This article revisits and expands on my previous research on the entanglement of state power, nationalist ideology, lingering coloniality, and heritage production in Arab music in postcolonial Cairo since the late 1960s.Footnote 1 It takes into consideration the intersection of politics and elite class positionality with Arab music heritage, an “absent presence” in my previous research and in much of the literature on heritage.Footnote 2 I argue that the heritagization of Arab music transformed, re-signified and (re)positioned a largely mass-mediated musical practice that was embedded in urban popular culture into a highbrow expressive domain, a discourse of privilege that conferred cultural and social capital to music, musicians, and audiences.Footnote 3
Heritage is a broad concept with multiple meanings and uses, both in academic and common sense discourses. Drawing on perspectives from ethnomusicology and critical heritage studies, I conceptualize heritage as a discourse that is articulated through material and intangible modes of expressive behavior, including music. It is an “act of communication,” a “social and cultural practice … of meaning and identity making.”Footnote 4 Heritage is also a mode of cultural production that is created from a “particular vantage point in the present,” with selective recourse to the past and an outlook toward the future.Footnote 5 It is used as a medium through which individuals and groups “negotiate a sense of social ‘place’ or class/community identity, and a cultural place.”Footnote 6 As in many other cases of heritagization, the production of an Arab music heritage in Egypt was grounded in an officially authorized hegemonic discourse that promoted a set of “Western elite cultural values as being universally applicable.”Footnote 7 Anchored in the “power/ knowledge claims of technical and aesthetic experts, and institutionalized in state cultural agencies … [it] takes its cue from the grand narratives of nation and class on the one hand, and technical expertise and aesthetic judgement on the other.”Footnote 8 This discourse undergirded Gamal Abdel Nasser’s (r. 1955-70) state “heritage regime,” “a set of rules and norms regulating the relations between a state-government and society.”Footnote 9
Arab Music
Arab music (al-mūsīqā al-‘Arabiyya) can be conceptualized as an ideologically grounded symbolic construct, a generic music category that associates diverse musical genres and styles with Middle East and North Africa nation–states that share Arab linguistic, historical, cultural, and musical legacies and contemporary practices.Footnote 10 In Cairo, it designates what ethnomusicologist A. J. Racy refers to as the central domain, or the dominant style of Arab music.Footnote 11 It also can be defined as a discursive field, a dynamic space with fluid boundaries that frames discourses about urban indigenous music practices that are characterized by melodic and rhythmic modes (maqām and īqā‘), vocal and instrumental genres (muwashshaḥ, dawr, qaṣīda, ughniyya, samā‘i, and bashraf), as well as performance practices anchored by the central role of the solo singer (muṭrib/a).Footnote 12 This professional musical practice also was designated ṭarab, a term that additionally refers to the state of heightened emotionality that is “experienced and expressed [by musicians and audiences] when performing or listening to singing, music and poetry.”Footnote 13
Since the early decades of the 20th century, Arab music has been performed live and through the media by professional singers accompanied by instrumental ensembles. From the late 19th century up to the 1930s, instrumental accompaniment was provided by a small ensemble designated takht, consisting of four or five instruments (typically the oud, qanūn, nay, violin, and riq) often led by the qanūn (plucked zither) player. The takht gradually expanded into a larger ensemble named firqa (pl. firāq) that, while maintaining the core instruments of the takht, multiplied the number of violins, and included cellos, a double bass, and occasionally other Western instruments. While maintaining the central role of the qanūn player, many firāq were led by a conductor.
In the Egyptian context, the discursive field of Arab music was introduced and re-signified in two critical historical moments. The first was the landmark international Arab Music Conference held in Cairo in 1932.Footnote 14 This was a period of rising Arab nationalism and intensifying nationalist movements against colonial rule in Egypt and other Arab countries. Patronized by King Fu’ad (r. 1922–36) and locally organized by the German-trained Egyptian musicologist Mahmud Ahmad al-Hifni (1896–1973), the conference gathered prominent music scholars and musicians from the Arab world, Turkey, and Europe to document and debate the state of Arab music, and to provide guidelines for its future course. One of the main concerns was what some musicians and scholars perceived as the increasing threat of Western musical influence.Footnote 15
Thirty-five years following the 1932 Arab Music Conference, the notion of Arab music was re-signified as coterminous with heritage (turāth), a set of musical genres and performance practices harkening back to the late 19th and early 20th centuries that were grounded in the ideal of authenticity (aṣāla). A central notion in discourses on culture and the arts in postcolonial Egypt, turāth was associated with monuments, artifacts, artistic creations, and cultural practices that were inherited from ancient times to the more recent past. The revival, renewal, and preservation of turāth, its seminal role in the construction of a modern Egyptian nation, and its conciliation with modernity (ḥadātha) and contemporaneity (mu‘āṣara) composed one of the challenges of the cultural policy of Nasser’s regime configured by the Minister of Culture Tharwat ʿUkasha (1921–2012) and his team of Western-trained intellectuals.Footnote 16
Heritage scholars have argued that categorization and branding are central processes in heritage-making.Footnote 17 I posit that the notions of al-mūsīqā al-‘Arabiyya and al-turāth that undergirded the heritagization of Arab music discursively positioned the heritagized repertoire and performance model as an expressive domain for elites, a monument, and a marker of cultural capital.
Ṭarab
The practice of ṭarab was predominant in Cairo from the late 19th century up to the 1970s. It is beyond the scope of this short essay to fully examine the culture and artistry of ṭarab, which is masterfully analyzed in other publications.Footnote 18 Here, I briefly point out some of ṭarab’s distinctive features, an indispensable backdrop for assessing the radical changes that resulted from the heritagization of Arab music, which in turn did away with the practice and aesthetics of ṭarab.
Ṭarab is anchored on the solo singer’s creativity, melodic artistry, and ability to transmit the meanings embedded in the lyrics, evoking an emotional transformation in the listeners, a state of ecstasy and enchantment. The singer freely (re)creates the composer’s musical text, an orally transmitted skeletal melody, in each performance with musical expressive tools such as the repetition and variation of segments of the main melodic line through the addition of ornaments; changes in vocal timbre or register; the elaboration of cadential formulae at the end of key textual and musical phrases; the improvisation of entire sections highlighting and sometimes reordering selected words or phrases from the lyrics; and the addition of interjections such as “ah” in key moments of the text. These and other musical expressive tools are also fundamental in the mujawwad style of Qur’anic recitation, a practice that served as a training ground for many singers in the early decades of the 20th century. Some men who started as Qur’an reciters later pursued careers as singers (muṭribīn) in the secular domain of ṭarab. Footnote 19 Instrumental accompaniment by a takht or a firqa played an important role in enhancing the singer’s interpretation through melodic dialogue and heterophonic interplay.Footnote 20
A strong connection between artist and cultivated listeners (sammī‘a) and an appropriate atmosphere are necessary conditions for inducing ṭarab. Footnote 21 In ṭarab performances, audiences are active listeners who express their emotions and their appreciation of the performance, and stimulate the singer’s creativity through verbal commentary, clapping, shouts, gestures, and requests for repetition in the course of the performance. As Jonathan Shannon points out in his study of ṭarab in Aleppo, as a highly complex and intersubjective process, ṭarab is produced in and by the relationship between audiences and performers.Footnote 22 This relationship at once reflects and produces the musical, social, and emotional states that allow artists and audiences to experience the emotion they designate as ṭarab.
The art of ṭarab was epitomized by singers such as the Egyptian Um Kulthum (1898–1975) and the Syrian Sabah Fakhri (1933–2021). Although ṭarab stars had millions of followers and filled mediascapes throughout the Arab world, it also was contested by some intellectuals and Western-trained musicians for cultivating emotionality, a “sign of musical backwardness, lack of imagination and non-modernity” and a form of “emotional escapism.”Footnote 23
The Making of an Arab Music Heritage
In 1967, a few months following Egypt’s humiliating defeat by Israel, a heritage ensemble for Arab music named Firqat al-Musiqa al-‘Arabiyya (hereafter FMA) was founded by a presidential decision of Gamal Abdel Nasser within the Egyptian Ministry of Culture. What motivated the founding of FMA at this moment of crisis? What were the ensemble’s goals? What was the performance model and repertoire selected as representative of Arab music heritage? What were the agencies involved? How did class ideologies play out in the heritagization of Arab music, and in its reception?
The political and identity crisis that followed the 1967 defeat and the decline of Arab nationalism motivated Egyptian intellectuals to search for ways through which indigenous values, beliefs, and heritages could be mobilized to restore confidence and national pride. It was within this context that the Egyptian Ministry of Culture decided to form a heritage ensemble for Arab music. This decision also can be read as a response to the need for a state-sponsored Arab music ensemble analogous to the Cairo Symphony Orchestra, which was founded and supported by the Ministry of Culture in 1959.Footnote 24
FMA’s goals are spelled out in the program notes of the inaugural concert as “reviving Arab music heritage (iḥya’ al-turāth al-musīqī al-‘Arabī), given that it is one of the pillars of the spiritual and cultural edification of society (aḥad da‘āim al-binā’ al-wijdāni wa-l-thaqāfi li-l-mujtama‘) and one of the bases of an authentic music development (wa asāsan min usūs al-nahda al-musiqiyya al-aṣīla).”Footnote 25 The selection of the repertoire that qualified as Arab music heritage and the configuration of a performance model for its enactment by the state-supported FMA resulted from a top-down decision made by an Artistic Bureau (Maktab Fanni) nominated by the Ministry of Culture. The bureau consisted of ten intellectuals and musicians, several of whom were trained in Arab and Western music.Footnote 26 It included the singer and composer ʿAbd al-Halim Nuwayra (1916–85), who became the ensemble’s conductor, from its founding up until his death. Trained in Arab and Western music, Nuwayra played a seminal role in curating the repertoire and new performance model for Arab music. In 1999, FMA was renamed Firqat ‘Abd al-Halim Nuwayra li-l-Musiqa al-‘Arabiyya, a tribute to its first conductor and curator.
The selection of the repertoire that came to constitute the official canon of Arab music heritage was informed by criteria of antiquity and authenticity. To qualify as turāth, a vocal or instrumental work had to have been composed and performed at least fifty years earlier, to adhere to the maqām and iqā’ systems of melodic and rhythmic organization, and to be set to one of the musical forms of Arab music that the Artistic Bureau considered traditional, such as the vocal muwashshaḥ, dawr, qaṣīda, and ṭaqṭūqa and the instrumental samā’i, bashraf, and dulāb. In the 1990s and 2000s, while roughly maintaining the fifty-year temporal boundary, FMA and other state-supported Arab music ensembles that were founded beginning in the late 1980s incorporated in their repertoire the “long song” genre (ughniyya), as will be described. The repertoire performed by these ensembles had been mediatized between the 1940s and 1970s by Um Kulthum, Muhammad ʿAbd al-Wahab (1902-91), ʿAbd al-Halim Hafiz (1929-77), and Farid al-Atrash (1910-74), among others.
The Artistic Bureau decided on a modernist performance model, implementing radical changes in Arab music performance that did away with the practice and aesthetics of ṭarab. Tantamount to the “invention of a tradition,” these changes were grounded in ideas on progress (taṭawur) and modernity (ḥadātha). For a segment of urban cultural elites and decision-makers in the domain of music, these ideas were epitomized by the values and norms that characterize European “art music” practice, a regular feature of Cairo’s musical life since the 19th century and the purview of Cairo’s cosmopolitan cultural elites.Footnote 27 These included the establishment of and adherence to a fixed urtext, the adaptation of the orchestral model of 18th- and 19th-century European “art music” with the conductor as its main figure, and the disciplined behavior of musicians and audiences. A mixed choir replaced the solo vocalist, the quintessential figure of Arab music performance. The accompanying instrumental ensemble maintained the firqa’s makeup, consisting of a core of Arab instruments (the oud, qanūn, and nay), and expanded the strings (violins, cellos, and one or two double basses.) The percussion sections (riq, ṭabla) occasionally added bongo drums or a large daf. The heterophonic instrumental accompaniment that typified ṭarab enactments was replaced by performance in unison by the choir and the instrumental ensemble. The conductor was institutionalized as the central figure. Within this new performance model, the creativity and the expressive tools that characterized ṭarab performances, especially melodic improvisation, gave way to fixity, uniformity, and adherence to a written text consisting of a skeletal melody, sometimes incorporating simple ornaments.Footnote 28
The new performance model for Arab music established by FMA also involved disciplining audience behavior. Listeners’ feedback during the course of a performance, a central feature of ṭarab, was prohibited. Western concert hall behavioral norms were imposed, namely, silent and motionless listening, and polite applause following each composition.Footnote 29 These behavioral norms were tacitly understood as markers of elite class identity.
The symbolic value of the modernizing performance model for Arab music heritage implemented by FMA and other state ensembles of Arab music that were founded beginning in the late 1980s was reinforced by the high social standing of the performance venues where these ensembles performed regular concert seasons. In these venues, Arab music performances alternated with Western “art” music concerts and opera and ballet performances by the state-supported Cairo Symphony Orchestra and Cairo opera and ballet companies, as well as other local and foreign performance groups. For more than two decades after its founding, FMA performed regular concert seasons at the Sayyid Darwish Concert Hall, part of the Academy of the Arts (formerly City of the Arts) in Giza.Footnote 30 After the inauguration of the National Cultural Center and Opera House (NCCOH) in 1988, situated on Gezira Island near downtown Cairo, part of Cairo’s upscale Zamalek district, FMA and other Arab music ensembles were institutionalized as part of this state-supported cultural complex. Built with the financial support of Japan’s International Cooperation Agency in an area that was previously used for large-scale exhibitions (Ard al-Ma’aid, Exhibition Grounds), the NCCOH includes a large and a small auditorium, an outdoor theater, rehearsal rooms, an administrative building, a library and archive, and a workshop for décor. Within the same complex, several previously existing cultural institutions that are not administered by the NCCOH continue their activities, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Hanager Theater, and several movie theaters, among others. The NCCOH patronizes and produces Arab and Western music and dance performances. It offers regular concert seasons that attract audiences from Cairo’s socioeconomic elite. The requirement of a formal dress code for entrance at this venue symbolizes elitism.
FMA’s performances attract Cairo’s social and cultural elites. The audience survey I conducted in 1977, ten years following the founding of FMA, demonstrated that this ensemble initially attracted Cairo’s educated youthful elite, an audience that was generally unfamiliar with the practice and aesthetics of ṭarab. Footnote 31 As I have suggested elsewhere, for this audience FMA represents a “monument, a symbolic reconciliation between authenticity and contemporaneity (aṣāla and mu‘āṣara), a sonic representation of a forward-looking Egyptian modernity anchored in its traditional roots.”Footnote 32 As far as I am aware, no other audience surveys have been carried out since. However, I have observed that FMA and other Arab music ensembles that perform at the NCCOH continue to attract an audience from Cairo’s socioeconomic and cultural elites, albeit representing a wider age range.
After Heritage
In 1989, a new state-supported Arab music ensemble, al-Firqa al-Qawmiyya al-‘Arabiyya li-l-Musika al-ʿArabiyya (hereafter, FQ) was founded, conducted, and curated by the Soviet-trained Lebanese-Egyptian musician Salim Sahab (b. 1941). Integrated into Cairo’s NCCOH, this new ensemble tacitly contested the heritage model that FMA had established. While maintaining the firqa’s instrumental makeup, al-Firqa al-Qawmiyya restored the solo vocalist’s central role, allowing him or her a measure of creativity, albeit within a tightly controlled performance by the conductor. It also encouraged audience applause during the course of performance. It featured as its core repertoire the Egyptian ughniyya composed or performed by Um Kulthum, ‘Abd al-Wahab, ‘Abd al-Halim Hafiz, and Farid El-Atrash, among others, between the 1940s and 1970s.Footnote 33
In the 1990s and early 2000s FMA, and other state-funded Arab music ensembles that were founded in the 2000s, integrated with the NCCOH, implementing changes in the model for representation of turāth and the expansion of the repertoire to include the ughniyya that FQ had introduced.Footnote 34
Concluding Observations
A heritage for Arab music was produced by the “authorial voices” of Western-trained intellectuals and professional Arab musicians belonging to the urban cultural and musical elites in the aftermath of a major political and identity crisis in Egypt and the Arab world.Footnote 35 A heterogeneous Arab music repertoire that had fallen out of use was revived to represent Arab music heritage, a repertoire that in its “first life” was featured in diverse social milieus, performance venues, and through the media. In its new guise as heritage, this repertoire was placed on the national stage, reconfigured and re-signified. The modernist performance model that FMA introduced, its subsequent revision by other Arab music ensembles, and their integration in NCCOH can be read as markers of high cultural capital. The model served as a medium for promoting the values of elite social classes embodied by performance and audience behavior. The institutionalization of state-sponsored Arab music ensembles and soloists in Cairo’s Opera House beginning in 1989, as part of its permanent staff and regular program, reinforced the social and cultural distinction conferred to Arab music performed in this venue as a domain for cultural elites. Within this cultural infrastructure, Arab music ensembles are homologous to the government-patronized Western music ensembles, such as the Cairo Symphony Orchestra and the opera and ballet companies that regularly perform in the same venue. Like museum visiting, attending concerts of the officially sanctioned Arab music heritage ensembles in prestigious venues indexes elite class positionality, refinement, and privilege. As a cultural practice of meaning and identity-making, Arab music heritage is entangled with politics and class.
Acknowledgments
I thank Clara Wenz for organizing the workshop on Music and Class: Perspectives from Egypt, Past and Present, held at the Schelling Forum of the Bayerisch Akademie der Wissenschaft, University of Würzburg, December 3-4, 2024. It stimulated me to consider the intersection of class positionality with the production, representation, and reception of Arab music heritage in Egypt, an issue that has been largely neglected.
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