as “artists” (fannānīn sing. fannān) to avoid the social stigma associated with musicians in Syria as in many Arab and Islamic lands.
Most professional or full-time musicians in Syria are not members of elite families, and many do not have a university or even high-school education. Moreover, musicians, I found, are not always the most self-reflective artists and often have difficulty talking about their craft in the same way that poets, writers, and painters, for example, often discourse at length about their work. Only those with considerable formal training in music talk about their music and music making in a systematic way; others prefer to just perform and let the music speak for itself, which it usually does more clearly than words anyway. Therefore, in addition to my work with musicians I also worked with those who would consider themselves to be intellectuals and members of the artistic elite: writers, poets, dramatists, actors, architects, film and television directors, journalists, and art critics.
As I explore in chapter 1, music enjoys an ambiguous status in Muslim society, at once intimately involved in some spiritual practices and reviled by some as unorthodox or dangerous. Moreover, today musicians occupy a very low position on the status hierarchy in Syrian society as elsewhere in the Arab and Mediterranean world, and few professional musicians are from elite Syrian families, though many members of elite families have training in Arab music. This is especially true of more culturally conservative families, including those having strong ties to the religious establishment. Yet, these individuals maintain music as a hobby while pursuing careers in medicine, law, and business. If pursuing a professional career in Arab music might be an inappropriate if not scandalous choice for the elite, specialization in other artistic domains—theater, painting, cinema, for example—would carry fewer risks of opprobrium; many Syrian fine artists and authors (both men and women) hail from elite families.
For members of the modernizing middle class, those newcomers to the emerging Syrian public sphere of galleries, poetry readings, literary salons, and discussion circles, music and the arts are not only possible career choices (though with little financial remuneration), they are arenas of great debate about the current and future direction of Arab and Syrian art and society. Therefore my research sites, aside from lessons, recitals, concerts, and the homes of musicians, were the hangouts of the intellectuals: cafés in Damascus and Aleppo, the fine arts club in Damascus, intellectual and literary salons, public lectures, and private gatherings. In other words, this is by no means a study only of musicians or of working-class artists. Rather, I focus on how a certain set of intellectuals and artists and cultural agents of the middle and elite classes create works of art, attempt to understand their contemporary cultural and social significance, and articulate visions for the future. Hence I would not expect the aesthetics of authenticity that I describe here for these cultural agents—their “structures of feeling,” to use Raymond Williams’s phrase (1977)—necessarily to correspond to that of villagers, Bedouin, or the urban working classes, or others not engaged in these kinds of cultural practices and productions.
Moreover, my research was conducted almost entirely among men. I never met a single professional woman instrumentalist or composer, though there are several well-known female vocalists and many women study, compose, and teach music, and play instruments—with rare exception they do not play them professionally or publicly (an all-female Arab music ensemble from Syria’s premier conservatory performs at international festivals, and women instrumentalists specializing in European art music are much more common). The absence of female musical artists is in contrast to much of the history of Arab music, in which women instrumental performers and especially vocalists were not only common but highly valued (see Danielson 1991, 1997, 1999; Van Nieuwkerk 1995). I did have numerous conversations and interviews with women journalists, writers, researchers, music teachers, and others interested in and knowledgeable about Arab music and Arab heritage in general, but all of my lessons and the majority of my research contacts were with men. This research bias reflects conceptions of gender relations and appropriate conduct prevalent within Arab and Muslim society, which often strictly enforces gender segregation. As a man, I was unable to attend all-women’s performances and celebrations, many of which feature musical performance and song (I describe some based on written sources below). This is not to deny the centrality of prominent Syrian women intellectuals, painters, authors, theater directors, and actors in the shaping of the course of modern Syria, and in the articulation of modern subjectivities; yet the dominant discourses of modernity in Syria tend to be patriarchal. Needless to say, other researchers might make fruitful studies of female artists and of how women listen to and engage with Arab music. Not only does this relative absence of women in the musical sphere reflect the dominance of men in nearly all forms of public discourse in Syria, it also reveals how music making and discourses of sentiment and emotion in Syrian music are vehicles for the construction of masculinity.11
Furthermore, my interaction with non-musicians often led to debates about my research project on Arab music in Syria and the question of authenticity. As I explore later, many asked if there indeed is such a thing as “Arab” music? Is there a “Syrian” music? If so, how is it different from “Arab” music? What is authenticity? These questions and others upset many of my assumptions about authenticity and culture in Syria, and trying to answer them enriched my research. Often my interlocutors compelled me to choose sides in the debates I was addressing in my research about authenticity and vulgarity. As I relate in the following chapter, one prominent artist challenged me to choose which of two worlds I would move in as a researcher, referring not so much to two social classes or two musical genres but to two visions of culture and modernity: a vision of a spirit-infused authentic and modern culture, versus a nostalgic vision of a traditional culture overrun with the excesses of vulgarity and banality. I chose the former, as will become clear throughout this work. Certainly, many of my own biases against much of what is produced in the contemporary musical market today were confirmed through my interaction with like-minded cultural agents, though some were nicely overturned as well. I fully recognize that my position put me at odds with the majority of Arab listeners, for whom the modern song is an integral and enjoyable part of daily life. Yet my views aligned nicely with those of many of my informants, for better or for worse, and allowed me to be accepted as serious (what “serious” person would devote years to studying the modern pop songs?). My position also prevented me from addressing certain questions or blinded me to certain ambiguities, though I hope at least some of these ambiguities will become apparent in this work.
Local, Regional, and Global Contexts
Because performing and listening to music do not occur in a vacuum, isolated from the social and cultural contexts in which artists and audiences engage in aesthetic experiences, I strive to situate debates and contradictions regarding authenticity and music in the context of the other arts in Syria, as well as in the general context of daily life in a changing and complex cultural landscape. My intention is as much to raise questions about what Steven Feld (1994b) calls “cross-modal homologies” of different aesthetic modes of attention as it is to provide an outline for examining how Syrian intellectuals and artists of diverse backgrounds articulate their understandings of modernity and authenticity (see also Feld 1990, 1996)
It is important to note that Syrian artistic production and reception simultaneously participate in local art worlds and regional aesthetic circuits. This is especially the case with the engagement of Syrian art and artists in artistic markets and circles that encompass Lebanon and Egypt. Beirut, a mere few hours drive from Damascus (including the inconvenient border crossing and numerous check-points), hosts a far more vibrant artistic and cultural life than Syria today, partly as a result of its self-constructed role as a cultural broker between East and West, and partly due to historical political-economic circumstances. Syria’s best artists perform and exhibit in Beirut, while selected Lebanese artists will do the same in Damascus or Aleppo, though usually the orientation (not to mention aspirations) of Lebanese artists lies distinctly to the North and West: Paris, London, and New York. But because of the historical ties of Lebanon and Syria (indeed, the official Syrian line is that Lebanon remains a province of Syria, and Syria exercises decisive influence in contemporary Lebanese politics), there has been and remains a great amount of cultural flow between the metropolitan centers of Syria and Lebanon.
Whereas Lebanon can be thought of