Palestinian Music and Song: Expression and Resistance since 1900

Introduction: Do Palestinian Musicians Play Music or Politics?

1 Introduction: Do Palestinian Musicians Play Music or Politics? Moslih Kanaaneh Why Music? And Why Palestinian Music? While theoreticians, philosophers, and empirical researchers may debate the ontological and epistemological relationships between culture and music (see Middleton 2003), the importance of music in the lives of humans and human collectivities cannot be denied. All human groups around the world and throughout human history have had music in one form or another, and music has been a fundamentally significant element in their cultural life and mode of being. As Philip Bohlman has observed: Music represented culture in two ways, as a form of expression common to humanity, and as one of the most extreme manifestations of difference. On the one hand, the essence of universal culture was borne by music; that is, the commonness that the colonizer and the colonized shared. On the other hand, the fact that music might embody profound differences accounted for the way it was totally incompatible with the culture of the colonizer.” (2003, 47) In war and in peace, in turmoil and in tranquility, human collectivities of all kinds and sizes constantly produce and consume music in their everyday life. In the colonial condition, the colonizers sing their triumph while the colonized sing their way to the hoped-for triumph. The difference, however, is that the colonizers 2 | Moslih Kanaaneh always try to silence the colonized, arguing (and perhaps truly believing) that the music of the colonized is nothing but a “primitive” tool for incitement and resistance against “the purveyors of civilization.” This becomes like a self-fulfilling prophecy: the colonizers use music and other cultural practices as a tool for labeling the colonized as “primitive,” and then this constructed notion of “primitivity ” becomes a justification for colonizing “the primitive” in the name of modernity and civilization. The significance of the Palestinian case for musicologists, anthropologists, and political analysts lies in the fact that it provides an outstanding opportunity for a generative analysis of the interactive relationship between music as a form of expressive culture and the use, abuse, and misuse of power, externally as well as internally . On the one hand, Palestinians share the same discourses and sociocultural , political, and economic characteristics of all the deprived, oppressed, and marginalized peoples of the third world, whether in Asia, Africa, Latin America, or elsewhere. On the other hand, Palestinians are a unique case in that while the rest of the world has moved to the postcolonial condition, Palestinians are still stuck in the colonial condition and seemingly have a long way to go in struggling for survival, resisting occupation, and fighting for liberation and national independence . Researchers and analysts therefore have to be exceedingly careful when applying postcolonial frames of analysis to the Palestinian situation. Nothing informs the Palestinians’ mode of being and ways of life more than their being subjugated to the aggressive, all-encroaching Israeli occupation that penetrates into the most minute details of their lives. An inseparable part of this condition is the permanent temporality of the exile of more than six million Palestinians who have been uprooted and displaced and still are denied the right to return to their homes and lands in Palestine. “All that has been happening to the Palestinians since 1948, whether in the occupied homeland or in exile, is nothing but the ramifications of the tragedy of uprootedness; uprootedness of human beings from their home, uprootedness of homes from their land, uprootedness of land from its history, and uprootedness of history from its humanity” (Kanaaneh 2008, 181). Since music is an integral part of culture, and culture is, in the final analysis, the mode of humans’ innovative adaptation to events and their consequences in time, music is thus inevitably organically tied to history such that one can read history in music, and, at the same time, one always has to understand music and musical works in their historical context. This may sound odd when taking into consideration the common conviction that music as a system of signification and expression is universal and eternal, defying the dividing boundaries of space and time. True as it may be, this universalism and eternality of music should not blind us to the particularity of music and musical works in space and time; that is why we distinguish between ancient, medieval, modern, and contemporary music, and Introduction | 3 that is why we distinguish among types of music associated with different geographic regions. This...