Umar al-Baṭsh moreover revived older songs and “completed” those that had been inherited with certain sections (khānāt) “missing,” including many by Sayyid Darwīsh (Mahannā 1998: 140).14 In addition, al-Baṭsh trained the majority of Aleppo’s major singers of the last fifty years, including Sabri Moudallal, Mustafā Māhir, Zuhayr Minīnī, Hassan and Kāmil Bassāl, Muḥammad Khairī, and Ṣabāḥ Fakhrī. His stamp is still heard in Aleppine performances today, in terms of both compositional and vocal style.
Other important names from among Aleppo’s musical progeny include the composer and vocalist Bakrī al-Kurdī (1909–1978); Sabri Moudallal (b. 1918); Ṣabāḥ Fakhrī (b. 1933), arguably the greatest living Arab vocalist; the late Muḥammad Khairī (1935–1981); Nouri Iskandar (b. 1938), former director of the Arab Music Institute in Aleppo, noted composer, musical modernizer, and researcher of Syriac and other ancient Levantine melodies; Muḥammad Qadrī Dalāl (b. 1946), a music researcher, current director of the Arab Music Institute in Aleppo, and among the finest contemporary oud performers in the Arab world (and my main teacher); Saad Allah Agha al-Qalah (b. 1950), currently Syrian Minister of Tourism, former Professor of Engineering at Damascus University, and a respected qānūn performer and music scholar; Mayāda al-Ḥinnāwī (b. 1958), among the Arab world’s leading female vocalists; and many others.
Ḥassan Baṣṣal (center), with (from left to right) Abd al-Ḥalīm Harīrī, Muḥammad Qadrī Dalāl, the author, and Ghass ān Amūrī, Aleppo, 2004.
Just as important as its reputation for distinguished scholars and performers has been Aleppo’s reputation for its knowledgeable and cultivated listeners, the fabled sammīa or “connoisseur listeners” explored in depth by ethnomusicologist A. J. Racy (2003).15 The sammīa are those who claim a “special talent for listening” (Racy 2003: 40; see also Elsner 1997) and a high degree of musical taste. Traditionally, they also functioned as arbiters of musical taste and aesthetics in urban center such as Cairo, Beirut, and Aleppo. Aleppine musicians often claim that no major Arab artist, including Umm Kulthūm and Muḥhammad Abd al-Wahhāb, achieved fame without having first earned the approval of the Aleppine sammīa. Numerous stories—nay, legends—abound of the importance of Aleppo’s sammīa in determining the course of modern Arab music. One oft-told legend states that in the 1930s the then-rising Egyptian star Muḥhammad Abd al-Wahhāb came to perform in Aleppo. On the evening of his first concert, only a small number of Aleppines came to hear him—perhaps as few as seven in a theater that would hold two thousand (often said to have been the famed “Luna Park” theater, now long-since demolished). Abd al-Wahhāb was stunned and disappointed but nevertheless gave a strong performance. On the second night, the audience overflowed the theater onto the streets, with over two thousand people showing up to hear him inside the theater and some two thousand standing outside the theater. After this second show, Abd al-Wahhāb asked the stage manager, “Why were there only a few people the first night and an overflow crowd tonight?” He was told, “Ah! Those who came the first night were our sammīa. No one in Aleppo will go to a concert unless the sammīa say the artist is good. You did well and therefore everyone came on the second night!” In other words, Abd al-Wahhāb passed the test of Aleppo’s sammīa and this allowed him, in the eyes of the Aleppines, not only to succeed in Aleppo but to succeed in the Arab world at large. He got their coveted “seal of approval.”
Muḥhammad Qadrī Dalāl, Aleppo, 2000.
Another legend involving ‘Abd al-Wahhāb and told in numerous versions, as most legends, says that the great artist wanted to meet with Aleppo’s musicians and learn what he could from them. In an evening gathering with Umar al-Baṭsh, Alī al-Darwīsh, and others, Abd al-Wahhāb asked if they had any muwashshaḥāt in the mode sīkāh, since none in this mode was known in Egypt at the time. Umar al-Baṭsh replied that, of course, they had a full suite in that mode. When Abd al-Wahhāb asked to hear it, al-Baṭsh replied that the time of day was not appropriate for singing that mode and that therefore he should come back the following morning when the stars would be more favorable, evoking the neo-Pythagorean theory of the correspondence between the different modes, the times of day, and particular moods. When Abd al-Wahhāb departed, ‘Alī al-Darwīsh turned to al-Baṭsh and said in surprise, “We don’t have any muwashshaḥāt in that mode! What are you going to do?!” Umar al-Baṭsh replied, “Well, it’s not appropriate for a city like Aleppo not to have any muwashshaḥāt in sīkāh, so I will compose some!” and that same evening he composed three and taught them to a chorus of singers. When ‘Abd al-Wahhāb returned the following morning, to his astonishment, and the astonishment of everyone else, al-Baṭsh and his chorus sang a complete suite in the mode (Mahannā 1998: 139–40; al-Sharīf 1991: 131–32).
What might account for Aleppo’s famed musical importance? Many Aleppines attribute the city’s musical and cultural strength to its historical importance as a center for commerce, learning, and industry. Located in northwestern Syria on the western end of the famous Silk Road, Aleppo served since the rise of the Ottoman Empire (in 1516) as the major center in the Levant for the overland textile and spice trade between Europe and Asia, via the port city of Alexandretta (Iskandarun) (Faroqhi 1987: 315; Inalçik 1997: 244; A. Marcus 1989: 146–48). Throughout the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, Aleppo had extensive and sustained contact with European powers, especially Venice, France, and England, whose merchants bought large quantities of raw silk in exchange for gold, silver, and woolen and silk cloth, much of which was later redistributed to cities in the North and East (Faroqhi 1987: 337; Inalçik 1997: 244–45; A. Marcus 1989: 148). Trade with Europe was never stable, but Aleppo remained an important center until the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, growing to be the third-largest
