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The Study of Women and Music in Morocco

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 October 2012

Alessandra Ciucci
Alessandra Ciucci*
Affiliation:
Departments of Music, Sociology, and Anthropology, and International Affairs, Northeastern University, Boston, Mass.; e-mail: a.ciucci@neu.edu
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Extract

The 1987 publication of Women and Music in Cross-Cultural Perspectives, the first anthology on the topic of women and music in the field of ethnomusicology, marked a critical turn in the scholarship. The ethnographic-focused essays on women's genres and roles in music in diverse societies around the world, including the Middle East, presented new analytical frameworks and research on authority, gender and access, and notions of power and performance. Today, research on the musical practices of women continues to expand in ethnomusicology and in fields such as anthropology. Many scholars now acknowledge the centrality of gender for locating “how society is in music and music is in society.” This is a particularly important approach for the Middle East and North Africa, where the undervaluing or silencing of women's musical practices and abilities had continued to dominate ethnomusicology. An important study to break from the paradigm was Virginia Danielson's 1997 monograph on Umm Kulthum. Danielson analyzes the development and the construction of a musical and a social “voice,” looking at what it means for this particular artist to both be the voice of and have a voice in colonial and postcolonial Egypt. In the discussion that follows I outline the academic trajectory of writings on women and music in Morocco, which I have divided into three distinct historical moments, each exemplifying different approaches to the subject matter: work by 20th-century French colonial scholars, by contemporary European and American scholars, and by contemporary Moroccan scholars.

Type
Roundtable
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 44 , Issue 4: Maghribi Histories in the Modern Era , November 2012 , pp. 787 - 789
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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References

NOTES

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11 Alessandra Ciucci, “Poems of Honor, Voices of Shame: The ʿAiṭa and the Moroccan Shikhat” (PhD diss., The Graduate Center, City University of New York, 2008).

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