UNIVERSITY OF LONDON - SCHOOL OF ADVANCED STUDY
INSTITUTE OF MUSICAL RESEARCH
MIDDLE EAST AND CENTRAL ASIA MUSIC FORUM
The Middle East and Central Asia Music forum is open to researchers, students and anyone interested in the music and culture of the region. In the spirit of fostering dialogue and interdisciplinarity, we hope that the issues discussed at the forum will be of interest to a broad audience, including musicologists, ethnomusicologists and other researchers in the arts, humanities and social sciences. In addition, we welcome those working on other aspects of Middle Eastern and Central Asian culture broadly speaking (dance, visual arts, media, film, literature, etc.)
Since March 2007 the Forum has met twice a year. Details of each of the meetings are contained in the archive. The convenor of the Forum is Laudan Nooshin (City University).
Next Meetings:
Musical Geographies of Central Asia conference (16-18 May 2012)
MIDDLE EAST AND CENTRAL ASIA MUSIC FORUM
25 November 2011
Stewart House, Room ST274/5
REVISED PROGRAMME
Registration from 9.15am
9.45am - Welcome
Focus on Palestine
Session 1: 9.45am-11.30am
Rachel Beckles Willson (Royal Holloway)
Music’s Necessary Complicity
Felicity Laurence (University of Newcastle)
Singing Lullabies in Nablus
11.30am tea/coffee
Session 2: 11.45 to 12.30pm
Yara El-Ghadban (University of the Witwatersrand)
Struggle Songs Without Words: Palestinian Instrumental Music Between The Two Intifadas
12.30pm – 1.30pm Lunch break
Session 3: 1.30 to 3pm
Screening of ‘It’s Not a Gun’ (67 mins; Palestine, 2006 Pierre-Nicolas Durant et Hélèna Cotinier), followed by discussion session.
3pm Tea/Coffee
Session 4: 3.15pm – 5pm
Jacob Olley (SOAS)
Tracing Modal Development in Early Ottoman Music: The Case of Makam Saba
Carolyn Landau (King’s College, London)
Western Symphony Orchestras, Creative Fusion Projects and Muslim Communities
in London: Heavenly Harmonies, Cultural Confusion or Political Propaganda?
SHORT BREAK
Session 4: 5.10-6.30pm
Khyam Allami (SOAS): Research presentation and Oud performance
London based Iraqi Oud player and SOAS Teaching Fellow Khyam Allami will present his Sound of Iraq project (http://www.soundofiraq.org), which aims to create a new National Sound Archive in Baghdad, Iraq. He will also discuss his ongoing research and involvement in the independent Middle Eastern music scene, followed by a live performance of his debut album "Resonance/Dissonance" in its entirety.
Advance booking is requested via Valerie James at music@sas.ac.uk; a contribution to costs of £10 is requested on the door. Attendance for students and the unwaged is free.
ABSTRACTS
Rachel Beckles Willson (Royal Holloway) Music's Necessary Complicity
Music is often celebrated as a means through which people can express resistance to subjugation, whether this is experienced in political, military or a range of other forms. Music is also acknowledged to be powerful in affirming dominant powers in a range of ways. Meanwhile, however, its role is always subject to interpretation by its performers and listeners, so it is an ambiguous, even unreliable medium of communication.
In some contexts, this ambiguity is explicit, namely when music is employed to do something about which it (or its publicity, its conceptual projection) is obliged to be silent. My case study for this phenomenon is the occupied West Bank, where musical performances initiated by foreign organizations are subject to Israeli permissions (or the lack thereof), and in their concern to be heard in some form may lead to a reinforcement of aspects of the situation that they seek to challenge. My paper explores the ramifications of music's complicity in this context.
Biography:
Rachel is Reader in Music and Director of the MMus in Advanced Musical Studies at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her research on Eastern Europe and the sociology of western classical music has been published in two monographs, over 20 book chapters and journal articles, and presented at conferences worldwide. Following studies as a pianist at the Royal Academy of Music in London and the Liszt Academy of Music, Budapest, she worked as a pianist but also read for a PhD at Kings College, London. She taught at the University of Bristol from 1999, joining Royal Holloway in 2003. Between 2008 and 2010 she was based at the Humboldt University in Berlin, supported by a Fellowship for Experienced Researchers from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation; during this period she wrote her forthcoming monograph, 'Orientalism and Musical Mission: The Case of Palestine'. She is now studying the 'ūd.
Felicity Laurence (University of Newcastle) Singing Lullabies in Nablus
In several recent visits to Palestine, I have been singing with children who have had limited access to the musical traditions of their culture, in areas near Nablus and in the South Mt Hebron desert. While some colleagues, both Palestinian and Israeli, are uneasy at evidence of an increasing loss among Palestinian children of musical sensitivity to Arabic musical forms, others working with children in the West Bank are offering them an eclectic musical programme partly or wholly based upon Western musical traditions.
Where the aim is seen principally as using music as a means of personal and even political empowerment, rather than (principally) as musical development, the question of 'which music?' seems to be answered by the specific expertise of those teaching it, rather than with paramount regard to the cultural legacy of the Palestinian children. This was so in my own work there, where I was concerned with issues of solidarity, identity, dialogue and relationship as well as 'straight' musical learning. I found that the children responded appreciatively and competently (in their singing and playing) to diverse musical styles, although my ability to judge this is restricted to musics in which I am myself competent: this precludes any fine judgement of their abilities to perceive and reproduce such musical elements as microtones.
This paper explores what arose quickly as conundrums inherent in this work -some fairly immediately clear, and others lurking somewhat concealed within the specific mesh of sociocultural and political factors and facets of life in this part of the Middle East.
Biography:
Felicity Laurence, from New Zealand, is a teacher, composer, and children's singing specialist whose international work within the areas of music education and of intercultural dialogue through musicking is underpinned by the principles of children's innate musicality, quality and empathy. Her doctoral study explored conceptual resonances between musicking and empathy in which field she continues ongoing research. Felicity has held lecturing positions in music education and children's singing at Bergen University College, Norway and at Trossingen Music Conservatory, Germany. She currently teaches at the International Centre for Music Studies, Newcastle University, where she is Degree Programme Director for the MA Music and Education, and at the Royal Northern College of Music as Research Supervisor.
Yara El-Ghadban (University of the Witwatersrand) Songs Without Words : Palestinian Instrumental Music Between the Two Intifadas
For years Palestinian artists and musicians have struggled against their work being interpreted exclusively within the paradigm of identity and liberation politics. Yet, while constantly trying to escape the reductive discourses surrounding politics, many refuse to give up engaging with it in their work. During the 1990s, this tension between politics and aesthetics ?between liberation discourse and the creative strategies of Palestinian musicians played out against the back-drop of the increasing circulation of Palestinian musicians in the world as hope for a peace settlement seemed, at the time, credible. In this context, instrumental music proved to be much more translatable and transportable culturally and politically than the struggle songs that had dominated in the Palestinian imaginary during the 60s and 70s. In this paper, I argue that Palestinian musicians view instruments as objects of ambivalence in a Middle-Eastern musical tradition that is dominated by the voice. As such, instruments gain new meaning as agents of mediation between the different facets of their transnational identity (Palestinian, Middle-Eastern and diasporic) and between different political ideologies in the fluid period between the Oslo peace accords and the second Intifada.
Biography:
Yara El-Ghadban is a post-doctoral researcher in anthropology at Wits University and an ethnomusicologist, based in London. Music has been her gateway to reflecting on the politics of identity, otherness and mutuality in a postcolonial context riddled with violence. She worked on contemporary Palestinian music in diaspora and in Palestine, as well as on musicians from the Global South trying to make it into the exclusive world of contemporary Western art music. Beyond music, since 2010, she has been following the reconstruction of the Nahr El-Bared Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon, focusing on the biopolitics that are implicated in a project where national and international stake-holders, utopia and dystopia collide (and collude), crystallizing the ethical and political conundrums that have come to be associated with the Palestinian question.
Jacob Olley (SOAS) Tracing Modal Development in Early Ottoman Music: The Case of Makam Saba
The collections of musical notation which survive from the 17th and early 18th century Ottoman tradition provide us with invaluable material for evaluating the processes of historical change in modal music. This paper traces the historical development of a single mode, makâm sabâ, by analysing and comparing its repertoire as it was notated in the earliest Ottoman sources. These collections contain a sizeable corpus of vocal and instrumental compositions in makâm sabâ, which display a degree of heterogeneity indicative either of temporal change, or of considerable variability in contemporary practices (or both).
Historical musicology inevitably tends towards a linear analysis of modal development which reflects the chronological ordering of textual sources, but detailed reading of the sources themselves hints at a more complex and disordered reality. The scarcity of notation in the Ottoman world before the 19th century means that any evaluation of the early modal system is speculative and incomplete, and is in danger of limiting musical phenomena to their textual remains. However, by reversing this perspective and considering the notated sources as a reflection of a living musical tradition, this paper will question the notion of modality as a static and predefined system of rules, and instead will argue that the early Ottoman collections display a diversity of practices within a changing and changeable musical culture.
Biography:
Jacob Olley recently completed an MMus in Ethnomusicology at SOAS, University of London, where he focused on early sources of notation in Ottoman music. He has been studying the Turkish ney since 2008, and currently lives in Istanbul.
Carolyn Landau (King’s College, London) Western Symphony Orchestras, Creative Fusion Projects and Muslim Communities in London: Heavenly Harmonies, Cultural Confusion or Political Propaganda?
Community outreach programmes run by western symphony orchestras in Britain emerged in the 1980s and have developed and diversified considerably since then, including projects with Muslim communities for whom music may be problematic for theological reasons. Through the presentation and analysis of ethnographic data collected since 2009, this paper explores the following questions: how does the community outreach work of western symphony orchestras fit into its overall aims and vision? Is this work, for example, mainly about widening participation, reaching new audiences, attracting more funding, following recent trends in music education and/or (inter)national political policies, or does it also include the expansion of artistic horizons and the creation of new, quality music, and are all of these various goals simultaneously achievable and measurable? To what extent are the aims, values and ideologies (be they artistic, educational, social, moral, religious or political) of orchestras, the community groups with whom they collaborate and their funders, compatible with one another? And
finally, how do orchestras choose which communities and what musical genres to engage with? Are these decisions governed by artistic, educational, political, or other factors and what conclusions can be drawn from the resulting projects, performances and on-going relationships between orchestras and communities?
Biography:
Carolyn Landau is Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Department of Music at King’s College, London, having completed her PhD at City University in 2010. Her research interests include the music of North Africa, Islam, migration, applied ethnomusicology, sound archiving and community music. She has published articles on Moroccan and Algerian musicians in London and music, media and migration, and has forthcoming articles on music consumption and Islam and proactive sound archiving. Her current research project examines the role and impact of music within diverse Muslim communities in London. She is also currently chair of the British Forum for Ethnomusicology.
