Sufi Music: The Rough Guide to Sufi Music (review)

Sampling from 11 different source albums, this compilation CD album offers a wonderful collection of stellar performers and powerful performances. Whether the package as a whole—including audio, text, and images—serves to represent the already-problematic category of Sufi music is another matter entirely. Certainly the scant 12 pages of notes, inadequate also in many other ways, do not make a compelling argument.

On its website, the publisher proclaims that “since its creation, World Music Network has released over two hundred celebrated Music Rough Guides.” World Music Network was founded in 1994. Perhaps the pace—evidently averaging more than a dozen discs per year—is simply too quick to allow so much music to be properly introduced, which is a shame, because whatever else it means, world music is almost never music that needs no introduction, a fortiori for anthologies representing multiple audio worlds. But proper introductions, ideally prepared by experts possessing firsthand musical knowledge, are significant undertakings that cost-benefit analyses cannot always justify.

Musical Tourism: Problematizing World Music as a Term

As many critics have observed, world music serves primarily as an industry marketing label for musical performances from “elsewhere,” featuring particular elements (sonic, textual, or contextual) unfamiliar to Western listeners, usually combined with other elements (typically percussive grooves, or—in fusion music—the ever-present timbres of Western popular music: bass, guitar, drum set) conveying reassuring familiarity. The typical marketing strategy for this world music includes techniques for selection and description designed to maximize sales, not representational accuracy.

While a few self-declared world music productions aiming primarily for nonpecuniary goals (preservation, scholarship, or education) may largely avoid such strategies, the vast majority, being commercial, deploy them, and unapologetically so. In search of sales, most world music representations, therefore, are biased—in both sound and description—to conform to the expectations for the world music idea, underscoring unfamiliarity by stressing features such as exoticism, ecstasy, trance, and spirituality, often emphasizing physical aspects (movement, dance, possession), and de-emphasizing text in favor of the (supposedly) more transcultural power of musical sound. Through this process, world music publishers distort both musical selection and presentation, garbling the musical message, though not necessarily detracting from its perceived aesthetic power. Representation in image and text suffers the most. Crass stereotypes abound, in condensed form—the business bottom line doesn’t support careful ethnomusicological documentation. These tendencies are perhaps heightened in a CD series linked to travel guidebooks (the Rough Guides), since mediated musical tourism and unmediated travel tourism share the same emphasis on otherness, sold as an escape from ordinary workaday life.

Like many in the Rough Guide music series, this CD purports to provide an introduction to Sufi music, compiling tracks from many different albums. Such sampling typically exacerbates all the problems already afflicting world music, for several reasons. First, the compiler stands at a much greater remove from the recording than the producers of the original CDs. Lacking broader knowledge of the musical universe from which it was sampled, the compiler perforce treats each source CD—already a problematic sample—as an undistorted, almost unmediated, sonic representation to be sampled yet again. In this way the compilation CD becomes a second-order representation, a representation of representations, a sampling of samplings, doubling the errors inherent in this process. Likewise, compilation entails abridging original liner notes. But when the reality behind those notes is not fully understood, representational errors cannot be corrected; on the contrary such errors are only compounded by cut-and-paste mechanical manipulation—quoting, paraphrasing, abridging. Second, connections between different tracks typically cannot be intelligently described because such connections are not present anywhere in the source material; their interpretation requires knowledge of the broader musical scene that has already been omitted in the original re-presentation. Third, radically different kinds of world music—in this case Sufi music from field recordings, studio recordings, live performances from the world music circuit, fusions with scant existence outside of...