From jazz trumpeters drawing on the noises of warfare in Beirut to female heavy metallers in Alexandria, the Arab culture offers a wealth of exciting, challenging, and diverse musics. The essays in this collection investigate the plethora of compositional and improvisational techniques, performance styles, political motivations, professional trainings, and inter-continental collaborations that claim the mantle of ’innovation’ within Arab and Arab diaspora music. While most books on Middle Eastern music-making focus on notions of tradition and regionally specific genres, The Arab Avant Garde presents a radically hybrid and globally dialectic set of practices. Engaging the ’avant-garde’—a term with Eurocentric resonances—this anthology disturbs that presumed exclusivity, drawing on and challenging a growing body of literature about alternative modernities.
Chapters delve into genres and modes as diverse as jazz, musical theatre, improvisation, hip hop, and heavy metal as performed in countries like Iraq, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, and the United States. Focusing on multiple ways in which the ’Arab avant-garde’ becomes manifest, this anthology brings together international writers with eclectic disciplinary trainings—practicing musicians, area studies specialists, ethnomusicologists, and scholars of popular culture and media. Contributors include Sami W. Asmar, Michael Khoury, Saed Muhssin, Marina Peterson, Kamran Rastegar, Caroline Rooney, and Shayna Silverstein, as well as the editors.
Innehållsförteckning
A Note on Transliteration
Introduction: ’Arab’ + ’Avant-Garde’ — Kay Dickinson
PART 1. ALTERNATIVE MODERNITIES: NORMS AND INNOVATIONS
Transforming Space: The Production of Contemporary Syrian Art Music — Shayna Silverstein
Balancing Integration and Disintegration: Amir Elsaffar and the Contingent Avant-Garde — Kamran Rastegar
Multisited Avant-Gardes or World Music 2.0? Musicians from Beirut and Beyond between Local Production and Euro-American Reception — Thomas Burkhalter
PART 2. ROOTS AND ROUTES
The ’People’s Artist’ and the Beginnings of the Twentieth-Century Arab Avant-Garde — Saed Muhssin
Challenging the Status Quo in War-Torn Lebanon: Ziad Rahbani, the Avant-Garde Heir to Musical Tradition — Sami W. Asmar
A Look at Lightning: The Life and Compositions of Halim El-Dabh — Michael Khoury
PART 3. POLITICAL DEPLOYMENTS OF THE AVANT-GARDE
Sonic Cosmopolitanisms: Experimental Improvised Music and a Lebanese-American Cultural Exchange — Marina Peterson
Activism and Authenticity: Palestinian and Related Hip-Hop in an International Frame — Caroline Rooney
Noise and Its Formless Shadows: Egypt’s Extreme Metal as Avant-Garde Nafas Dawsha — Benjamin J. Harbert
Selected Discography
Contributors
Index
Om författaren
Benjamin J. Harbert is associate professor in the music and the film and media studies departments at Georgetown University. He is the producer and director of Follow Me Down: Portraits of Louisiana Prison Musicians and co-editor of The Arab Avant-Garde: Music, Politics, Modernity.
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