Among the Jasmine Trees. Jonathan Holt Shannon

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I had to prove myself constantly before the suspicions of those who thought Arab music to be ineffable for non-Arabs. Whenever an oud was available, I generally was asked to play for people in order to demonstrate what I could do, and especially as a test for any manifestations of “oriental spirit”—that key yet elusive element of Arab musical aesthetics. Sometimes I was asked to sing songs, quizzed on specific modes, or enjoined to explain what I had “discovered” in their music. Only after many months of fieldwork was I able to convince people that I had at least a modicum of “oriental spirit.” My public lectures (in Arabic) on musical topics and performances in public contexts convinced some of the doubters that I had entered, if only in a rudimentary way, the heart of their music and understood some of its secrets. In this fashion, my own performances as well as the recordings and performances of Syrian musicians became an integral part of my search for the keys to authenticity in Syrian music and culture.

      Listening, Aesthetics, and Forming a Tape Collection

      As much as knowledge of the genres and styles and skill on an instrument, it is one’s skill as a listener that forms an essential component in announcing musical cultivation and taste. I constantly was asked, “To whom do you listen?” and given suggestions for tapes, specific recordings, and concerts. The question of what one listens to and what recordings are in one’s collection are absolutely critical in marking and defending claims to authenticity. Among nonspecialists, a claim to listen to Umm Kulthūm, Abd al-Ḥalīm Ḥāfiẓ, and Muḥammad Abd al-Wahhāb is one common way to make a claim to being a cultured person and respecting cultural authenticity (especially to the foreign music researcher). Among the discriminating, however, to answer “Umm Kulthūm” is not sufficient. At a listening session organized by a dramatist friend at the home of a well-known woman music teacher, my discrimination as a listener was put to the test early. “To whom do you enjoy listening?” asked the teacher. I replied, “Umm Kulthūm,” and, with a look of resignation that suggested to me, “Is that all there is?” she asked, “From which era [of her career]?” I had just listened to a harangue by a local cassette vendor about how beautiful and pure the early Umm Kulthūm was in comparison to her later work, so I replied, “Her early work, before she became well-known.” This elicited a nod of approval and the remark, “Her best recordings are from the period of about 1928 to 1930. Afterwards she became too repetitive and emotionally less sincere (muftaala),” she remarked.³²

      Forming a collection of cassette tapes (and, recently, compact disks) is another component of determining and even performing one’s musical taste as a symbol of wider “culture” (thaqāfa).³³ When I began my oud lessons, my teacher instructed me that the first thing I must do aside from obtaining a decent oud and practicing four hours every day was to begin collecting good tapes and listen to them regularly. Listening is considered a creative act among Syrians, and one’s collection of recordings announces one’s level of discrimination and culture. My teacher, for example, argued that he listens to “everything,” and indeed he has recordings from numerous diverse musical cultures to prove it. Another musician friend went to great lengths to show me his “jazz” tapes that for him symbolized his cosmopolitanism.³⁴

      Most Syrians listen to music on cassettes, which form the backbone of a thriving “cassette culture” (Manuel 1993). Although first-run recordings are available in the market (the so-called “original” recordings or aṣliyyāt), most are bootlegged copies from original tapes, reels, and CDs, or copies of other copies. The quality of tapes hence varies tremendously, though a number of specialty stores have arisen that deal in high-quality cassettes, usually costing two or three times what a standard tape might cost (for example, SYP100 to 150 versus SYP50).³⁵ It is not uncommon to see audience members with rudimentary tape recorders at concerts, and not long after the concert bootleg versions of these tapes will appear in the market, now often in poor-quality MP3 format on CD. Yet, “bootleg” is hardly the appropriate term. Until 2001 and the enforcement of laws protecting intellectual property in Syria, “copyright” was not a word found in the colloquial dictionary; even with the new laws, Syrian artists rarely if ever receive any remuneration from the sale of recordings. As one musician and studio owner put it: “We have no rights in the market.” In a way, the circulation of cassette tapes and MP3s has democratized the music market in Syria.³⁶

      The majority of music shops in Damascus and Aleppo carry the average run-of-the-mill recordings of the most recent pop stars as well as a handful of tapes of older masters. However, a few stores specialize in the “classical” repertoire and the great Arab artists of the twentieth century. I got most of my collection (almost entirely in the form of cassette tape) from these shops. I also would exchange recordings with my musician friends, with whom I would compare collections and ask advice about certain artists and recordings. Trading music became an important context for learning about musical aesthetics. Why was one performance of a given artist preferred over another? In which genres did a certain artist excel and, the converse, in which was he or she less skilled? What makes for a good voice, a good melody? Through engagement with local “cassette cultures,” I was able to acquire certain habits of listening that allowed me to learn much about the music that I could not have learned from lessons alone. As one musician told me, “You have to learn how to listen before you can learn how to play the music.”

      Old and New

      In the exchange of tapes and in the cassette culture in general, discourses of the old (qadīm) and the new (jadīd) are very important. I found that there is widespread agreement that earlier material by older artists is better than their recent material. For example, the owner of one cassette shop, a young man of perhaps twenty-two, argued that the older recordings of the popular singer George Wasoof are better than his new recordings, whereas anything by the late Egyptian singer Abd al-Ḥalīm Ḥāfiẓ would be better than Wasoof’s repertoire from any era. In discourses of authenticity, the old is almost always better than the new, which marks decay (inḥiṭāṭ). Indeed, the newer songs are blamed almost universally for lowering musical taste in Syria. Even many cassette vendors, whose livelihood depends on the sale of the “cheap” songs, argued that they prefer the older material. But closer examination of this discourse of debasement and the threat of the contemporary songs to the existence of the older ones reveals a somewhat different picture. First, not all is lost with respect to the “classical” songs and their conventions. Umm Kulthūm remains the single most popular artist not only on the airwaves but at cassette stands around Damascus and Aleppo. The owner of a stand in central Damascus that sells a variety of modern and “classical” songs, folk music, and even Western pop music claims that on any given day he sells about twenty-five Umm Kulthūm cassettes, whereas he might sell that amount of a contemporary singer only in the first few days after the cassette is released to the market. By comparison, he might sell five to ten George Wasoof tapes or a handful of Amru Diab tapes—both very popular Arab artists who have large audiences in Syria. But the Egyptian diva still reigns as queen of the market with an average of twenty-five tapes a day, every day, for the several years this man has been selling them. Other vendors claimed similar sales proportions: the new singers might sell a lot when their tapes first hit the market, but Umm Kulthūm, Abd al-Ḥalīm Ḥāfiẓ, and Muḥammad Abd al-Wahhāb—the venerated Big Three—remain the top sellers. Syrian stars such as Ṣabāḥ Fakhrī also do well, especially in specialty shops that do not offer the “cheap” music. In such shops in Damascus and Aleppo, one finds aficionados, young and old, of older styles and artists such as Asmahān, Laylā Murād, Nūr al-Hudā, Bakrī al-Kurdī,

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