The Arab Avant-Garde: Music, Politics, Modernity

7. Sonic Cosmopolitanisms: Experimental Improvised Music and a Lebanese-American Cultural Exchange

185 chapter seven Sonic Cosmopolitanisms Experimental Improvised Music and a Lebanese-American Cultural Exchange : marina peterson In February 2007, five Lebanese musicians traveled to the United States to perform with American musicians and dancers as part of the Tabadol Project. With funding from the U.S. Department of State, the Tabadol Project was cultural diplomacy as cultural exchange, a project of international understanding through the arts. “Tabadol,” the American organizer explained to audiences, means “exchange” in Arabic. The project was originally planned for July 2006, but the Israel-Hezbollah conflict broke out on July 12, a week before the scheduled dates. The project was rescheduled for February 2007, when five Lebanese musicians traveled to the United States to perform with American musicians and dancers in Chicago, Philadelphia, Baltimore, New York, and Washington, D.C. Four of the five musicians were experimental musicians, two of whom—Mazen Kerbaj and Raed Yassin—were based in Beirut and two—Sharif Sehnaoui and Christine Abdelnour—in Paris (see chapter 3 of this volume for further discussion of these artists). They played, respectively, trumpet, double bass and electronics, guitar, and saxophone. The fifth musician, Ziad El Ahmadié, played ‘ud. American musicians who participated in the project included the organizer, Gene Coleman (bass clarinet ), myself (cello), Jane Rigler (flute), Alex Waterman (cello), Evan Lipson (double bass), Carmel Raz (violin), and Alex Wing (‘ud). Dancers included Asimina Chremos, Nicole Bindler, and Emily Sweeney.1 Organizing an exchange around experimental improvised music opens a space for cultural exchange that does not rely on a stereotyped national marina peterson / 186 sound. With sound unmoored from a national “tradition,” the “culture” required by cultural diplomacy and exchange is in the body of the musician, as the person, rather than a particular musical tradition or sound, signifies the nation. The inclusion of the ‘ud player in the Tabadol Project, who bore the responsibility of sonically representing national culture, created disjunctures in this logic along with new opportunities for improvisation. The possibility for this project lay in an intersection of cosmopolitanisms in the context of post-9/11 U.S. foreign policy. Cosmopolitanism is often invoked as an aspiration, deployed for its emphases on transcending particularities and openness to difference. Though its terms are debated, the aim, for the most part, is not. Kant’s (1784/1991) iteration of cosmopolitanism as universal liberal democracy provides a bulwark with which discussions of cosmopolitanism have had to grapple. Recent scholars, while rejecting Kant’s Eurocentrism and elitism, reengage cosmopolitanism as a means of navigating some of the tensions of globalization, to convey an ethos of located difference, and for articulating a project of social justice on a world scale (Appiah 1997; Breckenridge, Pollock, Bhabha, and Chakrabarty 2002; Cheah and Robbins 1998; Harvey 2000; Held 2010; Kant 1991; Vertovec and Cohen 2002). Cosmopolitanism, Cheah posits, “primarily designates an intellectual ethic, a universal humanism that transcends regional particularism ” (Cheah 1998, 22). Yet the aspirations of cosmopolitanism toward openness, commonality, and harmony entail transcending the national while depending on the nation as the basis for that transcendence. In this way, the nation remains integral to cosmopolitanism, positioned variously as a maligned particularity of essentialized culture and an attitude of closedness (Breckenridge, Pollock, Bhabha, and Chakrabarty 2002), a scalar steppingstone toward and component of an aspired-to universalism (Kant 1991), or a home for the cosmopolitan subject (Appiah 1997). These tensions lay at the core of the Tabadol Project. In practice, cosmopolitanism takes on different shapes, satisfies divergent projects, and has a range of intended and unintended effects. In the Tabadol Project, diverse cosmopolitanisms emerged through a series of turns in the respective logics of cultural diplomacy, improvised music, and national origin. Reflecting cosmopolitanism’s status as “a domain of contested politics” (Robbins 1998, 12), in the Tabadol Project the cosmopolitanisms of experimental improvised music and the State Department were distinct, each deployed for particular ends.2 While the democratic and cosmopolitan aspirations of experimental improvised music support aims of cultural diplomacy to transcend national borders in order to promote understanding and social harmony, the State Department also uses the language of cosmopolitanism for a project of nation-state making that is grounded in territorial specificity. As participants in theTabadol Project, the Lebanese musicians were figured Experimental Improvised Music / 187 at once as national citizens and cosmopolitan subjects. Already cosmopolitan subjects as early twenty-first-century Lebanese and as improvisers, the musicians imbued experimental improvised music...