The Arab Avant-Garde: Music, Politics, Modernity

1. Transforming Space: The Production of Contemporary Syrian Art Music

37 chapter one Transforming Space The Production of Contemporary Syrian Art Music : shayna silverstein In the summers Solhi [al-Wadi] used to return to Damascus and he soon mixed with the fledgling classical music enthusiasts and other members of a revolutionary movement with a love for the fine arts, people like Sadek Faroun and Rafah Qasawat. . . . Sadek and Rafah played the violin while Solhi played the viola and conducted. They persevered and eventually, with 3 instruments, played the Introduction to Boieldieu’s “Calif of Bagdad” and the 2nd movement of Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony at the Ommayad Hotel in front of an astonished public. In the late 1940s this quartet started the serious classical music movement in Syria. —Samar al-Wadi (2009) Decades after this vanguard performance of “serious” music in the “the oldest continually inhabited city in the world,”1 the risks taken in pursuit of a space for contemporary Syrian art music continue to push the boundaries of musical creativity and expressive culture in Damascus. In Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East, composers who are invested in experimental approaches to musical structures and processes develop their work in a musical culture that tends to bestow aesthetic appeal and social prestige to modern Arab music or to classical, romantic, and early modern periods of European art music. Historically, the institutionalization of European art music in Syria has been attributed to Dr. Solhi al-Wadi, a visionary committed to the musical life of his nation. After graduating from the Royal Academy of Music in London in 1960, he returned to Damascus and established the inaugural children’s shayna silverstein / 38 music school in 1962. From the late 1960s onward, he invited educators from the Soviet Union to Damascus for residencies in piano, strings, and music theory, and likewise sponsored study opportunities in Moscow for Syrian students. He established the Higher Institute for Music and Drama in 1990 to provide domestic opportunities for higher education in the performing arts and conducted the Syrian National Symphony Orchestra until his sudden collapse onstage and subsequent death in 2007. His legacy continues to be honored today through commemorative concerts, commissions, and the dedicated efforts of those who were guided by his stern yet profoundly personal approach to tutelage.2 The post–World War Two era in which Solhi al-Wadi came of age was a period when Syria strove to determine an autonomous sense of nationhood. Symbolic resources such as folk music and dance were harnessed by various factions that competed for sovereignty over the nascent state of Syria in alignment with political ideologies of Arabism, Islamism, secular liberalism, and socialism (Wieland 2006). As suggested by al-Wadi’s efforts, collaborations with institutions in Western Europe and the Soviet Union shaped the establishment of musical programs and activities in Syria. The founding of a Syrian conservatory for musiqa klasikiyya, or classical music, was predicated on these interactions that more broadly indicate historically contingent patterns of mobility. As music students pursued opportunities for training abroad that perpetuated aesthetic models of European modernism or Soviet socialist realism, respectively, their choices were situated within larger discourses of social progress and cultural modernity that Edward Soja (1989) has termed “geographies of imperialism.” In the first decade of the twenty-first century, a young generation of Syrian experimental composers has conceived a space for musiqa mu‘asira, or contemporary art music. Informed by debates on critical aesthetics, modernity, and subjectivity in the Arab world and beyond, composers affiliated with musiqa mu‘asira draw on particular compositional devices and techniques in ways that mediate global discourses of avant-gardism. In what follows, I will discuss how their work transforms aesthetic concepts of musical space and situate musiqa mu‘asira in the context of contemporary Syria. In particular , this essay focuses on selected compositions by three composers—Zaid Jabri, Shafi Badreddin, and Hassan Taha—who collectively articulate the possibilities for transforming modern Arab music into a contemporary space for experimentation.3 This essay draws on a series of conversations, exchanges, and debates that I was privileged to join during a period of fieldwork in Damascus in 2007– 2008. As an ethnographer of musical practices, I regularly visited the Higher Institute for Music to take private instrumental lessons, visit informally with The Production of Contemporary Syrian Art Music / 39 students and faculty, and attend workshops, conferences, programs, and events that reflect the bustling pace of musical life in Damascus...