Among the Jasmine Trees: Music and Modernity in Contemporary Syria

THREE: Constructing Musical Authenticity: History,Cultural Memory, Emotion

83      ConstructingMusicalAuthenticity: History,CulturalMemory,Emotion  Maœtla⁄: The Time and Place of Authenticity With my ideas for research in one hand and my oud in the other, I felt that I was prepared for fieldwork in Syria. What I was not prepared for was a common response to my stated research interests in Arab music: Is there even such a thing as “Arab music”? While many Syrians expressed surprise at my choice of Syria as a research site—American researchers are few and far between there—some also expressed doubts about my intentions to study “Arab music.” Is the music Arab, or is it Turkish, Persian, or Byzantine, or is it a mixture of all of these? What is “Arab” about Arab music? Because many of the genres commonly performed in the “classical” repertoire have their roots in pan-Ottoman and Persian musical practices, calling them “Arab” is problematic, and many of my interlocutors , musicians and otherwise, pointed this out to me. Moreover, some Aleppines (mostly non-musicians) asked me what I even meant by “music.” Emphasizing the latter term, they often asked me if there is such a thing as Arab music—that is, music distinct from song. As mentioned in the previous chapter , referring to the melodic and rhythmic practices of the Arabs as “music” (mÂusµıqÂa) is problematic since in classical texts the term had referred to theories of music and not to instrumental practices. Because of the privilege of the voice in Arab aesthetics, Arabs have tended to refer to their melodic and rhythmic practices as song. What many Syrians considered to be Arab or Syrian music, or even “music” itself, depended a lot on their educational, religious, and artistic backgrounds. Some intellectuals argued that Arab music is the inheritor of the music of the ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia and the Fertile Crescent, and therefore 84     authentic. Others argued that it is essentially Turkish music, and therefore inauthentic . Still others claimed different roots, different histories. Aside from causing a certain amount of epistemological self-doubt, these sorts of dialogues opened windows onto discourses about identity that found expression in discussions of music and musical origins. For my Syrian interlocutors, the Arabness of their music had as much if not more to do with conceptions of cultural authenticity, origins, and identity than with more objective musical factors such as tonality, genre, and style. Chapter 2 explored some of the meanings of the concepts of modernity, authenticity , and heritage, and argued that authenticity is a constructed and contested domain of fluid subjectivities for different groups within Syria. This chapter examines further the construction of concepts of musical authenticity in Syria through an analysis of the spatial and temporal dimensions of discourses on authenticity. I explore a set of important spatial and temporal complexes that serve as orientational centers in contemporary discourses about musical and artistic authenticity in contemporary Syria, then turn to four discourses on the origins of “Arab music” that reveal not only different visions of authenticity but also different understandings of culture, self, and society. Temporal and Spatial Orientations of Authenticity in Contemporary Syrian Art Many Aleppine artists and intellectuals support their claims to cultural authenticity by appealing to particular constructions of the origins of the music. Indeed , some make the linguistic link between origin (aœsl) and authenticity (aœsÂala), for the words derive from the same roots. Authenticity itself implies a fixed origin in time and space. In their various discourses about art and authenticity , Syrian artists, critics, and consumers articulate concepts of origin with respect to two orientational centers, one temporal and the other spatial. With respect to temporality, those having an interest in promoting their visions of authentic culture tend to locate authenticity temporally in the past (mÂaœdµı), or, to be more accurate, in constructions of different pasts—for example, the preIslamic era, the early Islamic era, the Ottoman Period, and the early modern period. In general, as Silvia Naef (1996) notes in her study of modernity in Arab fine arts, Arab intellectuals and artists have tended to locate authenticity in the pre-colonial past. But in a country like Syria that has been colonized and recolonized literally for millennia, the pre-colonial past might mean the time prior to the French mandate (1922–1944), the Ottoman Period (1516–1918), and even, for some Christians, prior to the Muslim “occupation” of Syria (beginning in 3...