are very different big halls, but Turkish music hasn’t seen that much interest.14

One choir director in London said he was looking into a young state musician’s request to perform as a vocal soloist with the choir but felt pessimistic that he would be able to find the funds to organize a larger scale solo concert for a different state musician who is a renowned ud virtuoso: receiving financial support from the UK or Turkish governments seemed impossible, and ticket sales would not cover renting a hall of the prestige he believed the musician deserved. A choir director in Belgium was more direct in recognizing the power he holds: They [state musicians] cannot come, unfortunately. Well, they can come…I am the head of an association (also in fact I am the Belgium distributor for an artist organization in Turkey) by preparing one piece of paper, so I can produce an officially valid artist identity card for anyone I want. And with one letter of invitation (in fact I have them already prepared here, it takes only two minutes) and an artist ID card I can get a visa within one month for someone in Turkey who has never gone abroad, never gone to Europe. All this by showing there is a cultural activity. However, that does not mean they will be able to live here. They give up. One out of one hundred can endure it…so many people, my relatives, friends, even a police officer friend, ask me. However, first of all, I can’t take

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on that responsibility because they have to stay with me, and I have to deal with the situation. They have to be my first-degree relative or a girl I love for me to deal with this. Otherwise, to obtain residency in Belgium or Europe or some other place, they need to have an occupation or skill that will benefit that country.15

Despite diasporic amateur choirs’ engagement with state actors and the cultural and political visibility they afford to the transnational communities they animate, such comments reveal how the hegemony of the state becomes apparent through the realities of borders, boundaries, and residency requirements. Musicians based in Turkey may conflate the agency of amateur choirs to facilitate acts of cultural diplomacy across geopolitical boundaries with the citizen-making authority that remains the exclusive domain of the state. The disparities between the numbers of musicians in Turkey seeking long-term and/or permanent relocation abroad and the number of viable opportunities diasporic amateur choirs can create for them indicate how, despite their cultural diplomatic agency, diasporic amateur choirs profoundly experience their political subjectivity in relation to the strictures of state power. The fact that most of the diasporic amateur choirs I interviewed have established or are seeking to start children’s and youth choirs speaks to their desire to transmit a musical culture to and instill its significance in future generations, particularly given the wide array of popular musical genres that may dominate their interest; it also suggests that diasporic amateur choirs recognize the potential fragility of their relationship to state actors as well as the limitations of having to continually import culture-bearers to support their projects. In the words of one diasporic amateur choir director, “We are trying to reach young people—young people born here.”

Conclusion This study has sought to demonstrate how informal and often-overlooked configurations of people organizing musical activities in Turkish diasporic populations have an outsized role in mediating cultural flows between Turkey and the countries in which they reside. The Turkish state’s tenure of musicians as civil servants under the Ministry of Culture and Tourism as well as Turkish National Radio and Television would seem to suggest that these musicians would be the nation’s most obvious cultural diplomats; however, the bureaucratic obstacles they face frequently undermine their

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ability to exercise artistic agency and mobility, even within their own state ensembles. In contrast, despite the common perception of their ensembles’ inferior musical performances and informal operational practices, diasporic amateur Turkish music choirs play a key role in animating community abroad by transmitting a musical tradition as well as engaging economic and political networks in their country of operation. Indeed, these ensembles’ positionality as “hidden musicians” due to their amateur status and grassroots organizing (and even self-proclaimed apolitical motivations) enables them to deftly navigate bureaucratic systems and collaborate with governmental partners. Although they frequently do not receive state funding from either their country of operation or Turkey, diasporic choirs regularly engage state actors in both countries, gaining cultural and political visibility for their communities. The common practice of inviting Turkish state musicians to perform with diasporic amateur choirs exemplifies the power these ensembles wield to facilitate musical exchanges abroad, providing Turkish musicians with greater opportunities for mobility, prestige, and economic advantage. Nonetheless, the limited extent to which they can facilitate Turkish musicians’ more permanent relocation abroad demonstrates the confines of their positionality and power as cultural diplomats to bring the domestic abroad, while the “bridge” diasporic choir members have forged for themselves may afford them the unique ability to engage on multiple state and non-state levels and create a sense of transnational cultural community, the borders and boundaries created by state hegemony still render this third space one which is not easily accessible to those outside of it.

Notes 1. “Biz sadece amatör bir koroyuz ama profesyonel bir etkinliği sunmaya çalışıyoruz” (translated by author). ̇ 2. In 2012, this ensemble (in Turkish, Istanbul Devlet Klasik Türk Müziği Korosu) was renamed the Presidential Classical Turkish Music Choir (Cumhurbaşkanlığı Klasik Türk Müziği Korosu). 3. The problems of delineating musical traditions in Turkey reveal broader cultural and political tensions hearkening back to the nation-building project of the Republic’s ruling elite. The Republic’s foremost ideologue Ziya Gökalp divided the music of Turkey into “Eastern, Western, and folk” music, a trichotomy currently reinforced by the partitioning of the Turkish state ensembles into Western classical, Turkish folk, and Turkish classical.

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In the case of this latter category, the very act of naming the genre is particularly thorny, as it construes as a single genre the many referents of osmanlı mûsikî (Ottoman music), türk sanat müziği (Turkish art music), klasik Türk musikisi (classical Turkish music), alaturka (music of the Turkish style), and ahenk, among other terms. For more about how the Republican ideological project manifested in musical categories, see Tekelioglu (1996), Markoff (1990/1991 and 1994), O’Connell (2000), Degirmenci (2006), Karahasanoğlu and Skoog and Karahasanoglu (2009), Greve (2017), and Wozniak (2023). 4. State choirs reinforce a strong divide between the musical genres of Turkish art music (Türk sanat muziği) and Turkish folk music (Türk halk muziği), with ensembles being dedicated to either one or the other; some amateur choirs also follow this split while others are more flexible, programming repertoire drawn from both genres. 5. How else does one begin to unravel the cultural diplomacy of infamous Chicago Bulls basketball legend Dennis Rodman’s multiple visits to North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong-Un, originally financed and mediatized in a documentary series “Basketball Diplomacy” by Vice Media and later sponsored by an Irish betting company and a Canadian cryptocurrency firm? 6. h t t p s : / / w w w . h u r r i y e t d a i l y n e w s . com/5-­million-­turks-­living-­outside-­of-­turkey-­foreign-­ministry-­141049. 7. Turkey comprises many diverse populations that can be distinguished on the basis of ethnic, religious, and linguistic identities, including Kurdish, Armenian, Laz, Jewish, Alevi, Greek, Romani. The diasporic populations to whom I refer also include migrants and their descendants from Turkey and North Cyprus. Following Semra Eren-Nijhar (2017), for the purposes of this article, I use the term Turkish broadly to include this diversity paralleling the way in which the term “British” is employed to describe those from the United Kingdom (18). 8. It is important to note the choirs I describe tend to attract members of middle-class status and project a certain ideal of Turkish identity in their membership. Turks from the most elite social strata, many of whom have received or aspire to education abroad in Europe or the United States, often show disdain for “traditional” Turkish music in favor of Western classical music as well as English language popular music, an attitude that mirrors Kemalist ideology of the early Republican period. At the same time, from its outset the choir phenomenon has strongly emphasized the value of its members’ social respectability through primarily performing repertoire associated with an urban elite class, deterring the participation of those from the most marginalized classes; amateur choir members are often active or retired engineers, professors, real estate agents, accountants,

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or other white-collar workers. Moreover, while some amateur choirs may perform well-known songs from the arabesk genre that is strongly associated with singers from southeast Turkey, the groups tend to disregard the songs’ composers’ minority (often Kurdish) identities as well as the broader political issues surrounding expressing minority identity in Turkey.  My forthcoming work “A Discipline for the Nation: Turkish Classical Music Choirs in History and Practice” contains a broader discussion of how musical  amateurism  is deployed as a strategy of maintaining  respectability (simultaneously ­subverting and reinforcing ideologies around gender, class, and ethnoracial categories) in Turkish classical music communities. 9. While beyond the scope of this article, the deployment of classicity in Turkish musical culture is tied to issues of class, urbanity, ethnicity, and many other intersecting factors. 10. For a rigorous German account of multiple amateur Turkish folk music choirs and associations in Germany, see Greve (2003). 11. “Katılımın oldukça yoğun olduğu konserde Türkiye Londra Büyükelçilik ̇ Ticaret Müşaviri Aytuğ Göksu, Ingiltere Atatürkçü Düşünce Derneği Başkanı Jale Özer gibi Türkçe konuşan toplumların önde gelen isimleri de yer aldı.” 12. “Konsere Zürich Başkonsolosluğumuzu temsilen Muavin Konsolos Gözde ̇ ̇ Akal, Azarbaycan [sic] Büyükelçimizi temsilen eşi Izulat Alakbarova, ITT ̇ Başkanı Suat Şahin, Schaffhausen Milletvekili Ibrahim Taş, iş dünyasından önemli isimler, çeşitli dernek temsilcileri ve vatandaşlarımız katıldılar.” 13. Since the UK’s “Brexit” from the European Union, Turkish green passport holders are obliged to apply for a visa for entry. 14. “Köprü olmaya çalışıyoruz, küçük te olsa, köprü olmaya çalışıyoruz ama şöyle de bir gerçek var, çünkü çok arayanlar oldu son sıralarda, gelmek isteyenler var, hem de çok Türkiye’de önemli isimler…gelmek istiyor, fakat inanın, Türk müziği adına öyle geniş bir pazar yok. Ben en çok buna hayıflanıyorum. Burada yine, isim vermek doğru olmaz şimdi, kendisi şey olmadan, çok önemli bir ses, Türkiye’den, o da buraya yerleşmek istediğini konu oldu, gelsem çalışabilir miyim, dedim, öyle bir yer yok. Burada gelip restoranda çalışman gerekiyor, ben senin için onu yakıştıramam. Öyle bir müzikol, öyle bir şey yok yani. Aslında, diğer anlamda, diğer tüm müzikler için son derece farklı büyük salonlar var ama Türk müziği fazla rahbet görmüyor” (translated by author). 15. “Gelemezler, ne yazık ki. Gelebilirler…ben dernek başkanı oldugum için, hazırlacağım bir kağıt ile, ki ben Türkiye’deki bir kurumla da, aynı zamanda distribütörüm…Türkiye’de sanatçı kurumu, ve ben bu kurumun ̇ Belçika’nın distribütörüyüm. Istediğ im kişiye resmi sanatçı kimlik kartı çıkartabiliyorum. Ve buradan da bir davet yazısıyla, ki hazırdır benim, hemen iki dakikamı alır, davet yazısı ve sanatçı kimlik kartı ile Türkiye’de

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yurtdışına hiç çıkmamış Avrupa’ya çıkmamış birisine bir ay içerisinde vize alabilirim. Kültürel faaliyet gösterip. Ama, onların burada yaşayacağı anlamına gelmiyor. Pes ediyorlar. Yüz kişiden sadece bir tanesi sabredebiliyor…Çok soruyorlar, akrabalarım, arkadaşlarım, polis arkadaşım bile soruyor. Çok kişi soruyor. Ama burada kalmak, birincisi o sorumluluğu yüklenemem, üstlenemem, bir kişinin sorumluluğunu üstlenirsem benimle kalması lazım benim uğraşmam lazım, benim birinci dereceden akrabam olması lazım veya çok sevdiğim bir kız olması lazım ilgilenebilmem için. Yoksa Belçika gibi veya Avrupa gibi veya bir yerden oturum kimliği alabilmek eğer yaşama hakkını kazanabilmek için ya beyin göçüne sahip olması lazım ya da o ülkeye faydalı olabilecek bir mesleğe sahip olması lazım” (translated by author).

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CHAPTER 6

Shahnameh in the Classroom: Iranian Music and DIY Cultural Diplomacy in the UK Laudan Nooshin

Introduction: Beginnings We are no longer represented just by our leaders. Knowingly or not, we are all representatives of our countries and we have the tools to make an impact. We are all diplomats now. (Bound et al. 2007: 76) On the mountain of gems lives the Simorgh, a magical bird who finds the abandoned baby Zal and raises him as her own …

A tale of compassion and forgiveness, the story of Zal formed the centrepiece of the ‘Shahnameh Project’, a collaboration between the Music Department at City, University of London, the Community and Education Department at the London Philharmonic Orchestra (LPO) and the Bridge Project music education programme (London Music Masters) which took place in 2011–2012, and whose legacy has continued in various forms. Jointly funded by City University, the Higher Education Innovation Fund

L. Nooshin (*) City, University of London, London, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 M. M. Rijo Lopes da Cunha et al. (eds.), Music and Cultural Diplomacy in the Middle East, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36279-8_6

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and the LPO, the project introduced Iranian music, culture and storytelling to British school children. The project was led by myself and Patrick Bailey, Head of the Community and Education Department at the LPO, and brought together a number of partners including composer David Bruce, storyteller Sally Pomme Clayton, Iranian musicians Arash Moradi and Fariborz Kiani, and members of City University’s Middle Eastern Music Ensemble. In this chapter, I introduce this and a follow-on project and explore their impact through the lens of cultural diplomacy understood broadly as ‘the exchange of ideas, information, art, and other aspects of culture among nations and their peoples in order to foster mutual understanding’ (Cummings 2009: 1). The motivation for the project was rooted in my experiences as a child of parents who came from Iran to the UK as students in the late 1950s and early 60s, and this is where I begin the story. All academic journeys are underpinned by personal ones, and this is the foundation on which the project described below rests. Growing up in a provincial town in the 1970s, I experienced my share of overt racism, including the inevitable ‘Paki, go home’, at a time when politicians such as Enoch Powell made some feel entitled to verbally and physically abuse those with a different skin colour, accent, religion, and so on. There were relatively few Iranians resident in the UK at the time and only a very small number of British born Iranians. By the time I reached secondary school age, I was very aware that my experience of British society was quite different from almost every Iranian I knew. Indeed, in hindsight and though I didn’t think about it in those terms, I realise now that I tried to play something of a diplomatic role, mediating and explaining British culture to Iranian friends and family and vice versa. But whatever exotic caché was attached to being Iranian (or ‘Persian’) at that time was shattered almost overnight with the revolution of 1979, following which Iran became ostracised on the global stage and being British-Iranian something very complex. It is only with the distance of years that I can look back and reflect that much of my academic career has been about mediating between the different aspects of this identity, and always seeking common ground—for instance between Iran and the UK and between different areas of music study—as part of making sense of the relationship between self and other. I now fast forward 20 years. In the early 2000s, I started going to family concerts with my children. The LPO’s ‘Funharmonics’ offered a fun context in which children aged 4 and above could experience a live orchestra and ‘have a go’ on instruments. The concerts were led by an animateur

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and included audience participation. One of these concerts was to prove particularly key in inspiring the project that later developed. The LPO often commissioned new music for the Funharmonics and on one occasion the orchestra performed such a piece based on a story from the Finnish epic Kalevala (by composer Brendan Beales). The audience was involved in singing along and at the same time learning about an aspect of Finnish culture. At the time, I didn’t consciously think of this as a form of cultural diplomacy, but I was intrigued and it struck me that this kind of setting could be an effective way of introducing British children to Iranian culture through the stories of the epic Shahnameh. One of the questions I ask in this chapter is how we might understand grassroots, ‘bottom-up’ initiatives such as those described below as forms of cultural diplomacy. Music has of course been mobilised as part of public diplomacy initiatives by state actors for centuries, often as a means of accruing political or other capital, and there is an extensive literature on the topic as discussed in the introduction to this volume.1 In this case there were no state actors and the project was not initially conceived as a form of diplomacy, although it arguably ended up functioning as such. And whilst the current volume is primarily about cultural diplomacy ‘in’ the Middle East, the case discussed here was led by a collective of academic, non-state actors and local communities in the UK, including but not primarily aimed at diaspora. This makes the project somewhat unusual: whilst many outreach ‘world music’ projects in the UK have focused on diaspora communities, here the target group was by contrast those with no or little prior connection to or knowledge of Iran. From time to time UK government organisations such as the British Council or major venues have run cultural engagement activities related to Iran, often including collaborations between British and Iranian artists.2 Such projects have tended to take place at politically expedient times, are often short-lived and most have had limited reach and impact on broader attitudes towards Iran. What, then, might the role of the academic be as a quasi cultural diplomat? As noted, much of my professional career has been about ‘low level’ cultural diplomacy and making Iranian music and culture better known and understood outside the country, and particularly as a counter to predominantly negative portrayals of Iran within the Anglophone media sphere. Relatively little research has been conducted on the ways in which people with heritage connections to countries such as Iran that tend to be demonised by the media contend with such perceptions on a daily basis

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and the impact on their navigation of identity in diaspora contexts. For my part, I have experienced many times ‘hiding’ my heritage where I sense that this will generate a negative or even hostile response. The inevitable question that persons of colour or with a foreign accent regularly contend with in the UK, ‘where are you from?’, can open up a minefield such that it is often easier for me to simply say ‘from London’ (which is also not untrue!). Given all this, my academic work has offered a privileged platform from which to promote cultural understanding and to make Iranian music and culture better known in the UK (where I am based) and beyond. In the late 1990s, I abandoned a project on music and identity among diaspora Iranians after my first visit to Iran as an adult revealed a wealth of music-making (particularly with the re-emergence of popular music into the public domain following the election of President Mohamad Khatami in 1997), which I felt was more urgently in need of exposure and academic writing in order to be better known outside Iran. In 2008, I organised and led an educational trip to Iran with six students from City University, which as well as visiting historical sites such as Persepolis, attending concerts and meeting musicians, also included a half-day in the Music Department at the University of Tehran where the City students met and interacted with Iranian music students and heard them perform. Such small acts of cultural diplomacy no doubt feature in the work of many ethnomusicologists, but for me they have taken on particular importance in the face of both misconceptions about Iran and the chilly climate in which mentioning one’s Iranian heritage is often taboo.

Project 1: ‘Prince Zal and the Simorgh’, 2011–2012 Background It was with these thoughts in mind, then, that I approached the LPO in the spring of 2011, with the idea of commissioning a piece based on a story from the Iranian epic Shahnameh (‘Book of Kings’) by Iran’s national poet Abolqasem Ferdowsi (940-1020  CE), and with the support of Knowledge Transfer funds from City. I was put in touch with the then head of the Education and Community Department, Patrick Bailey, and we set up some initial meetings. Patrick was keen to involve David Bruce, a British composer with an international profile who had previously worked with the LPO and whose recent children’s opera had been performed at the Royal Opera House. Bruce was commissioned to write a

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piece for one of the LPO Brightsparks school concerts, aimed at Key Stage 2 primary school children (aged 8 to 11). Planning began in earnest in the summer of 2011, almost a year ahead of the concert. I had suggested that the story of Zal and the Simorgh would be particularly suitable for children, addressing as it does a number of ‘universal’ themes, including celebration of difference and forgiveness: born albino and abandoned as a baby, Zal is found and cared for by the magical and wise Simorgh bird; many years later he is reconciled with his family and returns triumphantly as the new king.3 A number of partners joined the project, including storyteller Sally Pomme Clayton, who was already familiar with the Shahnameh and other stories from Iran and who was commissioned to adapt the story for a young modern-day audience; and the Bridge Project, part of London Music Masters,4 a relatively young charity providing violin teaching in primary schools in underprivileged areas of south London. As such, the educational dimension of the project was strong from the start, as discussed below. It was also decided to include a number of additional musicians alongside the orchestra: Year 1 violinists from Jessop and Ashmole primary schools, Iranian musicians Arash Moradi (playing tanbur and setar long-­ necked lutes) and Fariborz Kiani (tombak goblet drum and daff frame drum), and members of the City University Middle Eastern Ensemble playing daff. The school workshops also involved City undergraduate violinists (Beverley Cooper, Sarah Hayward, Rachel Hobby) and composers (Alice Jeffreys, Lucasz Kapraz and Christina Michael). By the time activities began in the autumn of 2011, the project was already multi-faceted with a number of partners involved. In this section, I describe the project activities, culminating in the two Brightsparks school concerts. I will then discuss the impact of the project, including feedback from teachers, pupils and others involved and consider how one might understand the outcomes as a form of ‘DIY’, grassroots, non-state cultural diplomacy that is not part of any strategic cultural policy. The first creative session of the project was held at the Royal Festival Hall in early November 2011 and brought together all of the project partners to meet and share ideas. This also included a practical workshop run by violin teachers from the Bridge Project to introduce their approach to string teaching (using some ideas from Suzuki method). This was followed by a series of workshops in two primary schools in the London Borough of Lambeth, Ashmole and Jessop schools, in which London Music Masters teachers were already working.5 The aim was to introduce

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children to the project, to Iran and Iranian music, and for David Bruce to develop initial ideas for the composition. Each visit began with a whole school assembly at which Sally Pomme Clayton introduced the Shahnameh and the story of Zal, and performed the story accompanied by Moradi, Kiani, myself and City students. Children then had an opportunity to ask questions. Most had never seen or heard Iranian instruments before. Assemblies were followed by 40-minute workshops for Year 4 and 5 violinists (involving about 120 children), led by London Music Masters teachers with City student helpers. Children were introduced to Iranian melodies and rhythms, and were then asked to create musical ideas of their own to portray the different characters in the story, for instance what kind of music would suit the magical Simorgh bird? What might the mountain of gems (where she lives) sound like? (Fig. 6.1). Bruce incorporated some of these ideas into the final piece. Indeed, the next stage of work was the composition of the music and finalising the narrated text. Myself, Moradi and Kiani worked closely with Bruce, talking with him about Iranian music styles, structures and creative processes, particularly in relation to modal systems and improvisational practices, and I lent him a collection of books,

Fig. 6.1  Workshop at Ashmole School, November 2011

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articles and CDs. Bruce also attended rehearsals of the City University Middle Eastern (percussion) Ensemble, to gain an understanding of rhythmic patterns and cycles. By early spring 2012, the piece ‘Price Zal and the Simorgh’ was complete and those involved in the Royal Festival Hall performance began to rehearse. Educational Activities As the project developed, I became increasingly aware of its educational potential beyond the concert hall, which is where I had primarily envisaged it. Besides the school workshops and the involvement of children in the concerts, in conjunction with the LPO team I wrote a classroom guide for those teachers who would be bringing pupils to the concerts; I also assisted Patrick Bailey in running two teacher training (INSET) sessions. The guide introduced Iran and the broader Middle East region, and included information on Iranian culture, storytelling, visual arts and poetry, including on Ferdowsi, and on Iranian instruments, modes and rhythms, plus ideas for practical classroom activities. The latter included cross-curricular work in literacy (children writing their own versions of the story), numeracy (exploring additive rhythmic patterns made from multiples of 2 and 3 beats), art (children painting their own Simorghs, taking inspiration from the beautifully detailed miniature paintings of the Shahnameh in old manuscripts, an example of which was included in the guide), geography, PSHE (Personal Social and Health Education) and citizenship. The guide also introduced children to the instruments and layout of the symphony orchestra that they would be seeing live, many for the first time, thus presenting Iranian and orchestral instruments alongside one another and on equal terms in the same document. The guide was available through the LPO website, together with sound examples specially recorded by Moradi and Kiani.6 The INSET sessions took place on Wednesday 18th April 2012, with activities largely drawn from the teachers’ guide. The sessions were attended by about 35 primary school teachers and the aim was to support them in preparing pupils ahead of the concerts in order for the latter to get the most out of the experience. I was particularly struck by the engagement of teachers and their enthusiasm to introduce their pupils to a culture and music which most knew nothing about or likely would only have encountered in news media associated with negative and often frightening connotations around discourses of ‘axis of evil’, radical Islam, global

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terrorism, and so on. This enthusiasm was reflected in the feedback following the project, as discussed below. The planning for this project and the activities described above happened to take place soon after consultation that followed the 2008 UK Research Assessment Exercise,7 as part of which it was proposed to introduce an element aimed at assessing and measuring the ‘impact’, defined broadly, of public-funded university research outside academia. Universities were to develop a series of ‘Impact Case Studies’ to describe public-facing activities (underpinned by research outputs) and to evidence their impact on wider society. As the LPO project developed, it became clear that it was having an impact well beyond what I had envisaged and that there would be value in conducting follow up interviews and questionnaires beyond the standard feedback being collected by the LPO. In the event, I was able to secure impact funds from City University to interview teachers and others involved in the project and to make a short film.8 Additional educational activities continued after the main project ended. For instance, in the autumn of 2012, Bruce conducted a series workshops with second and third year undergraduate composition students at City University who developed their own pieces based on the Zal story; one of the students who had shadowed Bruce on the main project (Alice Jeffreys) was also accepted onto the LPO Soundhub young composers scheme. In other words, the impact of this project rippled out in many directions. The Concerts The two Brightsparks schools concerts took place on Wednesday 23rd May 2012 at London’s Royal Festival Hall. In all, the concerts were attended by 4658 Key Stage 2 pupils and their teachers from 75 primary schools. The concerts were subsidised by Deutsche Bank so pupils and teachers were able to attend for free. Many of the children attending were from socio-economically deprived backgrounds and the vast majority had never heard a live orchestra before or attended a performance in a large concert hall such as the RFH, even though several of the schools visiting were located in the same borough (Lambeth) as the South Bank Centre, only a few miles away or less. The central theme of the concert was ‘telling stories through music’ and included a number of standard repertoire pieces and some film music.9 There was also a surprise additional piece, the theme to the video game Angry Birds, which sent a frisson of excited recognition through the audience as soon as the orchestra started playing.

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Few of these children would have previously made the connection between a video game and other screen music that is so much part of their daily lives, and a symphony orchestra. The premiere of Prince Zal and the Simorgh was the centrepiece of the concert. As well as the full orchestra, also on stage were storyteller and narrator Sally Pomme Clayton, Moradi (setar and tanbur), Kiani (tombak and daff ), 53 Key Stage 1 (ages 5 to 7) violinists from Jessop and Ashmole primary schools and members of the City University Middle Eastern Ensemble (Fig. 6.2). The conductor was David Angus, and the presenter Andrew Barclay (principal percussionist at the LPO) introduced the music and led elements of audience participation; Angie Newman provided sign language from the front of the stage for one of the concerts. Prince Zal as a Form of Cultural Diplomacy Whilst I had picked up on teachers’ enthusiasm at the INSET events, I had not quite appreciated the impact of the project until we started to collect feedback. We were able to access responses to the LPO’s own evaluation, both of the concert, the teacher training events and the teachers’ guide. In addition, we recruited two research assistants, Stephen Wilford and Alex Jeffery (both City University PhD students at the time) to interview participants, as follows: Patrick Bailey and Alexandra Clarke (Education and Community Department, LPO), Rob Adediran and Rachel Wadham

Fig. 6.2  Rehearsal, 23.5.2012

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(London Music Masters), David Bruce, Sally Pomme Clayton, Arash Moradi, Fariborz Kiani, myself, and pupils and teachers from Jessop and Ashmole schools. Some of the interviews were also filmed, and as mentioned a short film was made about the project. Beyond the wider educational benefits, such as pupils experiencing a live orchestra in a major concert hall, and the messages of the story itself (valuing difference, the importance of forgiveness), it was clear that teachers had embraced the opportunity and used project materials effectively. The wider value was articulated in interview by Rob Adediran: ‘This was a very successful project on many levels. It was good for the children to work with adults and other young people outside their sphere; it’s an encouraging validation to have young professionals come into their school and invest time in them and to have a piece written especially for them. The real value of having City University involved was bringing diverse elements to the collaboration in a way that we haven’t seen before and which provided so many different types of role models for the children.’ (July 2012)

Adediran also commented on the value of the project to the children in performing in a professional setting on stage and being able to: ‘experience making music in such a large ensemble and to feel that they’re contributing something of worth … For these children from these schools and at this age it’s the kind of memory that will remain with them forever. They will also identify these experiences, and the people they are making music with, with Iran and as they get older and engage more in current affairs that will be for them a really positive memory of things Iranian.’

The teachers’ guide and INSET sessions received positive feedback, highlighting ways in which the project facilitated cross-curricular work, as well as developing music-specific skills in listening, performing and composing: ‘My colleagues and I LOVED the Teachers’ Guide; coupled with the INSET training session. It is possibly the best resource we’ve ever been provided with for an educational visit. I played audio clips that were recommended in the pack, did the activities based around the map and Iran’s location and talked about oral stories and the children also painted their own Simorghs.’ (See Fig. 6.3) (class teacher, Lee Manor Primary School)

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Fig. 6.3  Artwork from the project. ‘Simorgh’ by Oscar Murphy, Lee Manor Primary School, south London ‘We used the drumming patterns from the resources pack in a mathematics lesson, working out which numbers could be made by adding strings of 2s and 3s. Lots of children subsequently identified the concert as their favourite trip of the year!’ (class teacher, Charles Dickens Primary School) ‘In the week before the concert we used the story in our literacy lessons, describing the Simorgh, using drama and role play to investigate character and writing diary entries for Prince Zal from the different stages of the story. The children were really engaged and produced some really good writing. This meant that they were familiar with both the story and music, which enhanced their enjoyment and engagement at the concert.’ (class teacher, Charles Dickens Primary School) ‘The background work to Iranian rhythms was an excellent introduction and proved a good basis for percussive activities in school. We composed our own music to the Prince Zal story using the Iranian modes and rhythms. Great fun!’

Pupil responses were also positive: ‘From the story I learnt that you cannot be cross with someone forever. You need to forgive. If you have something you should be grateful for it because you may regret it if you’re not.’ ‘I liked the daff best. It was noisy. I wish they would come to our school.’

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The Shahnameh project was rooted in a complex of imperatives, including long-standing personal ones described earlier. However, it was only as the work progressed that I began to think about it more specifically as a form of cultural diplomacy, particularly as I observed and appreciated the deep impact of the project on teachers and pupils. As such, it felt important to understand more about how the ‘exchange of ideas, information, art, and other aspects of culture’ had led to ‘mutual understanding’ (Cummings). In some sense the ‘flow’ of diplomacy was in one direction, rather than being a ‘mutual’ exchange: this was about promoting a better understanding of Iranian culture and music in the UK. The hope was that children would take these ideas home and share with friends and family what they had learnt about Iran, as not just any country but one that has had a complex relationship with Britain (and with other European countries, Russia/Soviet Union and the US), particularly since the 1979 Revolution. Whilst the project was largely about offering children a different understanding of Iran, there was also an impact on those who already have that understanding but who struggle to make it known amidst the clamour of media and other negative representations. The following testimony from a teacher resonated with my own experiences: ‘We had an Iranian pupil, and her family were very excited about the chance to talk about their heritage. She was able to bring her own versions of the stories to read to the class’.

Not only did the project allow this child to share her culture, it opened up a space right at the heart of her classroom to validate an identity and heritage that she has no doubt at times sought to invisibilise, in ways that I recognise at a very visceral level. The Shahnameh Project ended in autumn 2012, although it was hoped that teachers would continue to use the classroom resources and that further performances of Prince Zal and the Simorgh might be possible.10 Soon after the project ended, Patrick Bailey left the LPO to take up a position in Cornwall and it was through his suggestion that the piece was chosen by the Cornwall Youth Orchestra for performances at Launceston Town Hall and Truro Cathedral (12th and 15th April 2015), and subsequently at the Music for Youth National Festival at Symphony Hall, Birmingham (July 11th), from where it was selected for the Youth Proms at London’s Royal Albert Hall on November 23rd.11 In this version of the piece, the

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text was divided between four narrators in a very creative way. For the Youth Proms, the maximum age of performers was 22, so the orchestra was conducted by 16-year old Angus Webster and the tanbur and setar parts were replaced by Greek bouzouki played by City student Antonis Rousounelos. The Birmingham and London concerts included violinists from Bedfordshire Young Strings (see images on Bruce’s website). As well as the concerts, school workshops were also held in Cornwall. Whilst it was not possible to collect feedback in the same way as for the earlier project, it is clear that the inclusion of Prince Zal and the Simorgh in the repertoire of a county youth orchestra and being performed at events aimed at young people had a similar ‘ripple’ effect. Programming a piece based on a story from Iran on a major concert stage as part of a national festival served to centre and to some extent to ‘normalise’ Iran as a country with its own rich history and culture, telling a rather different story from those more familiar from media headlines. And witnessing this piece being embraced so enthusiastically by the young people in the orchestra (as evidenced by the interviews in the film) was truly inspiring.

Project 2: The Phoenix of Persia Children’s Book, 2017–2019 Background The Cornwall Youth Orchestra performances took place three years after the end of the LPO project, and prompted me to start thinking again about the potential of this work and whether there might be further educational mileage in the story of Zal. At the time of the original project, it had occurred to me that the story could be well-suited to a children’s storybook with music, with perhaps even greater impact due to the potential reach, both in terms of numbers and a presence in people’s homes. And so it was that from autumn 2016, I applied for funding to turn this idea into reality, and I also sought out potential publishers. The latter was not easy; many people I spoke to with experience of children’s publishing were doubtful that any publisher would be interested in an unsolicited idea such as this. However, I was fortunate to be directed to a relatively young independent publisher, Tiny Owl, that specialises in beautifully illustrated children’s books featuring stories from around the world and that also has a particular connection with Iran via its founder-directors

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Delaram Ghanimifard and Karim Arghandehpour. And indeed, Tiny Owl was an ideal fit. Discussions started in the summer of 2017 and planning continued for several months, during which time Amin Hassanzadeh Sharif, an illustrator based in Iran, was invited to produce the artwork and Sally Pomme Clayton to adapt the story. I secured financial support from Iran Heritage Foundation and City University, and Tiny Owl was also awarded Arts Council funding. My original intention had been to adapt the music from Prince Zal and the Simorgh for the book, but it soon became apparent that an orchestral score would not be suitable for a number of reasons. I also wanted to take the opportunity to introduce children to Iranian instruments and their sounds. To this end, I decided early on that each instrument would ‘represent’ a character in the story, rather in the manner of Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf.12 It was also important to me to include female musicians, in order to highlight the little-known wealth of talented musicians in Iran and in diaspora. After initial discussions with composer Soosan Lolavar, one of my PhD students at City, who became the Project Manager and Creative Producer (and later Assistant Editor), we decided that rather than a single composer, it would be interesting to bring together a small group of Iranian musicians to workshop ideas and create the music collaboratively. Four musicians were invited to take part: Arash Moradi, who had been part of the earlier project (tanbur), Nilufar Habibian (qanun, plucked dulcimer), Saedi Kord Mafi (santur, hammered dulcimer and daff ) and Amir Eslami (nei, end-blown flute).13 Workshop sessions with the musicians and with Sally as storyteller began in May 2018, the aim being to compose and shape the music around the story. The music became structured around individual ‘chapters’ (equivalent to book page spreads), with each chapter composed (and generally performed by) one musician, according to the storyline. In the early workshops, musicians brought their pre-composed ideas, and others would listen and offer suggestions. A certain amount of the creative process was therefore collaborative and it was interesting to hear the music evolve organically and take shape over a period of months.14 The chapters were eventually ready for recording in the studios at City in autumn 2018, with editing, mixing and mastering taking place in January 2019. We were keen to involve students in the project and were fortunate to have funds to employ City undergraduates to lead on recording and production, in particular Julius Johansson who, together with Soosan Lolavar, edited the music files. The music is available using the QR code in the book, and can also be accessed via soundcloud.15

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The Phoenix of Persia (Clayton and Hassanzadeh Sharif 2019) was published in May 2019 and the official launch event, aimed at families with young children, was held at the British Library on 30th May 2019 with a live performance by Sally, Nilufar and Arash.16 Educational Activities As with the earlier project, something that started off as a single event/ product soon became much more multifaceted and richer than originally envisaged. And once again, educational activities became embedded in the project, largely due to the vision and enthusiasm of Sophie Hallam (at Tiny Owl) and the other partners, some of whom the publisher had worked with previously: Tower Hamlets Schools Library Service (THSLS), Pop Up Projects and HEC Global Learning Centre. Sophie led on the production of a beautifully designed and wide-ranging cross-curricular teacher resource pack, covering subjects including history, art, geography, maths, drama, religious studies, PSHE and English, as well as music. I wrote the latter section, based on some of the material from the earlier LPO guide.17 To further support learning, 25 ‘Shahnameh boxes’ were created, each containing a copy of the teacher resource, The Phoenix of Persia book, another Tiny Owl book based on a different story from the Shahnameh (Bijan and Manije, Seidabadi and  & Vafaian 2016), a non-­ fiction picture book on Iran (I is for Iran, Adl and Adl 2011), as well as objects related to the story and/or Iran: a piece of fabric, a nei, a small frame drum, miniature paintings, mosaics, feathers, coins and poetry. The boxes were distributed by THSLS to school library services across the UK and from there into schools. In the summer of 2019, The Phoenix of Persia also formed part of Pop Up Projects, a national festival programme bringing literature to schools across the UK.18 Schools received the Shahnameh Box approximately six weeks before the workshop so that children could explore the story and materials. The book and resources were also trialled in two Special Educational Needs (SEN) schools: one for children on the autistic spectrum and another for hearing impaired and deaf children (Frank Barnes School, London); a music workshop was also held at the latter. I led music workshops in a number of other schools, together with Nilufar Habibian, including composition activities.19 In addition, Clayton and Hassanzadeh Sharif led storytelling and art workshops (the latter during a visit to the UK from Iran by Hassanzadeh Sharif in the summer of 2019), as well as events at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. As

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such, there was a plethora of educational and other public-facing activity, particularly in the summer and autumn of 2019. As well as formal project partners, through my role as music consultant to the major exhibition on Iran at the V&A Museum, Epic Iran (summer 2021, postponed from 2020), music from the book was used in one of the exhibition rooms.20 Whilst many of the extended educational activities were suspended in spring 2020 due to Covid-19, some eventually resumed online; for instance, Clayton ran a storytelling session for Southwark Library Services in February 2021 that also resulted in follow up art work by children who attended.21 Partly as a result of the pandemic and the enforced pausing of workshops, I set up a project website, which also enabled me to share examples of classroom activities and feedback from teachers who had undertaken project work on the book.22 As part of the educational activities planning, there had been extensive discussion about the legacy of the project in order to ensure that its impact would be sustainable and long-lasting. For instance, in 2019 THSLS included training around the Shahnameh Box and other resources at INSET days and at Governors’ conferences, reaching over 200 teachers (and thereby potentially thousands of pupils): ‘We anticipate future usage from schools who run geography-themed weeks and request resources on various different countries. There is no reason why we should not still be lending out the Shahnameh box in ten years’ time!’ THSLS also planned to use the project model for a bid on local history resources. Music Masters also became involved again after the publication of the book and used the resources to extend their classroom musicianship teaching away from its primary focus on Western music. In January 2020, Soosan Lolavar delivered an INSET training day at City University for 14 Music Masters teachers working in six schools across three London boroughs. Since then, Music Masters has embedded The Phoenix of Persia materials into their core Year 4 and Year 6 musicianship curriculum (see below). Additionally, they now run a PGCEi course for instrumental teachers (in conjunction with Birmingham City University), and course materials include resources from The Phoenix of Persia, potentially taking this into hundreds of schools in the future. But Is It Cultural Diplomacy? ‘I consider myself an open-minded person who doesn’t judge countries or people without having spent time with those I pass judgement on. However,

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I admit I also connected Iran with negative thoughts … Now that I am aware of this, I will actively try to change this and share my experiences with others.’ (Class teacher)

Due to the number of partners involved in The Phoenix of Persia project and the ways in which it expanded in different directions, it was possible to capture a wealth of feedback on its impact, particularly on changed attitudes towards Iran. A parent who attended the book launch described how the music helped him introduce Iranian culture to his son: ‘I loved that the ancient story was set in a modern setting so we got to engage with examples of modern-day Iran … I don’t think it would have occurred to me to introduce him to Iranian music/culture without this book’.23 Following the school events, many pupils evidenced impact in areas such as appreciating and celebrating difference, and increased empathy and cross-cultural understanding: ‘I learned that everyone is different and it does not matter. We should celebrate differences’ and ‘I learned about a different country (Iran) and what their lifestyle is like’. In a survey undertaken by Tiny Owl of pupils and teachers involved in the Pop Up project, 58% of pupils said that they now wanted to read more books about other cultures and 100% of teachers agreed that reading the book and exploring the resources had supported pupils in developing positive associations with diversity and other cultures. Teachers also noted that both SEN pupils and reluctant readers had been ‘significantly more engaged than usual’ through the book and resources, bearing in mind the focus of the story on an albino child. Both in the survey and in conversation with teachers it was clear that pupils had increased their understanding of Iran and Iranian culture. One described how learning about music helped him teach pupils about the commonalities between cultures: ‘There are great benefits in children being able to see music from different cultural perspectives … Learning about culture through music is invaluable and helps children to understand the wider world.’24 Those who responded to the questionnaire agreed that the resource box and teaching pack had added value to their teaching and stimulated them to work more intensively with a book than normally. Further examples of feedback are as follows: ‘The teacher who borrowed the Shahnameh box last term used it for a display in school to promote different countries and cultures, and was pleased to find we stocked something representing Iran.’ (THLS)

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‘I dimmed the lights, put on fairy lights and just let the magical story play using the QR code in the book. You could have heard a pin drop. The children were completely mesmerised and drawn into the story in a way I haven’t seen before. I observed children moving their hands and bodies unconsciously to the music and not one child spoke until it finished.’ (class teacher)

One of the most interesting outcomes of the project was the cross-­ curricular classroom work, with teachers using ideas from the resources and extending them in creative ways, including activities such as children creating their own comic strips based on the story (art), writing letters between different characters (literacy), composing their own music, and so on. Ceridwen Eccles, a teacher based in Leicestershire, posted on social media about her pupils’ work; for one session, they chose their favourite musical instrument to research and wrote about how the sounds made them feel.25,26 As far as the impact of the project on the next generation of teachers, the following from Katrina Damigos (Head of Teacher Training Programmes and Musicians of Change (PGCEi) Course Leader at Music Masters) is worth quoting at length: At Music Masters we’ve been exploring the Phoenix of Persia with our musicianship and instrumental teachers to diversify teaching repertoire and the range of musical cultures we expose the children on our programme to … It’s worth pointing out that these sessions happened in January 2020 shortly after the US assassination of Suleimani and subsequent missile strikes so there was a timely drive amongst our teachers to counter negative and dehumanising broadcasting in the media with expanding their knowledge of Iranian culture, which they could take immediately into lessons. In the summer we piloted a whole class KS2 Musicianship 5 week project through bi-weekly 45 min lessons supported by class teachers in the alternate weeks (10 weeks in total) and established the project as a permanent fixture in our KS2 curriculum for Y4 and Y6 in September 2021. All of our teachers are Western classical musicians and as a team shared a common anxiety around representing a culture different from their own within their teaching … Significantly, however, it has been the nature of the contemporary music composed for the project which has bridged the initial gap of learning unfamiliar traditional instruments and musical language by

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putting a strong emphasis on creativity and living artistry within the resource. This has encouraged the teachers to find their own relationship to teaching it, some leaning more into the story telling aspect and some more into the composition, listening or improvisation as their comfort levels develop … Within our schools, our musicianship team have reported a real enthusiasm from the children, who love the book and connect strongly to the characters. (Personal communication, August 2022)

Damigos also reported on the impact on children and families with cultural heritage in the region: Perhaps most strikingly we were excited to receive a video from one of our violin students sharing her home music making with her family: Sarah Hill, Music Masters teacher who taught Phoenix of Persia in her KS2 Musicianship classes immediately recognised the student: ‘Amazing to see Zine playing violin with tanbur with her dad! She was in my Phoenix of Persia class and told me her mum and dad play the tanbur (one of the instruments that features in the story). She was so excited to talk about it and every time I mentioned it she was super proud. I said to her that I would love to see her play tanbur with her family and now I have!’ For us, this was a moment which demonstrated the power of sustained exposure to other cultures in our music lessons, leading not only to richer and deeper musical learning outcomes but making lessons a place where students feel proud, seen and able to share their multiple musical and cultural identities. (Ibid.)

Clearly, experiencing their own culture in the context of a positive mainstream setting was significant to this child, as it was in the example cited earlier.27 Similar feedback was received from an older child at the launch event: ‘I love that it relates to my home country even though it’s so far away. I always feel a sense of comfort when I’m in, or listening to something in, Iran’. Another respondent described the reaction of her elderly Iranian father (who lives in the UK) to the book: ‘He was smiling away; he remembered stories from the Shahnameh and was really excited when he recognised words and could also read Zal’s name in one of the pictures’. One of the resources developed as part of the project relates to global citizenship education and seeks to measure changed perceptions of Iran among pupils.28 As part of this, pupils are asked to identify what they might see in Iran and the UK, with the aim of establishing commonalities

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between the two countries, peoples and ways of life, as well as learning about difference. Teachers are asked to: Complete this activity before exploring The Shahnameh Box, including reading The Phoenix of Persia, and the learning activities in the Teacher Resources. Then repeat the activity again, either at an interim period or at the end, and analyse any changes that have occurred by a comparison with the first activity results. Look for a greater balance in pupils’ responses, showing an awareness of diversity, traditional and contemporary, greater awareness of Iranian culture, and note any other changes in awareness of issues surrounding Iran. For example, how there are rarely positive news stories about the country and how little we know about ancient civilisations outside a narrow curriculum.

Indeed, one of the challenges of these kinds of projects is to introduce children to different musics and cultures without essentialising or orientalising difference. For instance, drawing connections between the Iranian musical instruments that pupils learn about and instruments that they are already familiar with is one way of doing this.

Concluding Thoughts: Towards a DIY Cultural Diplomacy? ‘I hope that the legacy of this project will be a generation of children and young people who have their first experience of Iran being a really beautiful story with really wonderful music rather than anything negative.’ (Soosan Lolavar, Project Manager and Creative Producer for The Phoenix of Persia music)29

It’s clear from the projects described above that music offers a valuable space in which to foster greater cultural understanding. To what extent, though, might this be framed and understood as cultural diplomacy, what are the challenges to operationalising music and other arts in this way, and in what sense might my role as researcher, project initiator and (co-)lead be akin to that of a diplomat? The projects discussed here might be described as ‘citizen-led’ or even ‘DIY’ in the sense that they are not part of any strategic cultural policy (although they perhaps should be) and the impetus has come from very personal experiences of cultural dissonance and a desire to offer a different perspective on a country that has been negatively branded for so long by the Western political and media

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establishment. Feedback from teachers and pupils offered complex commentary on a range of benefits including the messages of the story, engaging with creative work and experiencing live music. Arguably the projects were perhaps all the more powerful and efficacious for the understated subtlety of their messages rather than being presented overtly as cultural diplomacy initiatives. In an increasingly polarised world of media disinformation, there is an urgent need for such grassroots ‘people-to-people’ soft cultural diplomacy that reaches into schools and homes. This is of course as important for people with no prior connection with Iran as it is for those for whom such projects open up a space to feel pride in their culture for a change. Certainly, in the current international climate, it’s hard to overstate the importance of such projects and indeed I have come to believe that there is perhaps no work that is more pressing for an educator-researcher such as myself.

Notes 1. For relevant recent work in ethnomusicology, see Braithwaite (2022) and the volume edited by David G. Herbert and Jonathan McCollum (2022), which includes a chapter on state-directed cultural diplomacy in Iran (Niknafs 2022). 2. For instance, in 2007, the BBC Symphony Orchestra ran a project called ‘Persepolis’, as part of which Iranian musicians from the ensemble Dastan collaborated with members of the orchestra on a specially commissioned piece. Other project events included a concert by the BBSO featuring the work of Iranian composers, some of which was broadcast by BBC Radio 3 (https://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/latejunction/pip/ha7oi/) and public facing workshops involving the City University Middle Eastern Ensemble. The British Council also funded a later project that brought together young musicians from Iran and the UK to work together. 3. There is a long tradition of live storytelling in Iran known as naqqali, including from the Shahnameh, which made the choice of this story feel particularly appropriate. 4. Now renamed as Music Masters, https://musicmasters.org.uk/. The project leads at London Music Masters at the time were Rob Adediran and Anne Findlay. 5. https://www.ashmoleprimaryschool.org.uk/; https://jessop.lambeth. sch.uk/. Workshop dates were as follows: Wednesday 23rd November, Monday November 28th and Wednesday December 7th 2011.

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6. http://www.lpomedia.org.uk/11-­12/bs/teacherresource-­may12.pdf. 7. The UK national research audit mechanism https://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Research_Assessment_Exercise. On the topic of ‘impact’ in ethnomusicology, see the special forum in the journal Ethnomusicology Forum (Cottrell 2011), based on the autumn 2010 one-day conference of the British Forum for Ethnomusicology. 8. Making an Impact: Introducing Key Stage 2 Children to Iranian Music (2012, Stephen Wilford and Alex Jeffery). See http://www.youtube. com/watch?v=BK10zcZHXUo. 9. The concert programme is available here: https://cityuni-­my.sharepoint. com/:b:/g/personal/l_nooshin_city_ac_uk/ESLk2x3Bn6RCumtXOzt MZ8MB4gfP-­3 ttI76yTbdQntYcEA?e=fvLUq10007/348325/ Brightsparks-­Concert-­Programme,-­23rd-­May-­2012.pdf. 10. Bruce wrote the piece such that it could be performed without necessarily needing Iranian musicians, a daff ensemble or a group of young string players. 11. For a video recording of this performance, see David Bruce’s website:  http://www.davidbruce.net/works/prince-­zal-­simorgh.asp. City University also produced a short film about the Youth Proms performance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHMgBgaqKog. 12. The Simorgh is represented by nei, the Mountain of Gems by santur, Zal by qanun, King Sam, Queen Aram and the royal court by tanbur, and the soldiers and wild countryside by daff. https://www.phoenixofpersia. co.uk/storytelling-­through-­music. 13. I was keen to include Amir, whose music I had previously written about and who I knew to be a wonderful composer and performer, but he is based in Vancouver and I wasn’t sure how the logistics would work. The normalisation of the online environment due to Covid-19 was still two years away and although we had the technology to do so at the time, it wasn’t yet part of normative ways of working. Had the project taken place now, we would certainly have connected online with Amir and involved him virtually in workshop sessions. As it was, Amir collaborated from a distance, composing sections and sending them for feedback. 14. It’s interesting to think here about musicians’ individual agency in cultural diplomacy projects. In this case, a certain amount of diplomacy was needed on the part of myself and the Creative Producer to manage ­differences of opinion on artistic vision between members of the group and sensitivities over how to credit individual contributions that had been enriched by collective work. 15. There are two versions of the soundfile: (1) The complete story with narration: https://soundcloud.com/user-­89102112/the-­phoenix-­of-­persia; and (2) Separate chapters with music only, for teachers to use for creative work

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such as children writing their own versions of the story: https://soundcloud. com/user-­89102112/sets/the-­phoenix-­of-­persia-­music-­composition. 16. Photographs of the book launch are available here: https://www.phoenixofpersia.co.uk/the-­story. 17. h t t p s : / / t i n y o w l . c o . u k / w p -­c o n t e n t / u p l o a d s / 2 0 1 9 / 0 3 / PhoenixPersia_TeachersResource_Final_LR.pdf. 18. This included 20 performance and storytelling workshops, reaching over 680 children. 19. The following short film about the project focuses on the book launch and a music workshop at Hugh Myddelton Primary School in Islington, London: Phoenix of Persia Children’s Book and Music Project, https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMhfd2Q8XFc. 20. The original plan had been to run family events at the V&A focused around the story and music, but due to Covid-19 this wasn’t possible. For more information on the Shahnameh Box and on the back page spread of the book, showing the instruments, see: https://www.phoenixofpersia.co.uk/ shahnameh-­box and https://www.phoenixofpersia.co.uk/instruments. 21. For artwork resulting from this session and other art-related work, see https://tinyowl.co.uk/phoenix-­art/. 22. See https://www.phoenixofpersia.co.uk/. 23. The majority of feedback collected was via teachers and educational organisations; it was less easy to assess the impact of the book and music within domestic settings in the UK and beyond. 24. Further feedback and social media posts are available on the project website: https://www.phoenixofpersia.co.uk/feedback-­ from-­teachers-­and-­pupils; https://www.phoenixofpersia.co.uk/ reviews-­of-­the-­phoenix-­of-­persia-­bo. 25. See the full blogpost here: https://teacherglitter.wordpress. com/2019/05/17/music-­and-­storytelling/. 26. Among many examples of teachers posting on social media, see https:// twitter.com/LacewingIOE/status/1144617139069997056/photo/1. See also: https://www.phoenixofpersia.co.uk/more-­ideas-­for-­classroom-­ activities and https://tinyowl.co.uk/phoenix-­art/. 27. Judging from the name, the child is likely Turkish Kurdish rather than Iranian, but the same idea applies. 28. See ‘What would you see in Iran?’ https://tinyowl.co.uk/wp-­content/ uploads/2019/03/Appendix-­1.pdf and ‘Iran or UK?’ https://tinyowl. co.uk/wp-­content/uploads/2019/03/Appendix-­2.pdf. 29. Phoenix of Persia Children’s Book and Music Project, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMhfd2Q8XFc (4:34-4:45).

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References Adl, Shirin, and Kamyar Adl. 2011. I is for Iran. Frances Lincoln. Bound, Kirsten, Rachel Briggs, John Holden, and Samuel Jones. 2007. Cultural diplomacy. Leicester: Demos. IPrint. Braithwaite, Lauren. 2022. Musical diplomacy in Kabul’s “Green Zone”. Paper presented at the Middle East and Central Asia Music Forum, 23rd May 2022. Clayton, Sally Pomme, and Amin Hassanzadeh Sharif. 2019. The phoenix of Persia. Tiny Owl. Cottrell, Stephen. 2011. The impact of ethnomusicology. Ethnomusicology Forum 20 (2): 229–232. Cummings, M.C. 2009. Cultural diplomacy and the United States government: A survey. Washington, DC: Cultural Diplomacy Research Series. Herbert, David G., and Jonathan McCollum, eds. 2022. Ethnomusicology and cultural diplomacy. Lexington Books. Niknafs, Nasim. 2022. Soft war and multilateral musical pathways in Iran. In Ethnomusicology and cultural diplomacy, eds., David G. Herbert and Jonathan McCollum (pp. 119–136). Lexington Books. Phoenix of Persia Teacher Resources. 2019. Tiny Owl. https://tinyowl.co.uk/wp-­ content/uploads/2019/03/PhoenixPersia_TeachersResource_Final_LR.pdf. Seidabadi, Ali, and Marjan Vafaian. 2016. Bijan and Manije. Tiny Owl.

Filmography 2019. Phoenix of Persia Children’s Book and Music Project https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=CMhfd2Q8XFc. 2016. Prince Zal and the Simorgh: Disseminating Iranian music and culture in Britain. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHMgBgaqKog. Wilford, Stephen, and Alex Jeffery. 2012. Making an impact: Introducing key stage 2 children to Iranian music. http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=BK10zcZHXUo.

PART III

Soft Power in State, Statecraft and Music-Making

CHAPTER 7

Umm Kulthum and Cultural Diplomacy in Egypt Virginia Danielson

Introduction Numerous governments in the Middle East and elsewhere have sent performers abroad, including those not well known outside their own countries, who are intended to cultivate attraction to their home country or, at least, positive, and sympathetic views. These musicians are the tools of soft power. Musicians from the Middle East have featured in cultural diplomacy for over a thousand years, as powerful entities sent musicians as evidence of their own accomplishment and authority. Shortly after the time of Muhammad (and perhaps before that), singers under the authority of Arab courts and wealthy merchant families were presented to each other as gifts, albeit without the trappings of the modern nation-state (Reynolds 2021: 200). Later—and memorably—Mehmet IV, Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, gave an entire Yeni Çeri (or military) band to the King of Poland, King August, in 1693 (Bowles 2006: 546, quoting Fassmann 1733: 246;

V. Danielson (*) Department of Music, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 M. M. Rijo Lopes da Cunha et al. (eds.), Music and Cultural Diplomacy in the Middle East, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36279-8_7

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Pirker 2001). Scholar Edmund Bowles tell us that this gift was said to have “caused a great sensation.” One can only imagine.1 Sometimes governments recruited internationally known star performers. In these cases, the agency of the performers takes on its own importance, with unintended consequences as the stars draw from their own experience or express their own views, and these attract considerable attention. Monson describes famous jazz musicians’ motivation to bring their art to the international world as a positive factor—a sense of pride— in sometimes-contentious employment in U.S.  State Department sponsored tours abroad (Monson 2007, chapter 4). In these cases, individual agency enters (or perhaps departs from) the diplomatic objectives. Here, one recalls Mahiet, Ferraguto, and Ahrendt’s warning that musicians, as nongovernmental actors, have “responsibilities and agendas distinct from those of policymakers” (Mahiet et al. 2014: 7). Umm Kulthum (ca. 1904–75) was certainly one of these stars. Given her international concerts to benefit Egypt during the last few years of her life and her, by then, great artistic stature in the Arabic-speaking world, Umm Kulthum is an obvious candidate for discussions of cultural diplomacy in the Middle East, and her series of concerts after Egypt’s defeat in the 1967 War would seem to be exemplary of cultural diplomacy. This essay explores what happened during Umm Kulthum’s Concerts for Egypt, as they have come to be called, her relationship to then-President Jamal ‘Abd al-Nasir’s government, and her likely reasons for undertaking this series. It presents one instance of the agency of a star performer in cultural diplomacy and also of her relatively independent approach to it. Umm Kulthum herself was the subject of U.S. diplomacy in the early 1950s. Desirous of a friendly gesture toward the emerging, revolutionary government of Egypt, the U.S. government offered to treat her thyroid problem at the Bethesda, Maryland, naval hospital, an offer that was accepted. In those days, thyroid treatment could adversely affect one’s voice, a risk that was discussed in embassy correspondence at the time, and few, if any, doctors in Egypt were willing to undertake the surgery themselves. The American doctors also considered it to be risky (U.S. Dept. of State, April 26, 1953a; U.S.  Dept. of State, Near East Bureau, May 1, 1953b).2 The surgery was, of course, successful. However, certainly her closest association with diplomacy came with the concerts for Egypt that she undertook after the Egyptian defeat in the 1967 war with Israel. Umm Kulthum’s work offers the opportunity to ask some questions about the relationship between a star performer and her

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government. What is the agency of musicians in diplomacy? What prompts a famous musician to engage with a government? First, I will summarize the concerts and then address these questions about the nature of the trips and their relationship to diplomacy and to the artist and her government.

The Concerts for Egypt3 Musicians are, of course, often great international travelers in their own right, developing the kinds of audiences that enable their utility as cultural ambassadors. Umm Kulthum was not one of these. She began touring relatively late, in the 1920s, long after her colleagues had established routine travel for performances throughout the Middle East and North Africa and sometimes to the Americas. It appears as though she only did so to maintain her competitive edge with others who had been touring for some time. While she certainly identified herself with the larger community of Muslims (the ‘umma) and that of Arabic speakers, her branding, if you will, was consistently that of an Egyptian. Most likely because she saw herself as a singer of poetry—Arabic poetry—she saw little point in performing outside of the domains of those who understood Arabic. That said, when she agreed to appear in Paris in 1967, an agreement reached before the 1967 war, she was not doing anything particularly unusual except in terms of her own prior behavior. Thus, in a new step in 1966, moving outside of her usual domain of performance, Umm Kulthum agreed to give two concerts in Paris (where of course, there was a substantial Arabic-speaking population). It is worth remembering that at this time, Umm Kulthum’s profile outside the Arabic-speaking world was nearly nonexistent. Transistor radios brought powerful Egyptian radio broadcasts across the Middle East, but sound recordings were still marketed only on vinyl discs, which were usually distributed only in specialty stores in Arab communities. Television broadcasting from the Middle East was relatively limited. After the June 1967 defeat, she announced that she would donate the proceeds from the Paris concerts to the Egyptian war effort. These donations were to complement benefit concerts she undertook within Egypt in most of the provincial cities that garnered substantial amounts of money and gold jewelry donated by women. The idea seems not to have been Umm Kulthum’s alone. Citing his article in the arts magazine al-Kawakib, Lohman attributes the idea of artists initiating benefit concerts for the country to journalist Fumil Habib (Lohman 2010: 176n1). Hard currency, though, was essential to

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the country’s military rebuilding effort, and Umm Kulthum launched a number of concerts in the years to follow in Libya, the Sudan, Abu Dhabi (on the brink of joining other Gulf emirates to form the United Arab Emirates), Lebanon, Tunisia, Morocco, Kuwait, Bahrain, Iraq, and Pakistan. Kuwait was particularly important, making a substantial early donation in hard currency on the strength of the upcoming concert. In 1970, she went to Moscow for concerts there and in Tashkent but returned home as President Jamal ‘Abd al-Nasir died while she was in Moscow. The financial results are difficult to estimate but amounted to somewhere between two and four million dollars (Danielson 1997: 184–86; Lohman 2009: 33). The government of Egypt supplied her with a diplomatic passport, and her trips took on the character of state visits, as she was met at the airports by high governmental officials and escorted to various cultural sites in each country. It has been said that she passed along messages from ‘Abd al-Nasir to other leaders, but I have not seen actual evidence of this (Fig. 7.1).

Fig. 7.1 Umm Muhammad’ Arif)

Kulthum

performing

in

Abu

Dhabi,

1971

(Photo:

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Despite the association with Egypt’s government, however, Umm Kulthum launched these efforts using her own systems for concert arrangement (and, one might add, control), right down to her restriction that only her own photographer photograph her for publication. For support with related activities, she sometimes worked with local, often private women’s associations (Lohman 2009: 35). The investment of the Egyptian government in these trips seems to have been minimal, but the trips account for the perception of Umm Kulthum as an Egyptian cultural ambassador. For these performances, she tended to sing songs in standard Arabic, often qasa’id (s., qasida),4 rather than colloquial Egyptian songs, and she sometimes commissioned lyrics from local poets, which were almost always set to music by Riyad al-Sunbati, a master of Arab classical composition and the qasida genre in particular. Thus, her musical language was geared to a broader than usual base of listeners. The qasida “al-Atlal” was a favorite, with the lines “Give me my freedom, set free my hands” appropriate to many politically relevant interpretations beyond the personal love that was the poet’s original theme. Many of the videos we now find online are derived from these international concerts.

Umm Kulthum and the Egyptian Government Despite the presumed closeness of Umm Kulthum and Egypt’s leaders that emerged after her death, in fact, over the course of her career, Umm Kulthum kept governments at a distance for the most part. Like nearly all musicians in Egypt, she performed at celebratory national events, including the birthdays of rulers, but her involvements were with the Egyptian social elites, not so much directly with government officials or politicians. Her career developed within a highly politicized environment that required careful stepping (Danielson 1998: 110), and she limited her association with governments to what seemed necessary. The documents surrounding Umm Kulthum’s life indicate that she wanted to become a well-off and accomplished singer, and she worked toward this goal throughout her adult life (Danielson 1998: 111). Until 1937, she avoided personal publicity, generally declined to speak with the press, and when she did (in an extensive biographical statement published as a series in the magazine Akhir Sa’a in the winter of 1937–38), she advanced the careful narrative that she repeated for the rest of her life: she presented herself as a peasant, a pious Muslim, and a loyal Egyptian

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(Danielson 1997: 187–92). There cannot be much doubt about her patriotism and her sense of public identity as an Egyptian. She was not truly a cosmopolitan figure in public life (Fig. 7.2). Overall, her ambitions moved her into the circles of political and economic elites, but in this, she was not different from many successful musicians in Cairo. She shared the anti-colonial views of most of the elite at the time. In the 1940s, she responded with alarm and dismay along with most of her countrymen at the corruption and inefficacy of the Egyptian government, the continued presence of the British in the country during

Fig. 7.2  Umm Kulthum in a rural area of Egypt with a water buffalo, 1960s. This image reinforces her Egyptian identity (Photo: Muhammad’ Arif)

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World War II, and the impending war in Palestine. She supported the soldiers defeated at the Battle of Faluja in 1948 vocally and publicly in the face of requests not to do so by the Egyptian ministries: “I have invited [the soldiers to my home] to express my appreciation as a citizen of Egypt for their struggle and sacrifice in the Sinai,” she told the government official and the press. “My sentiments have not changed and my invitation stands” (Za‘luk 1976).5 It was probably at this event that she met Jamal ‘Abd al-Nasir for the first time, later to become the President of Egypt. In the aftermath of World War II, she sang a series of qasa’id written by the eminent poet Ahmad Shawqi much earlier in the century. Many lines of these poems were subject to multiple interpretations, often critical of the monarchy and the British, and audiences responded to these with such enthusiasm that the concerts came to the attention of the U.S. embassy in Cairo. The embassy’s report described the lines of poetry (roughly, “given the historic greatness of Egypt, are we in need of “protection” … “Everyone must stand and fight”) and the vociferous response of listeners (U.S. Department of State December 7, 1951). Unfortunately, observers at the Embassy clearly lost their grip on her artistic role when they later characterized Umm Kulthum as one who sang “simple folk songs which have wide appeal to Arabs” U.S.  Dept. of State, July 11, 1953c). Her behavior, performances, and expressed sentiments were by no means out of step with most Egyptians at the time, and, among other personal qualities, speech, and choices, set Umm Kulthum on a course of public expression very similar to that of Jamal ‘Abd al-Nasir. After the 1952 Revolution, it was necessary for Umm Kulthum to remain on broadcast radio, like every other commercial musician, which was by no means automatic. Like her compatriots, she recorded numerous songs in support of the revolutionary government and, later, of ‘Abd al-­ Nasir himself. One of the songs was adopted as the new Egyptian national anthem. She increased her availability to the print media and voiced support for the nationalization of the Suez Canal and many other actions taken by the ‘Abd al-Nasir government. For his part, ‘Abd al-Nasir promoted her performances (among others) on his vastly strengthened international radio airwaves and advanced the idea that she and composer Muhammad ‘Abd al-Wahhab should collaborate on a new song. Umm Kulthum and ‘Abd al-Nasir shared holiday visits and were apparently friendly. When each spoke about values to the public, judging from the text divorced from the sound of the voice, it could be very difficult to know which one was speaking. Their public statements

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about themselves were remarkably similar. On the one hand, she was an artist maintaining her distinct and well-established professional position. On the other hand, she contributed to the efforts of a man whose background and social views were very much like her own. The contemporary picture that emerges in the mid-1960s is of two strong individuals friendly toward each other but set on parallel, not-overlapping, tracks. When the ‘Abd al-Nasir government actually engaged in cultural diplomacy involving musical performance, its efforts did not involve local Arab music. Instead, his transactions established a conservatory for European classical music training, a ballet school, training programs for musicians and ballet dancers in the Soviet Union and the then-eastern bloc of European countries (see Castelo-Branco in this volume). These decisions outraged Umm Kulthum and other local practitioners of Arab music, who demanded similar institutions that, after a fair amount of struggle, they eventually wrung out of the government. Her relationship to ‘Abd al-Nasir and his government was intentional, but she was no ‘client’ to his ‘patron.’ Umm Kulthum appeared in public with him only on the most obvious occasions, and ‘Abd al-Nasir himself was rarely photographed with any musician. The very strong connection between the two that we began to see in the late 1980s and later is a projection back in time, a later overlay of a picture that did not exist at the time of occurrence (Danielson 1998).

The Concerts for Egypt and Cultural Diplomacy Umm Kulthum had problems of her own in the aftermath of 1967. Among the many critiques in Egypt and the Arab world following the 1967 defeat was the charge that Egyptian society had become too complacent, insufficiently self-critical; that Egypt was immersed in delusions of grandeur, pride, and lack of awareness of serious problems in the Arab world. Performances such as Umm Kulthum’s were seen as symptomatic. She was compared negatively to the Lebanese singer Fayruz, whose work was thought to foster concern for the fate of Palestinians and Palestine. Egyptian journalists wrote that Umm Kulthum “numbs people rather than arousing them” (Umm Kulthum: Qitharat…. 1975: 134). Her concerts for Egypt attempted to address this criticism and to stabilize her own political position as much as anything else. They also arguably broadened her audience and supported the creation of some magnificent new songs. This last point should not be lost. As Laura Lohman summarizes, these

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concerts “redefined her contemporary relevance for Egyptian society” and “solidified her international renown providing occasions for …. numerous awards” (Lohman 2009: 53). They established her as an international cultural leader. In the long run, however, the concerts did little to ameliorate the perception of Umm Kulthum as a conservative figure with too-strong associations with the ruling elite. While traveling for the concerts, Umm Kulthum “distanced herself and her art from politics,” avoiding explicitly patriotic songs and overt political statements, “leaving listeners the interpretive space to voluntarily supply political motivations and readings for her performances” (Ibid.: 42). She maintained a decades-long behavior of presenting herself as an artist, a Muslim, and a loyal Egyptian on a path parallel to but removed from that of Jamal ‘Abd al-Nasir. She promoted the idea of the vitality of shared Arab culture (Lohman 2009: 46), an idea not really new to her public persona. Laura Lohman makes the powerful argument that these concerts— both within and outside of Egypt—did advance an important governmental objective: to direct financial support to the existing government of Egypt—and to articulate a means of rebuilding rather than replacing the government “by creating opportunities for active involvement and by presenting a vital picture of broad, unified Arab support for Egypt” (Lohman 2009: 34). Here, we see another reason for the diplomatic passport and other support. She writes, “Whilst her concerts provided an empowering mechanism for the public, they also conferred authority to the regime as they struggled to deal with both international and domestic pressures to respond and resolve the war” (Ibid.: 38) For one reason or another, there was considerable unrest in Egypt following the 1967 defeat and ‘Abd al-­ Nasir needed to consolidate the support of Arab governments for his own government in the face of calls for change.6 However, the gain that may have been derived from Umm Kulthum’s concerts was largely domestic, and the question remains whether host governments were supporting Egypt or simply Umm Kulthum.

Musicians, the State and Power As John Morgan O’Connell outlines effectively, musical performance is a relatively open code, not usually subject to a single interpretation. Music offers, in some cases, “the possibility of an imaginary ideal, a shared goal that promotes cooperation between groups while respectful of individual

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cultural identities” (O’Connell 2010: 2, 5). Listening to Umm Kulthum or sponsoring a concert by her whatever the costs and whomever the recipient of the money may have been a very easy choice for Arab governments to make, offering a valued entertainment with no very direct political implications. We see the shadow of the Egyptian government, though, in its weakened state, garnering support in hard currency and affirmation of its authority in the face of challenges to its competence. In the wild popularity of Umm Kulthum’s concerts and the large amounts of money passed along to the Egyptian government, all duly reported in Arab media, Egyptians could perceive international support for the country and for ‘Abd al-Nasir. Did cultural authority actually accrue to Egypt as a result of these concerts? Probably not, as Cairo (and Beirut) had long since established themselves as the main producers of mediated popular culture in which listeners throughout the Middle East partook. Applying the parameters suggested by Mahiet, Ferragut, and Ahrendt in their introduction to Music and Diplomacy from the Early Modern Era to the Present, we might ask whether music drove political change in this instance (Mahiet et al. 2014: 1). In the articulation of Arabic speakers as a unity, as people with history, language, and values in common through the performance of a music that is not, in fact, a universal language, but a distinctly Arab one, there was some gain for Egyptian general objectives. Did the concerts legitimate an Egyptian political position? Not by themselves, surely, but as a contributing factor to the stability of the ‘Abd al-­ Nasir government, probably they did (Zamorano 2016: 181–2). To a large extent, Umm Kulthum simply advanced her own agenda, as she always had vis-a-vis her government. “In music as in politics,” as Mahiet and colleagues write, “people labor to dominate others, acquire power, and secure recognition” (Mahiet et al. 2014: 10). Umm Kulthum did so throughout her career. That in these instances her performances also benefited ‘Abd al-Nasir would have been a good thing from her perspective, too. From a different perspective, however, fostering whatever association it had with Umm Kulthum’s concerts for Egypt was a low-risk proposition for the Egyptian government. She was extremely unlikely to behave in any way that would bring discredit to the government, and the positive associations that she still had, not to mention the hard currency these concerts brought in, remained advantageous to them. The sort of tensions that might often arise in musical-diplomatic missions did not arise.

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In her excellent discussion of the international tours of African American jazz stars sponsored by the U.S. State Department, Ingrid Monson points out that, while the interests of the state and the musicians coincided in part, the musicians “pursued their own visions of cultural ambassadorship” as well (Monson 2007: 118). Like Umm Kulthum, the jazz musicians Monson writes about solicited and developed their own relationships in the countries they visited and sometimes saw their purpose differently from that of their federal sponsors. Similarly, Von Eschen provides copious examples of diverging interests and unintended consequences in Louis Armstrong’s government-sponsored tours in her work, Satchmo Blows Up the World (Von Eschen 2006). The interests of these musicians sometimes coincided with those of their governments but often did not. Their performances had unintended consequences. One wonders whether it could ever be different. Were Umm Kulthum’s concert audiences abroad, whether sponsored by a state or by individuals, attending to support Egypt or simply to see Umm Kulthum? Were government sponsors simply trying to offer a special form of entertainment to their people? Were other Arab governments only trying to support the Egyptian government? In the relationship between music and the power of cultural diplomacy in the Middle East, whose power do we see in play here? The power deployed here looks like her own, to extend and to attempt to reconstitute her own political reputation while sustaining the narratives she articulated throughout her life. The money she collected came at least in part from the governments of the countries she visited. However, Arab governments were generally already willing to sustain battle against Israel, especially if Egypt was willing to fight it. While her trips may have appeared to be state visits, there is little reason to believe they actually were. Rather, they were the initiative of a successful musician following the lines of approach that characterized much of her professional career. They were a series of benefit concerts designed and controlled by Umm Kulthum, supporting ‘Abd al-Nasir and Egypt, from her customary separate, parallel, route.

Conclusion Joseph Nye (2008: 101) argues that the effectiveness of diplomacy is measured in minds changed: what minds were changed here? Few if any, although sensibilities may have been reinforced. While we cannot speak

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for the concert-goers, the foreign governmental contributions were reasonably predictable: whatever they thought of ‘Abd al-Nasir, the more leftist alternatives floated in Egypt at the time were hardly more appealing for them. Here, though, referring to Nye’s sources of soft power—culture, political values, and foreign policy—Egyptian culture was probably more persuasive in garnering financial support than its political values and foreign policies, as these countries had plenty of reason to question ‘Abd al-Nasir. While the concerts probably served the diplomatic function of attraction (Nye 2008: 94–95), they beg the question of “attraction to what?”— to a country, to a country’s policies, to a single musician? Umm Kulthum’s concerts for Egypt garnered hard currency for the state; they may have reinforced some sort of Arab unity and opposition to Israeli aggression. However, they were controlled by and served the individual musician. The case of the concerts for Egypt best illustrates best some of the issues in analyzing musical performance as a diplomatic force. The international touring of established star musicians complicates the deployment of soft power with the performer’s own agency and the related persistence of unintended consequences. Star performers advance their own opinions and objectives either as a matter of course or when confronted with circumstances abroad. While Umm Kulthum’s concerts for Egypt surely invoked elements of the shared language, history, and expressive culture congruent with ‘Abd al-Nasir’s efforts toward Arab unity, perhaps more importantly, they also raise the question of whether star performers actually achieve the goals envisioned by the governments who deploy them. In her case, also, one justifiably questions whose vision was in fact driving the goals.

Notes 1. It would be wonderful to know how this transfer of musicians from Istanbul to Warsaw turned out for everyone in the long run as the move raises questions about the agency of the musicians involved in national initiatives and longer-term impacts on them, questions relevant to the present discussion. 2. I am grateful to Robert Vitalis who shared with me a group of U.S. Dept. of State dispatches that he found during his own research on political relationships between the U.S. and Egypt. These documents show that the U.S. Dept. of State requested a report from the U.S. embassy in Cairo about

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Umm Kulthum’s public statements about her visit to the U.S. According to the documents, she was appropriately complimentary. 3. Biographical information about Umm Kulthum is available in  English in  Danielson (1997) and  Lohman (2010), both based on  ethnographic fieldwork as well as readings of substantial portions of the enormous quantity of  Arabic language biographies and  journalism. Lohman’s chapter 2 provides a good summary of the benefit concerts. To the extent to which Arabic newspapers from  the  countries Umm Kulthum visited have been available to  me, information is usually limited to  where she was  singing and that the money would be donated to the Egyptian war effort, with no further commentary. The rubric “Concerts for Egypt” came to be applied to the concerts after the fact. 4. The qasida is an elegant and historic Arabic poetic form, dating from before the time of the Prophet Muhammad. Typically it is a lengthy poem (from which singers or composers usually select a section) consisting of hemistichs and using a single meter and a single rhyme scheme throughout. 5. The translations in this article are my own. 6. The political situation in Egypt post-1967 has been discussed in many sources. For discussions in English, see, for instance, Abdalla (1985, chapter 8); Dekmejian (1971: 251–86); Gordon (2006, chapter 4).

References Abdalla, Ahmed. 1985. The student movement and national politics in Egypt. London: al-Saqi. Bowles, Edmund A. 2006. The impact of Turkish military bands on European court festivals in the 17th and 18th centuries. Early Music 34 (4): 533–559. Danielson, Virginia. 1997. “The Voice of Egypt:” Umm Kulthūm, Arabic Song, and Egyptian society in the 20th century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1998. Performance, political identity, and memory: Umm Kulthum and Gamal ‘Abd al-Nasir. In Images of enchantment: Visual and performing arts of the Middle East, ed. Sherifa Zuhur, 109–122. Cairo: American University in Cairo Press. Dekmejian, R.  Hrair. 1971. Egypt under Nasir: A study in political dynamics. Albany: State University of New York Press. Fassmann, D. 1733. Das glorwürdigste Leben und Thaten Friedrich Augusti, des grossen Königs in Pohlen und Chur-Fürstens zu Sachsen &c &c… Hamburg und Franckfurth, n.p. Gordon, Joel. 2006. Nasser: Hero of the Arab nation. Oxford, Eng.: Oneworld. Lohman, Laura. 2009. ‘The Artist of the People in Battle:’ Umm Kulthūm’s concerts for Egypt in political context. In Music and the play of power in the Middle

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East, North Africa and Central Asia, ed. Laudan Nooshin, 33–54. London: Routledge. ———. 2010. Artistic agency and the shaping of an Arab Legend, 1967–2007. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Mahiet, Damien, Mark Ferraguto, and Rebekah Ahrendt. 2014. Introduction. In Music and diplomacy from the early modern era to the present, ed. Rebekah Ahrendt, Mark Ferraguto, and Damien Mahiet, 1–16. New  York: Palgrave Macmillan. Monson, Ingrid. 2007. Freedom sounds: Civil rights call out to Jazz and Africa. New York: Oxford University Press. Nye, Joseph S., Jr. 2008. Public diplomacy and soft power. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 616: 94–109. O’Connell, John M. 2010. Introduction: An ethnomusicological approach to music and conflict. In Music and conflict, ed. John Morgan O’Connell and Salwa El-Shawan Castelo-Branco, 1–14. Champaign-Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Pirker, Michael. 2001. Janissary Music. In Grove music online. Oxford, Eng.: Oxford University Press. Reynolds, Dwight. 2021. The musical heritage of al-Andalus. Abingdon, Oxon.: Routledge. U.S. Department of State. 1951, December 7. Foreign service despatch. “Report on Um Kulsoum, Favorite Egyptian Singer.” ———. 1953a, April 26. Memorandum of Conversation in re Cairo dispatch no. 2022. ———. 1953b, May 1. Near East Bureau. Office memorandum “Medical Treatment for Om Kalsoom.” ———. 1953c, July 11. Foreign service despatch. “Miss Om Kalsoum.” Umm Kulthūm: Qithārat al-‘Arab. 1975. Beirut: Maktabat al-Jamahir. Von Eschen, Penny M. 2006. Satchmo blows up the world: Jazz Ambassadors play the Cold War. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Za‘luk, A. 1976. Qissat Awal Liqa’ bayna ‘Abd al-Nasir wa Umm Kulthum. Sabah al-Khayr, January 29. Zamorano, Mariano Martin. 2016. Reframing cultural diplomacy: The instrumentalization of culture under the soft power theory. Culture Unbound 8: 166–186.

CHAPTER 8

Performing Soviet Cultural Diplomacy: “Western Art Music” and Musicians in Cairo 1955–1970 Salwa El-Shawan Castelo-Branco I use the term “Western art” music to denote an “aesthetic, historical and social category” (Silva 2010: 854) characterized by a constellation of musical genres, styles and repertoire that developed in Europe from the Middle Ages to the present and was disseminated and localized among social and cultural elites in the Americas, Middle East, Asia, Africa, Australia and New Zealand. In Egypt, in the social and institutional settings in which this musical domain has been cultivated, it is often denominated as musiqa ‘alamiyyah (music of the world),—a term that alludes to its supposed “universal” dissemination and presumed superiority—musiqa klasikiyyah (classical music), or musiqa gaddah (serious music), the latter two adapted from similar terms in European languages. While I have argued for a critical perspective toward music categories, their political and social underpinnings, and changing meanings (Castelo-Branco 2013), in this chapter I adopt the term “Western art music”, for want of a more adequate term, to refer to the genres, styles and repertoires that originated in Europe and have become localized among a segment of the Egyptian cultural and social elite that adopted this music as its own. S. E.-S. Castelo-Branco (*) INET-MD, Instituto de Etnomusicologia - Centro de Estudos em Música e Dança, Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 M. M. Rijo Lopes da Cunha et al. (eds.), Music and Cultural Diplomacy in the Middle East, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36279-8_8

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Introduction During the cold war Soviet cultural diplomacy was deployed in several countries of the Middle East, especially Egypt, Syria and Iraq. The main goal was to free the region from colonial dependence and to minimize Western influence. As Dawisha (1975) has shown, the most extensive program of cultural diplomacy in the region was developed in postcolonial Egypt between 1955 and 1970. Throughout president Gamal ‘Abd Al-Nasser’s regime (1956–1970), the Soviet Union was Egypt’s main political, military, and economic ally. In tandem with the wide-ranging cooperation and aid program encompassing the aforementioned domains through which “hard power” was exercised, the Soviet government mobilized cultural diplomacy as a discursive field of action in which “soft power” was deployed across a wide spectrum of cultural practices. Soviet-Egyptian relations developed within the framework of the reorientation of the USSR’s foreign policy spearheaded by president Nikita Khrushchev following Stalin’s death in 1953. It called for “peaceful coexistence” among states, the expansion of “contacts and cooperation in the sphere of culture and science” and the consolidation of the “bonds of friendship and cooperation” between the Soviet Union and countries that “stand for peace” (Khrushchev 1956: 46–47). The new Soviet foreign policy also developed strategies for “fostering and protecting the victory of national liberation movements and their revolutionary transition to socialism” (Gould-Davies 2003: 200). Two political events that catalyzed international and regional tensions following WW II marked a turning point in Soviet-Egyptian relations and the beginning of the USSR’s involvement in the Middle East: the 1955 arms deal with the Soviet Union (following the unsuccessful attempt by Egypt to buy arms from the United States, England and France); and the Soviet political backing of Nasser’s government against the tripartite invasion of Egypt by England, France and Israel in 1956 in order to regain control over the Suez Canal following its nationalization by Nasser’s regime. The USSR supported Egypt and other Arab countries in their struggle against colonial rule, and in pursuing an anti-Western foreign policy, in an attempt to counterbalance Western interests and influence in the region and to assert itself as a world power. The ultimate goal was promoting a “Soviet-style political, economic and social system” (Dawisha 1975: 421–422). Cultural diplomacy was mobilized in the achievement of these goals.

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Between 1955 and 1970, the Soviet Union promoted a wide-ranging program of cooperation and exchange with the Egyptian government in the domains of science, technology, industry, education, culture, and tourism. This program was sustained by formal bi-lateral agreements, coordinated by Soviet and Egyptian State institutions, and carried out through the activities of institutions and individuals from both countries. The construction of the Aswan High Dam between 1960 and 1970 is one of the most emblematic results of Soviet-Egyptian cooperation. In this chapter, I briefly discuss Soviet cultural diplomacy in Egypt between 1955 and 1970 as a discursive field of action that operated through an assemblage of cultural activities carried out through Soviet and Egyptian state institutions, considering the agentive power of individuals, and of cultural exchange. Following a brief outline of the legacy of Western music in colonial Cairo and of the postcolonial politics of culture in Nasser’s Egypt, I focus on Soviet cultural diplomacy as it played out in two institutional sites: the Soviet Cultural Center in Cairo, a locus for Soviet cultural diplomacy, and the Cairo National Conservatory, the main institution where Western art music has been taught. I also briefly refer to other strategies of cultural diplomacy such as showcasing Soviet performing groups and artists. I argue that the strategies implemented by Soviet cultural diplomacy configured a new cosmopolitan dynamic, largely replacing the European cosmopolitan formation that thrived in Cairo and Alexandria during the first half of the twentieth century, where the agentive power of cultural exchange, and new artistic networks developed. I also contend that this new dynamic enabled the accomplishment of some of the goals of Egyptian cultural policy under Nasser’s regime, transforming the lives of leading musical institutions and the careers of many musicians, and configuring a legacy that has endured through cultural practices and collective memory, well beyond the formal severing of the Soviet-­ Egyptian alliance by president Anwar El-Sadat (Nasser’s successor) in 1972. I draw on extant studies on Soviet-Egyptian cultural relations (e.g.,‘Abd Al-‘Alim 2013; Anonymous 2016, 1976; Dawisha 1975; ‘Okashah 1988), archival sources, field research and my father’s and my own trajectories. My father, Aziz El-Shawan, a prominent Egyptian composer (1916–1993),1 directed the cultural sector of the Soviet Cultural Center from 1956 to 1967 and studied at the Moscow Conservatory with Aram Khachaturian from 1967 to 1969. I was a student of piano at the Cairo National Conservatory (CNC) from 1963 to 1970, a period during which this

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institution was gradually staffed by Soviet faculty. Several of my former colleagues at the CNC, some of whom collaborated in this chapter, completed their graduate studies in performance at the Tchaikovsky Conservatory in Moscow, later pursuing musical careers in Egypt and internationally.

The Postcolonial Politics of Culture in Nasser’s Egypt Gamal ‘Abd Al- Nasser’s regime was anchored on a nationalist ideology and promoted anti-imperialism, a local brand of socialism, and pan-­ Arabism. He embarked on a far-reaching modernization and development program that involved all sectors of society, including “culture”. Nasser was cognizant of the importance of “culture” for “reconfiguring the Egyptian spirit” (‘Okashah 1988 v.1: 418), and committed to supporting cultural activities, and making them accessible to the population, “transcending the walls of Cairo and Alexandria, and [reaching] the depth of the countryside to the Delta and Upper Egypt” (ibid.: 419).2 In 1956, Nasser’s government founded the Higher Council for the Humanities and Social Arts (Al-Maglis Al-A’la lil Funun wa Al-Adab AlIgtima‘iyah), the first state institution in charge of the arts that launched the bases for the government’s cultural policy. Directly dependent on the Council of Ministers, its mission was to “coordinate the work of governmental and non-governmental institutions working in the arts, humanities and social sciences … and finding ways of educating a generation of humanists and artists who feel the need to highlight the national character in Egyptian intellectual production, and to bring culture and artistic taste to citizens, allowing the nation to advance united in the path of progress, while preserving its distinctive civilizational character” (ibid.: 423). Two years later, for the first time in Egypt’s modern history, a Ministry of Culture was founded under the leadership of Tharwat ‘Okashah (1921–2012) from 1958 to 1962, and 1967 to 1970. One of the members of the free officers movement led by Gamal ‘Abd Al-Nasser that toppled King Faruq, Okasha was also a scholar, writer and translator. In addition to his military education, he was trained in Western music and completed his doctorate in literature at the Sorbonne University in Paris. Tharwat ‘Okashah had a clear notion of the principles that should guide the design of a cultural policy for Egypt and of the institutional structure

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that is indispensable for its implementation. Grounded in the Egyptian revolution’s ideology, his plan for the cultural sector drew on his international experience as a student, diplomat and Minister of Culture, on UNESCO’s guidelines, on dialogue with Egyptian intellectuals and artists, and on the model provided by the Soviet Union and several Western and Eastern bloc European countries. His vision is clearly spelled out in his memoires, a valuable source for the understanding of his personal and professional trajectories, the political, social and cultural contexts in which he worked, and his cultural policy and action (‘Okashah 1988). ‘Okashah’s cultural policy was grounded on the principle that “stimulating cultural and artistic life [is] one of the missions of the modern state … requiring a cultural policy that is in tune with its state, … with the needs of society”, and with the government’s overall development strategy (ibid.: 427). He adverts that the idea is not “… to fabricate a state culture, but rather to encourage the flourishing of cultural values and ambitions”, creating an environment in which artists enjoy freedom of expression (ibid.). For him, another responsibility of the state is to defend “cultural democracy” (ibid.: 441), ensuring “intellectual and spiritual equity” (ibid.: 420). Like many other Egyptian intellectuals and artists, he regarded as major challenges the conciliation between “local and international culture”, “authenticity and innovation”, “heritage and modernity” (ibid.: 445, 448, 450, 456). ‘Okashah and his team of intellectuals designed a two-pronged cultural policy that called for the revival and preservation of Egypt’s cultural heritage while at the same time stressing the need for modernizing cultural production and “the enrichment of national culture by cross fertilization with foreign cultural values” [the reference here is to the West] (Wahba 1972: 17). One of the earliest achievements of his mandate was working with UNESCO toward promoting an international campaign to raise funds for saving the ancient Abu Simbel temples in southern Egypt from being flooded by the waters of Lake Nasser as a consequence of the construction of the High Dam in Aswan. The project which involved the relocation of the colossal temples was not only an engineering feat, but it also led to the unprecedented international recognition that the “world holds cultural and natural heritage of universal value, which humanity must protect together as an indivisible legacy”,3 a recognition that was formalized and regulated through the highly influential 1972 UNESCO Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage.

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‘Okasha’s vision and agentive power enabled the creation of a state institutional infrastructure and a program for culture. In the late 1950s and the 1960s, he founded a network of institutions supported by the Ministry of Culture for safeguarding heritage, and for developing artistic practice and education. It included new museums, the Egyptian Book Organization, and the Academy of the Arts (an umbrella institution that includes the Cairo National Conservatory and the Arab Music, Ballet, Cinema, Theatre, Folk Arts, and Arts Criticism Institutes), where instruction was free. The state also transferred the Radio Orchestra to the Ministry of Culture, renaming it the Cairo Symphony Orchestra, and founded the Cairo Ballet and Opera Companies, the National Theatre, the Arabic Music Ensemble, the National Folklore Troupe, and the National Circus. Since its creation over sixty years ago, this state institutional infrastructure for culture has continued to play a key role in Egypt’s cultural and musical life and in arts education. ‘Okashah’s commitment to cultural equity was embodied through a network of Palaces of Culture situated in provincial capitals throughout the country. Modelled on similar institutions in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, in particular Yugoslavia,4 the Palaces of Culture were conceived as centers for the dissemination of cultural goods and urban artistic practices to workers in the agricultural and industrial sectors and for the discovery of local talent (Kamel 2010: 230–239; Shehata n.d.: 82–86). A similar mission was carried out in villages by itinerant vehicles, the Caravans of Culture (Shehata n.d.: 82–86). In recognition of ‘Okashah’s seminal role, a sculpted bust is exhibited at one of the foyers of Cairo’s Opera House and National Cultural Center. From the 1960s up to the mid-1970s, the Egyptian Ministry of Culture maintained close cooperation with its counterpart in the Soviet Union. Cultural diplomacy was enabled through the agentive power of cultural exchange that involved: staffing Egyptian artistic institutions with Soviet specialists, training Egyptian arts students in Soviet institutions of higher education, and showcasing cultural achievements of both countries.

The Soviet Cultural Center in Cairo: A Locus for Cultural Diplomacy The Soviet Cultural Center (SCC) was founded in Cairo in 1956. Since then, with the exception of a ten-year period (1978–1988) in which it was closed due to president Anwar Sadat’s change of policy vis-à-vis the Soviet

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Union, it served as an important locus for Soviet cultural diplomacy in Egypt by promoting free activities that were open to the general public, showcasing Soviet cultural and scientific achievements and enabling direct contact between intellectuals and artists from both countries. During its first decade of activity, it was located in a small building in downtown Cairo near the theatre district that housed a library with books and magazines in Russian and Arabic, an auditorium, classrooms for Russian language instruction, and offices. In 1966, the SCC was relocated to a mansion in the Dokki neighborhood where it expanded its activities and outreach. In the same year, a new SCC was founded in Alexandria, and both institutions began to extend their activities to other provinces through Soviet-Egyptian Friendship Weeks organized in provincial capitals (Anonymous 1976: n.p.) The overall management of Cairo’s SCC was in the hands of a director from the Soviet Union, while cultural activities were organized by an Egyptian director, a position that was held by Aziz El-Shawan between 1956 and 1967. As El-Shawan’s daughter and a music student at the Cairo National Conservatory, I was a participant in some of SCC’s cultural programs, and a witness to the informal encounters between intellectuals and musicians that took place there. The SCC’s stated goal was to disseminate the Russian language, culture, and the arts (Anonymous 2016: 20). It was primarily carried out through regular cultural programs that included instruction in the Russian language, translations of major literary works from Russian to Arabic, lectures, concerts, film screenings, art exhibits, as well as direct contact with prominent Soviet artists and intellectuals who were invited through cultural exchange programs to present and discuss their work. Through these and other activities, Egyptian audiences were introduced to an idealized perspective on Soviet values and achievements in the above-mentioned domains, but also in agriculture, industry and technology. In an attempt to “build bridges of understanding and connections” (ibid.: 7) across the two countries, the SCC also showcased the work of Egyptian visual artists, musicians, film makers, writers and intellectuals. For example, it organized exhibits of Egyptian artists (e.g., Salah Tahir, Seif Wanly, George Al-Bahguri), screened Egyptian films by famous directors (e.g., Salah Abu Al-Seif, and Yusif Shahin), and organized colloquia in which prominent Egyptian intellectuals participated (e.g., Siza Nabarawi, Zeynab Al-Sabki, Khalid Muhyi Al-Din, Hussein Fawzi, Louis Awad). The SCC also opened its doors to students of the arts to perform and present their work. During

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the 1960s, students at Cairo’s National Conservatory (including the author) gave concerts at the SCC, some featuring works by Egyptian composers. The importance of this Center as a locus for Soviet—Egyptian cultural exchange, and as a gateway to Soviet educational and artistic institutions was highlighted in a colloquium organized by the Russian Cultural Center at Cairo’s Opera House in January 2019 where several Russian and Egyptian intellectuals, artists and cultural politicians offered historical and personal retrospectives on Russian-Egyptian cultural relations, including their experience in the Soviet Union. Recalling the importance of the SCC for his initial contact with the Soviet Union, Hasan Sharara5 (violinist, violin professor and rector of the Cairo National Conservatory, 1991–1997) recalled: My story with the Tchaikovsky Conservatory goes back to 1965. I was invited by the well-known Egyptian composer Mr. Aziz El-Shawan to perform at the SCC. I was a student at the Cairo Conservatory at the time. Mr. Aziz El-Shawan welcomed us and all of our concerts were in the Soviet Cultural Center, now the Russian Cultural Center.

The SCC also served as a space of encounter and sociability among intellectuals and artists, independently of their ideological orientation, who participated in its events, used the library and sometimes gathered in Aziz El-Shawan’s office where the convivial atmosphere often led to prolonged debate. In short, within a few years of its founding, the SCC occupied an important place in Cairo’s cultural life, a place that has remained in the memory of artists and intellectuals. As the prominent Egyptian writer Yusif Idris and the well-known actor ‘Abd Al-Aziz Makhyun recall: I spent the most important days of my life at the library of the Soviet Cultural Center. (Idris in Anonymous 2016: 19) I still remember the beautiful evenings in the modest building on Shari’ Galal where we used to go to the Soviet Cultural Center and we were at the age of intellectual thirst. I never forgot the small room in which I heard Tchaikovsky and Khachaturian many times, and this hall in which I saw the films of the Bolshoi. I saw in all this a great encounter of our people with the civilization and achievements of the Soviet peoples. (Makhyun in Anonymous 1976: n.p.)

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In 1991, following the founding of the Russian Federation, the Soviet Cultural Center was renamed the Russian Culture and Science Center (RCSC), maintaining SCC’s core cultural program and widening the scope and diversity of its activities. It expanded Russian language instruction,6 as well as the cultural and artistic program, including training in Western “art” music, classical ballet, photography, film, theater and the visual arts (ibid.: 15, 20, 23). The Center also offered courses in computer programing and embarked on an intensive translation program of Russian literature (ibid.: 11–12), and the publication of Russian books in Egypt (ibid.: 9). In addition, it has supported a scholarship program, and the exchange of students, and leaders in the domains of culture and science. The RCSC extends some of its activities to the provinces (ibid.: 9) and has adopted a strategy of “citizen-oriented diplomacy” by cooperating with civil society, and cultural associations that promote Russian-Egyptian collaboration such as the Egyptian-Russian Friendship Association, the Egyptian-Russian Organization for Scientific and Cultural Cooperation, the Association of the High Dam Builders, and the Egyptian Association of the Graduates of Soviet and Russian Universities (ibid.: 11–13).

The Legacy of Western Art Music in Egypt During the 1960s and 1970s, the Cairo National Conservatory, the main state institution for teaching Western art music in Egypt, was an important arena for Soviet cultural diplomacy through the agentive power of cultural exchange within a new cosmopolitan dynamic which represents a turning point in the teaching and performance of Western art music in the country. Contextualizing the place of Western music in Egypt prior to Nasser’s regime is necessary for understanding the transformation brought about through the implementation of Soviet cultural diplomacy in this domain. As in many other contexts (Brucher and Reily 2013), Western music was introduced to Egypt through military bands. Trained by European teachers, military bands were part of the modernization program for the army that was launched during the first half of the nineteenth century by the Ottoman officer Muhammad ‘Ali who ruled Egypt from 1805 to 1848, founding a dynasty that ended with the 1952 revolution (El-Shawan Castelo-Branco 2002: 609). During the second half of the nineteenth century, Muhammad ‘Ali’s grandson, the French-educated Khedive Isma‘il (ruled 1863 to 1879) embarked on a wide-ranging modernization program that included major public works, education and several cultural

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sectors. He ordered the construction of an Italian opera house in central Cairo that was inaugurated in 1869 as part of the lavish celebrations of the opening of the Suez Canal, and commissioned Verdi to compose Aida as a “national opera” for this occasion (Mestyan 2013: 699). Cairo’s Opera House offered regular seasons featuring up to eighty annual performances of the nineteenth century operatic canon performed by Italian itinerant companies, effectively integrating Cairo in the European opera circuits. During this period and up to the mid-1950s, these performances attracted members of the court, the haute bourgeoisie cosmopolitans and the European-educated Egyptian elite. A watershed in the institutionalization of Western art music performance in Egypt, up to its destruction by fire in 1970, Cairo’s Opera House stood as a symbol of state power, as “evidence of commensurability with European civilization” (Gitr 2019: 19), and as a “discourse of progress and modernity” (Mestyan 2013: 700). The nineteenth century also saw a substantial increase in Cairo and Alexandria’s European population, configuring a multi-ethnic cosmopolitan formation that, together with the Europeanized Egyptian elite, sustained the life of Western music in Egypt’s two major cities up to the mid-twentieth century when much of this community left the country due to the political changes brought about by Nasser’s regime. For Egyptian and European resident cosmopolitans, learning, practicing and listening to Western art music conferred cultural capital that was an integral part of their cosmopolitan habitus. During the early decades of the twentieth century, tens of highly qualified European musicians migrated to Egypt to pursue their musical careers, some fleeing from fascist regimes in Europe. Using French as the lingua franca, they offered private instruction in Western art music performance and composition, and some also founded private conservatories7 in Cairo and Alexandria, attracting students from Egypt’s cosmopolitan communities. Several also taught at the women’s and men’s branches of the Teacher’s Music Institute founded in 1935/1936, the first state supported institution in Egypt that offered instruction in Western art music and music education. Some of the most influential European musicians and teachers in the life of Western art music in Cairo include the Polish pianist Ignaz Tiegerman, the Italian Pompeo Minatto who taught composition to several of Egypt’s prominent composers and musicians (Aziz El-Shawan, ‘Abd Al-Halim Nuwera, among others), and the German musicologists

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and music teachers Hans Hickman and Brigitte Schiffer who taught privately and at the Women’s Teachers College, respectively.

A Turning Point in Western Art Music Education and Performance in Cairo Building on the legacy of Western art music in Egypt, a legacy that was rooted in the country’s colonial past, one of the goals of ‘Okashah’s cultural policy was to indigenize and promote Western art music education and performance among a broad social spectrum of the population. To this end, in 1959, the government founded Cairo’s National Conservatory and Symphony Orchestra and Cairo’s Opera and Ballet Companies in 1964 and 1966, respectively. Soviet cultural diplomacy was instrumental in the implementation of ‘Okashah’s cultural plan in the domain of Western art music, especially during the 1960s and 1970s. For over a decade, highly qualified musicians and teachers from different regions of the USSR and the Eastern bloc countries staffed and held leadership positions in Cairo’s Conservatory and Symphony Orchestra, and the Opera and Ballet Companies were coached by Soviet specialists. Furthermore, tens of graduates of the CNC were offered grants by the Soviet government to study in leading Conservatories in the Soviet Union, and musicians and music ensembles coming from that country were showcased in Egypt. A similar strategy was carried out in other domains of the arts, science and technology.8 Egyptian authorities regarded the recourse to Soviet specialists in Egyptian institutions as a temporary measure that would enable the training of a critical mass of highly qualified personnel who would gradually replace the Soviet staff. The Cairo National Conservatory was initially staffed by a handful of European expatriates who had been teaching privately, and /or in private conservatories, or in state institutions, most notably the Italian Ettore Puglisi, Vicenzo Carro, Guido Nicoletti, and Elide Dello Strologo. The prominent Croatian pianist Melita Lorković (1907–1987) was the first musician from the former Yugoslavia to join the CNC where she taught from 1960 up to 1972. In 1967, in response to a request made by the Minister of Culture Tharwat ‘Okashah to his Soviet counterpart, the Georgian violin teacher Irakli Beridze9 was hired as CNC’s director where he had been teaching violin since the mid-1960s, a post he held up to

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1972 (‘Okashah 1988: v. 2:287). This was a turning point in the history of the institution and a “leap forward” in the teaching of Western art music and the level of excellence attained by its graduates (El-Shami, June 2022; Sharara 2022; Yassa 2022). An experienced pedagogue, he staffed the CNC with highly competent full-time teachers in all instruments mostly from his native Georgia, but also from other regions of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe (El-Shami 2003, 2022).10 He is credited for restructuring and systematizing study programs, increasing the required level of competence in instrumental performance, and founding the first Conservatory Orchestra (El-Shami 2022). He also trained several generations of violinists and placed some of CNC’s best graduates in the Soviet Union’s top conservatories to complete their studies benefitting from Soviet grants (Sharara 2022). Upon completing their studies in the Soviet Union, most graduates took up positions as teachers at the CNC, gradually replacing the Soviet staff, occupied leading positions in other key music institutions, or pursued international careers as soloists and teachers.11 During their study and following graduation, CNC’s graduates developed professional but also friendship and affective ties with some of the Soviet faculty that have endured beyond the political systems that had sustained cultural diplomacy. A decade after leaving Egypt, several former Faculty members from the Soviet Union, including Irakli Beridze, returned to teach at the CNC at the invitation of their former students who then held leadership positions in the institution. The agentive power of cultural exchange involving the training of several generations of the CNC’s graduates in the best Soviet music institutions was considerable. Several of my former colleagues who spent four or more years studying at the Tchaikovsky Conservatory emphasized the privileged treatment they received during their studies in the Soviet Union, notwithstanding the modest but adequate conditions in which they lived, the feeling of being monitored by Soviet authorities, and the promotion of Soviet ideology. They recalled their generous grants as compared to other foreign students from Eastern bloc countries and Asia, their exemption from entrance auditions, their placement with excellent teachers, their interaction with top musicians within a vibrant artistic milieu, and their launching in the professional international musical networks through concerts and competitions (El-Biltagi 2022; Sharara 2022; Yassa 2022). Like the Cairo National Conservatory, the Cairo Symphony Orchestra was a site for cultural diplomacy with many of its musicians coming from

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the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc countries, especially Yugoslavia. The Serbian Živojin Zdravković, also known as Gika Zdravković (1914–2008), chief conductor of the Belgrade Philharmonic Orchestra and conducting professor at the Belgrade Music Academy, led the Cairo Symphony Orchestra from 1960 up to the 1970s (Abdun 2002), attracting soloists and orchestra musicians from the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc countries. Cairo’s Symphony Orchestra was a source of pride for Egyptian politicians and was often showcased by president Nasser to visiting heads of state. Since the turn of the twentieth century, CNC’s graduates largely replaced the foreign musicians that had staffed the Cairo Symphony Orchestra for more than four decades.

Showcasing Cultural Achievements Showcasing Soviet cultural achievements was another strategy of cultural diplomacy through state visits to Egypt by prominent soviet artists, orchestras, ballet and opera companies. In 1961, the Soviet Armenian composer Aram Khachaturian was invited for a state visit to Egypt in which he conducted the CSO performing a program of his compositions  at Cairo’s Opera House. During the 1960s and early 1970s, several Soviet music and dance groups performed in Egypt including: the Bolshoi, Leningrad, Kiev, Novosibirsk and Tashkent ballet companies; the Moiseev Dance Company and the folkdance ensembles of Moldavia, Armenia, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, and Georgia; the Moscow and Leningrad orchestras; the State puppet theatre and the State circus (Abdun 1999; Dawisha 1975: 425). Cultural diplomacy between the two countries also involved visits and performances by Egyptian artists and ensembles to the Soviet Union. For example, in 1956 Aziz El-Shawan was invited to Moscow where some of his early works were recorded by the All Union Radio Symphonic Orchestra and published on LP by the Melodiya state record label. A decade later, at Khachaturian’s invitation, he spent two years (1967–1969) at the Tchaikovsky Conservatory where he joined Khachaturian’s composition class. During this period, several of El-Shawan’s works were performed by the Moscow Cinema Orchestra and issued on LP.  Several Egyptian artists and ensembles of Western and local musics and dance were also invited to perform in the Soviet Union, most notably Um Kulthum, the Cairo Symphony Orchestra, the Folklore Arts Ensemble, the Puppet Theater, and the Cairo Ballet Company.

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Closing Observations Soviet cultural diplomacy in Egypt configured a new dynamic that was one of the forces at play in the political and cultural transformation that characterized postcolonial Egypt in the 1960s and 1970s. This new cosmopolitan dynamic largely replaced the cosmopolitan formation that sustained the life of Western music in Cairo and Alexandria within a colonial framework during the first half of the twentieth century, enabling the accomplishment of some of the goals of the cultural policy of Nasser’s regime, including the indigenization of Western art music. While this policy might seem incongruent with Nasser’s anti-colonial stance and his regime’s investment in promoting nationalism and pan-Arabism, it was grounded in the perspective of the European educated ‘Okashah and his team of intellectuals and artists that Western art music is a universal musical idiom, and an icon of modernity and progress. The Cairo National Conservatory was one of the sites where the agentive power of cultural exchange and of individual actors was particularly poignant. A critical mass of highly competent Egyptian musicians were trained in the best Soviet conservatories and by Soviet teachers at the CNC, transforming the institution and more generally the arena of Western music instruction and performance in Cairo. The impact of Soviet cultural diplomacy in the domain of Western art music has endured up to the present in the collective memory and in the musical practices of all those involved.

Notes 1. For a brief reading of Aziz El-Shawan’s biographical and artistic trajectory, see El-Shawan Castelo-Branco (2019). 2. This and the following translations from Arabic are by the author. 3. https://en.unesco.org/70years/abu_simbel_safeguarding_heritage 4. In 1960, ‘Okashah, accompanied by an Egyptian delegation, visited the Palaces of Culture in the Soviet Union, and a year later he sent a delegation from the Ministry of Culture to Yugoslavia to learn from its successful experience in this domain (‘Okashah 1988: vol. 1: 524; Shehata n.d.: 82–83). 5. Initially trained at the Cairo National Conservatory, he was awarded a grant from the Soviet Union to complete his studies at the Tchaikovsky Conservatory in Moscow where he studied from 1972 to 1976. 6. 2500 students are reported to have enrolled in Russian courses at the RCSC (Anonymous 2016: 13).

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7. Owned and run by European expatriate musicians, often carrying their names, private conservatories in Cairo included the Conservatoire Joseph Berggrun, the Conservatoire Tiegermann, the Conservatoire Scarlatti, and the Liceo Musicale “Giuseppe Verdi” in Alexandria. 8. Many Egyptian institutions were staffed and /or led by Soviet specialists including the Ballet Institute, the National Circus, and the Folk Arts Troupe. 9. At the time of writing, information about Irakli Beridze’s trajectory was not readily available through online sources in English. According to Fawzi El-Shami, rector of the Cairo National Conservatory from 1997 to 2003, Beridze had been the Deputy Rector of the Tbilisi Conservatoire, the secretary of the Tchaikovsky Competition, and was granted by Soviet authorities the honorary title of the People’s Artist (El-Shami 2022). 10. For a comprehensive list of CNC’s staff since its founding, see El-Shami (2003). 11. The first CNC graduates who studied at Moscow’s Tchaikovsky Conservatory in the 1970s are: Ramzi Yassa (piano), Hasan Sharara (violin), Mustafa Nagui (cello) and Gabir El-Biltagi (voice), all of whom had successful national and international careers. Ramzi Yassa developed an international career as a concert pianist and is a professor at the École Normal de Musique “Alfred Cortot” in Paris (www.ramziyassa.com). The other three musicians pursued their careers in Egypt as soloists and CNC faculty members where Hasan Sharara was rector from 1991 to 1997. Mustafa Nagui was conductor of the Cairo Symphony Orchestra, and director of the Cairo Opera House from 1998 to 2000.

References ‘Abd Al-‘Alim, Yusif ‘Abd Al-‘Alim. 2013. Al- ilaqat Al-masriyah al-suvyetiyyah: 1970–1981. [Egyptian Soviet Relations: 1971–1981]. Cairo: Al-Maglis Al-‘A’la li Al-Thaqafah. Abdun, Saleh. 1999. Khamsun ‘Aman min Al-Musiqa wa Al-Ubira [Fifty Years of Music and Opera]. Cairo: Dar Al-Shuruq. ———. 2002. Orkestra Al-Qahira Al-Simfuni: Walid Thawrat Al-Khamsin ‘Aman [The Cairo Symphony Orchestra: Product of the Fifty-year Revolution]. Cairo: Sanduq Al-Tanmiyyah Al-Thaqafiyah. Anonymous. 2016. Khamsun ‘Am Tawasul Thaqafi: Al-Markaz Al-Rusi li a ‘Ulum wa Al-Thaqafah [Half a Century of Cultural Connection: The Russian Center for Science and Culture]. Dar Nashr Anba’ Russia [Russian News]. Anonynmous. 1976. Al-Markath Al-Thaqafi Al-Suvyeti fi ‘Ishrun ‘Am: 1956–1876 [The Soviet Cultural Center in Twenty Years: 1956–1976]. Cairo: Soviet Cultural Center.

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Brucher, Katherine, and Suzel Ana Reily. 2013. Introduction: The World of Brass Bands. In Brass Bands of the World: Militarism, Colonial Legacies, and Local Music Making, ed. Suzel Ana Reily and Katherine Brucher, 1–31. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Company. Castelo-Branco, Salwa El-Shawan. 2002. Western Music, Cosmopolitanism, and Modernity in Egypt. In The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music, ed. Virginia Danielson, Scott Marcus, and Dwight Reynolds, vol. 6, 607–612. New York: Routledge. ———. 2013. The Politics of Music Categorization in Portugal. In The Cambridge History of World Music, ed. Philip Bohlman, 661–677. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2019. Aziz El-Shawan: A Cosmopolitan and Nationalist Composer in Twentieth Century Egypt. Annales Islamologiques 53: 95–111. https://journals.openedition.org/anisl/5611. Dawisha, Karin. 1975. Soviet Cultural Relations with Iraq, Syria and Egypt 1955–70. Soviet Studies 27 (3): 418–442. El-Biltagi, Gabir. 2022. Interview with the author, June. El-Shami, Fawzi. 2003. Academiyyat Al-Funun: Al-Konservatoire: 1959–2003 [The Academy of the Arts. The Conservatoire: 1959–2003]. Cairo: The Conservatoire—Academy of the Arts. ———. 2022. Interview with the author, June. Gitr, Carmen. 2019. Acting Egyptian: Theater, Identity and Political Culture in Cairo, 1869–1930, 4. Austin: The University of Texas Press. Gould-Davies, Nigel. 2003. The Logic of Soviet Cultural Diplomacy. Diplomatic History 27 (2): 193–214. Kamel, ‘Ezz El-Din. 2010. Sa‘d Kamel: Al-Thaqafah Al-Gamahiriyyah [Sa’d Kamel: Peoples Culture]. Cairo: Al- Maglis Al-A’la li Al-Thaqafah. Khrushchev, Nikita. 1956. Report to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union to the 20th Party Congress. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House. Mestyan, Adam. 2013. Power and Music in Cairo: Azbakiyya. Urban History 40 (4): 681–705. ‘Okashah, Tharwat. 1988. Muthakkarati fi Al-Siyasa wa Al-Thaqafah [My Memoires in Politics and Culture]. 2 vols. Cairo Dar Al-Hilal. Sharara, Hasan. 2022. Interview with the author, June. Shehatah, Samir. n.d. Thawrat ‘Okashah [Okasha’s Revolution]. Cairo: Al-Gam'iyyah Al-Masriyyah LiKuttab wa Nuqqad Al-Cinima. Silva, Manuel Deniz. 2010. Música erudita. In Enciclopédia da Música em Portugal no Século XX, ed. Salwa Castelo-Branco, vol. 254. Lisbon: Círculo de Leitores/ Temas e Debates. Wahba, Magdi. 1972. Cultural Policy in Egypt. Paris: UNESCO. Yassa, Ramzi. 2022. Online Interview with the author, October

CHAPTER 9

Musical Diplomacy in Mandate Palestine from 1936 to 1948 Issa Boulos

Establishing a narrative of the music-making scene in Palestine before 1948 presents many research challenges, especially with the loss of materials due to al-Nakba, or Catastrophe, the founding of Israel, and the resulting mass exodus of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. In recent years, materials of musical interest have started to emerge from various sources, such as private collectors, enthusiasts, archives, and libraries. The Palestinian Institute for Cultural Development NAWA recently obtained rare recordings from the BBC Archive, BBC Arabic, Ahmad Al-Salhi, a private collector and scholar from Kuwait, and Bashar Shammout, a Palestinian researcher based in Germany. Over a dozen recordings of instrumental and vocal pieces recorded at the Palestine Broadcasting Service (PBS) and one from the Near East Broadcasting Station (NEBS) have survived. Although limited in number, the recordings shed light on the breadth of music-making in Palestine before 1948. They offer an overview of the extensive musical activities within the PBS and point to how

I. Boulos (*) Harper College, Palatine, IL, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 M. M. Rijo Lopes da Cunha et al. (eds.), Music and Cultural Diplomacy in the Middle East, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36279-8_9

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musicians navigated the pressing matters of the day, such as modernization, Arabism, nationalism, geopolitical forces, and culture. They also provide information about how music offered mechanisms to help musicians form, maintain, or adjust their identities at home and abroad. The recordings I selected to explore in this chapter address the various qualities of Palestinian music-making and offer a preview of how the PBS composers and musicians positioned themselves culturally and politically. In addition, politicians, governments, communities, and institutions used music to push their goals during the British Mandate of Palestine. Thus, this chapter aims to answer questions about how Palestinians used music as a vehicle for cultural transformation and diplomacy, both internally and externally. During the Mandate period, European powers influenced Palestinian communities’ self-perception and cultural identification (Kessel 2020). In his book “Transforming the Holy Land: The Ideology of Development and the British Mandate in Palestine,” Jacob Norris argues that “Britain entered the Mandate with grand ambitions to transform the territory in line with a ‘new imperialist’ vision of industrial and technological modernity”  (Norris 2017). Ultimately, the cultural transformations that the Palestinians underwent and pursued during the Mandate period can serve as a practical starting point in understanding how Palestinians responded to European influences. Tamara van Kessel contends that modernity triggered the striving for cultural recognition of a ‘constructed’ Palestinian Arab tradition and stimulated the local communities’ capacity as cultural producers (Kessel 2020). Under the British, colonial discourses in Palestine were set in an accelerated motion since 1917. As early as the 1920s, nationalist sentiment and the desire to seek sovereignty and independence started to define how Palestinian communities viewed themselves, subsequently impacting each community’s role. According to Rashid Khalidi, the traditional elites, or notables, who dominated the Palestinian leadership during the 1920s and early 1930s, refused to separate themselves from the British (Khalidi 2015); in contrast, their interests often intertwined. Ultimately, Palestinians reacted differently to the British, and between peasants, noble classes, and urbanites, their responses varied from resistance and diplomacy to accommodation. However, the 1936 Revolution revitalized and unified the general position of all Palestinians. Ted Swedenburg describes how peasants, not the nobility, put forth the ideals of the 1936 Revolution (Swedenburg 2003). The elite reluctantly embraced the new discourse determined by

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peasants and started to inject nationalist views into their responses, often through Western models. Although it seems that Western-driven expressions of modernity have become a trend labeled as accommodating the British, such an approach did not necessarily conflict with the evolving nationalist sentiment. As the revolution was quickly put down in cities, nobles and Western-­ converted Christians shifted their responses from accommodation to negotiation and diplomacy, but not confrontation. This new sphere of diplomacy arose to show the British that Palestinians were deserving of independence and that they could develop into a civilized society and a modern nation. Therefore, their activities, positions, and attempts were not intended only to accommodate the British but rather to negotiate or convince them of Palestinians’ worthiness of independence and sovereignty. In contrast, the peasants did not consider the conflict with the British to be a matter of negotiation or diplomacy, and they continued to fight. In this post-Revolution era, Palestinians were no longer willing to accept an inferior status imposed by the British. Despite favoring diplomacy over confrontation, this attitude is shared by the noble classes, various Christian communities, and peasants. Therefore, it is the nationalist aspirations that became the primary motivation that defined the difference between what used to be considered accommodation and what by then had evolved into diplomacy. There is a point in every colonial discourse where colonial subjects either explicitly or implicitly adopt colonial discourse but eventually give them a life of their own. Such a trend is still prevalent today among the same communities in Palestine. While decolonization attempts have not yet made significant traction at the national level in Palestine, the gap between how Palestinian communities view themselves and the world still defines much of their responses, which often appear incoherent and contradictory. Very few scholarly works were devoted to music in Palestine before 1948. Nevertheless, two publications are worth mentioning, Orientalism and Musical Mission: Palestine and the West (2013) by Rachel Beckles Willson, and My Voice Is My Weapon: Music, Nationalism, and the Poetics of Palestinian Resistance (2006) by David A.  McDonald. Beckles Willson examines the presence of Western music in Palestine through the lens of projects aimed at researching music, teaching music, setting up orchestras, and opening conservatories. McDonald examines Palestinian exile, occupation, and dispossession through an ethnographic history of Palestinian protest music. Both books are helpful but were published before the Israeli

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National Library’s archive, and the currently available repertoire and recordings became available. Since the publication of Wāsị f Jawhariyyeh’s (1897–1972) memoir in 2005 and 2014, many scholars began to explore various period topics such as politics, culture, society, and music. Jawhariyyeh was an amateur ʿūd player, singer, poet, collector, composer, and chronicler who lived in the old city of Jerusalem (Jawhariyya et al. 2005, 2014). His memoir consists of detailed anecdotes and stories about life in the city spanning over four decades. The most significant aspect of his writings is that music was positioned at the center of his life. Jawhariyyeh’s musicality was shaped by contemporary Egyptian music, and he developed an immense appreciation of t ̣arab.1 After leaving Palestine in 1948, he recorded several songs that were later included in his memoir on a CD recording. The recordings offer further evidence of his fascination with Egyptian music and appreciation of Ottoman instrumental music, especially the bashraf. Jawhariyyeh’s memoir also points to the regional influences of the Egyptian recording industry and mass media outlets in the early decades of the twentieth century. Thus, his account serves as a vital record of Palestinian urban musical life before 1948. Records show that from the 1910s through the mid-1930s, Palestinian performers and composers wrote and performed songs using home-grown or regional lyrics and poetry and incorporated local, regional, Ottoman, and even Western forms, modes, and rhythms. These include Nūḥ Ibrāhı ̄m, Nimir Nāsị r, Yiḥya al-Labābı ̄dı ̄, Ilyās ʿAwaḍ, Thurayya Qaddūra, and Rajab al-Akḥal. Their commercially available recordings show how they internalized such influences and fused them with local musical and literary traditions. The later recordings from the PBS direct our attention to the musical stimuli in Palestine as not entirely Egyptian or one-sided. Instead, they show a mixture of Egyptian, Iraqi, Syrian, Greek, Armenian, Ottoman, European, and Palestinian ingredients. They also illustrate the musical diversity of Palestinian urban centers and provide unique insights into the evolution of pre-1948 Palestinian society and its tendency to be inclusive and reflective of regional cultures. Palestinian artists involved in the scene during this time, whether affiliated with the PBS or the NEBS, demonstrated their commitment to the ideals of the Arab Renaissance revival movement (al-nahḍa). They advocated restoring standard Arabic (fuṣḥa) and bridging the present with the past through references to literary, historical, and cultural symbols (Boulos 2020). The cosmopolitan nature of Palestinian music at this time may also have been a response to the

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dominance of Egyptian artists, appropriation, and as a form of cultural and political diplomacy, in addition to the desire to reflect local tastes and political and social necessities. From the perspective of diplomacy, the PBS recordings of musicians— and the next generation of composers who operated within the PBS and NEBS—offer insight into how Palestinians steered their internal and external relationships, including with neighboring countries and the West. Some fascinating manifestations of the latter are some of the songs and primarily instrumental pieces created at the two stations, revealing the strategies that mission organizations and the British used to influence the local populations and direct them toward predetermined discourses. When the PBS began broadcasting from a transmitter in Ramallah on March 31, 1936, it aimed to maintain the political and economic stability in Palestine and counter the impact of hostile Arabic broadcasting from Italy and Germany (Boyd 2003; Stanton 2013). Programming for the rural Arab population was put forth as a discrete category, with no overlap with programming that aimed at urban folk (ibid.). The station would eventually become instrumental in promoting modernization among all Palestinian Arabs, including Bedouins and peasants. Such a plan is not surprising given that the British Mandate government viewed radio broadcasting as a vehicle for modernization and wanted to take advantage of it to display a positive image of the Mandate and its efforts in Palestine (Stanton 2013). In terms of geographic reach, the PBS was the most powerful station after Radio Ankara in Turkey (Nuwayhiḍ and Ḥ ūt 1993). Its coverage was extensive and included Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Lebanon, Najd and Ḥ ijāz (Saudi Arabia today), and Transjordan (Muntada, November 15, 1946, no. 41, 9).2 The British Mandate acted as a colonial entity by extending the policies developed in other British colonies to Palestine. This approach manifested itself when they separated the PBS’s listening audience by religious identity and language, resulting in three distinct sections: Arab, English, and Jewish.3 Laura Robson describes how the British promoted communally organized legal and political structures based on the models of imperial policies developed in India and elsewhere (Robson 2011). Ultimately, they introduced sectarianism as a necessary shaping principle of the potential new state, an approach that permanently transformed Palestine’s political landscape (ibid.). One of their most subtle colonial expressions was their complete control of the content of the PBS broadcasts, especially the news. Furthermore, to separate patriotism from political discourses or

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activism, they encouraged patriotic songs that glorified the homeland and expressed the people’s love of it but banned any expressions that deviated from this principle, especially political ones. In his statement during the opening ceremonies of the PBS, the British High Commissioner Sir Arthur Wauchope said: The broadcasting service in Palestine will not be concerned with politics. Broadcasting will be directed for the advantage of all classes of all communities. Its main objective will be the spread of knowledge and of culture nor, I can assure you, will the claims of religion be neglected. (Palestine Post, March 31, 1936: 8)

Then, the Commissioner became more specific and gave examples: We shall try to stimulate new interests and make all forms of knowledge more widespread. I will give you two examples in both of which I have a deep interest. There are thousands of farmers in this country who are striving to improve their methods of agriculture. I hope we shall find ways and means to help these farmers and assist them to increase the yield of the soil, improve the quality of their produce, and explain the advantages of various forms of cooperation. There are thousands of people in Palestine who have a natural love of music, but who experience difficulty in finding the means, whereby they may enjoy the many pleasures that music gives. The Broadcasting Service will endeavor to fill this need, and stimulate musical life in Palestine, so that we may see both Oriental and Western music grow in strength, side by side, each true to its own tradition. (8)

The Commissioner’s last statement demonstrates how the British imagined the area’s future to be based on a narrative of East and West as two separate forces that ought not to engage in a two-way conversation with one another, “each true to its own tradition.” This assertion placed the burden of change and its requirements squarely on the shoulders of Arabs. It also established the precedent for any attempt at diplomacy or transformation to become a local effort, not British. However, since using the station as a platform for any political protest was banned, Palestinians still attempted to use it as a tool for national expression, which ultimately did not differ much from the British notions of patriotism and homeland glorification. Andrea Stanton argues that the PBS did not project a British identity so much as an Egyptian, Palestinian, and Arab nationalist identity (Stanton 2013). This argument is valid for

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most of the PBS’s productions supporting the nahḍa and Arab nationalist movements. Furthermore, the available musical recordings show that Western music was integral to the PBS’s Arab Section, carried out by local musicians trained in Western music. Ultimately, the burden was on the local musicians trained in traditional music to modernize local music according to Western standards. Such pressures were pronounced by Nuwahiḍ and Nashāshı ̄bı ̄ and local Western-trained musicians within the PBS. They include injecting traditional music with Western methodology and ‘educating’ local musicians in Western methods, instruments, compositional devices, performance, and musical arrangements. Two observations can be drawn from this. The first is that the British placed the burden of “transformation” on Palestinians rather than the British. Therefore, any attempts at cultural diplomacy through music were anticipated to be produced by Palestinians and directed toward the West, but not vice versa. The second is that Stanton’s statement about identity accurately describes the trajectory from a political perspective but not from a cultural one. I argue that since the PBS was established as a tool to help the British establish colonial institutions and expand their mission into long-term cultural imperialism, the role that locals played was consistent with how the British envisioned their overall strategy, despite the political contradictions. ʿAjāj Nuwayhiḍ was the Observer of the Arab Section from 1940 to 1944. In his memoir, Sittūna ʿa ̄man maʿ al-qāfila al-ʿarabiyya (Sixty Years with the Arab Caravan), he claimed that he maneuvered within the British framework and used the PBS to build and strengthen Arab nationalism through its programming, with relative political and intellectual independence (Nuwayhiḍ and Ḥ ūt 1993). He argued that he advanced an Arab nationalist agenda, an extension of the ideals of Ḥizb al-Istiqlāl (The Independence Party of Palestine), which he co-founded in 1932. However, such awareness did not extend to matters of culture. Instead, it remained within the realms of patriotic sentimentalism, in contrast to the popular demand to foster an independent political, nationalist, and cultural identity. An example of this contradiction occurred when Nuwayhiḍ launched a mandatory program to educate all PBS musicians in Western music theory and how to read, write, and interpret sheet music so that they could modernize their music. He requested Yūsif al-Batrūnı ̄, a local PBS musician who had Western training, to take charge of the task of training local PBS musicians. Most musicians who attended the workshops learned how

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to read sheet music and use notation to understand, write, and interpret music, thanks to months of planning and execution by al-Batrūnı ̄. However, since Nuwayhiḍ insisted that there be no exceptions, he ended up having to fire Muḥammad ʿAbd al-Karı ̄m for his refusal to go through the program, despite ʿAbd al-Karı ̄m being one of the most prominent buzuq players and composers of his generation. Nuwayhiḍ later regretted firing him after discovering that ʿAbd al-Karı ̄m was illiterate and did not wish to disclose such information. Although Nuwayhiḍ’s regret points to both his guilt and a lack of consideration, he never questioned his approach, as it was in line with the PBS discourses but not local musical practice, which primarily had been transmitted orally. For Arab musicians, the maqāmāt (musical modes) and their structures, the intricate nuances of iqāʿa ̄t (rhythmic cycles), and the renderings of compositions and melodic contours are passed on from master to apprentice by word of mouth, instruction, and observation. There was little to no use of printed sheet music during that period. Musical notation by itself was not a medium to convey relevant knowledge to traditional musicians. In all his writings about his tenure at the PBS, Nuwayhiḍ’s nationalist and political stands were often at odds with the West. However, he was content with cultural modernization going through the West. Essentially, he elicited acts of diplomacy and transformation in individuals and communities accustomed to their surroundings. His insistence on having the Western-trained al-Batrūnı ̄ educate all local musicians in reading and writing music essentially adhered to the British notion of “educate and elevate” and gave Western ideals and the Western-trained musicians an advantage. As a result, the West and Western-trained musicians were assumed to be superior to the Eastern musicians, not their equals. Ultimately, both Nuwayhiḍ and his successor ʿAzmı ̄ al-Nashāshı ̄bı ̄ tied cultural modernization with their nationalist aspirations to becoming independent. They demonstrated to Westerners that they were capable of cultural modernization beyond accommodation, a display of diplomacy on the verge of becoming a discourse. During the 1940s, various acts of diplomacy emerged in multiple directions, as shown in Fig.  9.1. Palestinians were in active dialog with each other, their neighbors, and the West. However, such interactions were tangible and intangible, making an accurate assessment of the overall impact unmeasurable. The British Mandate government would articulate its general stance regarding the future of Palestine and its communities through formal correspondences, publications, programs, initiatives,

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East:

Eastern cultures, countries, and regions.

West:

European cultures, institutions, organizations, etc.

Religion:

Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Eastern, and Western congregations.

Colonial:

Mandate government, colonial discourses, and mission activity.

Community:

Any religious, nationalist, or ethnic group.

Class:

Socioeconomic status, poor, middle class, elites, notable families, etc.

Fig. 9.1  Trajectories of diplomacy

alliances, infrastructure, and collaborations. Establishing Jerusalem as a colonial city in the physical sense is an example of a tangible manifestation of such attempts. However, the subtle long-term initiatives they implemented, such as the PBS, NEBS, and Nuwayhiḍ’s program, aimed to change people’s mindsets, behaviors, attitudes, and outlooks. Bringing known Arab nationalists such as Ibrāhı ̄m Ṭ ūqān, ʿAjāj Nuwayhiḍ, and ʿAzmı ̄ al-Nashāshı ̄bı ̄ to the PBS’s forefront was undoubtedly an attempt to smooth out the image of the British in the eyes of Arabs. While the British were faithful to their generic colonial trajectory, they situated the colonial project at the center of where they envisioned the local communities in Palestine to end up, both culturally and politically, as shown in Fig. 9.1.

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To further put this contradiction in perspective, the PBS publications and programs show little indication of Western-trained musicians learning the local musical vocabulary from their traditionally trained peers. Instead, Western-trained musicians, such as al-Batrūnı̄, publicly criticized local musicians for their lack of education and adoption of modern (by which he meant Western) musical standards (Dhakhı̄ra, November 4, 1946: 15). In due course, the pressure was on traditional Arab musicians to demonstrate their ability to progress, become educated, and send diplomatic messages to the West, illustrating to them the capability of Palestinians to change and become adaptable. Nevertheless, such interactions did not necessarily mean that Arab/Palestinian diplomacy aimed at the West worked. Ultimately, while Arab/Palestinian diplomacy focused on political independence and sovereignty, the attitudes and perceptions of ordinary Palestinians concerning the notions of cultural transformation and modernity also changed. In NAWA’s collection, there are two recordings of instrumental pieces by what seems to be the Arab Legion Band, which collaborated closely with the PBS (Figs. 9.2 and 9.3).

Fig. 9.2  Jericho entertainment by the Palestine Broadcasting Service. Arab Legion Band. March 6, 1940. (American Colony, 1940)

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Fig. 9.3  The Palestine Post, March 7, 1940, 2

One of the recordings is an instrumental interpretation of the song “Yallı ̄ Zaraʿtū al-Burtu’a ̄n” (Oh, Orange Farmers), Recording 1. The song was written by Egyptian poet Bayram al-Tūnisı ̄ and composed by Muhammad Abd al-Wahab. It first appeared in the 1938 Egyptian film “Yaḥyā al-Ḥub” (Long Live Love). In addition to playing the piece without singing, the band omitted the instrumental introduction, likely to quickly engage the audience through the recognizable melody of the vocal line. There are several critical observations regarding musical transcription and interpretation. First, as the highlighted areas in Fig.  9.4 show, the performance was generally imprecise. Second, the opening melody in the band’s performance was somehow mixed up, as seen from measures nine to sixteen. This mix-up resulted in adding an extra bar to the phrase. For section B, starting in measure 17, some notes do not match the original

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Fig. 9.4  Yallı ̄ Zaraʿtū il-Burtu’an̄ . Music by Muhammad ʿAbd al-Wahab, lyrics by Bayram al-Tūnisı ̄. Transcription by Issa Boulos

melody, but the section was equal in length. The performance likely intended to highlight Palestine’s orange industry while also functioning as a sing-along. Of course, the sing-along expectation would not have worked with such a compromised rendition since an average listener who

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knew the song would have caught the mistakes and maybe even corrected them. Finally, the interpretation was likely not inspected by the musicians in the Arab Section, which is understandable, given that the band was not under the PBS’s jurisdiction. We do not know who transcribed the piece and when it was performed. However, there are several references in the Palestine Post to an individual who led the band, referred to as the Band Sergeant. In addition, in 1938, the Palestine Post published a short news segment about the band and named the sergeant ‘Abdul Latif Muhammed as its director (Palestine Post, February 13, 1938, 4). Nonetheless, the broadcast may have fulfilled its objective of promoting the orange industry in Palestine. Essentially, it was mutually beneficial for the PBS and the Arab Legion under Prince Abdullah, the emir of Transjordan, to maintain such a relationship. In fact, in his book Tārı ̄kh al-idha ̄ʿa al-falast ̣ı ̄niyya, huna ̄ al-quds: 1936–1948 (History of the Palestinian Broadcasting Station: 1936–1948), Naṣri al-Jūzı ̄ mentions that upon establishing the NEBS in 1941, Prince Abdullah sent them two bands to help them build the station, a brass band, and a bagpipe band (al-Jūzı ̄ 2010). Interestingly, the news segment in the Palestine Post mentions that the band also played Ghazālı ̄ Ghazālı ̄, a song that goes back to Ottoman times. Currently, it is known in Turkey as “Üsküdar’a,” “Apo xeno topo” in Greece, “Ruse kose curo imaš” in Serbia, and “Anadolka” in Bosnia, to name a few; many nations claim it as their own. In the spirit of modernization, the three observers of the Arab Section of the PBS, Ibrāhı ̄m Ṭ ūqān (1936–1940), ʿAjāj Nuwayhiḍ (1940–1944), and ʿAzmı ̄ al-Nashāshı ̄bı ̄ (1944–1948), accepted the notion of modernization and attempted to create a nationalist path to which the British and Palestine’s neighbors would give consent.4 Their efforts aimed to negotiate the PBS’s position from the perspective of the West, that is, an entity that accommodates or implements a colonial discourse. However, the PBS also reached out to Palestinians to position itself as a nationalist platform, or more accurately, as a colonial establishment directing its actions toward the local Palestinian socioeconomic classes, religions, and communities. For example, Nuwayhiḍ published an article in Huna al-Quds on September 29, 1941, as part of an exclusive broadcast celebrating the Islamic New Year. The publication included the program of the event scheduled for Tuesday, January 28, 1941, shown in the translation below:

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Islamic New Year Celebration, Tuesday, January 28, 1941, event: Music of the Arab Army.5 Prophet Muhammad and the Free Men, Muḥmmad ʿAbd al-Salām al-Barghūtı ̄ Yathrib Anthem as the people of Yathrib receive the Prophet, The Radio Choir Prophet Muhammad and the Human Race, Muhammad Barzaq Brotherhood, music by Salvador Arnita Prophet Muhammad and Women, Ms. Qudsiyya Khūrshı ̄d Equality, music by Salvador Arnita Prophet Muhammad and Christians, Reverend Nicūlā al-Khūri Arabism, music by Salvador Arnita Prophet Muhammad Migrating, ʿAjāj Nuwayhiḍ Yathrib Anthem The two songs or pieces entitled “Arabism” and “Equality” that appear in the program indicate how Nuwayhiḍ navigated geopolitical forces and utilized the ideals of Arabism as a means to advance the goals of pan-Arab unity. He also emphasized religion to reflect his ideological belief that Islamism and nationalism could work hand in hand, a notion that he repeatedly mentioned in his memoir. He believed that “Islam was a significant force in the region’s identity and must be used for mobilization and promotion of Arab and Islamic ideals” (Nuwayhiḍ and Ḥ ūt 1993: 255), in line with the consistent religious rhetoric of the period, which continued to highlight an Islamic narrative of the conflict. On the other hand, Arab Christians, such as Salvador Arnita and Yūsif al-Batrūnı̄, supported only broader and more secular Arab nationalist discourses (Boulos 2020). To inject the Islamic theme with a broader perspective, Reverend Nicūlā al-Khūri spoke about the Prophet Muhammad and his relationship with Christians. Essentially, the period shows Arab Christians increasingly engaging in activities that promoted a tolerant vision of Arabism, a secular concept, even in an Islamic-themed celebration. In the process, they often stepped out from their historical comfort zones within mission institutions and attempted to scale their cultural thoughts and outlook to the whole population; the PBS provided them with such a platform. Nuwayhiḍ’s successor, ʿAzmı ̄ al-Nashāshı ̄bı ̄, was pragmatic and friendly toward both the British and the Hashemites of Transjordan. Unlike Nuwayhiḍ and Ṭ ūqān, al-Nashāshı ̄bı ̄ wrote extensively in the PBS’s publications. In an article about the importance of radio in the Muntada issue

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of June 6, 1945 (no. 3, 26), he highlighted the critical role that radio played during the war and praised its future impact on the world. He argued that the quality of a country’s radio programming would determine its reputation, and broadcasting would become the heart of culture, promoting good taste, a strong work ethic, and high-quality productions. He believed that thoughtful programming would have a social, intellectual, aesthetic, and political impact. Al-Nashāshı ̄bı ̄ then highlighted how the Arab Section of the PBS strived to offer various programs to educate and entertain the public. He also stressed that the station needed to emphasize Palestinian Arab national culture. Al-Nashāshı ̄bı ̄ reiterated that the PBS programs aimed not only to serve Palestine but also all Arabs. He mentioned a daily broadcast that included a collection of compositions and songs by artists from various Arab countries to prove his point. He also took pride in the thirty to forty artists who participated in this daily program and highlighted that it aimed to bring Eastern and Western musical styles closer.

Christian Hymns As missionaries’ goal was to attract Eastern Christians to Western religious orders, utilizing Arabic was a critical component of enabling them to do so. During the second half of the nineteenth century, a group of American Presbyterian missionaries based in Beirut embarked on a mission to translate the Bible into Arabic. One of their main objectives was to confront Muslim growth and doctrine and direct the Evangelical mission to the indigenous population. Since then, various Palestinian Christian congregations have engaged with Western musical practices through liturgical songs sung in Arabic; however, such repertoires rarely had a public presence. Typically, mission organizations support such communities at mission schools and through publications, training, and formal instruction. As missionary Samuel Jessup put it in 1910, the introduction of melodeons, pianos, harmoniums, and organs by Americans and Europeans in the last fifty years and the regular instruction in harmony in the schools have developed in the second generation of educated Syrians several very remarkable cases of the musical genius of the European style. (Jessup 1910: 566)

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Missionaries employed Arabic as the primary language of instruction and the most critical tool of proselytization rather than Ottoman Turkish to create confidence with the local Christian communities, which were predominantly Orthodox. Based on the accounts of Henry Jessup, the circle of those utilizing Arabic as a tool for Christian missions expanded and included many local poets and scholars, many of whom had previously become involved in translating hymns and psalms into Arabic and writing their own. However, Khalil Totah claimed that despite their service, mission schools were detrimental to Arab solidarity: Like the Government schools, they are controlled by foreigners and are said to be lacking in zeal for Arab nationalism. Some are even accused of being political propagandists for their own governments. It is pointed out, e.g., that French schools emphasize French history and geography more than they do Arab; that American schools exalt American customs more than they foster Arab culture and native manners; that Italian schools serve Italian rather than Arab interests; and the German education is conducive to loyalty to Germany instead of love for Palestine. These mission schools use a foreign language as the medium of instruction; the headmasters are usually foreigners, and the atmosphere is likely to be foreign. The general effect is bound to lead to confusion and variety instead of national unity. (Totah 1932: 164–5)

Most Palestinian Christian congregations were Eastern. Nonetheless, proselytization was not only about ‘converting’ them to a different assembly, but it was also in line with the colonial mindset of cultural and political colonization. However, Eli Smith (1801–1857) was keen on traditional music, which led him to publish a translation of Mikhail Mishāqa’s book al-Risāla al-Shihabiyya fı ̄ al-Ṣināʿa al-Mūsiqiyya (The Shihābı ̄ Treatise of Music Making). The book is considered one of the essential theoretical treatises on Arab music.6 In the introduction of the translation, Smith himself states the purpose behind his endeavor, shedding light on the predicament of using Arabic or Arab music: The mission with which I am connected has not yet succeeded in introducing singing into Arabic worship. There are two obstacles, which have prevented, are two; one, the peculiarities of Arabic versification, the other, the equally strong peculiarities of Arab music. The former is such, that a hymn composed according to Arabic rules of prosody, would, in very few cases, if

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any, be adapted to our tunes; and one composed according to our rules would be still less adapted to Arab taste. (Smith 1847: 173)

In the summer of 1862, Henry Jessup supported the publication of a children’s hymnbook published by the mission’s press. He wrote to his musical friend Dr. Charles S. Robinson of New York: It has sometimes been a question with me whether the Arab race is capable of learning to sing Western music well. (This is partially due to the one-third intervals between the whole notes as against our one-half intervals.) The native music of the East is so monotonous and minor in its melody (harmony is unknown), so unlike the sacred melodies of Christian lands, that it appeared to me at one time that the Arabs could not learn to sing our tunes. It is difficult for the adults to sing correctly. (Jessup 1910: 251)

In his letter to Robinson, Jessup complained that when Arabs sing Western tunes, they sing with passion but not with much understanding. He noticed, however, that children can sing anything and “carry the soprano and alto parts with great success” (ibid.). Jessup also described the children singing at school, in the street, at home, in Sunday school, in public worship, and at missionary society meetings. He expressed what he felt when those children were singing and said that “[t]here is a tide and a power in children’s singing which carries onward the older people and not only drowns out the discords and harshness of older voices but actually sweeps away prejudice and discordant feeling from older hearts” (ibid.). Jessup’s records indicate that missionary hymns and tune books sold thousands of copies. Teachers used them to train their students to sing at their schools. He also noted that pianos were common during this period and that the locals started to embrace European musical standards (ibid.). By the late nineteenth century, Arabic was established as the primary language of proselytization, but not Arab music. The 1913 edition of the book Mazāmı ̄r wa tasa ̄bı ̄ḥ wa agha ̄nı ̄ ru ̄ḥiyya (Psalms, Hymns, and Spiritual Songs) is a collection of psalms, hymns, and religious songs translated from English into Arabic and mainly set to march-like Western tunes. It is noticeable that many of the poems, although religious, embraced the homeland. However, at that point, missionaries were determined to bring their musical practices to local populations through Arabic but were no longer interested in doing so by using Arab music, especially after the death of Eli Smith.

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Following the First World War, Palestinian Christians developed a better understanding and awareness of their position in the region. Their efforts were at the center of cultural and political diplomacy to support their bid for independence, particularly while under British rule. Augustine Lama (1902–1988) and Salvador Arnita (1914–1984) were both taught by missionaries at the Franciscan Friars in Jerusalem, while Yūsif al-Batrūnı ̄ was trained at the Salesian School in Bethlehem. Their experience growing up in Palestine was marked by a transformation from isolationism and seclusion to public expressions of patriotism. The songs that al-Batrūnı ̄ and Arnita wrote in the 1930s onward were set in standard Arabic and focused on educational and patriotic themes. Since Palestinian Anglicans and Catholics converted from Eastern orders, this practice was intended to sustain a patriotic image of these communities in society and offer them the means to affirm their presence as a religious minority. It was also meant to demonstrate the Palestinians’ ability to connect with and accept Western principles. Ultimately, until the establishment of the PBS in 1936, Western music-making occurred in missionary settings. While the proselytization of Palestinian Christians began over a century before, injecting both Christian religious music and Western musical styles into the public sphere was new. It was through the PBS that such practices were disseminated. An example of this is a PBS recording that NAWA obtained of a Christmas hymn (Recording 2). A poet by the name Shākir Dāghir set the poem in standard Arabic, entitled “Mı ̄lād al-Ması ̄ḥ” (Birth of the Messiah). In the upper left corner, the music is noted as a “Christmas Hymn,” as shown in Fig. 9.5. The song appears in the 1913 edition of Mazāmı ̄r wa tasābı ̄ḥ wa aghānı ̄ rūḥiyya. Unfortunately, it is unclear when the song was broadcast because the PBS programs did not often specify what was being performed during religious celebrations. Luckily, the performance strictly followed the sheet music below, except for a cello accompanying the piano playing the main melody. The singers were men and women who sang the tune an octave apart. Occasionally, a male voice would sing in unison with the mezzo-sopranos. Missionaries showed understanding, respect, and appreciation of local culture while focusing on the bigger picture: proselytization and the dissemination of Western cultural norms. Another aspect of mission diplomacy was the music notation being right to left to accommodate Arabic. This practice is common in secular and religious contexts among Arab Christians who follow Western orders (Boulos 2020). While such an orientation makes the flow of Arabic on sheet music much smoother, in the

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Fig. 9.5  The religious song “Mı ̄lād al-Ması ̄ḥ” (Birth of the Messiah). (Ford 1913)

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end, the melody is still Western, and the lyrics and poetry preach Western values. Laura Robson argues that Palestinian Christians intertwined their identity into this discourse of nationalism and, in the process, developed political positions while navigating their relationship with other local communities and the British. On the one hand, the British colonial power in Palestine and the Christian missions operated through the same lens, aiming to strengthen the social and political position of the Palestinian Christian community within Palestine, especially the Anglicans, and ensure their commitment to modernization by following colonial discourses. On the other hand, Palestinian Christians belonging to Western congregations utilized their knowledge of Western music to position themselves at the center of Western music-making in Palestine while using standard Arabic as a gesture of fidelity and dedication to Arab nationalist principles. Such attempts evolved with time to form their own trajectories, demonstrating how colonial discourses and specific acts of diplomacy can become a local force of cultural transformation. However, such changes did not necessarily lead to internal or external political reconciliation or understanding. In contrast, they created more complexities in how Palestinians are currently navigating their postcolonial identity.

The Mandolin and Guitar Ensembles At the PBS, many Palestinian artists, primarily Christian, composed and led Western ensembles. Most of these ensembles consisted of fretted instruments with fixed intonations. Examples include the mandolin ensemble, guitar ensemble, brass and woodwind ensembles, chamber, choirs, and orchestra. Some original compositions appeared in the programs incorporating Western and traditional instruments in duets, trios, quartets, and larger formations. Al-Batrūni and Arnita were particularly active in broadcasting and the Western live music scene. They appeared regularly at the YMCA in West Jerusalem, where the PBS broadcast and produced many shows. In addition, according to the PBS publications, al-Batrūnı ̄ arranged or composed for the orchestra at the PBS and composed and arranged the music for children’s songs, guitar, and mandolin ensembles (Muntada, September 27, 1946, no. 34, 17). Fortunately, NAWA obtained two recordings of instrumental pieces by the mandolin and guitar ensembles. In the first recording, a waltz, the mandolins take the lead while accompanied by strings and piano in G minor, al-Batrūnı ̄ most likely conducting (Recording 3). The piece is in three sections, A, B,

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and C, while the A section is slowed down and played as part of the introduction. The overall character of the performance resembles the Russian balalaika orchestras of the period. First, the mandolins played the A section ad libitum in tremolo style and slow tempo (86 BPM). The cello was meanwhile providing a drone and the bass line. Then, the A section, slightly modified, is played by the mandolins carrying the main melody, while the strings and piano provided the harmonies and the waltz rhythmic feel in a fast tempo (176 BPM). In the B section, the music shifted to D Phrygian, while the end of the section resolved in a fashion of a traditional qafla or cadence in maqām kurdı ̄, which is close to Phrygian (pl. maqāmāt; see List of Maqāmāt). In section C, the melody resembles maqām ḥijāz with its characteristic descending augmented second interval.7 The composition, which is likely by al-Batrūnı ̄, attempts to appeal diplomatically to the local population by referencing some of the maqāmāt and local melodic contours. However, the Western use of the descending augmented second interval emphasizes simplistic stereotypes about maqām music and enforces fictional and romantic imagery of “the Orient.” In an article published on November 4, 1946, in the Dhakhı ̄ra magazine, al-Batrūnı ̄ urged the “PBS and NEBS administrations to care about music and singing based on elevating the public to them, not to go down to the people’s musical level and be satisfied if the public is satisfied.” He criticized local music and the communities who consume it, describing the people’s habit of repeatedly wanting to hear a beloved melody so they could feel ṭarab as pointless. “My goal,” he said, “is to elevate Eastern music to its sister Western music and combine them” (emphasis added). In this piece, al-Batrūnı ̄ expressed how he envisioned such a belief to take shape, but ultimately compromising the aesthetics of traditional music-­ making in favor of Western models. Al-Batrūnı ̄ believed that Arab music would progress only if influenced by Western music, a view shared by many Palestinian Christians and urbanites engaged in the social or political process. They also embraced modernity as a vehicle for development and progress, an approach that mission organizations also advocated over a hundred years before this broadcast. However, the notion of progress through such means was not accepted by all Palestinians, especially peasants. Therefore, it was upon these musicians to reach out to the community to help them understand the value of progress through Western music and convince them that it was the proper discourse diplomatically. At the same time, the commitment to Western

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ideals demonstrated in al-Batrūnı ̄’s piece points to the musicians’ ability to position themselves at the forefront of progress, a diplomatic effort aimed at the British. However, despite the colonial vision of the British and their desire for Palestinians to accommodate them, modernity initiated a new cultural construct driven by the desire for independence. Therefore, the capacity of Palestinians as cultural producers is exemplified by the syncretism of nationalist thought, modernity, and notions of progress. The second example is a four-minute-long instrumental piece that incorporates a steel guitar, a harpsichord, a piano, strings, and mandolins (Recording 4). It resembles the repertoire emerging from the American West Coast during the first half of the twentieth century at the hands of native Hawaiian steel guitarists, especially Joseph Kekuku (1874–1932) (Troutman 2016).8 According to Troutman, as early as 1916, 78  rpm records featuring the Hawaiian steel guitar outsold every other genre of music in the United States (ibid.). Although the steel guitar dominated the first minute of the performance, the mandolins took over to the end of the piece, stylistically and practically. The move created another atmosphere that resembles the romantic folk repertoire emerging from Europe in the early twentieth century, especially in Italy.9 However, the instrumentation in this piece was not typical of any ensemble formations from the period. Instead, it seemed to suggest that al-Batrūnı ̄ took the liberty of mixing different instruments and musical styles, and it is not yet clear what his intentions were. Nevertheless, from the perspective of where the PBS positioned itself culturally and politically, al-Batrūnı ̄ incorporated trendy Western styles and incorporated local ingredients in a manner that suggests not only mere musical interpretations but also artistic preferences. Once more, al-Batrūnı ̄ proved that he has something for everyone: traditional elements for locals and harmony and trendy Western styles for the British.

Mawwāl Baghdādı̄ by Yūsif Raḍwān10

The Baghdādi mawwa ̄l11 is an Iraqi nonmetered improvised secular song type based on a poetic stanza consisting of seven hemistiches, typically in vernacular Arabic from Baghdad, Iraq. The first three hemistiches follow one rhyme, the following three use a different rhyme, and the last line follows the first rhyme. The singer manages the melodic contour in a specific maqām and ornaments and embellishes using melismatic and syllabic textures. Typically, the genre is performed by capable singers who take the

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stage without preparation (Hamood 2020). According to ʿAbd al-Karı ̄m Ashtar, this genre spread to northern Syria during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, especially in Aleppo, Hama, and Homs (Ashtar 2008). Broadcasts of the genre were cited repeatedly in the PBS programs, indicating its prominence in the region. There are three recordings of this genre among NAWA’s audio files: they all feature singer Yūsif Raḍwān. Raḍwān was born in Jerusalem in the Bāb al-Wād neighborhood. Based on the appearances of his name in the PBS programs, he seems to have started working for the PBS in 1938 as a singer and ʿūd player. Raḍwān made a name for himself and became a well-known singer during the 1940s and beyond.12 In this recording (Recording 5), the mawwāl “Bustān Ḥ ubbak,” performed in maqām huzām, begins with a dūlāb, a short instrumental piece shown in Fig. 9.6. The takht (ensemble) consists of a violin (kamān) section, cello, qānūn, nāy, riq, and ʿūd. The following are the Arabic lyrics and transliteration of Yūsif Raḍwān’s mawwāl Baghdādı ̄ “Bustān Ḥ ubbak”: bustān ḥubbak ḥayāt min al-mabāsim warad yā saʿid gāsị d ḥimāk wi man lirūḍak warad [amān yā nadı ̄mı ̄] (amān yābā) law fāragū s-saʿid ʿāwad bil-ʿawātiq warad (amām yā nadı ̄mı ̄) yā muhjatı ̄ fı ̄ naʿı ̄m il-ʿumur yā mālı ̄ yā man hawāk il-wafı ̄ galbı ̄ il-wafı ̄ mālı ̄ zaḥḥafit galbı ̄ warāk u bilhawā mālı ̄ rı ̄fak u yammim ḥimāk u ʿain ʿaṭfak warad (yā yābā, ūf yā ‘uyūnı ̄)

‫ب�ستان حبك حياة من املبامس ورد‬ ‫اي سعد گاصد حامك ومن لروضك ورد‬ ‫لو فارگوا ال سعد عاود ابلعواتق ورد‬ ‫اي همجيت يف نعمي العمر اي مايل‬ ‫اي من هواك الويف گليب الويف مايل‬ ‫زحفت گليب وراك وابلهوا مايل‬ ‫ريفك وميم حامك وعني عطفك ورد‬

Fig. 9.6  “Dūlāb Huzām.” Transcription by Issa Boulos

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Raḍwān begins singing the first two lines while the takht instruments provide a drone and the qānūn shadowing the melody. The qānūn follows the vocal line with a brief taqsı ̄m. Raḍwān then repeats the 2nd line, followed by another taqsı ̄m on nāy, while the other instruments provide the drone. When he starts singing the third line concluding the first rhyme, the whole ensemble accompanies him by playing an ostinato in the 10/16 rhythm known as jurjı ̄nā, among the most common in Iraq (Fig.  9.7). The violin then plays taqsı ̄m in the style of the Iraqi jūza (spike fiddle) while the other instruments play the ostinato. Raḍwān then sings the remaining four poetic lines in one stretch. The qānūn continues shadowing the vocal line throughout the piece. This song demonstrates some noteworthy characteristics: the genre’s origin, vocal technique, dialect, pronunciation, additions, and performance practices. To the first point, the recording points to Iraqi song genres performed by Palestinian singers at the PBS and possibly in the public sphere. According to researcher Nadir Jalāl, evidence of recordings of the Baghdādi mawwa ̄l coming out from the Levant appeared as early as 1906. Faraj Allah Bayḍa was the most famous Lebanese singer performing in this genre. In a 1914 Baidaphone catalog, Bayḍa seems to have recorded over 150 Baghdādi mawwāl songs spread over several years. In terms of form and performance practice, in a 1921 Faraj Allah Bayḍa recording of a Baghdādi mawwāl, the song “Ya ̄ ze ̄n yallı ̄ ʿala qatlı ̄” begins with an ostinato figure in the jurjı ̄nā rhythmic cycle but without an introductory dūlāb (AMAR, 2014). While other short instrumental pieces were being used in Iraq as introductions to mawwāl, including basta, the use of dūla ̄b was not typical of how the Baghdādı ̄ mawwāl was performed. Instead, using the dūlāb as an introduction to a vocal piece seems to express the appropriation of Egyptian practices in local repertoires in the Near East. Such usage appeared regularly in early Egyptian recordings. The Raḍwān performance, however, combined elements from Egypt by introducing the dūlāb as an introductory piece but referenced the jurjı ̄nā rhythm from Iraq in the middle of the piece, double-edged diplomacy and Fig. 9.7  Ostinato on jūrjı ̄na rhythm

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representation. His vocal technique was also consistent with the Iraqi style, especially the usage of a vocal trill called laʿlaʿa. Additionally, for the most part, Raḍwān’s intonations followed Iraqi characteristics but with less glissando or back-and-forth stretching of notes before the qaflāt (cadences). Essentially, the intonations were softened to appeal to the local population but with a conscious effort to maintain and acknowledge the main components of the genre as Iraqi. The improvisations between the vocal parts were also accommodating to the Iraqi style. For example, the violinist’s bowing technique mimicked the edgy sound of the Iraqi jūza, which typically accompanies singers in this genre. Although Raḍwān’s pronunciation was also mellowed down, he kept the main characteristic of Iraq’s dialect intact, such as using “ga” to replace “qa.” For example, the word qalbı ̄, my heart, is pronounced as written in standard Arabic. In the Iraqi dialect, however, the word becomes galbı ̄. In addition, Raḍwān minimized the usage of tafkhı ̄m, which is a way to exaggerate the pronunciation of specific letters in the Iraqi dialect. An example of this is Raḍwān’s pronunciation of yābā (Dad or father) according to the local dialect, not yūbā according to the Iraqi dialect. According to Ayman Taysı ̄r, Bedouin influences on pronunciation also appear more prominently in the genre when performed in the Near East (Taysir 2011). Although the Baghdādi mawwa ̄l genre became popular in the Near East region and was well recorded as early as 1906, it seems that by the 1930s, it had taken a life of its own. While some of the genre’s main characteristics were maintained, various aspects of its performance were adapted to local taste, such as the traditional Iraqi vocal technique and pronunciation mentioned previously. Thus, one can observe the difference between Faraj Allah Bayḍa’s recordings and later ones by his nephew Iliyyā Bayḍa. In all scenarios, the genre was still labeled Baghdādı ̄, but other designations remained, such as sabʿāwı ̄ (7 lines) or sharqāwı ̄ (Eastern), especially in Syria (al-Sharı ̄f 2011). According to Muḥammad Dawūd, the most renowned Iraqi singer Muḥammad al-Qabanjı ̄ (1901–1988), visited Palestine in 1932 and performed twice in Jerusalem (Dawūd 2010). His recordings appeared regularly in the PBS programs, often adjacent to live performances by Yūsif Raḍwān (Palestine Post, February 12, 1939, 6). Such encounters and appearances assert the PBS’s role in the Near East as a significant force in promoting and embracing music-making based on the representation of regional idioms, in striking contrast to Radio Cairo. ʿAzmı ̄ al-Nashāshı ̄bı ̄ was explicit in his writings when referring to the emergence of al-Mashriq

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as one nation. The PBS musicians seem to have understood the intricacies of creating new music while engaging older traditions in the process.

Children’s Song Al-Batrūnı ̄ is mentioned in the PBS programs as the composer and arranger of all the children’s songs that the station broadcast as part of its daily “Children’s Corner” program. Luckily, NAWA obtained a recording of one of those songs, “Ḥubbı ̄nı ̄ Yā Sit al-Dār” (Love me, little lady, master of the house), Recording 6. The song is in the voice of a brother who is encouraging his younger sister to behave and be nice, and it points to various fascinating trends: 1. The musical arrangement resembles the texture and voice-leading found in earlier Anglican publications. 2. The poetic meter is based on the folk genre “ʿal yādı ̄”  (Fig. 9.8). The lyricist kept the refrain identical to “ʿal ya ̄dı ̄,” but added a fifth hemistich to the verses and followed the same prosody. 3. The subject matter is secular, not religious. 4. There are references to various attractions of modernity, such as chocolate, balloons, motorized toys, and the radiogram. 5. The lyrics are in colloquial Palestinian common in the coastal region and Jerusalem.

Fig. 9.8  “ʿal yādı ̄” melody. Transcription by Issa Boulos

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“Ḥubbı ̄nı ̄ Yā Sit al-Dār” translation: Love me, little lady, love me and take a dinar Love me, dad and mom, and our neighbors. Love, you snobbish lady, dad brought you a bird and I am bringing you a little train It moves and goes around, and you may hop on it for a short ride Nūnū, there is no one like you, and I looked everywhere! Without you, I cannot live I’ll get you a new toy as a tip, and it will keep you amused day and night Love me and go to sleep early, and when you fall asleep, I’ll love you more Like the moon, your face becomes And I’ll get you a small plane and a wagon for the wilderness Love me and be obedient; mom loves you a great deal I’ll get you chocolate right away You wish me well before your go to sleep, and you’ll grow fast and develop good habits Love me, and I’ll get you bubble gum, Radio Gramophone And I’ll order a balloon. I see a lot in the neighborhood, but please put this one in the middle of the house. “ʿal yādı ̄,” lyrics of the refrain: ‫اي ام العبيدية‬ ‫للحلو صدرية‬ ʿal yādı̄-l yādı̄-l yādı̄ yā jūkh la faṣṣilak

‫ع اليادي اليادي اليادي‬ ‫اي جوخ لفصكل‬ yammi laʿbaydiyya lal ḥilū ṣidriyya

The usage of the poetic meter of ʿal ya ̄dı ̄ is significant. It demonstrates how traditional materials were utilized in a modern context and were invisible and often subtle. While using such meters helps composers render the melody in a contemporary context, it also allows listeners to relate to the song without necessarily recognizing that it is set to a poetic meter that is familiar to them. They may also memorize them quickly, especially since they are worded similarly to one of the most common meters at that time. Such usage is unlikely coincidental and may illustrate how lyricists and composers attempted to reach out to the community using familiar

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tools while knowing that they were stretching the musical idiom toward the West. “ʿal yādı ̄” poetic meter:13 ‫فاعيالتن فاعيال‬ fāʿı̄lātun fāʿı̄lā

‫فاعيالتن فاعيال‬ fāʿı̄lātun fāʿı̄lā

“ʿal yādı ̄” melody in maqām bayātı ̄: The singer is likely Fahd Najjār, a singer born in 1932 who started appearing regularly in the PBS programs beginning in 1939 when he was seven years old (Palestine Post, June 16, 1939, 7). The song was featured in the BBC Arabic program Sundūq al-Nagham in 2018  (The Music Box). The host Nāhid Najjār introduced it and referred to it as a 1941 song from the NEBS. However, it is unlikely that the song was performed at the NEBS because the station was barely established by then. Additionally, Fahd Najjār appeared in the PBS programs, not in those of the NEBS. As shown in Fig.  9.9, the strings and piano accompany the singers softly, supporting the vocal line. The accompaniment sustains complete harmonies from beginning to end, with voice-leading that adheres to Western standards. It is noticeable that the cluster or chorale effect is likely due to the composition being conceived first on piano and later expanded to the strings, a feature that we encountered earlier in the Christian hymn. Despite their Western musical expertise and the religious nature of the repertoire to which some Palestinian Christian musicians were accustomed, “Ḥubbı ̄nı ̄ Yā Sit il-Dār” brings distant components together. It utilizes rural poetic meters and adjusts the lyrics to urban and secular subject matters. It also moves beyond traditional music and instead offers a Western rendition. The song was in colloquial dialect, catered to children, and was distinct from rural or Bedouin dialects and subject matters. It also addressed various characteristics of modern life, such as motorized toys, balloons, chocolate, and bubble gum. While this may seem like an act of diplomacy directed toward the West, demonstrating the ability of Palestinians to adapt and modernize, it did indeed have components directed toward the local population, intending to smoothen and normalize musical progress in the direction of the West. For example, the lyrics incorporate the familiar designation sit bdūr, a common nickname given to snobbish girls or women who always show up late and are difficult to please. This song’s lyrics are also exceptional because they are among the

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Fig. 9.9  Ḥ ubbı ̄nı ̄ Yā Sit al-Dār. Transcription by Issa Boulos

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Fig. 9.9­  (continued)

very few songs based on folk and rural poetic meters but set to nontraditional urban music. At the same time, the process of negotiation, reconciliation, and diplomacy between rural and urban dwellers is not visible to many, especially in this case. However, the song’s potential influence on listeners may shed light on the subtleness of such diplomacy and its subconscious impact.

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Poetry and Lyrics as Diplomacy Setting new music to lyrics written according to folk poetic meters was not entirely a new idea. Since folk lyrics typically rhyme and are rhythmically tight, composers and songwriters are tempted to use the structure but change the subject matter. Musically, they would also better articulate the melodic phrasing in the new song while relying on familiar points of reference. However, skilled musicians can easily hide folk meters using compositional devices, different maqāmāt, rhythms, forms, ensemble formations, pronunciation, dialect, and other performance practices. In the mid-­1930s, likely before “Ḥubbı ̄nı ̄Ya ̄ Sit il-Da ̄r,” Palestinian songwriter Nūḥ Ibrāhı ̄m (1913–1938) used folk poetic meters to write his lyrics in an urban local dialect of the coastal region and set them to new melodies. The available recordings and writings of Ibrāhı ̄m show that he favored the murabbaʿ poetic meter in most of his songs.14 The murabbaʿ is a quatrain type of zajal that typically appears in weddings and accompanying saḥja (malʿab) dances. It is also used to disseminate news, narratives, histories, and stories and engage the public through participation. In addition, it typically includes the phrase yā ḥalālı ̄ yā mālı ̄ (My Possessions, My Riches), which the attendees repeat in a call and response fashion (see Boulos 2020). In his songs, Ibrāhı ̄m borrowed specific musical elements from the murabbaʿ genre, such as call and response. In his performances, Ibrahı ̄m targeted primarily rural and uneducated audiences (McDonald 2013; ʿAwaḍ 2001). He moved from town to town and performed in settings other than the traditional ones, such as coffee shops, community centers, and centers of town (ʿAwaḍ 2001). He did not equate himself with the other poet-singers or zajjalı ̄n; instead, he distinguished himself as offering something different (ibid.). Furthermore, the subjects of his songs were also varied and inspired by or based on day-to-­ day issues.15 Various poets, lyricists, and zajjālı ̄n (singer-poets of colloquial poetry) contributed to the scene in the 1930s and 1940s. Among them were ‘Umar al-Zaʿnı ̄ (1895–1961) and Asʿad Saʿı ̄d (1922–2010), both of whom were active in the PBS and NEBS (Jalāl 2014). One of the tasks they took upon themselves was writing poetry in colloquial dialects (Al-Rayyis 2019). By the 1940s, various literary competitions were established at the PBS and NEBS. On November 1, 1944 (no. 8, 19), the Muntada published “A Call for Poets,” encouraging zajal (colloquial) and muwashshaḥ (standard Arabic) lyrics to be submitted as part of a

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competition under the PBS. In 1946, the NEBS announced several contests and exponentially expanded previous calls by the PBS. The Muntada issue of September 27, 1946 (no. 34, 19) published an announcement for three competitions: zajal, classical poetry, and translation to Arabic from English and French. In the mid-1940s, Asʿad Saʿı ̄d was commissioned by Ṣabrı ̄ al-Sharı ̄f at the NEBS and began his efforts to collect local peasant songs (Jalāl 2014). To achieve this, he commissioned Asʿad Saʿı ̄d to carry out the fieldwork and gather lyrics from Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq, intending to use this material as the foundation for modernizing the music of the region (Abū Fakhr 2015). In his book, al-zajal fı ̄ aṣlihi wa fas ̣lihi (The Origin and Variations of Zajal), Saʿı ̄d claims that, based on his extensive research and collection efforts, the traditions of Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine are all shared. He argues that their differences do not go beyond the differences one would find from one village to another within the same country (Saʿı ̄d 2009).

Some Conclusions Internal and external interactions transformed music-making in Palestine, especially in urban settings. Whether cultural and political acts of musical diplomacy were motivated by colonial discourses or by the influx of modernist or nationalist thoughts, music-making in Palestine during the Mandate period represents a fascinating intersection in the history and evolution of musical traditions in the whole region. Such trajectories and the rapid changes that influenced Palestine’s cultural, political, and demographic environment since the early nineteenth century played a significant role in creating an infrastructure upon which such trajectories could become sustainable. Since Christian Arabs were not immune to change, their interactions with missionaries, Arab nationalists, and the British gradually transformed their musical outlook and means of expression. Initially, only a few Palestinians were exposed to European liturgical music, but this progressively led to incorporating Western music genres and techniques into the fabric of Palestinian culture, especially during the Mandate period. Through the PBS, such practices took a nationalist and secular form and became an extension of the cultural agendas of missionary and colonial agencies. Therefore, the role of these communities was transformed from being communal to shaping the cultural and political preferences of other local communities through appeal and attraction.

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During this period, the dynamics at play in Palestine were different from other colonial situations. While it is hasty to assume that Palestinians fully understood such dynamics, they intuitively acted as intermediaries and negotiated various political positions, nationalism, and cultural identities. For example, despite the dominance of Egyptian music in the Near East, when the PBS, followed by the NEBS, started to promote local song types, the hybrid paradigm shifted in favor of Palestine. The leadership of Ṭ ūqan, Nuwayhiḍ, and al-Nashāshı ̄bı ̄ embraced regional collaborations in the multiple disciplines of broadcasting at the PBS, primarily through music. By the early 1940s, the PBS’s and NEBS’s efforts to promote local dialects increased, but this time was accompanied by nationalist sentiment in the entirety of the region. As a result, both stations further diversified their programming to suggest a common nationalist expectation for the area, apart from Egypt’s, but not in direct contradiction to it. The reasoning behind such caution is that during the 1940s, highlighting a single local nationalist agenda was not favorable in political and intellectual circles. It was widely discouraged by literary and political figures such as al-Khalil al-Sakakini, Khalil Totah, ʿArif al-ʿArif, ʿIsa al-ʿIsa (Palestine Newspaper), and ʿIsa al-Bandak, who advocated for Arab nationalism in al-Mashriq but criticized any attempt to foster local nationalism. The reasoning behind their positions lies in how they viewed their identity as part of Greater Syria and the striving to have one united voice against colonial, imperialist, and zionist ambitions. At the frontier of diversification and cultural and political diplomacies, Palestinian broadcasters attempted to balance their national discourse with regional ones. As a result, Palestine’s position emerged as a credible alternative to Egypt’s domination by the late 1940s, transmitting literature, educational content, diversified music, theater, and programming for and about women, children, and wellness. Palestinian musicians continued to diligently incorporate various characteristics of Egyptian music-making. However, they also used local dialects and melodic sensibilities and often added other elements that belong to different musical traditions from Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Europe. Whether their plans were in the collective best interest of Palestinians remains to be seen. One thing is sure: an examination of colonial discourses points to which communities were engaged the most in cultural and political dominance and mobilization. The various song and

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instrumental genres that emerged from such processes, including Bedouin, children, folk, shaʿbı ̄, short, urban, satire, and qaṣı ̄da (see Boulos 2020), represent a wide variety of practices and an assortment of productions. Such hybridity and  diversity reflect the region’s musical variety. Nevertheless, this emergence reflected the region’s cultural and political struggles and the race for creating nationalist discourses that a­ffected/ impacted the peoples of the whole area. Palestine’s proximity to the Hashemites of Jordan and the latter’s close and complicit ties with colonial institutions presented both an opportunity and a predicament to various Palestinian communities and organizations, depending on the stances of each side, including the tenures of both Nuwayhiḍ and al-Nashāshı ̄bı ̄, both Hashemite-loyalists. Although the Hashemites faced constant turmoil in Iraq, Transjordan, and Syria and experienced  uneasy paths to independence, Palestinians used the available platforms to advocate for  unification, modernity, diversity, tolerance, secularism, and cultural evolution despite the conflicts. However, after the loss of Palestine in 1948, the ability to impact regional musical cultures that characterized Palestinian music ended abruptly. The Nakba left hundreds of thousands of Palestinians without a home. A handful of them managed to start rebuilding elsewhere; Ṣabrı ̄ al-Sharı ̄f was one of them. He visited Lebanon in 1950 in search of the Rahbani Brothers, Ā ṣı ̄, and Manṣūr (Sabri 2012; Shūmān 2018), as he wanted to assess their ability to combine indigenous repertoires from al-Mashriq with European music (Burkhalter 2014; Sabri 2012). Regardless of the later nationalist manifestation of music-making in the newly emerging nation-states, such attempts led to the rebirth of music in a specifically Levantine context. The rejuvenation of music-making is felt today through the region’s various song and instrumental genres. From the works of the Raḥbānı ̄ Brothers through their partnership with Ṣabrı ̄ al-Sharı ̄f to the popularization of qaṣı ̄da, shaʿbı ̄, and folk styles in Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq, and Syria, Palestinian music-making during the first half of the twentieth century set the stage for the Mashriq to emerge as a significant cultural force.

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List of Maqāmāt

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Notes 1. A trend of Egyptian music-making that expanded the realm of Qur’anic chanting into various secular vocal song types (Racy 2004), which focuses on invoking emotions among listeners while adhering to certain maqām melodic contours. It generally refers to the ecstatic experience associated with the performance of maqām music. 2. The Muntada Magazine (al-Muntada) was a government-sponsored magazine devoted to cultural issues. One of its objectives was to promote modernization by highlighting the advantages of contemporary technologies. The journal began publication in 1943 at the Government Printing Office in cooperation with the Palestine Broadcast Authority and ceased publication in 1947. 3. For more information about the structure of PBS see Stanton Andrea L. “This Is Jerusalem Calling”: State Radio in Mandate Palestine. University of Texas Press 2021. 4. During Ṭ ūqān’s tenure at the PBS he did not write in its publications. The PBS programs, however, point to his influence. 5. Known officially in English as the Arab Legion, which was financed by Britain and commanded by British officers For further reading see Shlaim (2009). 6. For further reading see Smith (1847). 7. This interval occurs in maqām music across a wide variety of contexts. The closest interval to it from a Western perspective is the augmented 2nd. However, such representations from the perspective of intonation is not accurate. For example, in practice, in maqām ḥijāz on D, the interval appears between the 2nd and 3rd tones, Eb and F#, the Eb is higher and the F# is lower than in an equal-tempered augmented second interval; see maqām ḥijāz in the List of Maqāmāt. 8. For further listening, see Sol K Bright’s Hollywaiians—La Rosita, (1934). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5_SfcV3E8E. 9. See the works of Italian mandolin virtuoso, composer, and conductor Silvio Ranieri (1882–1956) and his mandolin orchestra. 10. Also appears as Yousef Radwan. 11. Also called Sabʿāwı ̄ (seven-line mawwāl), sharqāwı ̄, nuʿmānı ̄, and al-zuhairı ̄. 12. Raḍwān’s date of birth and death are not currently available. 13. The meter of the rhythmical poetry is known in Arabic as baḥr (pl. buḥur̄ ). The measuring unit of buḥur̄ is known as tafʿı ̄la (pl. tafʿı ̄lāt), and every baḥr contains a certain number of tafʿı ̄lāt which the poet has to observe in every line of the poem. Each line consists of two identical hemistiches, and each hemistich consists of a number of tafʿı ̄lāt that form a feet.

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14. The term is used to describe two things, the poetic meter or baḥr of the murabbaʿ and the murabbaʿ song type. 15. It’s not a coincidence that most of Fayrūz’s famous songs were set according to folk poetic meters. For example, “Anā Khawfı ̄ Min ʿAtm il-­Layl,” which was written by the Raḥbānı ̄ Brothers and composed by Filmūn Wahbı ̄, became one of the singer’s most iconic signatures; the song follows “ʿal yādi” meter. Such practice was advocated for by Ṣabrı ̄ al-Sharı ̄f through his partnership with the Raḥbānı ̄ Brothers and Fayrūz beginning in the early1950s.

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Muntada Magazine A Call for Poets, Lyricists, and Translators NEBS. September 27, 1946, no. 34, 19. Al-Nashāshı ̄bı ̄, ʿAzmı ̄. “Al-Qism al-ʿArabı ̄.” June 6, 1945, no. 3, 26. ———. “Huna al-Quds.” November 15, 1946, no. 41, 9. Arab Section Orchestra. September 27, 1946, no. 34. 17. Ila al-Shuʿarā’. November 1, 1944, no. 8, p. 19. Iṣtị fān, Iṣt ̣ifān. “Ṣaḥja.” January 1944, no. 10, 16.

Dhakhıra ̄ Magazine Maʿ al-Ustadh Batrūnı ̄. November 4, 1946, 15.

Palestine Post Newspaper Arab Legion Aires on the PBS. February 13, 1938, 4. Highlights of Next Week on the PBS, Friday to Friday. June 16, 1939, 7. Palestine Broadcasting Begun. March 31, 1936, 8.

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PBS Broadcasts from Below Sea Level. Arab Band Legion at Jericho. March 7, 1940, 2. PBS programs. February 12, 1939, 6.

Interviews Jalāl, Nādir. Personal interview with Ilyas Saḥāb. April 2014. ———. Phone interview. September 2021.

Multimedia Sources

Online Audio Sol K Bright’s Hollywaiians  – La Rosita. 1934. Retrieved November 11, 2021, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5_SfcV3E8E.

PART IV

Affective and Sensorial Diplomacy in Transnational Spaces

CHAPTER 10

Music as Cultural Diplomacy: Analyzing the Role of Musical Flows from the Arab Levant to New Cultural Poles in the Arab Gulf in the Twenty-First Century Maria M. Rijo Lopes da Cunha

Introduction This chapter examines the flows of musics, musicians, aesthetics, and ideologies between the Arab Levant and the Gulf. It questions the centrality of such flows in reconfiguring Arab regional dynamics with new centers for cultural production in the Arab Gulf region, facilitated by a collective investment—‘cultural capital’—aided by online digital media tools. This strategy, I argue, connects cultural diplomacy with rebranding strategies leveraging conservative Arab Gulf societies into twenty-first century competitive international cultural markets. Furthermore, this argument distinguishes the mobilization of two types of soft power initiatives in cultural diplomacy contexts. The first falls under

M. M. Rijo Lopes da Cunha (*) Department of Arts and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 M. M. Rijo Lopes da Cunha et al. (eds.), Music and Cultural Diplomacy in the Middle East, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36279-8_10

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conventional understandings of cultural diplomacy focused on state-­ funded institutions that operate through a top-down approach to culture; the second focuses on organic bottom-up individual-communal artistic initiatives that can operate within or outside nation-state institutional frameworks whose soft power potential remains underexplored since they have, hitherto, escaped conventional definitions of cultural diplomacy. While acknowledging the need for both types of approaches to cultural diplomacy, this chapter argues that artist-led initiatives establish a more efficient long-term influence while considering the pivotal role of digital media, networked communities and economic sustainability deployed in the latter type of cultural diplomacy initiative. The analytical framework proposed here relies on a combination of methodologies from ethnomusicology intersecting literature in cultural diplomacy (Nye 1990; Fosler-Lussier 2012, 2015) with ethnomusicological literature on the intersections among music, capitalism, cultural economies, and digital cultures (Mazierska and Rigg 2018; Whiteley and Rambarran 2016). This methodological combination is applied to fieldwork data gathered at the Sheikh Jaber al-Ahmad Cultural Centre (JACC) in Kuwait City (Nov.–Dec–2019 and Feb.–March 2020) designed to better highlight the full potential for soft power of the two case studies provided here. The first case study examines the transnational, institutional-based potential for cultural diplomacy enmeshed in the actions of the revival movement of music from the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century known as the Tajdı ̄d min-al-Dakhil (or renewal from within) among Egypt, Lebanon and Kuwait presented in a performance dedicated to the Arab Levantine violinist Sami Shawa at the Sheikh al-Jaber al-Ahmad Centre (JACC) in Kuwait in December 2019. The second probes the soft power potential of artist-led transregional performance projects in addressing themes of conflict, migration, exile, and sociopolitical justice in the contemporary Arab world such as the theater play iMedea, a contemporary Arabic adaptation of the Greek myth of Medea created by Kuwaiti director and playwright Suleyman al-Bassam with musical soundtrack by the Lebanese electroacoustic duo Two or the Dragon. The first case exemplifies a top-down style cultural diplomacy, while the second case demonstrates the potential of artist-led cultural diplomacy initiatives. This chapter will be divided into three sections. In the first section, I delineate cultural diplomacy while contextualizing it within the twenty-­ first century geopolitical transformations that affect the global order at

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large and the Middle East in particular. In the second section, I examine the role played by the Kuwaiti Sheikh al-Jaber al-Ahmed Centre (JACC), which is an emerging cultural institution of the Arab Gulf, while assessing its potential for cultural diplomacy at a transnational level, particularly within the wider Arab region. In the third section, I examine artist-led cultural initiatives against the notion of economic sustainability within the region. In the three sections of this essay, I emphasize how the mix of transregional and cosmopolitan cultures that are deployed, capitalized, and branded in artistic practices give way to aesthetic, emotive and artistic polyvocal communities that manage to circumvent the ‘hard borders’ that delimitate artistic practices in top-down traditional cultural policy and diplomacy frameworks.

Contextualizing Cultural Diplomacy and Geopolitical Shifts in the Twenty-First Century The twenty-first century is, according to current news reports, ushering the end of a long period of peace dominated by the hegemonic power of the USA. As the Russian invasion of Ukraine continues, news commentators question the efficacy of mainstream diplomacy in handling highly sensitive geopolitical strife. Simultaneously, other mainstream news outlets argue that what we are witnessing is the emergence of the ‘post-Western world’ and the ending of the unipolar world-order of the previous century. However, these shifts were anticipated in the 1990s by Harvard political scientist Joseph Nye. Nye argued that the U.S. would face new challenges in the twenty-first century. In this century, Nye argued, the power of all large nations would diminish due to the “rapid growth of private actors operating across international borders, whether large corporations or political groups” (Nye 1990: 155–156), causing a shift in the balance of power that becomes “interdependent in economics, in communications, in human aspirations” (Ibid.). The root cause of such power fragmentation emerged in the 1990s and is still gaining traction today. Namely, through greater economic interdependence, an increased role for transnational actors, the rise of nationalism in ‘weak states’, the spread of technology, and changing political issues (Nye 1990: 160). These shifts anticipated by Nye have now consolidated and account for many of the geopolitical changes occurring worldwide. In the Arab world,

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these trends have impacted the shifts in traditional centers of cultural dominance and economic and political power from the Arab Levant to the Arab Gulf region. These centers of power moved from being ‘capital-rich’ to being ‘information-rich’ (Nye 1990: 164); from the national-state driven to being driven by private transnational actors (i.e., corporations); from geographically bounded to globally flowing through open channels of online communication; and from being material-based, favoring countries and geographies with greater material resources and infrastructures, to being immaterial-based, favoring the ideological, affective communities that can be harnessed through the immaterial infrastructures ranging from the economic, the digital, the aesthetic to the affective. It is important to note that such geopolitical power shifts do not annul each other but rather can often work in complementarity, as the two case studies in this chapter illustrate. Danielle Fosler-Lussier’s seminal study, Music in America’s Cold War Diplomacy (2015), was the first to highlight the role of music within wider U.S. State Department cultural exchange programs. These were designed as “a one-way instrument by which the United States could exert influence on other countries” (Fosler-Lussier 2015), paving the way for “pouring American values into the minds of the foreign public” (Fosler-Lussier 2012: 53). However, as Fosler-Lussier points out, during the twentieth century, there were two prevailing models of cultural diplomacy. Namely, one that suggested reciprocity through the image of flow and implied mutuality in the exchange of cultural goods and another one that suggested dominance using cultural programs to establish neo-imperial influence and control over other countries (Ibid.). However, the increase in the interconnectivity and interdependence of the world has led to an erasure of the power of the nation-state, which, in turn, has changed both the concept and the way in which cultural diplomacy operates. In this chapter, I emphasize the essential role of polyvocality as the quintessential marker of twenty-first century cosmopolitan cultural diplomacy. In the case studies presented below, I illustrate two ways whereby musicians engage with cultural initiatives from public institutions. I argue that such engagement enables them to ensure their artistic economic sustainability (i.e., funding) while also pursuing personally meaningful projects requiring minor artistic compromise. Likewise, these case studies illustrate how cultural diplomacy emerges through the engagement of a plurality of voices that can, without controlling, participate in the diversification of the channels for international relations and diplomatic action.

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Last, it is important to note that this diversification of channels does not equate to democratization or equality; rather, it means increased resources and infrastructures of access. As Ang et al. aptly point out, the examination of these processes reveals how “‘the national interest’ emerges not as a top-down target imposed by government decree, but as a generative mechanism for overcoming narrow or exclusionary notions of the nation, in favor of more relational and open understandings” (Ibid.). In sum, I argue that it is by focusing on the processes of formation of cultural relations, whether within or outside an institutional framework, that cultural diplomacy is rendered significant to the reconfiguration of sociopolitical and cultural geographies of the twenty-first century.

Re-Configuring Tradition in the Tajdıd̄ Min al-Dakhil Movement (2009–2018) as a Point of Departure for Cultural Diplomacy Between 2012 and 2018, I worked with a group of musicians, scholars, and music amateurs at the time based in or visiting Lebanon regularly. I came to refer to this group as the Tajdı ̄d min al-Dakhil, or ‘Renewal from Within’ movement (henceforth, Tajdı ̄d). Tajdı ̄d’s work develops along two defining principles: first, to revive the music repertoires, performance practices and aesthetics of Nahḍa music; and second to create new music inspired by these same repertoires, practices, and aesthetics. It is the interplay between these two factors that defines the Tajdı ̄d a distinctive group within the contemporary Lebanese Arab traditional music scene (Rijo Lopes da Cunha 2017, 2022a). The Tajdı ̄d is a revival movement of music from the Nahḍa, defined by this group roughly as the timespan 1885–1932. It gained traction in Lebanon after 2009, which can be traced to three main actions. First was the pioneering work of musician and musicologist Nidaa Abou Mrad, who pioneered the revival of Nahḍa music in the 1980s and founded the Music Institute at the Antonine University. Second was the sponsorship of Kamal Kassar, the patron and founder of the AMAR Foundation. Third was the work of Mustafa Said, who has been the artistic director of the AMAR Foundation as well as a solo artist, composer, and founder of the Aṣil Ensemble for Contemporary Arabic Music, hereafter “Aṣil” (Rijo Lopes da Cunha 2022a). Since 2009, Said continued to distinguish himself as the most prominent figure of the Tajdı ̄d, playing fundamental roles in all

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three areas of action covered by the Tajdı ̄d: archival and musicological research; pedagogical change; and music performance and innovation. By 2013, the AMAR Foundation had gathered approximately seven thousand recordings (reels and 78 rpm) bought from private collectors, thus creating the most extensive collection of Middle Eastern music from around the turn of the twentieth century. It is undeniable that the coordinated actions for dissemination and promotion of music of the Nahḍa, set forth by the individuals above and the team at the helm of AMAR, were critical to drawing attention to this music. Knowledge about the multiple aspects of Nahḍa musical life, such as its musicians, music technique, aesthetics, and performance practice, was facilitated through the release of CDs accompanied by explanatory booklets and the production of online podcasts. Among the international team of musicians and scholars working with the AMAR foundation is Ahmad al-Salhi, the Music Director at the Sheikh al-Jabber al-Ahmad Cultural Centre (JACC) in Kuwait. Al-Salhi’s music performance and scholarly work has had two key focal points: first, the conceptual and performative development of the history and concept of ṣaut in Kuwait and Bahrain (al-Salhi 2018), and second, as a member of the Tajdı ̄d movement (Rijo Lopes da Cunha 2022a). Al-Salhi has played a crucial role in placing the JACC on the map for performances of both Nahḍa music and contemporary but Nahḍa-inspired music in the Arab gulf region, demonstrating how the geopolitical and economic transformations occurring since the mid-twentieth century have been not only political and economic but also cultural.

The Asị l Ensemble for Contemporary Arab Music at JACC, Kuwait In January 2017, Mustafa Said’s Aṣil Ensemble (for Contemporary Arab Music), which I had joined in 2013 as a cellist during my doctoral research, performed at the JACC at the invitation of Ahmad al-Salhi. The Aṣil is perhaps one of the most visible expressions of the Tajdı ̄d’s ideological stance regarding ‘internal renewal’ in contemporary Arabic music. The ensemble’s repertoire has consisted, thus far, of two main sets: one set comprising music from the Nahḍa era and a second comprising original compositions by its founder, Mustafa Said.

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The ensemble’s instrumental formation builds on the upper and lower register and timbre of the Arabic takht, which is traditionally constituted by ‘ūd (Arabic lute), qanūn (Arabic plucked zither), kamancheh (violin) and riqq (small frame drum). However, to this Said extended its upper and lower registers and added instruments from other musical traditions in the wider Middle Eastern region, such as the buzuq (Arabic long-neck fretted lute), the tambur (long-neck fretted string Turkish-Ottoman instrument), or the santur (Iraqi hammered trapezoid zither) that effectively expanded the traditional takht while keeping it within its own Arab and Middle Eastern cultural frame of reference. I argue that this represents a shift in notions of modernization of Arabic music. It moves away from the mid-twentieth century borrowing from western music systems and toward re-establishing a new relationship with music systems of the wider Arab region (specifically from Iraq and the Arab Gulf) and neighboring Middle Eastern musical cultures (particularly Turkish and Iranian). Musical examples that illustrate this shift can be heard in Mustafa Said’s piece al- Burda, the one selected to be performed at JACC in January 2017 and recorded on the eponymous CD (2014) available online (on Spotify, YouTube, etc.). Aṣil performed last with this instrumental and individual formation in 2018. Since then, its musicians have developed their work separately, some staying faithful to the tenets of the Tajdı ̄d and others not, depending on the musician’s professional projects and personal preferences. However, they have almost all returned to perform at Kuwait’s JACC on different occasions. For example, on the 2nd of December 2019, Dr. Ahmad al-­ Salhi alongside Mustafa Said, Ghassan Sahhab (qanūn) and Ali Hout (ūd, qanun, and riq players of the Aṣil Ensemble) performed at JACC a concert in homage of eminent Nahḍa violinist, Sami al-Shawa (1889–1965). Within three months, in late February and early March 2020, Ali Hout (the same percussionist) returned to JACC accompanied by a former Aṣil Ensemble musician, the buzuq player Abed Kobeissy, this time on an unrelated musical project known as the Two or the Dragon. With this formation, they worked on creating the live soundtrack for the theater play iMedea directed by Kuwaiti author, playwright and director, Suleyman al-Bassam. These two cases illustrate the complexities of current cultural diplomacy in the Arab region. Namely, it questions whether the circulation of musicians, cultural capital, and economic capital is a prerequisite for cultural diplomacy or, rather, is it a case of intercultural relations alone and,

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what is the difference between the intercultural relations and artist-led cultural diplomacy. The initiatives of the AMAR foundation created a transnational community of musicians, musicologists, aficionados, and patrons whose work is either centered or departs from the revival of Nahḍa music. The music of the Nahda is a type of cultural capital that is valued, shared, and promoted through this community’s cultural initiatives within and outside the Arab region. Cultural relation initiatives such as these only become cultural diplomacy when they are co-opted by governmental institutions that use them to advance governmental agendas of interest. The Tajdı ̄d is also an aesthetic community; in this sense, the value of cultural and public diplomacies stems from the emergence of collective identities, afforded through artistic practices, or in our case, through ‘musicking’ (Small 2010). According to Villanueva Rivas (2007), “identities and interests of actors [are] ‘socially construed’ but also […] they share the stage with a whole host of other ideational factors emanating from people as cultural beings. A core feature of cultural and public diplomacies may be precisely the construction of collective identities of peace, understanding and diversity at the international level” (Villanueva Rivas 2007 in Clarke 2016: 166). These can be complementary to top-down, nation-state-based institutional approaches to cultural diplomacy or operate transnationally through aesthetic collectivities and networked communities mobilizing online digital media to achieve greater cohesion within it, to reach further audiences and to ensure the economic sustainability of the group.

Tajdıd̄ ’ Dissent: The Duo Two or the Dragon at JACC, Kuwait During my fieldwork research in Kuwait, in February and March 2020, I attended the rehearsals of iMedea, a rewriting of the ancient Greek tragedy written by Euripedes (431  BC) by the Kuwaiti director and playwright Suleiman al-Bassam. Al-Bassam adapts the myth of Jason and Medea to a contemporary Arab world while remaining faithful to the original Greek storyline of Medea and Jason’s love, vengeance, and violence underpinned by a subtext of gender, identity, and displacement politics explored from a feminist perspective in the late twentieth century. In the Euripides play, Medea is a princess of the uncivilized kingdom of Colchis, who is exiled from the realm of Corinth when she takes revenge against her husband,

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Jason, who abandoned her to marry the daughter of Creon, king of Corinth. Al-Bassam’s adaptation, although faithful to the original storyline, foregrounds two central issues: displacement and digital and social media politics. This is emphasized by naming the play iMedea (renamed during the summer iMedea: for the Age of Non-Facts), evoking the main characters’ deep involvement with smartphone-based social media apps that allow, in play as in real life, the development of certain types of performative populist politics at a global level. In the first scene of the play, the main character, Medea, is being interviewed by a TV host. According to the script, the character of Medea uses social media to raise awareness of a migrant crisis in Corinth to fight back against the manipulations of her ‘Big Pharma’ tycoon ex-husband, Jason, and Creon the king of Corinth, a populist politician who uses press conferences to rally against migration. The drafting of such characters openly criticizes current Euro-American global realpolitik, particularly concerning issues of digital media, big data, and the migration crisis to which a critique of neoliberal promotion of systematic social-economic inequalities is underpinned (Fig. 10.1). In conversation with Al-Bassam, he told me that “Medea is a refugee, and her story is about migration” (personal communication, 10th March, 2020). Although in the script it is clear that Medea is first a migrant from Colchis in Corinth, who is then exiled in Athens, the rehearsals and further presentations of the play added to the state of migrant ‘in-­betweenness’ through the constant interplay of the off-line and online presence of the characters, who are presented as being both on-stage and on-line. This rendering serves to highlight “the power of digital platforms in altering political space to create a vividly imagined allegory for conflict in the twenty-first century” (iMedea website). The music and sound for the play created live by ‘The Dragon’ music duo reinforces the liminality of the ‘time-space’ of the play, which is strengthened by the musicians’ stage-setting. They sit on-stage separated from the actors by a semitransparent screen where images are projected, still allowing for them, or most frequently their shadows, to be visible. The audio material they produce is created through improvisation for the performance and, as an audio text, is in constant fluid dialog with the development with current texts of the play: the written, the performed and the mediated (Reinsch and Westrup 2020). Musicians do not just provide the soundtrack; they are active participants alongside the director and the

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Fig. 10.1  Photo from Rehearsal of iMedea on 11 March 2020. (Photo credit, my own)

actors in the development, direction, and general co-creation of the theater play. Kobeissy and Hout’s musical training is firmly rooted in the Nahḍa repertoire as defined and favored by the Tajdı ̄d movement, and their musical work between 2009 and 2014 forms an important part of this movement through their collaboration with the Aṣil Ensemble. However, after 2016, the collaboration between Sharjah Arts Foundation (UAE) and the Arabic Music and Archiving and Research, or AMAR Foundation (Lebanon), ended. The lack of funding led to the departure of Mustafa Said, leader of the Aṣil Ensemble and spearhead of the Tajdı ̄d, from Beirut for Cairo. Although Kobeissy and Hout kept their collaboration with the Aṣil Ensemble until 2018, the duo two or the Dragon became their main musical project. It was the duo that allowed Kobeissy and Hout sources of regular and steady income through music performance alone. Most of the duo’s work

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has focused on the creation of live soundtracks for the Beirut-based Zoukak theater company and for the works of dancer Ali Chahrour. These two collaborations allowed them to tour internationally for extended periods, raising their national and international visibility while allowing them to distance from the more traditionally oriented and less profitable Aṣil Ensemble and the Tajdı ̄d project. Furthermore, the description of the group on their Facebook page states, “their work questions Arabic music’s ability to express urban and industrial soundscapes without causing a rupture with its lyrical and poetic roots,” an anxiety that had already been expressed by Kobeissy in 2013. In a personal communication, Kobeissy stated: Arabic traditional or traditional pop music is one of the most dead [sic] (archeological) musics in our lifetime because it has nothing to do with the auditive and visual aesthetics of our cities, and our everyday life, violence is the most obvious absentee from it; violence being the most present aspect in our cities and daily life. (Abed Kobeissy, personal e-mail communication, 20 March, 2013)

Since then, Kobeissy started to experiment with what I have called elsewhere ‘noising the tradition’ to create an “audible waveband” (Attali in Sterne) that attempts the sonic and aesthetic reconciliation between the external and internal dimensions of conflict. Through a set of devices—such as the distortion of traditional forms, the changing of playing techniques in traditional instruments, adding of effects allied to live free-improvisation—Kobeissy started on a path toward the disruption of the “monumentality” and “sacredness” (Tragaki 2015: 111) of Arabic music narratives to a point of rupture. These devices allowed him to shift from a region-specific, half-closeted musical product to one that is part of cosmopolitan circles in which improvisation and noise are “a mode of pure sonic experience [that] challenges the representations of musical history” (Novak 2013: 6). Crucially, as Two or the Dragon, Kobeissy and Hout, became connected to a global artistic network that provides sources of income that allow them to survive financially in Lebanon, a country where since 2019, they have been unable to access their own money as banks cut cash withdrawals, ceased dispensing foreign currency, and dollars, a currency used as much as the Lebanese Pound, become scarce even in the black market (Reuters).

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In the face of such a crisis, to which is added the global pandemic, musicians, and artists in Lebanon, like elsewhere in the world, are forced to look for creative ways to produce, showcase, and earn an income from their work since live performances are no longer a source of income. However, as another musician stated in a recent online interview, “making soundtrack music for film, TV commercials or other advertisement is one of the several sources of income that keeps Lebanese musicians minimally solvent during such crisis. This has become particularly important since the explosion of 2750 tons of ammonium nitrate in the Port of Beirut on the 4th of August 2020 that devastated the city. Three years into an economic crisis, the percentage of the population under the world poverty line is estimated by the World Bank to have increased by 9.1 percentage points, with over 53% of the population being “multidimensionally poor”, with the largest deprivation factors being access to health (30.2%), employment (25.8%) and education (25.3%) (World Bank Report, May 2022). 17

Economic Underpinnings of Cultural Diplomacy at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century On the 11th of March I sat, as before, in the auditorium of JACC attending rehearsal of iMedea with brilliant moments of live improvised music by the duo Two or the Dragon. Meanwhile, another musician friend sent me a text message saying that the Kuwaiti Minister of Health had just announced a national state of emergency in the combat of the pandemic, which would lead to the closure of the airport within the next two days. In the first rehearsal break, I rushed to tell Kobeissy and Hout the news on the development of the pandemic in Kuwait. After confirming the veracity of the news, they held a meeting and, lasting a few minutes in what appeared to be moments, the entire crew was disbanded. Each member was flying out of Kuwait to various destinations: the musicians to Beirut, some actors to London, others to France. Within a matter of moments, musicians, actors, and the entire crew were living the same paradigm they had just been rehearsing on stage: a state of liminality in the face of crisis. Crisis occurs, which, as Bryant and Knight state, “when anticipation, and therefore the alleviation of anxiety, are not possible, and when as a result the present becomes present to us in its present-ness” (2019: 43). Glued to their smartphones and other ‘i-devices’ in a convergence of offline and online worlds but also of several times- spaces inhabited by the

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artist at that moment. That convergent moment emphasizes that, for artists coming from Lebanon—but also those from the wider Arab Levant, North Africa, and Europe—to work in the Gulf in transnational collaborations, opportunities are both lucrative and transient. To many artists, they provide not only more profitable work but also a sustenance lifeline with which to face crisis situations at home, as is the case with Lebanese musicians. As Christian Licoppe (2004) states, in his study about mobile phone communication, social media allows for the reinforcement of personal relationships, as they allow individuals to ‘feel connected to the other person through a continuous flow of small communicative acts’ (Licoppe 2004: 154). Artistic circulation within the Middle East, accompanied by these acts of online communication, constitutes an example of the polyvocal nature of twenty-first century cultural diplomacy in which a variety of agentive powers, from state-led to artist-led, act concomitantly. The musical activities described in this chapter are embedded in and contribute to the development of this mediated affective community while at times serving as a replacement for the place-bound social context. Musicians, such as the ‘The Dragon,’ use online digital platforms as fundamental tools for community building and sociopolitical participation where their agentive power is displayed. These platforms played a fundamental role in the start of the revolution on 17th October 2019, during Covid, after the explosion on 4th August 2020, and until now, in the sharing of cultural and personal memories and transcontinental family bonding through mobile phone apps such as Instagram, Twitter or WhatsApp, when the lack of electricity and general infrastructure is bringing the country near complete collapse. As Bryant and Knight state, a crisis occurs “when anticipation, and therefore the alleviation of anxiety, are not possible, and when as a result the present becomes present to us in its present-ness” (2019: 43). I have argued elsewhere that digital media communication platforms serve as carriers of a central affective dimension that intertwines the material, political, social, and sonic worlds that enable a new form of politics of solidarity to emerge from the interplay between online-offline worlds (see Rijo Lopes da Cunha 2022b). Digital media platforms, in this specific context but also more broadly, by one, enabling the creation of communal virtual spaces in which people live spanning a vast geographical area are afforded ‘copresence; two, being central for the sharing of online-offline narratives of identity and belonging; and three, enabling the sharing personal and collective memories affectively infused by intimate visual and

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emotional imaginaries that, in turn, allow for the emergence of transnational solidarity movements. (Rijo Lopes da Cunha 2022b). It is generally acknowledged that digital and social media aided in the political momentum of insurgency such as the Arab Spring (2011) but also the Occupy Wall Street (2011) and Los Indignados (2011–2015) movements. However, as media scholar Zizi Papacharisi poignantly recognizes, the internet pluralizes but does not inherently democratize the social, cultural, political, or economic spheres (Papacharissi 2014: 8). I argue that such pluralization of online communities, or what Papacharisi calls ‘networked communities’, is underpinned by a crucial consolidating factor: affect. ‘Structures of affect’ shared online through social media have the power to impact more meaningfully and long-term, both at individual and community levels, to which is added the capability of transcending geographical boundaries: as has been in the case of Lebanon in the last year, online digital communication has harnessed a singular momentum of international ‘social cohesion and solidarity.’ Aiding the long-term power-to-influence of transnational, aesthetic, artistic communities is what Okano-Heijmans calls ‘economic diplomacy’. Economic diplomacy refers to the “pragmatic linking between politics and economics in foreign policy” (Okano-Heijmans 2013: 167). On the one hand, it notes the declining role of the state “in some fields, but not in others” (Ibid.) in the era of free markets, it also emphasizes the “shifting to a postmodern world in which sovereignty is increasingly handed over by the national state to other levels of government—both at a higher and lower level—and power is gradually more in the hands of nonstate actors (Okano-Heijmans 2013: 168). Economic diplomacy is relevant for this essay since it demonstrates how diplomacy evolves to respond to shifting international politics, economics, and security environments while also allowing for a “growing number of actors” (Okano-Heijmans 2013: 169), non-state organizations, communities and even individuals to become agents for cultural diplomacy. Hence, musicians’ strategies for coping with precarity in cultural industries, described in the literature either as ‘resistance’ and/or ‘resilience’, can determine musicians’ artistic decisions and, in turn, influence the flows of cultural capital. The main distinction between musicians’ ‘resistance’ and ‘resilience’, Lake states, is ‘the capacity to weather a disturbance without loss is defined as resistance, whereas resilience is the capacity to recover from a disturbance after incurring losses, which may be considerable’.

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Ethnomusicologist Ioannis Tsioulakis cautions against deployment of the notion of resilience in association with musical work since musicians’ resilience, or ‘capacity to recover’ from acute crisis situations, can fill the infrastructural gap in neoliberal societies for providing “stable and supportive working conditions” (Tsioulakis 2020: 142) for artists. This logic, he argues, would have musicians’ own ‘entrepreneurial’ motivations perpetuate precarious working conditions, which can solely be overcome by engaging in more work under similar conditions, thereby perpetuating the cycle of precarity. This is what Laurent Berlant highlighted as “resilience and repair” work not being able to mitigate the problem but that can indeed reproduce it. Ethnomusicologist O’Brien Bernini (2016), on the other hand, argues that resilience strategies help musicians utilize new resources and technologies to access alternative capital since they can anticipate and adapt their artistic and economic sustainability accordingly. (Tsioulakis 2020: 142). In some cases, however, this ‘adaptability’ pushes them to commodify creative responses, both in terms of the product and the inherent subjective processes underpinning the navigation of such critical circumstances. The case studies presented in this chapter on the musical performances by the Aṣil Ensemble and the Two or The Dragon at the JACC in Kuwait, illustrate the practice of ‘of ‘reliance’ and ‘adaptability’ of musicians in both groups navigating critical conditions for cultural production between the Arab Levan and the Gulf. As Ove Eliassen has pointed out, the neoliberal paradigm of governance, with its econometric protocols, sieves into the art and cultural world in a way that “the nature of the social bond is renegotiated” (Eliassen et al. 2018: 9). Similarly, deep global infrastructural social rearrangements such as globalization, digitization and financialization usher in “new success criteria such as ‘user preferences’, ‘marketability’, and ‘investment returns’ … supplementing and at times even supplanting the values of the previous regime of governance” (Eliassen et al. 2018: 8), which, in turn, transform the ways in which art is produced, distributed, and consumed, as the case above demonstrated. These deep global infrastructural social rearrangements with their subsequent economic infrastructures propel the formation of new geopolitical configurations for the twenty-first century globally but have a specific impact in the Global South, to which most Middle Eastern countries belong. As Aouragh and Chakravartty point out, in their study on the infrastructures of empire, these new emerging global infrastructures

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“present no ideological alternative to neoliberalism” but, perhaps more interestingly, pose serious challenges to the, hitherto, monopolar sociopolitical, economic, and cultural global order by their contribution to a multipolar world. As Biwas (2005) states, “it should come as no surprise that postcolonial countries with greater economic leverage having been humiliated for decades, are pushing back in the attempt to gain a greater foothold in setting of the terms of global ‘financial architecture’ outside of the Bretton Woods institutions of the World Bank and IMF (Biswas, 2015)” (in Aouragh and Chakravartty 2015: 567).

Conclusion Music as cultural diplomacy in the twenty-first century Middle East highlights the geopolitical shifts occurring in the region since the mid-to-late twentieth century. In both case studies illustrated above, Aṣil Ensemble and the Two of the Dragon account for the investment of GCC countries (in this case, Kuwait) in culture as a means to leverage their economic, cultural, and social development while raising their international power at global international and regional levels. This is aided by what Manuel Castells named the ‘networked society’, which, while making the world more connected, also implies competing agendas. The cultural and economic diplomacy of Kuwait and other GCC countries has not undone the ‘infrastructures of empire ‘but rather reconceptualized and rematerialized them for global social development. In the case of the Tajdı ̄d musicians performing in Kuwait, for both the ‘aligned’ Aṣil Ensemble and the dissident ‘nonaligned’ Two or the Dragon, the competing agenda of cosmopolitan cultural diplomacy is apparent. On the one hand, we have the artists’ decolonial agendas mixed with the very pragmatic and basic need for employment and economic solvency. Mustafa Said’s Aṣil Ensemble resonates with decolonial agendas insofar, as Walter Mignolo stated, it attempts to unlink music from major Western macro narratives by seeking a ‘third way’ (Mignolo 2013: 131) involving the revival of Nahḍa music. Two or The Dragon’s project can also be understood from a decolonial perspective. The duo’s ‘epistemic disobedience’ (Mignolo 2013) targets both Western and Arab traditional music epistemes, opting instead to adopt a global cosmopolitan perspective. On the other hand, the JACC in Kuwait mobilizes global artists to advance its own agenda of urban, cultural, and economic development while asserting itself as a new center in Middle Eastern cultural life.

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In this chapter, I have examined the flows of musics, musicians, aesthetics, and ideologies between the Arab Gulf (Kuwait) and the Arab Levant (Lebanon), arguing for their centrality in the geopolitical reconfiguration of the Arab region. I maintain that the investment in culture by Arab Gulf countries is a key cultural diplomacy tool deployed for leveraging their international image in competitive global culture markets. First, I have examined the role of the Kuwaiti Sheikh al-Jaber al-Ahmed Centre (JACC) as an emerging cultural institution in the Arab Gulf, examining its potential for cultural diplomacy at a transnational level within the Arab world. Second, I assessed the soft power potential of the theatre play iMedea, by Kuwait playwright and director Suleiman al-Bassam with live soundtrack by the Lebanese electroacoustic duo Two or The Dragon. I have argued for the necessity of a critical approach to the notion of culture in cultural diplomacy initiated by claiming that the emergence of collective identities is key to their success. Furthermore, I have argued that polyvocality is the fundamental marker of twenty-first century cultural diplomacy, which can be best assessed through engagement with the ethnographic method. Finally, I argued that it is by focusing on the processes of formation of cultural relations, whether within or outside an institutional framework, that renders cultural diplomacy significant in the twenty-­ first century.

Notes 1. The Tajdı ̄d min al-Dakhil has been defined as “a revival movement of music from the Nahda (1885–1940), translated as “Arab Renaissance,” that gained traction in Lebanon after 2009”, which “Like any revitalization movement the Tajdı ̄d is “a deliberate, organized, conscious effort by members of a society to construct a more satisfying culture, one that is forward-looking while rooted in Arab cultural and historical legacies” (Rijo Lopes da Cunha 2022a: 87). 2. For further in-depth discussion on the work of the AMAR Foundation, please see Rijo Lopes da Cunha, M. “The Contemporary Revival of Nahda Music in Lebanon: Politics of Remembrance and Representation.” Ph.D. Thesis 2017: 135–136. 3. Further analysis and commentary on these musical pieces is under preparation for forthcoming articles. 4. See https://imedea.org (accessed 9th November 2020).

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5. Abed Kobeissy, personal communication, 20 March 2013. 6. This notion stems from a conference paper at the BFE One-Day Conference 2018 (Keele) ‘Beyond Memory and Reconciliation: Music, Conflict and Social Manipulation in PostConflict Contexts’ (BFE One Day Conference, 3 November 2018, Keele University, UK). This paper is currently being reworked as a journal article. 7. Reuters Staff, Lebanese central bank sets 3900 pound/dollar rate for essential food industries https://www.reuters.com/article/us-­ lebanon-­crisis-­pound-­idUSKBN2471D9 (accessed 25.10.2020). 8. Youmna Saba, Online Interview, 13 October 2020. 9. Beirut from ‘October Revolution’ of 2019 to the 4th August Explosion in 2020: Transnational Solidarity, Social Media and Affective Communities’ in Diasporic Political Communication: Theoretical and Empirical Perspectives, Edited by Ehab Gala, Mostafa Shehata, and Claus Valling Pedersen, Routledge (Forthcoming). 10. Beirut from ‘October Revolution’ of 2019 to the 4th August Explosion in 2020: Transnational Solidarity, Social Media and Affective Communities’ in Diasporic Political Communication: Theoretical and Empirical Perspectives, Edited by Ehab Gala, Mostafa Shehata, and Claus Valling Pedersen, Routledge (Forthcoming). Acknowledgments  I would like to express my gratitude to Dr. Ahmad al-Salhi, Mustafa Said, Ghassan Sahhab, Abed Kobeissy and Ali Hout for their support of my research in Kuwait.

References Alsalhi, A. 2018. SAUT IN BAHRAIN AND KUWAIT: History and Creativity in Concept and Practice. PhD Thesis. Department of Music, Royal Holloway, University of London. Aouragh, M. and Chakravartty, P. 2015. “ Infrastructures of empire: towards a critical geopolitics of media and information studies” in Media, Culture & Society Vol. 38(4) 559–575. Biswas, R. 2015. Reshaping the financial architecture for development finance: the new devel- opment banks. Working paper, 2/2015. London: Global South Unit, London School of Economics and Political Science. Bryant, R., and Daniel M.  Knight. 2019. The Anthropology of the Future. New Departures in Anthropology Series. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Clarke, D. 2016. Theorizing the Role of Cultural Products in Cultural Diplomacy from a Cultural Studies Perspective. International Journal of Cultural Policy 22 (2): 147–163.

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Eliassen et al. 2018. Contested Qualities: Negotiating Value in Arts and Culture. Fagbogforlaget. Ewa Mazierska, Leslie Gillon, & Tony Rigg (Eds.). 2018. Popular Music in the Post-Digital Age: Politics, Economy, Culture and Technology. New York and London: Bloombsbury Publishing. Fosler-Lussier, D. 2012. Music Pushed, Music Pulled: Cultural Diplomacy, Globalization, and Imperialism. In Diplomatic History, vol. 36, 1. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2015. Music in America’s Cold War Diplomacy. Oakland: University of California Press. Licoppe, C. 2004. ‘Connected’ Presence: The Emergence of a New Repertoire for Managing Social Relationships in a Changing Communication Technoscape. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 22: 135–156. Mignolo, W. 2013. Geopolitics of Sensing and Knowing: On (de)Coloniality, Border Thinking, and Epistemic Disobedience. In Postcolonial Studies, vol. 14 (3), 273–283. London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis. Novak, D. 2013. Japanoise: Music at the Edge of Circulation.Duke University Press. Nye, J. 1990. Soft Power. Foreign Policy, (Autumn), No. 80, Twentieth Anniversary, 153–171. Slate Group. O’Brien Bernini, L. M. 2016. The neoliberalisation of cultural production:An ethnography of professionalI rish traditional music [Unpublished P h.D. dissertation].University of Limerick. Okano-Heijmans, Maaike. 2013. Economic Diplomacy: Japan and the Balance of National Interests. Leiden: Brill. Papacharissi, Z. 2014. Affective Publics: Sentiment, Technology, and Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rambarran, S & Whiteley, S. 2016. The Oxford Handbook of Music and Virtuality. Oxford University Press (OUP), New York. Reinsch, P. and Westrup, L. (Eds) 2020. The Soundtrack Album: Listening to Media. London: Routledge. Rijo Lopes da Cunha, M. M. 2017. The Contemporary Revival of Nahda Music in Lebanon: Politics of Remembrance and Representation. PhD Thesis. Music Department, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. Rijo Lopes da Cunha, M. 2022a. The Contemporary Revival of Nahḍa Music in Lebanon: The role of Nostalgia in the Creation of a Contemporary Transnational Music Tradition. Acta Musicologica 94 (1): 87–108, Basel: IMS/Bärenreiter. ———. 2022b. Beirut from ‘October Revolution’ of 2019 to the 4th of August Explosion in 2020: Transnational Solidarity, social media, and Affective Communities. In Diasporic Political Communication: Theoretical and Empirical Perspectives, ed. Ehab Galal, Mostafa Shehata, and Claus Valling Pedersen. Routledge.

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Small, C. 2010. Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening. Conneticut: Wesleyan University Press. Tragaki, D. 2015. “Rebetiko past, performativity, and the political: The music of Yiannis Angelakas” in Acta Musicologica. Bärenreiter-Verlag Basel AG. Tsioulakis, I. 2020. Musicians in Crisis: Working and Playing in the Greek Popular Music Industry. London, NY: Routledge. Villanueva, C. 2007. Representing Cultural Diplomacy: Soft Power, Cosmopolitan Constructivism and Nation Branding in Mexico and Sweden. Acta Wexionensia.

CHAPTER 11

Arabian Violence: Censorship in Morocco’s Techno Underground Jillian Fulton-Melanson

Moroccans live ‘jungle style’: day-to-day, breaking laws, bribing the police, scamming the system. We have no expectation for a government having our interests, but I miss being enmeshed in a social web of emotions on the regular. There is a feeling in Morocco that I am bound to never find elsewhere and constantly miss—a feeling of togetherness in the midst of anxiety and adversity.

Fatima-Zahra, a regular in the techno scene who left Morocco in recent years to study in the UK, illustrates above how the Moroccan government forces Moroccan nationals to live their daily lives “stuck in chaos” while somehow finding stability through a sense of ‘togetherness,’ or solidarity.1 Fatima-Zahra’s sentiments toward the Moroccan state are not uncommon. Throughout my twelve years of fieldwork with Moroccans in Morocco and in diaspora, I have heard Moroccans from all walks of life

J. Fulton-Melanson (*) Department of Anthropology, York University, Toronto, ON, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 M. M. Rijo Lopes da Cunha et al. (eds.), Music and Cultural Diplomacy in the Middle East, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36279-8_11

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describe Morocco, especially cities such as Casablanca, as a jungle. As I will illuminate in this chapter, Morocco is thought of as a jungle because of the violent imposition of state surveillance and censorship, forcing Moroccan nationals to constantly face obstructions and barriers in their lives. The tourism industry takes part in the marketing of music that promotes Moroccan culture and as such censors out the music that critiques the state—music that aligns with Fatima-Zahra’s sentiments. Morocco is known for its rich musical culture, which can be seen and heard through the vast array of annual music festivals held there, each highlighting different musical genres and cultural tropes. Each festival is thus symbolic of a different facet of Morocco’s artistic culture and reflective of the Moroccan population, including music from their Amazigh (Indigenous) roots, African and Gnawa presence and geo-cultural position, European and Arabic colonial ties and cultural influence, and Sufi spiritual practices.2 Although such festivals showcase diversity and appear to be promoting cosmopolitanism and cultural bridging, they are also tailored to perform what Moroccan music “is” or “should be” and indicative of what the Moroccan tourism industry, which has the objectives of the state in mind, is willing to endorse. These tailored forms of Moroccan artistic culture are curated to attract tourists to come to Morocco and are thus presented to international audiences who, based on the performance, might feel they have gained a sense of what Moroccan culture is comprised of and what Moroccan people value in their social and musical lives. Within electronic music genres, ethnic+, Afro+, and Arab+ house music that features Moroccan cultural nuances tends to gain the most traction in Moroccan nightclubs, cultural centers, and festivals. These cultural nuances are performed through instruments and samples from Gnawa, chaabi (a folk popular genre in Morocco, as well as the French transliteration of sha’bi, which references folk popular genres across the Arab world), and traditional music. This particularly Moroccan subgenre of house music carries with it a community or “scene” of followers—as do most subgenres within electronic music—aged approximately 20 to 45, who are upper-middle class Moroccan nationals, many of whom are highly educated and have international experience.3 Because of the upper-middle class identity of this community, varying gender identifications are welcome at events so long as they adhere to certain dress codes and bodily comportment. This community is more mainstream when it comes to the larger underground Moroccan electronic music scene, and DJs within this community tend to play one of the the most represented electronic music

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genres in the region, which is a particularly Moroccan subgenre of deep house and melodic techno. Moroccan deep house and melodic techno can be heard in a variety of venues ranging from cafés to small local bars and clubs to large nightclubs and widely promoted international festivals. Broadly speaking, the artists who perform this genre of house music combined with Moroccan musical tropes understand the Moroccan cultural identity to be one that is simultaneously modern while celebrating its interconnected, traditional, Amazigh, Arab, and African roots. The state does not interfere with these events because they celebrate contemporary Moroccanness, Africanness, and Arabness while also referencing traditional culture in a way that speaks to youth. The Moroccan state is currently caught in a position that necessitates sensitivity to their youth’s needs because over half the population is under thirty years of age.4 As Morocco is home to a vibrant artistic community, the state caters to the needs of artists by endorsing a style of artistic branding that celebrates Moroccanness as a unique and colorful blend of Arabness with Africanness and Europeanness. This is an imposition of what Joseph S.  Nye calls “soft power” (2008). That is, the state shows support for artistic forms that align with its desired ‘brand’ of artistic culture for the purpose of international marketing. House and techno music produced in this particular Moroccan style is popular in Africa and Europe and has also touched down in Montreal, which is thought of by many as Canada’s most culturally European city and is home to the largest Maghrebi diaspora in the country. Artists who produce such music are branding themselves through soundscapes that explore Morocco’s musical roots. Such branding promotes cosmopolitanism and Afropolitanism (Selasi 2005; Skinner 2015; Mbembe and Balakrishnan 2016) because it reminds Moroccan youth of their histories and traditional culture while allowing them to express their contemporary identities autonomously. The artists who perform electronic music that features Moroccan folk elements are thus aligned with the state’s branding; however, they remain critical about Morocco’s social world in everyday conversations. The music they produce and their personal sentiments about Moroccan society do not align because their music depicts a Moroccan ‘utopia’ that exists only as a performance for tourists and the upper class. This is not to say that working class people in lower-income households do not enjoy this music, but I argue that it is not made ‘for them’. As deep house and melodic techno scenes are among the most mainstream of underground electronic music, the collective that follows this music are part of the elite,

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“jet-set” sector of Moroccan society. The parties that host this music are often inviting an exclusive community that can afford to attend and are held in luxurious riads in Marrakech, portraying the Moroccan ‘utopia’ on social media for an international audience. Electronic music artists who do not produce music that portrays the unofficially sanctioned Moroccan utopia and thus do not align with the state’s branding are not supported. This chapter discusses the international performance of “Morocco” as presented by the Moroccan state and how the tensions arising out of that performance are grappled with by Moroccans in Morocco. In this chapter, I argue that nonstate actors—in this case, industrial techno musicians and their communities—present a view of Morocco that complicates the state’s presentation of itself as largely Arab and “classical”. I do this through an analysis of electronic music produced in Morocco that is not endorsed by the state and anecdotal evidence obtained by interview and participant-­observation research conducted through a mixture of in-person and online contact between 2018 and 2023. I begin with a discussion of the gap between Morocco’s mediated image and the lived experiences of many Moroccan citizens as expressed to me by my interlocutors. After, I discuss the censorship and surveillance that my interlocutors must navigate as artists who are part of subcultural music scenes and genres.5 Finally, I recount my interlocutors’ intersensorial responses to the power dynamics of their society as felt in their musical endeavours. I define their responses as intersensorial because they not only engage multiple senses at once but because their senses also interact with each other. This chapter is not an analysis of the Moroccan legal system. Rather, it is a social, ethnographic analysis of what members of the population who belong to subcultural groups think. In an effort to create a discussion about which cultural narratives are state-­ endorsed and which are silenced, this chapter describes how the Moroccan state uses cultural diplomacy to promote its rich cultural heritage and censor discontent. Through stories told to me by my interlocutors—Reda, Nizar, Med Amine, Fatima-Zahra, Youssef, and Simo—I piece together different experiences of surveillance and censorship that my interlocutors feel are violently impeding their individual and collective wellbeing as Moroccan nationals. These five individuals are a mixture of DJs, producers, and participants in various electronic music scenes based on subgenres. The musicians each have jobs outside of music performance and production and have traveled outside of Morocco to perform, albeit on tourist visas and not with the Moroccan Artist Card, which they have stated is incredibly difficult to obtain.6 Within Morocco, the communities they have built and

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are part of help tell an honest story about what it is like to live in Morocco. These communities also create a safe space for members to seek refuge from such violent impositions of power that they live through every day.

Morocco’s Public Image With the aforementioned festival culture present in Morocco, Morocco portrays itself as a bridge between Africa, Europe, and the Arab world. The idea is that tourists can go to Morocco if they want to have a cultural experience that is considered to represent these three societal entities, regardless of how vast that series of intersections may seem to be. Morocco’s proximity to Europe and lack of civil unrest makes it considered to be one of the safer destinations for tourists to experience the Arab world. Portraying Morocco as Arab, however, is contentious. Many Moroccans reflect on the history of Arab colonization and feel that the state is Orientalizing itself by portraying itself as such. My interlocutors believe they are performing Moroccanness by not playing music or samples from the Arab or greater Middle Eastern canon. One of the reasons my interlocutors’ music is critiqued by the state is because it isn’t ‘Arab’ or ‘Oriental’7 enough. My interlocutors have mentioned how frustrating this is to them. I will highlight such sentiments through the following excerpt from an interview with DJ and producer Reda, who is one of the co-founders of Wrath, a niche, industrial techno community supported by subcultural youth. Look at where we are positioned: we can literally see Spain from here [Tangier]! … The Middle East is much farther away, but we are always categorized as an Arab culture instead of European culture. Our cuisine, our nouvelles villes, it’s a fusion of Amazigh and Europe, and anyway— both the bastards colonized us, so why do we get lumped in with one but not the other? I don’t see any links between myself and the Saudi guys who come here to get wasted.

This transcript points to Arab colonization, which pro-Amazigh movements are speaking out against in an attempt to have their Indigenous ethnic groups recognized by both the state and international forces. In such conversations, Reda expressed that he feels more culturally aligned with European people than he does with Arab people, especially those from the Middle Eastern, Arab nations. He also believes that the

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categorical location of Morocco in the so-called Arab world continues to Orientalize Moroccan people.8 One of the motivations for Reda’s music-­ making, which highlights Amazigh and pagan traditions, is to counter this Orientalism. Amazigh consciousness is becoming more vocalized in the narratives of Moroccan youth who are pushing away from their Arab identities. This consciousness is found in both the industrial music of Reda and his collective as well as the Moroccan house and techno scene, albeit presented quite differently. Because Reda’s music is based on European industrial genres and does not celebrate Morocco in the way the state desires, it is not deemed worthy of the state’s support. In fact, the final Wrath techno party held before entering quarantine in March 2020 was cancelled because Violence of Arabia was on the bill.9 Reda recounted to me over an online conversation that only a few days before the event was scheduled, authorities arrived at the venue and told the owner to “shut it down” due to the threat of terrorism embedded in the artist’s moniker. Further to my point, Reda’s music has gained more traction outside of Morocco, specifically in Berlin, Germany, where industrial techno has a large community, and where his musical performance is not promoted as “a night of Moroccan music”; his moniker and country of origin are the only identifiers listed on promotional flyers and events, and thus he obtains the same treatment as any given artist from any given nation-state. Reda’s sentiments about Middle Eastern, Arab nations have relaxed over the course of my research because of his performances in Europe, often alongside Palestinian and Lebanese artists who produce and perform music of a similar style. However, he remains adamant that Moroccan culture and those of Middle Eastern Arab nations are not aligned due to the prevalence of conservative Islam in many Middle Eastern Arab nation-states. Morocco maintains a positive reputation in international media with its image as an international bridge. Their reliance on this image and their tourism industry requires them to promote their land as a safe space for tourists to vacation. Their use of censorship as a means of maintaining this image is stifling according to my interlocutors. For example, when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, tourism was forced to shut down. However, Morocco continued to be situated well—through socioeconomic image— in the hierarchy of African nations by aiding other African countries, sending them medical supplies, and covering the cost of hotels for Moroccan nationals who were stuck abroad and unable to return due to border closures. Because of their quick action, Morocco initially had a low number of COVID-19 cases and was praised for handling the situation so well.

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However, according to my interlocutors, Morocco’s positive image is just a façade. My interlocutors expressed to me that the way Morocco handled the COVID-19 situation was performative and did not benefit Moroccans inside the country. My interlocutors told me that workers in Morocco who lost employment due to COVID-19 only received between 800 and 2000 Moroccan dirhams (MAD) per month. This compensation was restricted to individuals who had registered employment; those working in the informal markets were left with nothing and were simultaneously unable to sell their products (crops, electronics, and more) due to Morocco’s strict lockdown measures. According to my interlocutors, informal markets are the only spaces where many lower-income families can make enough money to afford to eat. Registering a small business formally would require some money up front, which is not necessarily available to many individuals who are doing their best to raise their families and survive.10 Furthermore, for some, it is difficult to prioritize making tax payments to a state with goals and ethics they do not align with and whose intentions they do not trust. Closing the informal markets and kicking unregistered vendors and beggars off the streets creates serious issues for people who otherwise cannot afford the basic items to live. During the closing of informal markets, my interlocutors posted stories on social media about how they witnessed people who were begging on the streets (when they were supposed to be inside) being taken to jail or beaten by the police. Furthermore, tollbooths between cities were closed overnight, creating panicked drivers and a pile-up of accidents on intercity highways. My interlocutors relentlessly posted on social media in an attempt to expose the shortcomings of the Moroccan state during this time, for they found the state’s media image to be toxic and suffocating. The media images I have discussed in this section are about Morocco’s international performance. As previously mentioned, this media presentation is a form of ‘soft power’ that the state uses to negotiate its position among European, Arab, and African nation-states. This international image is protected through both vertical and horizontal implementations of surveillance. This image, along with the cultural connection to the Middle East, is what my interlocutors critique through their industrial sonic textures.

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The Power of Music Members of the Wrath community are transparent about the way they feel about the measures the state takes to control them. They are a collective co-founded by my interlocutors, Reda and Nizar, who are industrial music producers and DJs local to Rabat and Casablanca. Reda and Nizar have been working to establish a community of likeminded, subcultural Moroccan youth who love fast, heavy music since 2017. Their collective began by sharing industrial techno music but has expanded to include post-punk, Noise, and other genres that are electronic and use field recordings to create thickly textured dissonance.11 Although they do not oppose the state-supported, electronic-folk-fusion genres and their coinciding communities, they reject the colorful celebration of Moroccan roots, host their events in affordable nightclubs that do not restrict members at the door, and do not require a dress code. Instead, they perform their interpretation of Moroccanness and Moroccan society with provocative, dark, industrial techno music that is directly opposed to the Moroccan state’s cultural and religious objectives because the sounds they use are symbolic of pain. Their art exemplifies the way they view Moroccan society and how their sense of being is lost and out of place inside its state boundaries due to their conflicting values. This subcultural performance displays the power structures present in Moroccan society and displays the boundaries within which the Moroccan public is forced to live. Because of its controversial narrative, it is one of many styles of performance that is censored by state authorities and that usually generates repercussions when broadcasted. Since January 2020, many Moroccan rappers have been incarcerated for critiquing the Moroccan state via public posts and songs that express the limits of their social freedoms. The Moroccan state implements censorship in an effort to block controversial perspectives and information that exposes structural, cultural, symbolic, and physical forms of violence inflicted on Moroccan nationals, such as the examples in the previous section. Tracks produced in industrial genres generally do not incorporate lyrics.12 At times, artists do incorporate vocals, but the vocal lines are not lyrical in the way that they can be heard in rap and hip-hop songs. Rap and hip-hop songs are known to have catchy melodies with lyrics that listeners sing along  with, and artists or their followers will often post the lyrics online. In this way, songs share protest sentiments in loud volume and spread them widely and internationally. The context of vocals in industrial

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genres is quite different, often omitting lyrics completely and, instead, using the voice as an instrument in production. Unlike lyrical genres such as rap, this omission of lyrics allows artists to avoid imprisonment or charges. Industrial music thereby gains political potential through dissonant textures and pitches. Ethnomusicologists have written extensively about music’s power to unite people in times of despair.13 Songs, especially, hold this power. A song’s ability to create solidarity among minority groups and within revolutions is one of the reasons why the Moroccan government has taken action by fining and incarcerating rap and hip-hop artists who are rapping and singing about the various social issues they are facing. My interlocutors speculate that such incarcerations may also have the purpose of being ‘examples’ or ‘warnings’ for more influential musicians who could generate more antigovernment influence if they started making music with such themes as well. It is possible that the state does not completely shut down techno events to leave an outlet for nonverbal resistance and thus prevent more serious expressions of resistance. However, as I watched more events become canceled last minute, or shut down mid-DJ set in 2019, it seemed as though the growing industrial scene was causing the state to react accordingly. In January 2023, Youssef, an Amazigh, Moroccan man from Agadir living in Casablanca, started a new industrial techno collective called Genesis. Although Genesis’s first event—held at an abandoned farm on the outskirts of the city—saw minor issues with the arrival of authorities, Youssef managed to pay them off. Genesis’s event revived the industrial scene in Casablanca, and thus, the community was finally reunited in that city. Industrial genres are used as a form of protest music in what Hakim Bey (1991) calls the Temporary Autonomous Zone (TAZ): an anti-authority sentiment and counternormative space that exists as a result of a disbelief in revolutions as well as a disbelief in the state. The TAZ is a fleeting and nomadic, often artistic, critique of a society’s perceived hegemonic center, performed continuously in its peripheries, proving that the center of one’s social world  can be anywhere (Bey 1991: 73). In this way, the TAZ is simultaneously a social disappearance, as it cannot necessarily be seen or heard, and a social disruption, as it is a break from societal norms. Youssef conceptualizes the Genesis parties using Bey’s TAZ. A combination of the yaz, an Amazigh symbol representing the free man, a skull and crossbones flag, and the statement “together to keep the underground spirit alive in

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North Africa. Temporary Autonomous Zone” fronts the Genesis community description on their social media pages. Through the TAZ, communities such as Genesis and Wrath are able to navigate the state in a way that is simultaneously quiet and loud. Although they are not celebrating Moroccanness in a way that aligns with the state, and although they speak out about the different forms of violence that the state inflicts on them, they would suggest that they are still performing and celebrating Moroccanness. Their branding sonically illustrates what they believe to be Amazigh, ‘pre-Islamic Morocco’ through what they define as ‘tribal rhythms’ and ‘pagan ritualistic sounds.’ Although ‘tribal rhythms’ and ‘pagan ritualistic sounds’ are part of Morocco’s history, it is generally taboo to talk about pre-Islamic Morocco. Therefore, although such branding is Moroccan, it is simultaneously countercultural and is not considered useful as a tool of cultural diplomacy. Because the pre-Islamic symbolism is blurred with a purely sonic presentation, it is a loud political statement that is presented quietly. Ronak K.  Kapadia (2019: 10) writes about queer collectives who respond to state violence using art installations as their symbolic weapon in a manner reminiscent of a TAZ. In parallel to the communities Kapadia writes about, Moroccan, underground industrial techno communities such as Wrath navigate the laws of the state to carve space for a contemporary underground social world that has potential as a zone of political action and social change. Moroccan musicians producing industrial techno are using their own experiences of indeterminacy, uncertainty, ambiguity, and liminality as fuel for their branding and music production. I view live industrial events in Morocco in a similar light to Kapadia’s description of art installations and believe that this space is located in a TAZ. Because industrial techno events—as opposed to Moroccan deep house and melodic techno—are countercultural, state authorities consider them to be transgressive and often arrive at and close down events, either days before—as the final Wrath party before lockdown was—or during the event, forcing paying customers to leave. This results in financial and social losses for both venue owners and artists, thereby creating tension between them, as they both lose both money and clients. The loss of clients and money by a venue owner often makes them less likely to book industrial techno events in the future. Although members of the industrial scene seem to be avoiding incarceration, it is clear that they are still being censored by authorities, and there are still many variables for such members to navigate.

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Navigating the State’s Power Power is distributed both top-down and haptically by the Moroccan state, causing Moroccan citizens to navigate public and private spaces differently.14 Using King Mohammed VI as an example, his ominous power over the Kingdom of Morocco is ever-present in the form of a photograph located in every commercial property in the country. Usually, the photograph is located above the cashier or front desk of a given business, and as such, it is the first and last object that catches a customer’s eye. To complement this Foucauldian (Foucault  1977) panoptic presence is the King’s palace, Dar al-Makhzen, in Rabat. An interlocutor, Med Amine, who lived abroad in Thailand and France while studying and who recently returned to Morocco to start his career, told me that the Dar al-Makhzen is the tallest building in Rabat—not necessarily in structure, but in height above sea level—and that there is a law in place where the construction of new buildings is not allowed to surpass it. He told me that “the King has the right to see into everybody’s yard, but nobody should be able to peer down into the King’s [yard].” My examples of power dynamics expressed through the palace and the photograph highlight the vertical, Foucauldian panopticon present in Morocco at the same time as “haptic power.”15 The King’s photograph moves throughout the city haptically because it not only looms above patrons in each commercial building but is also ‘within’ and ‘throughout’ the streets of the entire nation, making social actors manage and censor themselves while they are in public.16 In the city of Rabat, where Dar al-Makhzen is located, armed police and military personnel are commonly seen in both the ancient medina and the nouvelle ville’s city center.17 The Moroccan state makes it clear that they are always watching, which forces Moroccan people to perform a public identity of an ‘exemplary citizen.’ However, one’s behavior and presentation in private spaces need not match this public persona.18 Performing the state’s ‘exemplary citizen’ archetype—a hard-working, educated, pious Muslim who provides a good life for their family, is kind and respectful to others, and speaks highly of the King—is an identity that individuals perform in public to navigate the state’s multidirectional, intersensorial presence of power. A lack of adherence to the state’s ‘exemplary citizen’ archetype has potential repercussions ranging from familial unrest to social exclusion and incarceration. Performing the ‘exemplary citizen’ archetype enhances the number of potential venues and events that a DJ can perform at. Further to my point,

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if an artist does not engage in consuming alcohol or drugs, more performance opportunities can be obtained, such as ‘dry’ events during the month of Ramadan. The majority of Moroccan people who participate in electronic music, however, do not fit this persona and seek refuge at electronic music events to escape societal pressure to conform—a slow, banal form of violence.19 My interlocutors are growing tired of performing the ‘exemplary citizen.’ Although industrial musicians use dark, subcultural art and music to portray their message—a style that often appears unappealing to outsiders due to its shock value—I argue that many working-class citizens feel similar sentiments about state control: anti-state sentiments can be seen and heard throughout the streets of Rabat, where worker’s strikes and protests occur regularly due to the close presence of the King and the Dar al-­ Makhzen. The soundscapes of Moroccan power and violence are thus present both inside and outside of industrial music. I argue that the narrative of pain that is present in industrial music is a more accurate portrayal and critique of Moroccan society than is the Moroccan ‘utopia’ endorsed by the state. Industrial musicians in Morocco suggest that they are tired of performing the ‘exemplary citizen’ by producing soundscapes about the various forms of power and violence that the Moroccan state inflicts on its citizens. Noise music, a central influence of industrial genres, is known to promote live, participatory encounters and reject virtuosity and form (Hegarty 2007, and Hennion 2004 in Klett and Gerber 2014: 286). It is used as a means of exemplifying the chaos, pain, and boundaries experienced in everyday life, in this case by Moroccan nationals. Performing industrial techno creates a community of and space for listeners and participants who have a cohesive, alternative understanding of the state’s objectives. Simultaneously, performing industrial techno illustrates boundaries that obstruct people’s lives and empowers them through movement, dance, and trance. This is done through the genre’s dark and aggressive tones, timbres, and the repetitive—mostly percussive—sounds that represent anger and pain. Although this music represents anger and pain, participants in the scene are empowered through a politics of solidarity (Rijo Lopes da Cunha 2022), where they are able to unite against oppression in the middle of a dance floor.20 The performance of social violence does not, however, stop at the sonic. Performers also accompany their music with video imagery to show the state’s methods of control and censorship. The imagery is compiled

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either in a format presented on YouTube or through live, projected video at events. The themes of control are presented through the following types of images: 1. Submission: through images of the King, religious rituals, military tanks, and guns. 2. Incarceration: through images of torture and handcuffed men. 3. Death: through images of funerals and caskets. This speaks to illness, violence, poverty, and substandard medical resources and facilities. 4. Financial crisis: through images of people participating in the informal markets by selling things on the street such as individual cigarettes, fruits, vegetables, clothes, and cheap electronics. This represents the large gap between informal and formal proprietary registration. 5. Racism: through images of street performances by Gnawa musicians, a minority group that was originally forced into the country via the transSaharan slave trade.21 These images speak to various forms of violence and suffering. Performers compile images together in a montage to capture the systemic control and violence perpetrated by the state’s police, who are shown inflicting physical violence on people in the streets. In an interview with Reda, he refers to the police as “exécutants,” which translates into English as ‘executors’ or ‘performers’ of actions. The way my interlocutors navigate the state and its exécutants with their music and images is through affectual or haptic movement, for they are feeling the vibe of the venue owners and feeling out the presence of the police by treading lightly through carefully planned advertisement. For example, by not including Violence of Arabia on the physical flyer posted at the venue. Although power is imposed on them haptically, they also respond with haptic navigation.

Conclusion In summary, my interlocutors navigate an intersensorial tangle of sonic, visual, and haptic stimuli. My interlocutors navigate the use of lyrics and song, protest by telling their story through dissonant sounds and textures, and compile images to show state control. The raves where this music is

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performed live exemplify how sound represents sentiment and how such communities and spaces are each a TAZ of political action. Although communities such as Wrath are not celebrating Moroccanness in the way suggested by the state, I argue that the likeminded members of Wrath are celebrating their intersectional, countercultural Moroccan identities, and they take pride in the space they have carved for individuals to come and express themselves. It is a safe, nonjudgmental space for expressing political views that oppose those of the state and a space for feeling bodily movement through dance. Communities such as Wrath have created a space where participants can ‘feel’ through numbness, sitting and listening, absorbing the soundscape that speaks to their surrounding social situation. The music and movement of the Wrath community makes me wonder what will happen when community leaders become too burnt out to continue throwing events. I reflect on a moment spent with an interlocutor, Simo, who runs a psytrance community.22 While I was sitting at his house for an evening of apéros, he tossed me his passport and said, “Look at this shit.” I opened up the page to his new European tourist visa as he instructed me to compare it with his expired ones. Each of his expired visas had been valid for six months to one year, but in this instance, they only allotted him three months. “And the price is the same for each application,” he said, while smoothing out the cigarette papers encapsulating the hash he was rolling. I asked him if anything had changed in his life or assets since he had last submitted an application, and he responded, “I have worked the same job for ten years; I am the soul renter on my lease and am never late on my payments; same with my other bills, and even my car is fully paid off.” He then laughed and continued, gesturing toward three cats cuddling with each other on the couch, “I guess they don’t know that I also support three kids!” He extended his bottle and clinked it against mine as we proceeded to take a drink. Morocco’s cultural diplomacy, for artists of a less “influential” social class—Simo is part of the middle class but has less opportunity for the jet-­ set lifestyle of the upper-middle class—is focused on bringing tourists to Morocco, not on sending Moroccan musicians abroad. However, musicians such as Simo continue to perform at various events in Morocco and abroad, albeit on a tourist visa instead of using the extremely difficult and expensive Moroccan Artist Card. Like many musicians across the globe, Simo was recently ‘stuck’ in lockdown for some time during the COVID-19 pandemic, but he still

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managed to produce multiple compilation albums on his independent label. Simo is only one example of many Moroccan nationals who continuously navigate through the grips of society to find pleasure and success in their musical ventures. Although Simo is tired of navigating the state, he continues to press on. Anti-state electronic music communities seem to be a blossoming political movement in Morocco, but artists continue to dream about leaving Morocco because they are tired of running from authority, chasing venues and gigs, and experiencing judgment from outside communities due to their dark, subcultural presentation. Some of my interlocutors want to stay and continue to build the community, some want to leave and build it from afar, and some are forced to stay because their social and financial capital does not allow them to leave. As Biehl and Locke suggest in their edited volume, Unfinished: The Anthropology of Becoming, ethnography begins in the middle of social life, and our interlocutors are constantly engaging with the modulation of their desires (2017: 7, 24). The stories recounted in this chapter are thus still in-motion, and as my interlocutors continue to grapple with burnout, they also continue to produce music and throw events. I think of this dynamic movement as a politics of solidarity, where regardless of what the state imposes on them, they use their sensorium to navigate through the obstacles together, as a community of likeminded individuals.

Notes 1. Ann Cvetkovich defines the experience of feeling ‘stuck’ or in a moment of stasis as “Impasse” (2012). She describes this state as an ‘experience of everyday life when we don’t know what to do. In addition, […] it is related to the category of spiritual crisis as well, those moments when a system of belief or belonging loses meaning and faith is in question’ (2012: 21). 2. To describe a few: the Fes Festival of World Sacred Music highlights Morocco’s acceptance of religious diversity; the Gnaoua World Music Festival celebrates the presence of the Gnawa people in Morocco; Visa for Music: Africa Middle East Music Meeting highlights African and Middle Eastern musicians who have yet to emerge onto the international scene; and Atlas Electronic celebrates musicians from Africa and African diasporas. 3. Electronic music communities are close-knit collectives, also known as “scenes”, and consist of musicians, artists, dancers, and music appreciators. A scene can be thought of as a group or collective filled with individuals and subgroups who each join the scene for a wide variety of reasons (Císar ̌

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and Koubek 2012). Some participants in electronic music scenes are there for political representation. Others are there for the music, dancing, or just to party. Each scene is identified by the music, and the people within the scene have this musical identity as their primary cohesive factor (Baulch 2007). Other intersectional factors, such as lifestyle, sexuality, gender, ethnicity, and nationality, however, still play the role of subtext in this greater ecology because of the influence that such subtexts can have on the different ways that people can identify with music. Nevertheless, the music is the cohesive factor that binds the scene and the way people move throughout it. 4. According to the World Population Review, “Morocco is a demographically young country with 27% of its population under the age of 15, 18% between the ages of 15 and 24, 42% between 25 and 54  years old, 7% between the ages of 55 and 64 and just 6% 65 years and older. The median age of Moroccans is just 29 years old as of 2018, with a life expectancy of 77.1 years of age” (World Population Review 2022). 5. In this chapter, I use the term “subcultural” to refer to queer communities that are both countercultural to the state’s objectives and that implement subcultural imagery in their performances, such as the use of leather, BDSM, and violence. 6. The Moroccan Artist Card is a document issued by the Moroccan government that allows artists to apply for travel visas with more ease. 7. I use the term “Oriental” because my interlocutors have referred to this music as such. 8. I recognize the shift from Middle East and North Africa (MENA) to Southwest Asia and North Africa (SWANA) as one that has moved from an ethnic categorization to a geographic categorization. The term “Arab world”, however, is still used colloquially to refer to the SWANA region, as well as academically to discuss the ethno-linguistic region. Although many of my interlocutors do not identify as “Arab”, they still refer to North Africa as part of the “Arab world”. 9. All names of interlocutors, artist monikers, events, and venues have been changed for anonymity. 10. According to an interlocutor who owns a small business, registering a business costs between 1500–2000 MAD. 11. The genre “Noise” is capitalized as per Paul Hegarty’s (2007) use of the term, differentiating it from the more general sonic “noise”. 12. Laudan Nooshin’s edited volume, Music and the Play of Power in the Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia (2009), outlines how powerful music can be in uniting individuals and communities and thus how threatening music can be for the nation-state. As such, the authors in this volume also discuss how musicians and individuals navigate the state’s objectives through their musical endeavours.

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13. In electronic music culture, pieces of music are referred to as “tracks”. 14. On the topic of navigating public and private spaces in the Islamic world, Asma Afsaruddin’s edited volume, Hermeneutics and Honor: Negotiating Female “Public Space in islamic/ate Societies (1999) argues that the dichotomy of public and private space must be situated into the local context and temporality; Charles Hirschkind writes about the ethics of navigating public and private space through the spread of cassette sermons in Egypt in The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics (2006); and Karin van Nieuwkerk analyzes the discourse surrounding the ‘pious turn’ of 1980s and 1990s Egypt in “Debating Piety and Performing Arts in the Public Sphere: The ‘Caravan’ of Veiled Actresses in Egypt” (2014). 15. William Bogard (2007) writes about how haptic power expands and contracts like the coils of a snake, like an object that slides through the expanding and contracting grips of one’s hands. Haptic power thus takes place on the ground, horizontally, moving throughout the streets of a given society, as opposed to panoptic power, which is imposed from above. Laura Marks (2015) writes about haptic power in art, illuminating how paintings on ceramic sculptures represent horizontal, haptic movement. The painting thus appears to be moving even though it is fixed on the ceramic object. As such, although it cannot necessarily be seen, haptic power is imposed horizontally. 16. Susan Ossman’s book, Picturing Casablanca: Portraits of Power in a Modern City (1994), references the visual imagery that represents power in Morocco through a critique of billboards in Casablanca. 17. The nouvelle ville translates to the “new city” and refers to the French colonial city center. The “new city” is in opposition to the “ancienne medina”, referring to the traditional, old city. 18. Although in this case it is not applied to a member of a diaspora, rather members of citizens who are in their place of origin, when behavior in public and private spheres does not match because one is trying to assimilate to the public environment, this can be described as ‘politesse,’ a word used by Rapport (2012) to describe the process of restraining one’s performance of ethnicity or reactions to problematic situations, ‘politely.’ In Anyone: The Cosmopolitan Subject of Anthropology (2012) Rapport explains that the diasporic, cosmopolitan subject has to adhere to a collective identity—for the sake of etiquette—as a way for individuals to survive through assimilation. The cosmopolitan individual, he argues, uses critical thought to create and understand ideas and worldviews that are not necessarily aligned with their own collective group. It is because they require a public identity that they perform politesse as such. One cannot simply assimilate and ‘become like you,’ but they can use politesse to ‘fit in.’

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19. See Crapanzano (1985), Mbembe (1992), and Seremetakis (2019) for slow, banal violence: violence that seeps into an individual’s body through seemingly insipid imposition. 20. Nooshin (2017) and Rijo Lopes da Cunha (2022) frame a politics of solidarity as a movement that is not necessarily based in a “revolution” or an “uprising” and that is also not based on feelings of victimization but rather empowerment through the arts, namely, music. 21. Gnawa music receives performance attention that appears to be a celebration of their culture and presence in Morocco but is thought of by many instead to be a form of government reconciliation. Furthermore, Sub-­ Saharan migrants who are not Gnawa-identified continue to face adversity in Morocco today. 22. Psytrance is a genre with a fast bpm ranging from 140 to over 200 bpm.

References Asfaruddin, Asma, ed. 1999. Hermeneutics and Honor: Negotiating Female “Public” Space in Islamic/ate Societies. Cambridge: Harvard Center for Middle East Studies. Baulch, Emily. 2007. Making Scenes: Reggae, Punk, and Death Metal in 1990s Bali. Duke University Press. Bey, Hakim. 1991. T.A.Z.: Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism. Anti-Copyright; Autonomedia. Biehl, João, and Peter Locke. 2017. Unfinished: The Anthropology of Becoming. Durham: Duke University Press. Bogard, William. 2007. The Coils of a Serpent: Haptic Space and Control Societies. CTheory td057. http://ctheory.net/ctheory_wp/the-­coils-­of-­a-­ serpent-­haptic-­spaceand-­control-­societies/#bio. Accessed 4 June 2020. Císař, Ondřej, and Martin Koubek. 2012. "Include ‘em all?: Culture, Politics and a Local Hardcore/Punk Scene in the Czech Republic". Poetics 40 (1): 1–21. Crapanzano, Vincent. 1985. Waiting: The Whites of South Africa. New  York: Random House. Cvetkovich, Ann. 2012. Depression: A Public Feeling. Durham: Duke University Press. Foucault, Michel. 1977 [1995]. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of Prison. New York: Vintage Books. Hegarty, Paul. 2007. Noise/music: A history. New York: Continuum. Hennion, Antoine. 2004. Pragmatics of Taste. In The Blackwell Companion to the Sociology of Culture, ed. Mark Jacobs and Nancy Hanrahan, 131–144. Blackwell. Hirschkind, Charles. 2006. The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics. New York: Columbia University Press.

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Kapadia, Ronak K. 2019. Insurgent Aesthetics: Security and the Queer Life of the Forever War. Durham: Duke University Press. Klett, Joseph, and Alison Gerber. 2014. The Meaning of Indeterminacy: Noise Music as Performance. Cultural Sociology 8 (3): 275–290. Marks, Laura U. 2015. The Taming of the Haptic Space: From Malaga to Valencia to Florence. Muqarnas 32: 253–278. Mbembe, Achille. 1992. Provisional Notes on the Postcolony. Africa 62 (1): 3–37. Mbembe, Achille, and Sarah Balakrishnan. 2016. Pan-African Legacies, Afropolitan Futures. Transition (Kampala, Uganda) 120: 28–37. Nooshin, Laudan. 2009. Music and the Play of Power in the Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia. London: Routledge. ———. 2017. Whose Revolution? Iranian Popular Music and the Fetishization of Resistance. Popular Communication 15 (3): 163–191. Nye, Joseph S. 2008. Public Diplomacy and Soft Power. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 616 (1): 94–109. Ossman, Susan. 1994. Picturing Casablanca: Portraits of Power in a Modern City. Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press. Rapport, Nigel. 2012. Anyone: The Cosmopolitan Subject of Anthropology. New York: Berghahn Books. Rijo Lopes da Cunha, Maria. 2022. Beirut from ‘October Revolution’ of 2019 to the 4th August Explosion in 2020: Transnational Solidarity, Social Media and Affective Communities. In Diasporic Political Communication: Theoretical and Empirical Perspectives, ed. Ehab Galal, Mostafa Shehata, and Claus Valling Pederson. London: Routledge. Selasi, Taiye. 2005. Bye-Bye Babar. The LIP Magazine. https://thelip.robertsharp.co.uk/2005/03/03/bye-­bye-­barbar/ Seremetakis, Nadia. 2019. Sensing the Everyday: Dialogues from Austerity Greece. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. Skinner, Ryan Thomas. 2015. Bamako Sounds: The Afropolitan Ethics of Malian Music. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Van Nieuwkerk, Karin. 2014. Debating Piety and Performing Arts in the Public Sphere: The ‘Caravan’ of Veiled Actresses in Egypt. In Music, Culture and Identity in the Muslim World: Performance, Politics and Piety, ed. Kamal Salhi. London: Routledge. World Population Review. 2022. Morocco Population 2022 (Demographics, Maps, Graphs). https://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/morocco-­ population. Accessed Apr 1 2022

CHAPTER 12

Musical Delineations of a PostNational Space for National Struggle: Hazara, Kurdish, and Baloch Cases George Murer

When communities are resituated through processes of migration and transsettlement, music does not merely accompany them—it becomes a site where people define themselves in relation to their origins and sense of history, to their current social surroundings, and, crucially, to the paths leading from one to the other. Introducing a section of an edited volume devoted to relationships between music and migration, Byron Dueck (2011: 22) identifies “three social bearings that seem to have a particular salience for migrants as people who are far from home and in a foreign cultural environment: orientation to social ‘imaginaries’; comportment in public spaces; and relationships to social intimates.” These framings are logical, but the dialogs they sustain with one another are equally vital. Arjun Appadurai maintains that deterritorialization “affects the loyalties of groups (especially in the context of complex diasporas)”, as the “loosening of bonds between people, wealth, and territories

G. Murer (*) Columbia University, New York, NY, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 M. M. Rijo Lopes da Cunha et al. (eds.), Music and Cultural Diplomacy in the Middle East, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36279-8_12

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fundamentally alters the basis of cultural reproduction” (1991: 192–193, see also Appadurai 1996). It is important to note the intensification of loyalties that often results, especially when deterritorialization creates or compounds a sense of fragmentation and precarity. Loyalty itself can be expressed as a virtue interchangeable with a collective commitment, one inspired not merely by ethnonationalist sentiment but by an abstract intuition of a greater good, by ideals that stand to benefit not only the self-­ identified community but also the other communities with whom the former seeks to share spaces of habitation and belonging. This is the essence of cultural diplomacy—a delicate balance between self-interest and outwardly projected goodwill, the two interwoven into cultural practices. In this essay, I take Hazara Afghans, Kurds, and Baloch in the current historical moment as case studies that illuminate ways to think past migrant communities as isolated formations by taking into account the role played by music as culture-in-circulation in maintaining dynamic cohesion across geographic divides between ancestral lands and places of transsettlement. In each case, mutual empowerment lies in articulations of an embattled nationhood, while the actual space for cultural performance transcends not only political boundaries but also the logic of political boundaries, enabling appeals to an imagined global citizenry to accept, include, and appreciate these collectivities that have been marginalized, exploited, and vilified, casualties of economic and geopolitical power structures in which narratives of ethnicity are elided with narratives of legitimacy and protagonism. I have selected these three case studies because, having undertaken music-oriented fieldwork within each of these cultural milieus, I have been struck by the nuanced contrasts and resonances between them. Questions of territory, of nationhood, of class, and of cultural heritage all emerge in domains of musical performance, interwoven with the politics of representation and an urgent need to take into account direct correspondences between thriving cultural expression and collective morale in the face of cultural rupture and possible erasure. It is striking that the return to power of the Taliban to Afghanistan, the continued aggression against Kurds by the Turkish State (and we must add perceptions that natural disasters such as wildfires and the recent earthquakes that claimed the lives of thousands in Southeastern Turkey and Northern Syria are compounded and weaponized through state policies), and the brutal response to nationwide uprisings in Iran in the wake of the senseless murder of Zhina (Mahsa) Amini by Iranian security forces,

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which has played out especially acutely in Balochistan, have opened pathways for explicit solidarity across previously rigid communal, political, regional, and cultural boundaries, including between Kurds, Baloch, and Hazaras. Even the rallying cry resounding first across Iran and then glob̄ ally, “Zan, Zindagı ̄, Azādı ̄” (Woman, Life, Freedom), is a Persian translation of a political slogan in Kurmanji and has notably spread to Afghanistan and has since been rendered  into Balochi among other languages. As Hazara singer, dambura player, and activist Abdurrauf Sarkhosh—who we shall meet in the following section—said when interviewed at a rally in Gothenburg in 2022 “I am very proud that today, throughout the world, and especially in Afghanistan, the flag of freedom is held by our daughters, our mothers, our sisters” (Kheili eftekhar mikonum ki emruz dar tamām-e dunyā wa ba khosūs dar Afghānistān, bayrak-e a ̄zādı ̄, parcham-e āzādı ̄, ba dast-e dokhtarha ̄-ye mā, mādarhā-ye mā, khwāharhā-ye māst).1 The binding thread among the groups foregrounded in this article is the way music is strategically deployed by people who, although possessed of a strong sense of cultural selfhood and sometimes phantom nationhood, have been left to fend for themselves in an unforgiving wilderness of mounting adversity. There is always the hope that humanity at large is poised to take their side, to champion the freedom and terra firma they seek, if only the right messages can be conveyed. At the same time, counteracting internal fissures and faltering morale is at least as important as getting through to an outside world.

Hazara Visions of an Integrated Afghanistan In Afghanistan, Hazaras represent one of two major groups held to be native to the central portion of the country, the other being a nomadic Pashtun group designated as Kuchis. The portion of Central Afghanistan in which Hazara have been historically concentrated is sometimes called the Hazarajat, suggestive of an autochthonous status. Hiromi Lorraine Sakata compares this region with the northeastern portion of Afghanistan that climbs into the Pamir mountains: “The inaccessibility of the Hazarajat perhaps equals that of Badakhshan, but here the likeness ends. Hazarajat seems inhospitable and stark when compared to the green and fertile valleys of Badakhshan. […] Sometimes the land is even too harsh for the Hazaras, many of whom emigrate to the cities in search of a living” (2002: 29). Despite a degree of isolation from the rest of Afghanistan, Sakata notes “contacts with Pashtun nomads who bring their flocks to graze in

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the Hazarajat every summer. These contacts provide for an exchange of good and services, but more often result in quarrels and violence” (ibid.). Legends circulate portraying Hazaras as descended at least in part from the armies of Genghis Khan, and some have proposed that the term Hazara is a Persian rendering of the Mongol term minggan designating a unit of 1000 soldiers (see Jamal 2010: 6). In fact, there is a considerably larger volume of Mongol words in the Hazaregi dialect of Persian than in Iranian, Herawi, Tajik, or Kabuli Persian (ibid.: 22). Thus, Hazaras are variously portrayed as people who have been invaded and as the descendants of invaders (Greeks as well as Mongols). These are in no sense mutually exclusive perspectives—it is the underlying sentiments that are divergent. Some Hazara nationalists vocally reject the narrative of Mongol origins, as it is used to deny them an indigenous status and has in fact served to bolster calls for their exclusion from Afghanistan (Jamal 2010: 7). In his recent study of the Hazara language and its vocabulary, Hafiz Shari’ati weighs the different origin stories of Hazaras and notes the preference among European scholars of orientalist leanings for the Mongol origin narrative, admonishing that no one has ever been able to offer substantive evidence of this genealogy (Shari’ati 1395/2017: 45–46). Meanwhile, contemporary transnational Pan-Mongolian networks enthusiastically include Hazaras as a Mongol branch alongside Oirats, Buryats, Kalmyks, and others in the events they organize. The majority of Hazaras are Shi’i, which sets them apart from the larger portion of the already culturally diverse population of Afghanistan, who are Sunni and in some cases profoundly unsympathetic to a Shi’i religious orientation. Outside Afghanistan, there are notable concentrations of Hazaras in Quetta, Balochistan, Pakistan, and in numerous cities in Iran, owing to the flight of refugees from war and extremism alongside economic migration. The borders that give Afghanistan its distinctive shape on a map are the product of recent history, as is true for many of the world’s nations. The Durand line that arbitrarily bisects the Pashtun heartland (Pakhtunkhwa) into Pakistan- and Afghanistan-administered portions is a notorious imperial contrivance. The river Panj, which may be claimed as a natural boundary separating Afghanistan and Tajikistan, is in places a mere brook that can be waded in seconds with rolled up pant legs. Politically, it bisects communities that share the same Pamiri and Tajik languages, the same Isma’ili faith, and the same cultural repertoires. A Soviet influence is apparent in the shingled roofs, men’s suits, and (now practically antique)

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military-style jeeps regularly within sight along the Tajik side where the Afghan side is visually marked by mudbrick houses, men’s shalwar khameez, and a noticeable lack of vehicles, with donkeys being the rule for transport apart from the odd 4 WD. Today, however, the collective experience of weathering invasions, turmoil, and geopolitical power struggles as they ravaged Afghanistan has instilled a deep sense of shared belonging across Afghanistan’s diverse population. Unfortunately, Hazaras are most prone to exclusion on the part of the other groups. Hazaras have sought to integrate further into an Afghan unity, softening barriers with neighbors who often ostracize them, particularly on religious grounds, while also fostering a sense of intra-­ Hazara community that is transnational in nature. Musicians have taken up both agendas. In adopting the dambura, Hazara folk music entered a sphere shared with Uzbek and Tajik music. According to his son, Abdurrauf Sarkhosh, the singer and dambura player Sarwar Sarkhosh was killed amid his efforts to call for interethnic,2 trans-sectarian unity in Afghanistan during the period of Soviet invasion (see also Sakata 2013: 79). Long based in Vienna and now in Canada, Dawood Sarkhosh—Sarwar Sarkhosh’s younger brother and Abdurrauf’s uncle—has taken up his brother’s mission, crafting and performing very accessible, commercially viable music that is extremely well known not only among Hazaras around the world but also among Afghans broadly (see Kölbl 2021). One of his recent performances in response to the return to power of the Taliban once again affirms an Afghan unity with a rousing rendition of his best known song, the 1998 Sarzamı ̄n-e Man (The Land to Which I Belong),3 in which he speaks of anguish and longing that marks the collective experience of Afghan refugees, voiceless (bı ̄sorūd o bı ̄sedāi), exhausted from their suffering (khasteh khasteh az jafa ̄i), and faced with dead ends (kı ̄ rāhı ̄ tūrā goshūdeh?). Abdurrauf, facing threats, left Afghanistan in 2011 and was granted asylum in Sweden after an arduous journey by land and sea alongside other refugees, some of whom perished along the way. Based in Vänersborg in Southwest Sweden, he has taken a number of young Hazaras under his tutelage, teaching dambūra and hosting musical soirées. He has been invited to participate in a range of local festivals, appearing variously as the face of refugees, Swedish diversity, Afghans, and Hazaras, even performing amid a selection of metal bands at the Nordic Guitar Con. When I first met Abdurrauf Sarkhosh, he was performing alongside other accomplished musicians representing different regional milieus in an

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Aga-Khan-Foundation-sponsored ensemble that rehearsed at an Aga-­ Khan-­funded music center in Kabul. The ensemble would play pieces in a heterophonic unison with individual instrumentalists such as the Herati dūtār player Ustad Ghulamhaidar taking turns  coming to the fore to showcase regional inflections. When I visited Rauf at his home, he and a young zirbaghali player performed for me a whole range of pieces they would perform as a unit. Rauf’s repertoire as a self-proclaimed amateur musician (an important distinction in Afghanistan) was embroidered with narratives of displacement as well as of reaching across ethnic and cultural boundaries. His accompanist, the brilliant, completely original Azim Bamiyani, was a fellow Hazara from Central Afghanistan who he had met while laboring as a refugee near Mashhad in Iran, Rauf working at a truck weigh station, Azim picking fruit in the fields. Azim would come often to Rauf to weigh large quantities of melons, and thus, they became acquainted. Earlier, while living as a refugee in Pakistan, Rauf was rooming with a Pakistani English teacher and thought that if he rendered one of the songs he played into English, he could reach a wider audience. He performed at a program attended by English-speaking Pakistanis who, he told me, were charmed by the imperfections of his delivery. In Kabul, he asked me to contact an American colonel he had met in Daiqundi, his hometown in Uruzgan province, to ask if he could come perform at ISAF4 functions, and this song he felt would be indispensable for such an occasion. I got through to the colonel’s aide but our request was never answered. Another of the songs in his repertoire—Bibi Shirin—was a cover of a commercially recorded song in Pashto that was popular at the time. Rauf told me that in fact it was a Kuchi folksong traditionally sung at celebrations marking a seasonal migration. It is significant that Hazara musicians should include a song tied to the Kuchi community in light of the frequent conflict between Kuchis and Hazara. Kuchis, as a nomadic group, seek access to lands settled by Hazaras. Kuchis in some cases claim that they—along with their way of life—are the original inhabitants of Afghanistan (Foschini 2013: 4). Thus, they too hover between a reputation as invaders and an aura of deep-rootedness relative to other prominent groups in Afghanistan, so many of whom (Pashtuns, Uzbeks, Pamiris, Wakhis, Türkmens, Baloch, Arabs) can claim a cultural geography that extends far beyond Afghanistan’s current boundaries. However, another song the duo performed was a wedding song in the Hazaregi dialect but one that welcomed the dancing of different regions,

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specifying Kabul, Bamiyan, Daiqundi, and Daizangi. Rauf explained to me years later that it was meant, by extension, to welcome attendees from all backgrounds, whether Pashtun, Panjshiri, Türkmen, Uzbek, Sikh, Baloch, Sayad, and more on a list that was very long. Azim went on to be quite an established wedding performer with his own band, presiding as well as a maddāh at Shi’i commemorative occasions. Each musician then is very focused on service to a larger Hazara community but also on overtures to friendly relations with other groups with whom they are in proximity. Building these friendly relations is perhaps the lone defense available to Hazaras in the face of existential threats that have surrounded them under successive regimes and social climates. Recent news from Central Afghanistan is bleak, with steady reports of Hazaras forced from their homes and villages. In the aforementioned interview at the rally in Gothenburg, Abdurrauf is asked for his message to Afghans as a whole, whether inside or outside Afghanistan. What he asks of them, listed as “etehād, hambastegı ̄, ehterām ba hamdı ̄gar, va hampazı ̄ri-ye yek digar ba ̄ a ̄gāhı ̄ va da ̄nā’i” (unity, mutual cohesion, respect for one another, and acceptance for one another through awareness and wisdom), can easily be taken as core tenets of universal humanism but also should be read more specifically as an appeal to higher ideals that would lead to a much greater acceptance of Hazaras. It should ̄ be noted that, at this moment when “Zan, Zindagı ̄, Azādı ̄” had gained a great deal of traction, a Hazara-specific hashtag—#StopHazaraGenocide— had emerged and was finding support among sympathetic Pashtuns and Tajiks. When Azim fled Afghanistan with his family when the Taliban retook the country, they found themselves in a precarious situation that continues at the time of writing, having crossed into Iran illegally and without valid passports. He was particularly vulnerable and distraught upon arrival, lacking in possessions and any means to support himself. While he remains in a situation of great risk, his tone changed markedly once he had obtained a keyboard through financial support from a network of contacts and began performing at “programs” for Hazara in Tehran and other cities. Once again, he was a performer, a personality, and a conduit for Hazara community and festivity, rather than merely an abject, anonymous refugee. However, as crucial as this space for connection is, the lack of access to continued education for his children is acutely distressing for him, as for them to become cultured, literate, and confident citizens of the world is, in his eyes, their path to a bright future.

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As Zuzanna Olszewska explores in her study of communities of Afghan poets in Iran (2015: 39–50; 114–122), there is a great deal for Afghans— many of whom are Hazara—to navigate in Iran. Speaking to two ethnic Arabs from Iran in Muscat in 2000, one of them told me that because of his dark complexion, which he thought would lead to the assumption he was Afghan, he wouldn’t dare set foot in Hamadan where, he said, they cut off the heads of Afghans. When I was studying in Esfahan in 1999, a large portion of low wage manual laborers were displaced Afghans. Even Iranian friends I regarded as kindly and critically minded would repeat hostile assumptions regarding Afghans—one told me that Afghans posed a threat because they could be easily enlisted to commit murder for just a few dollars. Therefore, prominent Hazara musicians are often invested in confronting the circumstances facing Afghans as a whole, speaking to the particular vulnerabilities and collective consciousness and shared identities that span diffused communities of Hazaras, and tactfully addressing the prejudices that others—non-Hazara Afghans, Iranians, Europeans—hold toward Hazaras or Afghans generally depending on the circumstance.

Kurdish granî as Multidirectional Public Relations A loosely defined Kurdish public must navigate myriad, interlinked areas of uncertainty, from the place of Kurds within the geopolitical enclosures of Turkey, Iran, Iraq/Iraqi Kurdistan, and Syria to the mistrust and hostility with which affirmations of Kurdishness and Kurdish territorial aspirations are regarded to the continual reshuffling and resiting of Kurdish populations through processes of displacement, state aggression, and economic migration. Music responds to—and is shaped by—these pressures. In her comparative study of Kurdish and Amazigh nation-building—in Turkey and Morocco, respectively—Senem Aslan discusses the legal status of Kurdish music in the 1990s after the relaxation of the infamous law 2932, which explicitly banned all activities promoting a mother tongue other than Turkish. Aslan outlines both strategies Turkish policy-makers and security officials employed to curtail the free circulation of materials in Kurdish and the strategies by which Kurds sought to broadcast their music. If there was no case to be made that a song sung in Kurdish was politically inflammatory, it might be censured on moral grounds. The broadcasting of news and topical discussions was only accepted in languages other than Turkish if they were the languages internationally

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established in scientific and cultural forums, such as English, French, Russian, and German, presumably Arabic as well. Therefore, where music sung in Kurdish was theoretically less restricted, the level of scrutiny and the frequency of investigations and interrogations with respect to performing, broadcasting, or listening to music sung in Kurdish created a relentless sense of eminent threat. Aslan writes that the radio station Radio Karacadağ repeatedly “faced criminal charges for broadcasting banned Kurdish songs, all of which had permission from the Ministry of the Interior”: In a two-year period until 1998, approximately twenty legal investigations were opened against the radio station about these songs. Many times, the police renewed their accusations concerning the same songs to the prosecutor. In all these cases, the prosecutor decided to drop the charges, being unable to find any grounds for litigation. Radio Karacadağ’s experiences indicate the level of harassment and intimidation that Kurdish institutions had to face from state officials. (Aslan 2014: 154–155)

For its part, Radio Karacadağ “broadcast Kurdish songs but was careful to include world music in its repertoire in order to avoid being considered a pro-Kurdish radio station.”(153) More than just a tactic to obscure a conspicuous Kurdish orientation, the engagement with other musical and cultural frames alongside explicitly Kurdish ones aligns with two broad trends. The first is the fostering of contrasts with a Turkish nationalist stance, which asserts and valorizes a unified Turkish identity above all else, whether such an identity is more European or more Islamic in inflection. To this day, Kurds are frequently branded in everyday life as rough-hewn, uneducated, and uncultured by non-Kurdish Turkish citizens, an image promoted, in turn, explicitly and implicitly at the official level of government and state media discourse. At one point in the twentieth century, authorities insisted that Kurdish was not a language but a corrupted, Persian-­ influenced mountain Turkish. The fact that there are multiple Kurdish dialects in Turkey, such as Kurmanji and Zazaki—considered by linguists to be demonstrably separate languages—has merely reinforced the premise that there was no such thing as a Kurdish language. Inherent to proposals that Kurds govern themselves or at least be accorded a dramatically greater degree of regional autonomy are claims that the Kurdish cultural landscape is rich and variegated as well as cosmopolitan and respectful of and engaged with other communities

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representing their own ethnolinguistic milieus. If Kurds can show themselves, musically, to be effortlessly conversant in a global musical-cultural landscape, they acquire an image of versatility and broadmindedness that helps to subvert many of the demeaning narratives to which Kurds are subjected, in particular regarding their supposed parochialism. The second broad trend is for Turkish citizens who espouse a socially liberal, multicultural vision of Turkey to incline toward a “mosaic” model of culture and society, explicitly articulated in Sezen Aksu’s album “Işık Doğudan Yükselir” (see Stokes 2010: 130–132) and implicitly—and even more intensively—in the repertoires of groups such as Kardeş Türküler and Grup Yorum, collectives known for seeking to represent the full range of diverse cultural groups that comprise and inform Anatolian society (see Bates 2016: 94–97). This latter tendency notably creates a welcoming space for Kurdish culture, which is so often otherwise pointedly overlooked or represented as a threatening, volatile presence, always on the verge of violence.5 At the same time, in these sympathetic contexts, Kurdish culture—and specifically music—is molded to fit an ideology, to harmonize with distillations of other specified Anatolian cultures, with a musical template that invokes the communal and folkloric, while bespeaking in its instrumentation and arrangements a world of carefully mapped out, diligently rehearsed concert performances and recording sessions. Many Kurds are grateful for being cast in this light—the music is often rousing and exuberant but also gentle, even genteel. Replicating the logic of officially sanctioned Turkish folklore projects while contradicting their tendencies to exclude “non-Turkish” groups, songs are also somewhat rigidly compartmentalized, such as Laz, Greek, Armenian, and Kurdish, and each has a place in a modern Turkey with a progressive social outlook. With the severe restrictions on recording and performing in Kurdish in Turkey, many of the most widely disseminated Kurdish performers of the late twentieth century were based among immigrant communities in Germany, Sweden, and elsewhere in Europe. A kind of pan-Kurdish pantheon emerged that went on to form non-Kurdish audiences’ ideas of what Kurdish music looked and sounded like—Şivan Perwer, Kamkars, Ali Akbar Moradi, and Tara Jaff. At the same time, the luminaries of twentieth-­ century Kurdish music who are known mainly to Kurds represent figures of diverse local backgrounds, who also tended to move around, due to demands for their performances in various settings and shifts in the favorability of one location or another for living and working safely. If we look

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at the lives of artists such as Mihemed Arif Cizrawî, Ayşe Şan, Şakiro, Maryam Xan, Hasan Zirek, and Seîd Gabarî, we can note a considerable amount of movement from one region and city to another, in some cases as an extension of growing popularity, in others driven by financial insecurity. When openly performing Kurdish music became more viable than it had been in the 1980s and early 1990s, there was an explosion of young Kurds who began to pursue careers as wedding performers. Perhaps impelled by dire economic necessity, perhaps regarding the role of professional musician as recast in a more patriotic light, the young Kurds began to ignore commonplace stigmatizations of professional musicians as ethnic and moral outsiders and embraced the possibilities of personally contributing to trajectories of evolving repertoires. In the first decades of the twenty-first century, young male singers and instrumentalists (and videographers) emerged as the chief contemporary architects of the wedding as a social institution and expressive outlet. Some weddings take over communal spaces such as the residential streets of Kurdish neighborhoods or open squares of Kurdish towns and extend from the afternoon until late at night for several consecutive days. The more upscale, implicitly more respectable trend is to hold express wedding celebrations of approximately two hours in a professionally catered wedding hall with a full range of lighting and special effects options for mounting a glamorous spectacle. This packaging of Kurdish wedding events aligns with the mediated packaging of the music and dancing whereby young people routinely circulate and consume fragments of a given wedding. Many weddings are also livestreamed and can be viewed remotely, with effusive emoji reactions and gestures of encouragement and solidarity. Wedding performers double as recording artists, cultivating public personae more akin to pop or rock stars than mere commercial brandings as appealing and competent performers-for-hire serving nuptial needs. Without expecting to profit directly from their studio recordings or music videos, musicians monetize their works as best they can through cooperation with platforms such as YouTube, Instagram, and Spotify. Top wedding performers quickly generate millions of views upon uploading a new track or live clip. Rather than seeking to control the free digital circulation of music, it is more advantageous that it reaches all who will appreciate it. This ensures that their phones will be ringing constantly with invitations to play at weddings, which generally net them several thousand dollars. If

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feasible, they will play two weddings a week, sometimes more in the high season. Just as the performers representing Kurdish culture on the world stage through tours and major label releases are doing PR work for Kurds as a people, there is a great deal of thought that goes into how Kurdish society is portrayed in the studio recordings and music videos produced by wedding musicians, who tend to think of themselves as folk musicians, no matter how grounded their music is in high-tech contemporary popular music from EDM to latter day hard rock. The blatant omission of Kurdish folk music from the annals of state-sponsored archives and publications has at least meant that these artists aren’t breaking taboos by freely reimagining what Kurdish folk music is. When Kurds who are confined in their surroundings to marginalized Kurdish communities present their vision of a mosaic, it is every bit as cosmopolitan as Sezen Aksu or Kardeş Türküler but also brings a more charged edge. One particular contemporary genre, granî, is currently prominent among Kurds in Diyarbakir and neighboring provinces in Turkey as well as—increasingly—in centers of Kurdish migration across Turkey and Europe and can serve as an illustration. The name of this genre refers specifically to a slow line dance but more generally to the sonic aesthetic of electric and electronic instruments that accompany the dance at today’s weddings. This genre is characterized by distortion, sustained tones, and heavy virtuosity—“shredding” is the invariable anglophone response. The flow and melodic contour proceeds from traditional wedding dance music played on instruments suited to the open air such as the shrill zirne,6 whose timbre directly informs the carefully tweaked overdriven tone of the elektrobağlama,7 with a feel that also recalls some of the heaviest rock music (we might think of the beefy guitar tone, nimble riffing, and driving energy of early Black Sabbath). As a sound and genre in the making—and one whose accredited architects I have been working with as a researcher from 2004 to the present— granî reveals a great deal about the mood, concerns, internal social dynamic, and regional positionality of a large Kurdish public, particularly how they are eager to represent themselves to the world around them and how they are determined to represent themselves to themselves. The sound of the contemporary Kurdish wedding, particularly among working class urban communities in the Diyarbakir vicinity and in Kurdish migrant communities across Turkey, is a kaleidoscopic, accumulative pastiche of musical styles. To a traditional, regional folk dance armature is

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welded all manner of other resonant musical templates, from political anthems of Kurdish resistance to invocations of the dengbêj and the pavyon8 to nods to hip hop and Arabesk. All styles are internalized in the playing of the elektrobağlama, which reproduces the penetrating timbre and flutter of the zirne, the sentimental flourishes of melodramatic Arabesk, and the droning, shrieking barrages characteristic of the effects-­ laden electric guitar across genres such as metal, punk, and electric blues. In the granî context, the dance beats are supplied by one or more rock-­ style drum kits or by sequences programmed into electronic keyboards, which also frequently mimic the distorted riffs of the elektrobağlama. Kurdish wedding musicians adhere to certain patterns in the videos they produce. Dancing is the most reliable visual component, with young men and women in traditional Kurdish attire occupying the frame. Picturesque and historic surroundings are common—the grassy fields along the Tigris, the ramparts and bazaar of old Diyarbakir. Increasingly, however, as high production values become more accessible on a modest budget, drone shots of luxuriating on boats or along a corniche while wearing name brand clothing and accessories have become a dominant theme. It is important that Kurds regard themselves precisely as they are not regarded in the Turkish media and popular imagination—as socially and professionally successful, as gainfully employed, as having refined tastes, and as being at ease. Public relations work is directed not only at fashioning and reforming outsider perceptions of Kurds as a collectivity but also at cultivating a positive self-image. The phenomenon of granî can be understood as a kind of stewardship on the part of young, working class, male musicians. As a contribution to the North Kurdish social landscape of Turkey amid ongoing tensions and unredressed grievances, granî accomplishes the following: It injects the concept of Kurdish folklore with a sense of currency and life, a living, breathing, growing expressive idiom that belongs to the people and has not atrophied in the manner increasingly portrayed as the fate of the art of the dengbêj (see Scalbert-Yücel 2009) and in many senses of the stable categories of Anatolian folk music—rigorously archived and enshrined by the TRT to the notable exclusion of Kurdish music. It emerged as a deliberate maneuver to reinforce the transgenerational cohesion among participants in Kurdish weddings by ensuring that one of the dominant dance forms was slow enough for the elderly and less physically able to participate fully.

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It offers a social space to adolescents in the absence of viable nightlife establishments, a time and place of unambiguous belonging. It offers great flexibility during times of great uncertainty—it can be purely instrumental or support politically charged songs, offering the wildly talented virtuoso endless possibilities for experimentation while remaining accessible, in its tonal, rhythmic, and structural simplicity, to untrained musicians and dancers. It is true to life—hard edged, earthy, and upholding a reliable groove while still laced with memories of the acoustic accompaniment at village weddings, so faithful are the elektrobağlama and keyboard players to the timbral aesthetics, ornamentation, attack and sustain, and overall phraseology of the zirne and the kemaçe (spike fiddle) It recenters nonelite, working class communities as having a creative agency in the public evolution of Kurdish cultural expression, bearing in mind that this same milieu—and above all its young men—has tended to provoke ridicule and inspire fear, and yet here have claimed an outlet far less likely to invite scorn and labels akin to Arabesk (see Stokes 1992) and Apaçi (see Uyar 2011). Perhaps above all, granî is the most dramatically living, breathing, and perceptibly evolving facet of arguably the lone economy in Turkey that is anchored in Kurdish cultural expression. Therefore, the agency invested in the musicians who embody this genre and the responsibilities they shoulder must be taken very seriously.

Extending the Mulk: Intangible Dimensions to Baloch Connectivity and Territory The extent to which Balochistan is labeled on maps corresponds to two administrative jurisdictions: the provinces of Sistan va Balochistan in Iran and Balochistan in Pakistan. From the perspective of Baloch, Balochistan properly extends to a portion of southernmost Afghanistan, the eastern portion of Iran’s Hormozgan province, and parts of the Iranian provinces of Kerman and Southern Khorasan. Beyond this loosely delineated homeland, Baloch also inhabit, in significant concentrations, adjacent and nearby regions, principally the Karachi metropolitan area, the Yolöten river valley of Eastern Turkmenistan, and cities and towns of coastal Oman and UAE, with large communities in Bahrain, Qatar, and Kuwait as well.

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Within the Persian- and Punjabi/Muhajjer/Sindhi-dominated spheres of Iran and Pakistan, Baloch have faced neglect and exclusion in areas of development, economic opportunity, political agency, infrastructure, and education. As an example of the kind of exploitation that Baloch seeks to reverse, Pakistan, with heavy investment from China, has been developing the Baloch city of Gwadar as a massive industrial Arabian Sea port and terminus for pipelines carrying oil and gas from Central Asia. Simultaneously, Iran, with investment from India, has been developing the Baloch coastal town of Chabahar as a free trade zone and industrial port with critical Gulf and Indian Ocean access. In these projects, Iran competes with Pakistan, and China competes with India. Each expanding city is then a magnet for economic migration, with non-Baloch Iranian, Pakistani, and Chinese laborers cutting local Baloch out of employment opportunities and revenues being drained away from Balochistan instead of reinvested in the local economy and development needs. Baloch as a collective are subject to typecasting that further muffles their ability to be heard. They have routinely been branded mercenaries, bandits, drug smugglers, and insurgents. They are criminalized in the popular imagination on the one hand, while perceptions of fierceness and loyalty have led them to be targeted for service in regional police and military forces within various regional imperial, colonial, and monarchal structures. In Bahrain today, Baloch recruits to the police and security services conspicuously reinforce the State in the face of a restive citizenry who resist the policies and authority of the rulership. As bearers of culture and folklore, Baloch receive a different kind of attention. In Iran, connoisseurs of “local” (mahalı ̄), “regional” (navāhı ̄), “epic” (hemmāsı ̄), or “ceremonial” (a ̄inı ̄) musics tend to be very aware of and attracted by Baloch genres such as she ̄r, guātı ̄ leb, lı ̄kū, zahı ̄rōk, and sōt and their local performers. For obvious reasons, the substantial number of Iranian publications that speak to this interest and are produced under state policies that regulate ways in which Iran’s diverse social landscape is represented are silent with respect to the political dynamics that inform the experiences and sentiments of Baloch communities. Even so, the disconnect is jarring—Baloch musical idioms tend to be enshrined as vibrant but at the same time residual displays of premodern culture, a characteristic romanticization of rural and nomadic populations by urbane Iranian social milieus. In the popular imagination of urban intellectuals, Baloch are the sturdy, fearsome dwellers of Iran’s inhospitable Eastern frontiers and perform this

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role in the works of various auteurs. Filmmaker Parviz Kimiavi, for instance, prior to the 1979 revolution, made a pair of films that offer biting critiques of the rapid degeneration of Iranian cultural values in favor of brand-new technologies and sensibilities emanating from the U.S. and Europe. Mogolha (The Mongols) explicitly compared the advent of television with all the requisite physical apparatus, such as antennae, to invading hordes on horseback, with images of Baloch nomads representing the collapsing of space and time through broadcasting, the threat of lawless invaders, and the landscape of premodern tradition all bound up together in loaded images. The tableaus that appear in his montages curiously echo the use of photographs of Baloch “bandits in the mountains of Persia” viewed through a plastic stereoscope by decadent hippies and their resident gangster in Donald Cammell’s and Nicholas Roeg’s late 1960s London in their kaleidoscopic film Performance. Most telling is the arc of Kimiavi’s Ok Mister, set in an unspecified village whose arid, windswept setting and mudbrick architecture strongly suggest southeastern Iran. When the villagers are captivated by the wiles of westerners who have plopped into their midst in a damaged hot air balloon and become swept into a frenzy of outrageous goggles and Grand Funk Railroad t-shirts, snorkeling through lanes piled with garishly colored synthetic fabrics, it is a simple, toothless, white bearded villager who snaps them out of their folly, reminding them of life’s bare, rustic essentials: “khak… Gol… Gandum” (soil, flowers, wheat). This same barren environment is romanticized in contemporary Baloch poetry as the setting most infused with balance and nostalgia and the backdrop of struggles and valor, past and present. Far from uniformly impoverished, Baloch society is marked by wealthy families of prominence who wield a great deal of power and authority, even as Baloch nationalist political movements such as the Baloch Students’ Organization proclaim a dedication to a classless, egalitarian society. Nonetheless, Baloch of prestigious family backgrounds still play influential roles in literary organizations that serve as sites for cultural activism. Male gatherings in which poetry is read aloud (mushaira) are focal points for the assertion of a cohesive Baloch cultural consciousness and the articulation of political outlooks. Nationalist poetry (komi sher) and revolutionary poetry (inkilabi sher) are declaimed alongside less politicized works that are more focused on introspective contemplations or feelings of interpersonal infatuation and longing.

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Baloch men and women immersed in the culture of poetic verse are far more common than competent performers of Baloch musical genres, the latter being generally drawn from lineages of hereditary artisans. However, whenever possible, having singers and instrumentalists present at gatherings is highly valued, and there is a great deal of overlap between sets of individuals dedicated to literary activity and networks of individuals who maintain close relationships with performers and promote them and sponsor their performances. From vantage points in Oman, UAE, Bahrain, Qatar, and Kuwait, I have noted the extent to which these networks tightly bind communities disparately sited in Balochistan, Karachi, the Gulf, and Europe (notably Sweden and Norway). Here, again, we see how inherently entwined a national consciousness and a postnational space can be. The term used to express the concept of Baloch culture is rather specialized and does not come up in everyday speech—dodorobidag. This term is used for the Baloch culture day (Balochey Dodorobidagey roch) observed every year on March 2. In more insular circles of Baloch intellectuals, it equates to every dimension of Baloch culture that can be located in the unspoilt mulk (home country). In Baloch cultural contexts, people often identify themselves with a mulk, a home region that they can specify (e.g., Mand, Dasht, Bam Pusht), and within that mulk, a mitag—a distinct village or neighborhood within a city or town. However, Balochistan is also the mulk collectively for Baloch who dwell outside. On so many levels, the quality of life has been degraded relative to that imagined by a nostalgic consciousness of a “pure” Baloch culture as expressed through the heritage of music and poetry as well as less formalized oral traditions and material culture. On social media, a range of communities are focused on maintaining and promoting an awareness of an authentic Baloch lexicon, often seizing the names of archaic farming implements and species of plants and animals endemic to Balochistan. One household where I was a guest for a period in Al-‘Ain, UAE, lived in a large, newly built villa with an adjacent garage, but across the courtyard was a traditional Baloch shelter (lōg) with a barastı ̄ (woven palm frond) canopy and various handmade traditional implements hanging inside. The inseparability of the abstract concept of dodorobidag and the idealized setting of the mulk is very much alive in the leisure outings of Baloch families and especially groups of male friends and relations who seek out green areas with running streambeds in wadis outside of Muscat, in the mountains—Jebel Shams and Jebel Akhdar—or in Dhofar during the lush

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rainy season—the summer monsoon months when a misty rainy activates an extraordinary explosion of greenery that blankets the usually arid and barren South Arabian landscape. In some frames, Baloch represents an immigrant population who must negotiate their place in these Gulf States. In others, it is clearer that Balochs are firmly established as a major component in the diverse demographic character of these long-evolving societies. Certain districts in particular (such as Khoudh and Maabelah in Muscat) convey an even more acute sense of being an annex to Balochistan, especially when Baloch community rhythms overflow into public spaces or when literary salons are held and events are organized around the presence of Makrani Baloch musicians whose livelihoods crucially depend on patronage from the Gulf, a relationship reliably acknowledged even by those researchers (e.g., Sabir Badalkhan and Jean During) who concentrate their studies on musical culture within Balochistan. Turning to Scandinavia, the celebrated master of the benju, Abdurrahman Surizehi, lives in Oslo. His father played a major role in developing a keyed zither invented in early twentieth century Japan, where it was called taishōgoto into a distinctly South Asian variety known as benju (after the banjo) (Surizehi 2006), and Abdurrahman went on to popularize not only the instrument but his own virtuosic approach to integrating rhythmic strumming of the damburag and sung and fiddled melodies— especially those featured in guātı ̄ ceremonies—into mesmerizing, shimmering patterns. I met Abdurrahman Surizehi in Oslo in 2018 with his daughter and a friend of hers who spoke to me about the musical activities of their generation of Scandinavians of Baloch background. One music group that both women singled out as particularly meaningful was the rap duo Lash. The word lash in Baloch—as in Persian— means corpse, but here it is also short for Lashari, the Baloch family name of the performers who are sisters and both openly queer. Considered in the context of the popular culture landscape of Sweden, the hip hop-ness, the queerness, and the blanket immigrant-ness of the sisters may be far more prominently integral to their public image than their Balochness. However, the two Norwegian Baloch women I was speaking with emphasized ways in which they represented their Baloch identity that were empowering for Baloch: Sneaking Baloch words and expressions into their Swedish-slang-riddled rhymes, and the fact that their conservative, extremely culturally Baloch mother went on record vocally supporting their sexuality.

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In a short video devoted to the notion of women’s identity produced by the Swedish fashion brand Monki (2019), the Lashari sisters are profiled and interviewed (in English) alongside other women of diverse backgrounds. The piece never mentions their Baloch heritage, but one of them, when she comes around to most directly addressing what identity means to her, emphasizes that identity is a fluid, elusive, and potentially insignificant concept, but ultimately, when she thinks of the most stable aspect of her identity, it is her cultural heritage and her motherland. The songs and music videos are vivid depictions of life in housing estates, the self-censorship-in-public of women who prefer female partners, and in one case, inspired by tiresome questions they have been asked about sexual contact between women. One significant facet of this duo then, from Baloch perspectives, is that their strong stance and high visibility in a Swedish cultural sphere occurs on the part of women who are also proud Baloch with an affectionate attachment to their mulk, once again extending the vivid presence of the mulk far outside its geographic confines.

Conclusion Musical performers serve as cultural activists and liaisons, who navigate fraught terrains of crisis and encounter in real time and emerge with fine-­ tuned impulses and wide angle perspectives that go on to shape what they want to say and how they say it. Today, Baloch, Kurds, Hazaras, and many other groups (e.g., Imazighen, Uyghurs) offer clear examples of collective affiliations that dwell in postnational frames that disrupt the logic of nation as an enclosed, governed territory. Considering the prospects for a stable resolution to the major ordeals facing Hazaras, Kurds, and Baloch sadly inspires pessimism. To safeguard Balochistan from plundering and profiteering, for Kurds to be allowed to transform the region they call home from a cluster of heavily policed borderlands into a stable, cohesive, and autonomously governed entity, or for Hazaras to escape sectarian persecution and enjoy an equal belonging in Afghanistan’s rural and urban landscapes—each of these perfectly reasonable objectives depends on unthinkably drastic concessions from parties who have shown themselves to be profoundly unsympathetic to these communities. In response, music and other expressive arts serve the crucial functions of providing emotional-social outlets, delineating topical forums, and constructing an arena for public self-actualization in which

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forces of cultural erasure are temporarily vanquished, libelous misrepresentations are defanged, and the horizons of conviviality are bright and limitless. This is soft power in the conspicuous absence of hard power. In potent gestures that speak to the interdependence of autonomy, selfhood, and unbounded creative agency, music is used not only to enliven communal life but also to refuse the constraints of rigid compartmentalization and to harness the power of self-representation within the public sphere. For culturally inscribed collectives struggling to gain or maintain a foothold with the world’s geopolitical topography, this is cultural diplomacy at its most dire and most critical.

Notes 1. https://youtube.com/watch?v=6Ie3WAJnSPM&si=EnSIkaIECMiOmarE. 2. Intraethnic as well—as Zuzanna Olszewska (2015: 23) points out, there was severe fighting among Hazara factions in Central Afghanistan in the 1980s. 3. Actually a poem by Dawood Sarkhosh that he recorded set to the melody of the song “Haydi Söyle” by Ibrahim Tatlises (see Kölbl 2021). 4. The NATO-dominated International Security Assistance Force deployed in Afghanistan from 2001–2014 to support the centralized government and civilian populations against insurgents, jihadists, and lawless elements. 5. For instance, in the late summer of 2021, large swaths of Mediterranean Turkey were devastated by wildfires that have generally been linked to climate change. During this time there were spates of violent attacks on Kurds, fueled by viral disinformation campaigns claiming that Kurds had started the fires. 6. Conical double-reed shawm. 7. The electric version of both the Anatolian bağlama and the Kurdish tembûr—closely related long-necked lutes associated with regional folk music and bardic repertoires. 8. The dengbêj is a bardic figure who recites orally transmitted epic narratives in Kurmanji in a highly stylized, melodized recitative with impassioned ornamentation while the pavyon is an archetypal nightclub of questionable repute where electrified renditions of central Anatolian folk songs provide the soundtrack to a floorshow of dancing women as men are pressured to consume large quantities of overpriced drinks and spend even more on hostesses under the watchful eyes of the gangster-esque patron and his henchmen.

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References Appadurai, Arjun. 1991. Global ethnoscapes: Notes and queries for a transnational anthropology. In Recapturing anthropology: Working in the present, ed. Richard G. Fox. Albuquerque, NM: School of American Research Press. ———. 1996. Sovereignty without territoriality: Notes for a postnational geography. In The geography of identity, ed. Patricia Yaeger, 40–58. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Aslan, Senem. 2014. Nation-building in Turkey and Morocco: Governing Kurdish and Berber Dissent. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bates, Eliot. 2016. Digital traditions: Arrangement and labor in Istanbul’s recording studio culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dueck, Byron. 2011. “Introduction” to “Part 1: Migrants”. In Migrating music, ed. Jason Toynbee and Byron Dueck, 21–27. London and New  York: Routledge. Foschini, Fabrizio. 2013. The social wandering of the Afghan Kuchis. Afghanistan Analysts Network Thematic Report 4. Jamal, Abedin. 2010. Attitudes toward Hazaragi. MA Thesis, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. Kölbl, Marko. 2021. Ethnomusicology, fieldwork, and the refugee experience: Notes on Afghan music in Austria. Music & Minorities 1. Monki. 2019. You don’t have to define yourself for other people. Identity, Monki Thinks series. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BS4Y1_VCpAk. Olszewska, Zuzanna. 2015. The Pearl of Dari: Poetry and personhood among young Afghans in Iran. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Sakata, Hiromi Lorraine. 2002. Music in the mind: The concepts of music and musician in Afghanistan. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution. ———. 2013. Afghanistan encounters with music and friends. Los Angeles: Mazda. Scalbert-Yücel, Clemence. 2009. The invention of a tradition: Diyarbakir’s Dengbêj project. European Journal of Turkish Studies 10. Shari’ati, Hafiz. 1395/2017. Guyesh-e Hazaragi: Sarf, Nahw, Avashenasi, Vazheshenasi. Kabul: Amiri. Stokes, Martin. 1992. The Arabesk Debate: Music and musicians in modern Turkey. Oxford University Press. ———. 2010. The Republic of Love: Cultural intimacy in Turkish popular music. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Surizehi, Abdorahman. 2006. Notes from the CD, “Balochi Gowati o Damali Zeymol: Instrumental Love songs and Trance Music from Balochistan.” Kongsberg, Norway: Etnisk Musikklubb. Uyar, Yaprak Melike. 2011. A newly emerging subculture in Turkey: Apaches dancing to a fusion of progressive trance and Arabesk. Unpublished paper.

CHAPTER 13

Epilogue: Cultural Diplomacy, Some Discontents Yudhishthir Raj Isar

Introduction The most likely function for an epilogue to any scholarly volume would be to share additional or novel perspectives on the main subject matter. In the present case, on the Middle Eastern musical initiatives and issues explored in the preceding twelve essays. The writer would probably be expected to express complimentary views on the essays, albeit perhaps not wholly, since there is always a place for constructively critical judgements. However, as I have scant expertise in the ethnomusicological domain, although I am a fervent music-lover and concertgoer, and also an anthropologist by training, it was understood that my contribution would focus on cultural diplomacy, which is the second term in the binomial that constitutes the volume’s title and subject matter. Nevertheless, what I have to say here may not be quite what the editors expected, for reasons that I shall explain. While the noun “epilogue” is value-neutral in both English and French (and no doubt in most other

Y. R. Isar (*) The American University of Paris, Paris, France © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 M. M. Rijo Lopes da Cunha et al. (eds.), Music and Cultural Diplomacy in the Middle East, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36279-8_13

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languages), there is a French verbal form, épiloguer, that doesn’t exist in English, and has a somewhat negative connotation. As I myself work and think in both English and French, this notion came to mind immediately when I began to reflect on the assignment I was given. The French verb denotes the articulation of critical commentary that is often long, at best a bit of a quibble, and at its worst somewhat specious, if not malicious. Now while I admit to no malicious intent, some may well see a degree of semantic quibbling in the claim that I have been making for many years about the term “cultural diplomacy” as it is deployed nowadays. This claim is a contrarian one, namely that cultural diplomacy has become a portmanteau term, hence one that is over-used and over-extended. Moreover, as the term is understood by most people and most institutions nowadays—and most certainly by many of the contributors to this excellent volume—it conflates what I identify as cultural diplomacy stricto sensu, which is intrinsically instrumental, with the practice of cultural relations, which isn’t. This claim of mine has been alluded to by Maria M.  Rijo Lopes da Cunha in her admirable Introduction to the volume, which cites points raised in the sections of a 2015 co-authored paper (Ang et al. 2015) of which I was the principal author Since her treatment of these points was necessarily an overview, it could not go beyond simply summarizing the arguments. Hence, I shall explore them in more detail in the pages that follow. In a nutshell, I argue that only six of the twelve musical initiatives that have been explored so well in the preceding pages are actually cases of cultural diplomacy as I believe the term ought to be understood or intersect with issues that arise with respect to it. Maria M. Rijo Lopes da Cunha in her Introduction to the volume, sets the stage by judiciously exploring recent literature in the domain of cultural diplomacy before taking inspiration from these writings to trace a range of musical flows from the Arab Levant to new cultural poles in the Gulf. Jonathan Shannon’s exploration of “melodies heard and unheard” with regard to Andalusi musics across the Straits of Gibraltar provides a lucid review of the potential, as well as the limits—and some perverse effects—of musical performance in forging inter-cultural understanding. Houda Shawa’s analysis of the gift made by Queen Elizabeth I to the Ottoman Sultan of a golden jewel-encrusted automated musical clockwork organ illustrates the complex relationships between elite cultural expression and the exercise of power, confirming Richard Arndt’s apt characterization of cultural diplomacy as the “first

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resort of kings” (Arndt 2006). Virginia Danielson focuses on musical performance as a diplomatic force for Egypt, by analyzing the sometimes-­ paradoxical ways in which the international touring of star musicians, notably Umm Kulthum, has conjugated governmental objectives with the performer’s own agency. Finally, Audrey M. Wozniak’s explicitly entitled contribution—“Singing and Bringing the Domestic Abroad: Examining Cultural Diplomacy in the Context of Diasporic Amateur Turkish Music Choirs”—unpacks the ways in which amateur Turkish music choirs across the Turkish diaspora “play a key role in animating community abroad” (a feature of self-representation shared by the cultural diplomacy programmes of several countries, notably China and India) and are often solicited by officially created Turkish state choirs, whose efficacy is severely hampered by bureaucracy. To my mind, the remaining twelve cases (which I shall not list out here) that have been analysed in this volume do not have any significant cultural diplomacy content but either deal with significant ethnomusicological issues that arise within the boundaries of a single nation-state or exemplify activities of cultural relations rather than cultural diplomacy. Now if this assertion is valid, the question arises of why the term cultural diplomacy has become so prevalent. What has been its trajectory and wherein lies its “magic”? Why are scholars so keen on making their subjects “fit” within the Procrustean bed of cultural diplomacy?

Cultural Relations Are Different from Cultural Diplomacy Indeed, the term “cultural diplomacy” looms large nowadays, not just where it ought to, in the foreign policy stances and programmes of nation-­ states, but also in culturalist discourse in general and among many cultural operators. Yet there is often a distinct lack of clarity in the way the notion is used, on exactly what its practice involves, on why it is important, or on how it works. Much of this indeterminacy stems from the conflation of cultural diplomacy stricto sensu, which is essentially interest-driven governmental practice, with cultural relations, which tends to be driven by ideals rather than interests and is practiced largely by non-state actors. The semantic field covered by the term cultural diplomacy has broadened very considerably over the years. It now applies to pretty much any practice that is related to purposeful cultural cooperation carried out

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trans-­nationally between nations or groups of nations by governmental as well as civil society actors. Yet one also observes many instances in which the term is used for interactions within nations, among cities and regions for example, or even between and among rival or conflicting cultural groups within national societies. In the process, the term has floated some distance away from its original moorings. The American diplomat turned writer Richard Arndt, whose work has just been alluded to, made the necessary distinction between cultural relations that “grow naturally and organically, without government intervention” and “cultural diplomacy [that] can only be said to take place when formal diplomats, serving national governments, try to shape and channel this natural flow to advance national interests” (Arndt 2006, p. xviii). This useful distinction has become increasingly blurred, however. A perfect example is the following definition proposed by Emil Constantinescu, a distinguished academic and former President of Romania (1996–2000), that was presented at the opening of a recent cultural diplomacy conference as a working definition of the practice: Cultural Diplomacy may best be described as a course of actions, which are based on and utilize the exchange of ideas, values, traditions and other aspects of culture or identity. Whether to strengthen relationships, enhance sociocultural cooperation, or promote national interests, Cultural Diplomacy can be practiced by either the public sector, private sector, or civil society.

Although the intelligentsia in countries such as France have used the term since the late nineteenth century, cultural diplomacy entered common parlance in English (as well as in many countries, whether English-speaking or not) only in the 1990s. It was originally used to refer to the processes occurring when diplomats serving national governments took recourse to cultural exchanges and flows or sought to channel them for the advancement of their perceived national interests. But the scope of the term has broadened to become far more capacious that that. Both cultural relations and cultural diplomacy tend nowadays to be perceived and deployed as instruments for the attainment or promotion of a wide range of good causes. Recent years have seen a host of conferences and seminars centred on finding ways to have cultural diplomacy tackle issues including intercultural dialogue, the role of artists in social change, international private philanthropy in the arts and cultural rights—an issue internal to national communities if there ever was one.

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In the enumeration above, I deliberately chose to list “intercultural dialogue” first, for together with “dialogue of civilizations” this notion has become the favoured overarching trope for all cultural cooperation. One would not quarrel with this usage. It is surely vital to foster the sorts of intercultural competencies needed to respond to the dual “claims of cultures to retain their variety, and to … meet and intermingle within the context of a new global civilization … through risky dialogues with other cultures than can lead to estrangement and contestation as well as comprehension and mutual learning” (Benhabib 2002: xii-xiv). Or, as Jacques Delors put it, to learn how to live together in “a new spirit which, guided by recognition of our growing interdependence and a common analysis of the risks and challenges of the future, would induce people to implement common projects or to manage the inevitable conflicts in an intelligent and peaceful way” (Delors et al. 1996: 23). But the forging of such a new intercultural spirit requires processes far more complex and person-to-person based than those included in the toolbox of cultural diplomacy as I have just described it. In this domain as well as in others, broader definitions are needed if the cultural processes in question can be legitimately characterized as cultural diplomacy. A case in point is Milton Cummings’ often cited belief that cultural diplomacy “refers to the exchange of ideas, information, art and other aspects of culture among nations and their peoples in order to foster mutual understanding” (Cummings 2003: 1). In fact, mutual understanding is only sometimes the object. The true protagonists of cultural diplomacy are never abstract “nations” or generalized “peoples.” Governmental agents and envoys are. In other words, cultural diplomacy is a governmental practice that operates in the name of a clearly defined ethos of national or local representation, in a space where nationalism and internationalism merge. In this sense, the term has come to be used as a partial or total replacement for many previously used notions such as foreign cultural relations, international cultural relations (ICR), international cultural exchange or international cultural cooperation. At the same time the different terms in this semantic constellation—including cultural diplomacy—tend to be used interchangeably, making it a true floating signifier. In this process, all the state actors involved, as well as their partners, are deeply engaged in the practice of what Raymond Williams (1984: 3) once called “cultural policy as display”. This may consist either of “national aggrandizement,” or “economic reductionism,” or both (the latter term refers to the justification of cultural investment in terms of economic and employment

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pay-offs). For the first, historical precedents abound—the arts patronage of princes, kings, and bishops; and indeed, the example of the gift Queen Elizabeth I made to the Ottoman Sultan presented in this volume. Also, the great exhibitions and world fairs past and present combining both display and commerce, concerned as they were and increasingly are with “promoting national business in a complex interplay with other nations and in the context of trade rivalry” (McGuigan 2004: 91). These obvious instrumental purposes of cultural diplomacy tend to be played down, even elided, today. Perhaps it is awkward to explicitly recognize such workings of the “exhibitionary complex” (Bennett 1995) built into state cultural policy for what they are.

A Talismanic Term and Its Discontents The logic of the “new” public diplomacy, within which cultural diplomacy is generally included, is for governments to build alliances with non-state actors with a view to engaging with much larger publics (Cull 2009). This begs the question, however, of whether artists and arts organizers are actually interested in singing the government-led tune. The theatre scholar and activist Dragan Klaic argued strongly that they are not; for him their motivations in working across national boundaries are “about more than promotion,” focussing on purposes such as mutual learning; pooling of resources; co-financing; technical assistance; joint reflection, debate, research and experimentation; and “in its most complex forms, cooperation in the creative processes, the creation of new artistic works.” (2007: 46) The failure to recognize that cultural actors are not seeking to attain State interest-driven deliverables seems to signal a disjuncture from reality. Cull recognizes (2009: 19) that “discomfort with advocacy roles and overt diplomatic objectives have led some Cultural Diplomacy organizations to distance themselves from the term….” Yet he himself sticks with the term. On the other hand, few are likely to distance themselves to an equal degree from the grants available under the cultural diplomacy rubric. Recourse to grand narratives such as “intercultural dialogue,” or “mutual understanding” makes it easier for them to adopt this stance, just as it makes it easier for governments to advance the national interest while remaining safely cloaked in the mantle of these noble concepts. So, there is a respondent opportunism at work on the part of cultural actors, even if its mainsprings are different, i.e., artistic, deontological, ethical or

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axiological rather than interest-driven in the strict sense of the word. Espousing the cause of cultural diplomacy is no doubt good strategy, in terms of funding and visibility, even for players who may not want to be in the business of diplomacy at all. To be sure, artistic self-identification with the practice of cultural diplomacy and claims to be performing it, is partly or even largely opportunistic, as they have become open sesames to support from official sources. But clearly there is also a kind of cognitive and emotional attachment to this vogue term that has been generated. The efforts of artists and arts organizations, including musicians, in this arena are therefore often ambiguous. Yet this semantic allegiance to the term at the same time warrants a cautionary appeal to cultural sector actors not to let themselves become prisoners of a rhetoric developed and propagated by others, in the service of different agendas. They need to be careful about jumping on to bandwagons opportunistically, with the aim of becoming better positioned on the contemporary policy agenda. If cultural activists must make overblown claims, for strategic reasons let’s say, then they ought to be more fully aware of what they are doing and why, in other words deploy a heightened reflexivity about the discourses that now predominate in cultural affairs. These discourses are the products of contemporary culturalism, in other words the ways in which agency and causality are attributed to culture, as cultural expression and cultural difference are increasingly deployed in the service of political and other causes. Indeed, politicians and policymakers the world over are using the arts and heritage as resources in the service of ends such as economic growth, employment, or social cohesion (Yúdice 2004). Another major trend is embodied in the special meaning of “cultural diversity” that inspired UNESCO’s 2005 Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions). Expenditures on the arts, even more so on the “creative industries,” are now justified not for the value or values those arts themselves, but as investments in “protecting” or “promoting” cultures understood as entire ways of life in the broader social science sense of the term culture. As Philip Schlesinger has observed as regards European Union audiovisual policy, it is not the intrinsic merit of the audiovisual sector that is valued. Rather, and this applies globally, “it has been the assumed impact of the production and consumption of audiovisual culture upon national (and European) culture as a way of life that has been central to the debate… sustaining audiovisual production is commonly conflated with protecting (because it is believed to shape) a whole way of life” (Schlesinger 2001: 94).

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Conversely, as regards governmental stances, the uptake of cultural diplomacy as a new frontier in international relations warrants interrogation as well. Three key questions arise here. First, does cultural diplomacy really transcend cooperation among elites? Is governmental agency central to achieving the goals of trans- and intercultural interaction to which cultural diplomacy now aspires? Can cultural diplomacy overcome negative national images? In all three cases, it may well be that too much is expected of cultural diplomacy today, that it is pressed into service in the name of goods that it cannot deliver. The first ambitious claim underpinning the boosting of cultural diplomacy is that it transcends inter-state relations at the elite level of the kind that has been practiced for centuries, if not millennia. Yet surely it is not for nothing that Richard Arndt called cultural diplomacy “the first resort of Kings” (Arndt 2006). Yet some other accounts claim that a world of “static and traditional cultural settings” is being replaced by one “where culture is also a medium between people on a mass scale” (Bound et al. 2007: 16–17). The same authors also tell us that “many-to-many cultural exchange is now very fast moving and capable of profound effect, both laterally and upwardly, to the extent that cultural diplomacy now directly affects and may even direct the more traditional forms of public diplomacy.” There are several problems with this claim. First, the exaggerated directive agency attributed to cultural diplomacy. Second, the implied model of a “two-step flow,” which Cull articulated clearly when he wrote that “PD [public diplomacy] does not always seek its mass audience directly. Often it has cultivated individuals within the target audience who are themselves influential in the wider community” (2009:12). Closer examination would reveal that cultural diplomacy actually preaches largely to the converted and that it is principally carried out within and across the “high culture” forms—exhibition exchanges, the performing arts of different traditions, etc. To be sure, all these forms have become increasingly more accessible to larger numbers of people, but has “mass” scale really been attained? Where mass scale really comes into play, it seems to me, governmental agency is less likely to be present. As I have observed elsewhere about cultural policy (Isar 2009), public policy and its impacts are incorrectly assumed to be principal determinants of what we might call the “cultural ecosystem.” Clearly, today a range of other forces are at work in shaping the cultural life of any human group, whether on the level of the nation-­ state, sub-nationally or supra-nationally. The market, or societal dispositions and actions, notably civil society campaigns related to cultural causes

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and quality of life issues, impact on the cultural system far more deeply than the measures taken by ministries of culture (this goes without saying in the USA, but it must be remembered that in practically all other countries, culture is a domain of public policy assumed and funded by the State directly, or at least at arm’s length). At the forefront of India’s contemporary cultural system, for example, stands the popular culture generated and disseminated by Bollywood and other major centres of film production. The policies of the ministries responsible respectively for “culture” and “information” impinge but superficially on this cultural universe. Instead, they support institutions of “high culture,” offer awards and prizes to artists and writers, and…pursue efforts of cultural diplomacy that pale into insignificance compared with the international reach of the film industry. A similar point was made in the European context by Geoff Mulgan and Ken Worpole, who “alerted us long ago to the fact that the cultural policies doing most to shape national cultures were not being framed within bespoke government departments but in the boardrooms of very powerful transnational commercial organisations” (Ahearne 2009: 144). Several of the essays in this volume attest eloquently to the decline of governmental agency in the cultural arena. Today’s dense border-crossing flows and migrations are taking place increasingly beyond the grasp and control of governments. What is virtue in the intergovernmental arena is in other circles the vice of “methodological nationalism,” i.e., the assumption that the nation-state is the default container for culture and cultural expression. Now that the primacy of the nation-state appears past its heyday, the nexus of culture and nation no longer holds. There is a growing awareness of the porosity of boundaries and the fluidity and multiplicity of cultural identities. It is not just that this “cracking open,” as Ien Ang puts it (Ang 2011), of the nationalist narrative, undercuts the homogenizing image of nationhood and national culture. More significantly, the purposes of mutual understanding are being achieved far more effectively by direct cultural interactions at the civil society level, notably in artistic disciplines such as music. Again, this is a point brought out in several contributions to this volume. Several of the contributions resonate indirectly with the thrust of Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory, which could be a useful conceptual, analytical and explanatory tool. This is a point I would like to expand on parenthetically, hence only briefly (Isar and Triandafyllidou 2020). A Bourdieusian field is

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an asymmetrically constituted space of power relations, hence of unspoken competition and conflict in a “game” that agents play, as they struggle to increase their stock of economic, social and cultural capital. Possession of these forms of capital are forms of power whose possession commands access to specific profits that are at stake in the field as well as actors’ relation to other positions (domination, subordination, homologies, etc.). The field of music making in the Middle East could be seen to consist of several assemblages of players: musical individuals and organizations engaged in cultural relations, often supported by private individuals, business sector sponsors and foundations, sometimes also driven by governments, mainly ministries of culture, but to a limited extent. Among these actors, all three forms of Bourdieusian capital are constantly being deployed and transmuted between and among the different forms. Cultural capital, and to some extent social capital as well, reside within the musical field, both valued in terms of musical criteria. Bourdieu would see both as largely “autonomous”, whereas economic capital is “heteronomous” in the sense that it deploys itself essentially beyond the space of the arts and artistic exchange yet bears heavily upon the cultural and social axes and is also often transmuted into cultural and social capital. A case could be made for further scrutiny that would allow us to reach beneath the surface of the cultural relations “system” within which music making is encapsulated. Bourdieu often used the analogy of a playing field for a team sport. This analogy connotes boundaries. And within that bounded space, a range of position-takings where the cultural operators concerned affirm or shape their identities and hierarchical positions— always in relation to other actors—notably those from whom various forms of support, mainly financial, are expected. And within which players are guided by certain conventions, or rules (that are often implicit) as to what sorts of stances or “moves” are allowable. A wide range of “moves” involve the deployment of two other notions, as discussed by Lopes da Cunha in her Introduction, namely “soft power” and “public diplomacy”, that have become part of a constellation of standard terms in the lexicon of international relations and foreign policy thinking. They are also factored into the policy mix by national, regional and local governments, as well as by supranational organizations such as the European Union. As mentioned earlier, however, the processes these terms entail have rarely been critically examined. Their emergence as tools of the “cultural policy of display” has been insufficiently unpacked. Nor

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has there been much analysis of their place in discourses of cultural nationalism, which is arguably a key dimension of cultural diplomacy as a governmental practice.

A Concluding Question In the intellectual landscape of every historical period, new ideas emerge one after the other. Over the last 50 years or so, the pace of such lexical emergence in various disciplines of the Humanities has been extremely rapid, producing a brisk turnover in ideas, many of which have been passing fashions. A dizzying succession of dominant ideas have derived their impact from the apparent ease with which each of them has seemed able to address complex issues. These key ideas, moulded into powerful narratives, have also operated as organizers on several different levels and have focused scientific and media attention almost completely. Cultural diplomacy is such a term. The life of these sorts of terms usually goes through different phases—formation, dissemination, discursive adaptation and popularization, as the philosopher Susanne Langer once observed. Then they reach a final stage of consolidation, becoming integral parts of the general vocabulary. In the process, they become truth-­ generating concepts, framing metaphors whose use becomes obligatory. They don’t always last long in this capacity, however; sooner or later, many are abandoned and soon forgotten. Some, however, continue to be of value well past their phase of consolidation. Cultural diplomacy has clearly become such a consolidated term, judging from the manner so many people, scholars and otherwise, use it today. It probably has many decades of life ahead of it. How useful is it already as an analytical tool and how useful will it remain, going forward?

References Ahearne, J. 2009. Cultural policy explicit and implicit: A distinction and some uses. International Journal of Cultural Policy 15 (2). Ang, I. 2011. Unsettling the national: Heritage and diaspora. In Heritage, memory & identity, The cultures and globalization series, ed. H.K.  Anheier and Y.R. Isar, vol. 4. London: SAGE Publications. Ang, I., Y.R.  Isar, and P.  Mar. 2015. Cultural diplomacy: Beyond the national interest? International Journal of Cultural Policy 21 (4): 365–381. Arndt, R. 2006. The first resort of kings. American cultural diplomacy in the twentieth century. Washington, DC: Potomac Books.

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Benhabib, S. 2002. The claims of culture. Equality and diversity in the global era. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Bennett, T. 1995. The birth of the museum—History, theory, politics. London and New York: Routledge. Bound, K., R.  Briggs, J.  Holden, and S.  Jones. 2007. Cultural diplomacy. London: Demos. Cull, N.J. 2009. Public diplomacy: Lessons from the past (CPD perspectives on public diplomacy). Los Angeles: Figeroa Press. Cummings, M. 2003. Cultural diplomacy and the United States government: A survey. Washington, DC: Center for Arts and Culture. http://www.culturalpolicy.org/issuepages/culturaldiplomacy.cfm. Delors, Jacques, et al. 1996. International Commission on Education for the 21st century. Education: The treasure within. Paris: UNESCO Publishing Isar, Y.R. 2009. Cultural policy: Towards a global survey. Culture Unbound. Journal of Current Cultural Research 1. Isar, Y.R., and A. Triandafyllidou 2020. What role for cities and civil society actors? Introduction to Special Issue on Cultural Diplomacy of the International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society. Klaic, D. 2007. Mobility of imagination. Budapest: Center for Arts and Culture, Central European University. McGuigan, J. 2004. Rethinking cultural policy. Maidenhead, UK: Open University Press. Schlesinger. P. 2001. From cultural protection to political culture? Media policy and the European Union. In Constructing Europe’s Identity. The External Dimension, edited by L.-E. Cedermann, 91–114. Boulder: Lynne Riener. Williams, R. 1984. State culture and beyond. In Culture and the state, ed. L. Appignanesi, 3–5. London: Institute of Contemporary Arts. Yúdice, G. 2004. The expediency of culture. Uses of culture in the global era. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Index1

A Aesthetics, 9, 11, 19, 84, 193, 199, 221–237, 272, 274 Affect, 9, 11, 150, 222, 234, 261, 290 Afghanistan, 11, 12, 262–268, 274, 279, 280n4 Agency/agentive power, 4, 5, 10–13, 15, 18, 19, 81, 85, 86, 93–115, 144n14, 150, 151, 160, 160n1, 165, 168, 171, 174, 176, 210, 233, 274, 275, 280, 285, 289–291 Al-Andalus/Andalusi/Andalusian, 72, 77, 78, 80, 284 Al-Nahda, 182 Al-Nakba, 179 Amateur, 10, 16, 18, 93–115, 182, 225, 266, 285 Amazigh, 242, 243, 245, 246, 249, 250, 268

Anglo-Ottoman interactions, 52 Anti-migration, 2 See also Migration Arabian Peninsula, 34, 35 Asia, 5, 6, 40, 80, 174 Audience participation, 125, 131 Azerbaijan, 87n1, 93, 94, 175 B Bahrain, 152, 226, 274, 275, 277 Baidaphone, 202 Balance of power, see Power Balochistan, 263, 264, 274, 275, 277–279 Barthes, Roland, 58, 59 Bedouin, 183, 203, 206, 212 Black-face minstrel, 40 Border/boundary/boundaries, 3, 12–14, 19, 27, 28, 45, 78, 80,

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 M. M. Rijo Lopes da Cunha et al. (eds.), Music and Cultural Diplomacy in the Middle East, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36279-8

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INDEX

82, 86, 97, 114, 115, 223, 234, 246, 248, 252, 262–264, 266, 285, 288, 291, 292 Branding, 2, 13, 16, 19, 73, 151, 243, 244, 250, 271 Bridge/bridge-building, 11, 13, 72, 75–81, 83, 86, 97, 105, 113, 115, 169, 245, 246 Britain, see United Kingdom (UK) British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), 179, 206 C Capital cultural, 7, 81, 172, 221, 227, 228, 234, 292 political, 125 Catholic Church, 54 Censorship, 241–255 Centers of power, see Power Citizenship/citizen-led, 12, 45, 80, 129, 141, 142 Class, see Socio-economic class Coexistence, 7, 15, 78, 79, 85, 164 Cold War, 2, 4, 14, 18, 73, 98, 164 Colonial, 11, 14, 19, 26, 36, 164, 165, 173, 176, 180, 181, 183, 185, 187, 191, 194, 198, 200, 210–212, 242, 257n17, 275 Commodification, 6, 13, 76, 87n4 Community/community-building, 2–4, 9–13, 15, 18–20, 26, 40, 75, 88n12, 96, 97, 99–101, 103, 105–107, 109, 110, 113–115, 125, 151, 172, 180, 181, 184, 186, 187, 191, 193, 194, 196, 198, 199, 205, 209–212, 222–224, 228, 233, 234, 242–246, 248–250, 252, 254, 255, 255n3, 256n5, 256n12, 261, 262, 264–270, 272, 274, 275, 277–279, 285, 286, 290

Concerts for Egypt, 150–153, 156–158, 160, 161n3 Conflict, 1, 2, 4, 11, 73, 75, 78, 94, 100, 181, 192, 212, 222, 229, 231, 266, 287, 292 Conservatory, 26, 34, 42, 45, 95, 156, 172–174, 176, 177n7, 181 Consumption, 58, 71, 100, 289 Contingency, 11, 12, 16, 18, 107, 109 Convivencia, 77, 78, 80–82, 85, 87n6 Cosmopolitan, 9, 14, 15, 19, 27, 31–35, 45, 56, 79, 105, 154, 165, 171, 172, 176, 182, 223, 224, 231, 236, 257n18, 269, 272 COVID-19, 138, 144n13, 145n20, 246, 247, 254 Cultural diplomacy diplomatic gift, 51, 53, 64, 65 gift exchange, 53 Cultural narratives, 244 Cultural relations/intercultural relations, 4, 10, 18, 109, 165, 170, 225, 227, 228, 237, 284–288, 292 Cultural understanding, 126, 142 Culture jamming, 72, 81–87 D Decentralization of power, see Power Decolonization/decolonial initiatives, 181 Democracy, 73, 167 Diaspora/diasporic, 10, 12, 13, 16, 18, 96–101, 103, 105–115, 116n7, 125, 126, 136, 241, 243, 255n2, 257n18, 261, 285 Digital media, 221, 222, 228, 229, 233 platforms, 9, 229, 233 streaming, 9 Diplomacy, see Cultural diplomacy

 INDEX 

Displacement, 12, 228, 229, 266, 268 Diversification, 9, 211, 224, 225 Diversity, 8, 10, 15, 74, 100, 116n7, 139, 142, 171, 182, 212, 228, 242, 255n2, 265, 289 DIY cultural diplomacy, see Cultural diplomacy E Early music, 51–67 East-West relations, 67 Economic diplomacy, 16, 19, 234, 236 Economy earning potential, 16 exchange, 76 global, 17, 74 political, 74, 76 EDM, 13, 14, 16, 19, 244, 272 Educational activities, 129–130, 137–138 Education programme, 123 Egypt, 14–16, 18, 19, 28–30, 40, 45, 149–160, 164–169, 171–176, 177n11, 183, 202, 211, 222, 257n14, 285 Elite, 27, 37, 39, 98, 115n3, 116n8, 153, 154, 157, 172, 180, 243, 284, 290 Engagement, sonic engagement, 3, 8–11, 15, 72, 75, 76, 81, 82, 87, 97, 101, 102, 104, 114, 125, 129, 133, 224, 237, 269 Epic, 13, 18, 125, 126, 275, 280n8 Epistemic fault lines, 72, 84 frames, 13, 14, 72, 76, 85 Epistemological, 14, 15 Ethics, ethical, 82, 247, 257n14, 288

297

Ethnic/ethnicity, 11, 40, 116n7, 117n9, 245, 256n3, 256n8, 257n18, 262, 266, 268, 271 Ethnography, 9, 95, 97, 255 Europe/eurocentric, 1, 10, 12, 33, 53, 54, 65, 73, 77, 79–81, 84, 85, 99, 113, 114, 116n8, 172, 200, 211, 233, 243, 245, 246, 270, 272, 276, 277 European Union, 88n10, 109, 111, 117n13, 289, 292 Exotic/exoticism imagery, 39 stereotypes, 39 F Ferdowsi, Abolqasem, 18, 126, 129 Festivals, 74, 75, 87n4, 88n9, 88n10, 98, 112, 135, 137, 242, 243, 245, 265 Finland/Finnish, 125 Flow cultural, 75, 76, 114 Folk music, 95, 115n3, 116n4, 117n10, 265, 272, 273, 280n7 G Gender, 228, 242, 256n3 Geopolitical/geopolitics, 1–20, 27, 45, 67, 94, 100, 105, 108, 114, 180, 192, 222–226, 235–237, 262, 265, 268, 280 Germany, 85, 86, 88n13, 96, 97, 99, 105–107, 109, 110, 112, 113, 117n10, 179, 183, 194, 246, 270 Global north, 11 south, 11, 235 Globalization, 3, 72, 83, 235

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INDEX

Grassroots, 72, 81, 83, 86, 87, 96, 115, 125, 127, 143 Gulf region, 221, 224, 226 H Haptics, 251, 253, 257n15 Hashemite, 26–28, 31, 34, 35, 39, 192, 212 Hegemony, 98, 114, 115 Hejaz/Hijaz, 26–31, 35, 37, 44, 45, 183 Heritage, 77, 111, 125, 126, 134, 141, 167, 168, 244, 262, 277, 279, 289 Hip-hop, 248, 249, 273 House music, 242, 243 I Iconoclasm, 65 Immigrant communities, 26, 270 Immigration, see Migration Initiative bottom-up, 11, 125, 222 top-down, 222 Institutional, institutions, institutionalize, 2, 7, 8, 10, 16, 31, 85, 96, 101, 107, 156, 165, 166, 168–174, 176, 177n8, 180, 185, 192, 212, 222–225, 228, 236, 237, 269, 271, 284, 291 Intercultural connection, 76 exchange, 4, 72, 73 Iran, Iranian, Persian, 12, 13, 18, 32, 54, 123–143, 227, 262–264, 266–268, 274–276, 278 Iraq, 11, 12, 26–28, 45, 152, 164, 183, 200, 202, 203, 210–212, 227

Islam, Islamophobia, Muslim, 17, 27–29, 31, 35, 44, 55, 59, 78, 80, 83, 84, 129, 151, 153, 157, 192, 193, 246, 251 Israel, 150, 159, 164, 179 J Janissary groups, 34 Jazz, 73, 75, 150, 159 Jordan, 45, 191, 192, 212 K Kuwait, 152, 179, 222, 226–232, 235–237, 274, 277 L Lebanon, 12, 45, 152, 183, 210–212, 222, 225, 230–234, 237 Levant, 202 Libya, 152 Liturgical music, 210 Local communities, 13, 113, 125, 180, 187, 198, 210 London Philharmonic orchestra (LPO), 123–126, 129–131, 134, 135, 137 M Marketing, 6, 16, 39, 242 Media, media sphere, 5, 6, 97, 100, 107, 108, 125, 129, 134, 135, 140, 142, 143, 155, 158, 182, 229, 233, 234, 244, 246, 247, 250, 269, 273, 277, 293 Mediterranean region, 77, 88n10, 88n12 Middle East, 1–20, 27, 34, 45, 46, 79, 125, 129, 149–151, 158, 159, 164, 223, 233, 236, 245, 247, 292

 INDEX 

Middle powers, see Power Migration, 39, 80, 85, 88n12, 96, 99, 100, 222, 229, 261, 264, 266, 268, 272, 275, 291 Missionaries, 193–196, 210 Modernity, 27, 39, 167, 172, 176, 180, 181, 188, 199, 200, 204, 212 Morocco, 6, 13, 14, 19, 54, 64, 75, 77, 78, 152, 241–255, 255n2, 256n4, 257n16, 258n21, 268 Multiethnic, 13, 26, 27, 172 Multipolar, multipolarity, 3, 236 Musical automaton, 60, 62, 66 Music educators, 25 Music of the Spheres, 61 N Nation-building, nationalism, 3, 16, 71, 73, 74, 115n3, 176, 180, 185, 192, 194, 198, 211, 223, 268, 287, 291, 293 Nation, nation-state, national interests, 3–5, 10–14, 17–19, 27, 44–46, 56, 58, 73–75, 78, 80, 88n12, 98, 99, 124, 149, 166, 181, 191, 204, 212, 222–225, 245–247, 251, 256n12, 264, 279, 285–288, 290, 291 NAWA, see Palestinian Institute for Cultural Development (NAWA) Near East Broadcasting Station (NEBS), 14, 179, 182, 187, 191, 199, 206, 209–211 Neoliberal, neoliberalism, 71, 229, 235, 236 Non-state actors, 3, 13, 97, 101, 125, 234, 244, 285, 288 North Africa, 54, 79, 88n9, 99, 233, 250, 256n8 Norway, 277 Nye, Joseph S., 2, 3, 5, 15, 71, 98, 159, 160, 222–224, 243

299

O Oman, 274, 277 Orientalism, 41, 72, 85, 246 Orientalism (Edward Said), 67 Ottoman aristocratic life, 34 court, 51–67, 95 empire, 14, 17, 26, 27, 40, 53–55, 67 P Pakistan, 152, 264, 266, 274, 275 Palestine, 11, 14, 155, 156, 179–212 Palestine Broadcasting Service (PBS), 14, 19, 179, 180, 182–188, 191–193, 196, 198–204, 206, 209–211, 214n4 Palestinian Institute for Cultural Development (NAWA), 188 Peace/peace-building, 8, 29, 65, 164, 223, 228 The Phoenix of Persia, see Shahnameh Poetry, 129, 137, 151, 155, 182, 198, 209–210 Political views/politics, 16, 29, 30, 32, 77, 81, 84, 96, 157, 158, 165–168, 182, 184, 228, 229, 233, 234, 252, 254, 255, 258n20, 262 Politicization/politicizing music, 27 Polyglots, 32 Postcolonialism/postcolonial, 11, 14, 19, 165–168, 176, 198, 236 Postnational, 12, 261–280 Power, 2, 5–7, 10, 18, 221, 280 balance of power, 6, 15, 223 soft, 2, 5, 6, 8, 10, 11, 18, 66, 71–75, 86, 97, 98, 149, 160, 164, 221, 222, 237, 243, 247, 292 state, 101, 114, 172 Precarity, 234, 235, 262

300 

INDEX

Q Qatar, 274, 277 Quran, 32 R Racism, 124, 253 Radio, 14, 25, 26, 35, 39, 42, 43, 101, 151, 155, 183, 192, 193, 269 Rap, 85, 248, 249, 278 Religious fundamentalism, 45 S Said, Edward, 66, 225 Satire, satirical, 212 Saudi Arabia, 26, 183 Sensorial/intersensorial, 16, 19, 244, 251, 253 Shahnameh/The Book of Kings, 13, 18, 123–143 Slaves, 29, 30, 253 Socio-economic class, 30, 64, 95, 116n8, 117n9, 133, 134, 139–141, 175, 180, 181, 184, 191, 242, 243, 254, 262, 272–274 Soft power, see Power South-South, 79 Soviet Union, 18, 95, 134, 156, 164, 165, 167–170, 173–175, 176n4, 176n5 Spain, 16, 53, 77–81 State ensembles, 94, 95, 101–103, 111, 115, 115n3 initiatives, 77 State power, see Power Sudan, 152 Surveillance, 14, 60, 80, 242, 244, 247 Sweden, 265, 270, 277, 278

Symphony orchestra, 129, 131, 143n2, 168, 173–175, 177n11 Syria, 12, 28, 34, 164, 183, 201, 203, 210–212, 268 T Taliban, 262, 265, 267 Techno music, 243, 248 Tourism, 6, 13, 16, 19, 73, 165, 242, 246 Traditional music, 185, 194, 206, 225, 236, 242 Transjordan, see Jordan Transnationalism/transnational, 2–5, 12, 13, 97, 99, 101, 105, 114, 115, 222–224, 228, 233, 234, 237, 264, 265, 291 Tudor composers, 64 Tunisia, 152 Turkey, 12, 18, 25–27, 45, 54, 55, 94–101, 103, 105–109, 111–115, 115n3, 116n7, 117n8, 183, 191, 268–270, 272–274 U UAE/United Arab Emirates, 152, 274, 277 United Kingdom(UK), 13, 17, 18, 74, 96, 97, 99, 100, 105, 107, 108, 112, 113, 116n7, 117n13, 123–143, 180, 214n5, 241 United States(US), 1, 3, 10, 12, 16, 17, 25, 31, 32, 34, 35, 37, 39, 45, 46, 73, 74, 80, 96–99, 116n8, 134, 140, 164, 200, 223, 224, 291 V Violence, 78, 84, 100, 228, 231, 241–255, 264, 270

 INDEX 

W Wahabism, 29 Western classical music, 37, 95, 116n8 World music, 43, 102, 112, 125, 269 World War, First, 14, 26, 28, 31, 32, 41, 196

301

Y Yemen, 11, 183 Young Turk Revolution, 34 Z Zal and The Simorgh, see Shahnameh