It is also worth remembering that ethnography is the result of a largely collaborative process of research. I was in Syria not only to receive knowledge from informants but to engage in scholarly debate and research with them. Many of the musicians with whom I studied and performed also consider themselves to be scholars and researchers; some present papers at international conferences and write articles and books on their music. Acknowledging the mutual constitution of knowledge in fieldwork helps overcome the tendency in anthropological and ethnomusicological research to construe the informants as Others residing in some Other time, namely, “tradition,” even when they are engaged in what we characterize (caricaturize?) as a “struggle for modernity” (Fabian 1983; see also Blum 1990: 417–19). My participation in this process was as a co-researcher, lover, and novice performer of the music, and certainly as a junior partner in the overall efforts of a certain group of artists and intellectuals to understand and document the richness of their music. Nevertheless, I participated as one who potentially might “discover” something, and so many of my interlocutors exposed this expectation—or ridiculed it—by asking me, “What have you discovered?” (shū iktashaft?). My simple performances and demonstrations on the oud, my interviews and public lectures, and my lessons and interactions with so many musicians all attest to the mutuality of this process. I mention this not to trumpet my own achievements—modest as they were—but rather to raise the question of how our complex and compound identities as researchers imply a different sort of practice of anthropology, one closer to the practices of artists and musicians themselves, who often stress “complementarity” (Blum 1990: 418; Turino 1990: 409–410) and not the subject-object division common in so much traditional ethnography.
Therefore I strive to keep the voices of my interlocutors in the foreground in order to emphasize the collaborative nature of the research. As I have written this manuscript, at each turn I asked myself, “What would so-and-so say?” “Is this in line with what I learned in Aleppo?” and so on. At the same time, we need to follow Vaclev Havel’s advice (cited in Blum 1990: 418) to “distrust words,” especially when they come from those occupying positions of power who construe themselves as centers of truth. Certain of my interlocutors occupied positions of authority and had strong connections to local centers of political power. Others less well-connected also occupied certain positions within Syrian society that conditioned their forms of discourse and practice. All of them articulated ideological stances that need to be taken into account. So it is not merely a matter of giving voice to a multiplicity of actors but of contextualizing these voices in the overall fabric of Syrian society in which musical and other cultural practices are made meaningful.
Qafla
In the following chapters, I explore the question of modernity through analysis of discourse about authenticity in contemporary Syrian music. Chapter 1 provides an overview of debates over musical authenticity in Syria, and outlines the major genres of Arab music performed in Syria today as well as the primary performance venues. I discuss some of the contexts and strategies of learning music in Syria and show how the local “cassette culture” (Manuel 1993) plays an important role in defining conceptions of musical and cultural authenticity. In chapter 2, I trace a genealogy of some of the keywords in debates about modernity in the Arab world, namely modernity (ḥadātha), authenticity (aṣāla), and heritage (turāth), drawing on accounts from nineteenth-century Egypt and Syria, as well as more recent writings from Syria, Lebanon, and Morocco. I examine the complex ways in which these terms find expression in twentieth-century Syrian musical discourse and practice, and argue that these debates in music participate in the composition of different visions of a Syrian alternative modernity. In chapter 3, I discuss some of the temporal and spatial dimensions of the aesthetics of authenticity in contemporary Syrian art worlds and examine how the idea of origin operates in constructions of tradition, heritage, identity, and authenticity in four narratives of the origins of Arab music. In chapter 4, I continue the discussion of musical origins with an exploration of a domain that many Aleppine musicians asserted was an origin of both their musical traditions and their own involvement with the music: the Sufi dhikr, the ritual invocation of God. I analyze dhikr both as a ritual context and as an art world in which conceptions of authenticity and personhood are conceptualized, invoked, and enacted. Moreover, I examine the role of temporality and modes of body memory in structuring the experience of transformation and transcendence in the dhikr and suggest how this relates to the construction and social reproduction of embodied experiences of moral and musical selfhood in Aleppo.
In chapter 5, I explore the waṣla or musical suite as the paradigmatic authentic genre of secular Arab music in Aleppo. I discuss three key terms in the critical aesthetic lexicon of “authentic” Arab music—melody (laḥn), lyrics (kalimāt), and voice (ṣawt)—and show how these critical-musical terms gloss emotional states that play a defining role in the constitution of authentic aesthetic experience. In chapter 6, I further explore the concept of ṭarab and argue that, like other terms in Aleppine discourses of music and emotion, ṭarab serves as a metaphor for the social context of performance and is one strategy for the presentation of positively valued conceptions of the self in the context of performance. Finally, I end this work with an examination of the concept of “Oriental spirit” in Syrian aesthetics and of how spirit and emotion perform and improvise on visions for an alternative modernity in which emotionality and sentiment are seen not as impediments to progress, but as the very substance of modern Syrian subjectivity.
ONE
Among the Jasmine Trees
Soon after arriving in Damascus, I met Fateh Moudarres (1924–1999), one of modern Syria’s—indeed, the Arab world’s—greatest artists. “Ustāz Fateh,” as he was known to his students and friends, was famous for his powerful paintings that evoke the Syrian countryside with their rich colors and characters drawn from rural life.1
A native of Aleppo and graduate of academies in Rome and Paris in the 1950s and 1960s, Moudarres advocated both modernism and authenticity in his art, arguing that authentic Syrian art in any medium should evoke a strong sense of place, of local geography, the smells and sounds of the countryside, the animals and plants, the very soil. His works convey geographical specificity through the use of strong colors, natural pigments, abstractions of simple themes from folk life and mythology, and an acute awareness of temporality—that is, of timelessness. His paintings, which have hung beside the works of Miro and Picasso, won several international prizes. Yet, he claimed that Syrian artists had not yet managed to achieve an authentic modern vision despite a few individual efforts, his own included.
In addition to his painting, Moudarres also published several collections of stories and poetry and recorded some of his own compositions on the piano. Indeed, he claimed to me to be a musician at heart but to prefer painting because, as he put it, music is “too noisy” for his tastes. Yet, he playfully suggested that one could experience what he called “silent music” in his canvases. Some of his works include portraits of peasants playing on simple reed instruments or carry titles that suggest a relationship to music.
Fateh Moudarres
