Translating ‘Music of Foreign Nations’: Perspectives of a Comparative Musicologist in Mandatory Palestine

In 1935, Robert Lachmann, pioneering scholar of Arab music, arrived in Jerusalem to establish an Oriental Music Archive at the Hebrew University. While his main preoccupation was to record the oral musical traditions of the various ‘Eastern’ communities, he also engaged in outreach activities such as public lectures and broadcasts aimed at promoting his work more widely and challenging prevailing European prejudices against local music. In this paper I show how Lachmann drew on a multidisciplinary framework of comparative musicology, ethnography, and the history of ancient and classical civilisations in an attempt to translate the unfamiliar sounds of Middle Eastern music into terms both comprehensible and appealing to his European audiences. More broadly, I explore the various ways in which the concept of translation guided Lachmann’s research and I consider the continuing relevance of this concept for contemporary approaches to world music.