alt="lang"/>Abd al-Ḥalīm and others, Rātib al-Ḥuṣāmī, then Director General of the Syrian Broadcast Authority, argued that the songs of his day were: “of the cheap variety that have no meaning and no content and that cultured people reject, but which are requested by a large portion of the general population . . . the majority are nothing more than debased words drowning in love, desire, ardor and passion!”16
He goes on to excoriate what he terms love songs that have no connection with Arabic literature, especially poetry, and are little more than “unacceptable and unreasonable prattle” (al-Ḥuṣāmī 1965:1).17 Yet, fifty years later, many contemporary listeners consider these songs to represent “authentic” Arab music and “Oriental spirit”—especially when compared to what is heard on the air-waves today. The “prattle” of yesterday has become the cherished “heritage” of today.
Matters of taste aside, the centrality of Cairo (and to a lesser degree Beirut and the Arabian Gulf) for contemporary Syrian arts problematizes the commonly held assumption of the predominant influence of Western European and American culture on the Arab world. Moreover, while many of Syria’s prominent older artists studied at European academies, more-recent generations of Syrian artists, writers, and musicians (not to mention engineers, doctors, and architects) are more likely to be graduates of institutes and universities in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Moscow, Budapest, Sofia, Prague, Kiev, and Dresden have been as important to the younger generation of Syrian artists and intellectuals as Rome and Paris were to an older generation. Of course, few would pass up the opportunity to study in Paris, Rome, Berlin, Florence, and Madrid, and many prominent Syrian and other Arab artists in fact can be found in these cities today. However, these opportunities have been relatively scarce. Connections with Eastern Europe have been stronger because of military and economic cooperation between Syria and these countries since the late 1950s. For this reason, Eastern European conceptions of folklore, nationalism, and authenticity have had important influences on the visions of authentic culture of contemporary Syrian artists who studied at academies in Prague, Budapest, Bucharest, Warsaw, Moscow, and Sofia (see Rice 1993).18 New York and Los Angeles have drawn relatively few Syrian artists and intellectuals (though many doctors and engineers). For postcolonial Syrian artists and intellectuals, then, the international refers to a complex network of political, cultural, and intellectual centers ranging from the Levant and Arab world, to Eastern Europe, and South and East Asia. Western European cities, though they may figure prominently in rhetorics of the international, are for most Syrian artists of secondary importance, while New York and Los Angeles hardly figure at all, except as performance venues for singers.
Performance and the Performance of Authenticity
A commonplace in anthropology and performance studies is that aesthetic concepts and the discourses of society and self that they engage do not exist independent of their particular performative contexts; that is, they arise or emerge in the context of performance (Bauman 1977, 1986, 1992; Bauman and Briggs 1990; Hymes 1975; Kapchan 1995). Moreover, aesthetic concepts and discourses are themselves performative, that is, they participate in the constitution of the contexts and performance situations in which they emerge and do not merely reflect them. In linguistic terms, we can understand aesthetic discourse as a metalanguage that refers to the indexical and pragmatic processes of context marking, framing, and creation (Crapanzano 1992; Silverstein 1976). Performance serves as a central organizing motif in this work, and I strive to discuss aesthetic practices and discourses as they arise in specific performance situations. Yet, performance can mean a number of very different things: music making, poetry readings, colloquial speech acts and genres, and so on. Beyond the particular acts and events of performance, I address performance as a mode of being and as a strategy of framing and differentiating diverse modes of practice and being (Bateson 1972; Bell 1992, 1997; Erlmann 1996; Goffman 1959; Schechner 1985). Therefore performance, when understood as a particular strategy of acting, can include a much wider range of behaviors and contexts than what we normally understand to be “performance.” This is especially the case in the performance of emotion and sentiment in discourse and in the gestural economy of Syria’s music cultures in which the intersubjective and reflexive characteristics of performance as a strategy are most apparent (see Kapchan 1995). Indeed, emotion if not emotionality is in many ways the centerpiece of the aesthetics and kinesthetics of musical and other modes of performance in Syria, and this accounts for the centrality of sentiment in what I am arguing are the outlines of a Syrian alternative modernity.
In the Syrian aesthetics of authenticity, aesthetic judgments are based first and foremost on the degree to which any given cultural object is considered to be authentic (aṣīl). Criteria of authenticity (aṣāla) include an object’s relationship first and foremost to the Arab cultural heritage—itself a manifold of conflicting terms and concepts. The criteria of authenticity are filtered through the dialectics of local and the international, the city and the country, center and periphery, the modern and the traditional; conceptions of the self, the emotions, creativity, and the imagination; discourses of religion, language, and identity; and the reality of politics and patronage. It is this complex web of interrelated discourses and practices that I explore through analysis and interpretation of important currents in contemporary Syrian music. Modeled in some ways on a musical mode, which allows modulation to related modes, this ethnography modulates to themes that elucidate the depth and potential of the primary theme of authenticity—modernity, emotion, memory, and temporality are among the collateral themes.
Borrowing from the conventional structure of the genre of instrumental improvisation called the taqsīm, I open each chapter with a maṭla
In writing, I have adopted a number of narrative strategies that suggest some Syrian forms of cultural expression. These include a heavy reliance on anecdote, for much of what I learned about cultural life in Syria was taught to me by my friends and acquaintances through the medium of the well-phrased anecdote. “Let me tell you a story . . .” (baḥkīlak
