places, if not down right seedy; they tend to feature renditions of contemporary pop songs and favorite songs from the 1950s though 1970s. Many musicians who used to earn a good living performing in these cabarets attribute their decline to the influx of wealthy “Arab” tourists (usually wealthy Arabs from the Arabian Gulf). With rising conservatism in the 1970s and 1980s, many of Aleppo’s mercantile and religious elite shied away from the once-famous cabarets and many musicians gave up performing in them. Now considered off-limits for “respectable” people—mostly meaning the middle classes and elite but also the pious in general—these establishments tend to attract denizens from the lower classes, migrant workers, and foreigners, though higher-class cabarets in Damascus are patronized by the wealthy.
Local musicians such as Muḥhammad Qadrī Dalāl, the master oud player, give seasonal performances of “classical” music at some of Aleppo’s ancient caravansaries and heritage buildings that date from between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries. The annual Syrian Song Festival, although held in a dreary sports arena during the period of my research, is now held in the Citadel. In addition to the Citadel, Aleppo’s numerous private clubs host summer evening concerts for local and regional artists. Concerts of European music also are held from time to time in Aleppo, though less frequently than in Damascus, and they garner only modest audiences. Occasionally, foreign cultural centers will sponsor jazz festivals or concerts of European and “World” music (non-European and non-Arab, in this context). More common are concerts of contemporary Arab pop music at Aleppo’s clubs featuring pan-Arab superstars like Syrian George Wasoof, Lebanese Diana Haddad, and Egyptian
Despite the importance of Aleppo in modern Arab music, almost no research has been done on the contributions of Syrian artists to Arab music (see Belleface 1992; Saadé 1993). In contrast, studies abound of Arab music in Egypt (e.g., Danielson 1997; Frishkopf 1999; S. Marcus 1989; Racy 1981; Reynolds 1995; Van Nieuwkerk 1995), and to a lesser extent Iraq, Yemen, Tunisia, Morocco, and the countries of the Arabian Gulf (Lambert 1997; Schuyler 1990/1991; Touma 1996). The focus on Arab music in Egypt reflects both the common sentiment that Egypt is the cultural leader of the Arab world and the relatively greater openness of Egypt to foreign researchers.25 In terms of Egypt’s role, many Arabs and non-Arabs make the implicit identification of “Egyptian” music with “Arab” music. The Egyptian styles flood the contemporary markets and the past masters of Egypt have gained significant audiences outside of Egypt through the influence of the Egyptian mass media (Armbrust 1996; Danielson 1997; Racy 1977).
Syria, whose media and broadcast centers opened later than Egypt’s and remained on a smaller scale, does not have the same pan-regional effect that Egypt enjoys. Non-Arabs as well as Arabs resident outside of the Arab lands perpetuate the identification of “Egyptian” with “Arab” music through concerts featuring Egyptian tunes and through their memories that draw on a time when Egyptian artists were ascendant.26 Texts that treat “Arab music” as a whole often specialize in one region with only brief information about musical practices in others; this is the case, for example, with Touma’s The Music of the Arabs (1996), which has rich information about music in Iraq, Morocco, and the Arabian Gulf (where the author had done research) but little information on music in Egypt and the Levant. Racy’s Making Music in the Arab World: The Culture and Artistry of Ṭarab (2003) provides rich detail about music performance practices in the Levant, and especially the concept of ṭarab, but does not treat North African music cultures for whom the concept of ṭarab is also important, for example in the music known as ṭarab andalusī and ṭarab gharnāṭī (though North African understandings of ṭarab are distinct in many ways from those of the Levant). Moreover, his work does not address the wider concerns of music making in Arab society, for example broader issues of aesthetics that reach beyond music into the realm of politics and ethics. Among the Jasmine Trees thus aims to fill part of a gap in our knowledge of the diverse Arab musical traditions by offering insights into music performance practice and ideologies of music and culture in contemporary Syria, as well as to establish an ethnographic framework for understanding them in Aleppo. In this sense it complements and extends the work of other scholars.
Music and Musicians in Syria: Ambivalences
According to one popular account, in early modern Syria musicians were grouped with thieves, dove trainers, and people who eat on the streets as those whose testimony was not permissible in court (Qaṣṣāb Ḥasan 1988: 85, passim). Dove trainers were suspect because they loiter on rooftops to train their birds, where they also have a view into the private domains of homes and thus are scandal-prone. People who eat in the streets were suspect (and remain so) because no one with a solid family and home would have to eat meals on the streets in the first place. As for musicians, their case is far more complex. As numerous scholars have indicated (for example, al-Faruqi 1985/1986), music and song have always occupied an ambiguous status in Islamic cultures, as in many other cultures. Despite the histories of celebrated court musicians of the Arab past, today musicians usually occupy a low position on the status hierarchy in the Arab lands, something clearly demonstrated by Karin Van Nieuwkerk in her research on dancers and musicians in Cairo (Van Nieuwkerk 1995). I found this to be the case in Syria, where muscians are looked upon by non-musicians with some distrust if not disdain, even among those who enjoy listening to music. Therefore the choice to be a musician or even to learn music is often a difficult one for Syrians, Muslim and non-Muslim alike.
For example, my main teacher, Muḥhammad Qadrī Dalāl, hails from a prominent religious family in Aleppo, his father having served as the sheikh of a prominent mosque and his wife’s father having been the city’s chief religious authority (muftī). His desire to study music was met with resistance from his father, who only allowed him to study once he had demonstrated his serious intent in school and passed his preliminary school exams. Once he passed, his father hired the famous singer and composer Bakrī al-Kurdī to tutor him in music and song. Dalāl later went on to earn a degree in Arabic literature from Egypt’s al-Azhar University, a prominent religious institution, and taught Arabic literature and language in Syrian and Moroccan schools for many years before devoting himself full-time to music performance and research. Music alone would not have been an appropriate career.
Many older musicians, especially those from more prominent families, claimed that they had to practice music in secret for fear of their parents’ wrath. One man, an employee at the Syrian Ministry of Pious Endowments (awqāf27), hid an oud in his closet and would only play when no one else was at home. He reminisced with me about the old days when he could “croon” (yidandan) with his oud. Even respected and established musicians from an earlier generation are said to have had others carry their instruments for them in the streets to avoid public censure. To be seen on the streets with an oud was considered shameful (
At the same time, music has gained some prestige as a diversionary hobby and as a finishing element of polite education among the elite. One way of avoiding the public censure of music making in recent years has been for families to allow their children to study European music and instruments, such as the Western-style violin, cello, flute, clarinet, and piano. Many elite families and those struggling to join their ranks associate European classical music with modernity, progress, and civilization, and consider Arab music to be backward. A Moscow-trained violinist and instructor at the High Institute for Music in Damascus, the son of a well-known Syrian family of musicians that includes prominent performers of Arab music, claimed that Arab music is irrational, leads to irrational behavior, and in general is an “insult” (bahdalah). At the time of my research, the Arab Music Institute in Aleppo had long waiting lists of students wanting to study piano and violin, yet only five students were studying the oud and six the qānūn—two quintessentially Arabic instruments. One day, during a conversation with the Institute’s director, a woman came in to register her young son. When the director asked if the boy would like to study the oud, the woman proudly (and loudly) declaimed: “Oh no! My son would never play that kind of music. In fact he only listens