Music And Encounter At The Mediterranean Crossroads

Music and Encounter at the Mediterranean Crossroads: A Sea of Voices explores the musical practices that circulate the Mediterranean Sea. Collectively, the authors relate this musical flow to broader transnational flows of people and power that generate complex encounters, bringing the diverse cultures of Europe, Africa, and the Middle East into new and challenging forms of contact. Individually, the chapters offer detailed ethnographic and historiographic studies of music’s multifaceted roles in such interactions. From collaborations between Moroccan migrant and Spanish Muslim convert musicians in Granada, to the incorporation of West African sonorities and Hasidic melodies in the musical liturgy of Abu Ghosh Abbey, Jerusalem, these communities sing, play, dance, listen, and record their diverse experiences of encounter at the Mediterranean crossroads.

A new history of twentieth-century North Africa, that gives voice to the musicians who defined an era and the vibrant recording industry that carried their popular sounds from the colonial period through decolonization. If twentieth-century stories of Jews and Muslims in North Africa are usually told separately, Recording History demonstrates that we have not been listening to what brought these communities together: Arab music. For decades, thousands of phonograph records flowed across North African borders. The sounds embedded in their grooves were shaped in large part by Jewish musicians, who gave voice to a changing world around them. Their popular songs broadcast on radio, performed in concert, and circulated on disc carried with them the power to delight audiences, stir national sentiments, and frustrate French colonial authorities. With this book, Christopher Silver provides the first history of the music scene and recording industry across Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, and offers striking insights into Jewish-Muslim relations through the rhythms that animated them. He traces the path of hit-makers and their hit records, illuminating regional and transnational connections. In asking what North Africa once sounded like, Silver recovers a world of many voices—of pioneering impresarios, daring female stars, cantors turned composers, witnesses and survivors of war, and national and nationalist icons—whose music still resonates well into our present.

Modern Jerusalem, a city central to Jewish, Muslim, and Christian religious imaginaries and the political epicenter of the Israeli-Palestinian crisis, is to put it mildly a highly contested space. More surprising, perhaps, is that its musical landscape not only reflects these rifts but also helped to define them as the ancient city transitioned to modernity during the twentieth century. In City of Song: Music and the Making of Modern Jerusalem, author Michael A. Figueroa argues that musical renderings of Jerusalem have been critical to the formation of Israeli political consciousness. The book demonstrates how Israeli songwriters helped to shape their public's territorial imagination-- creating images of a city at once heavenly and earthly, that dwells in longing, that must not be forgotten, that compels one to bereave the dead, that represents the fulfilment of prophecy, and that is the site of immense cultural diversity. The dynamic history of its representation in lyrics and music helps dispel any notion that the Israeli-Palestinian crisis is timeless, intractable, and based on static, essential identities; while there are continuities across historical divides, radical change constantly transpires. City of Song combines analyses of musical meaning, political discourse, and public performance over the long twentieth century (1880s-2010) to reveal how the Israeli-Palestinian crisis' territorial fixation on Jerusalem has been constructed, historically contingent, and subject to artistic intervention in modernity. Through a musical history of Jerusalem, Figueroa introduces a novel, humanities-centered approach to one of the world's most contested cities, and one of the defining cultural and political questions of our era.

Politically and historically, the Mediterranean has been a space for critical dialogue for competing and often antagonistic voices, and still functions as meeting place for diverse and interdisciplinary approaches. Although other academic disciplines have attempted a unified approach to Mediterranean studies, until recently Mediterranean music as a singular concept has received relatively little scholarly development. This volume is a crucial first step and investigates several musical cultures that have traditionally demonstrated common threads, trends, and interactions. The music of Greece, Crete, Turkey, Albania, Corsica, Italy, Spain, Morocco, Algeria and Palestine are all considered in this volume as the scholars represented here reveal the musical commonality among otherwise divergent traditions. Unnecessary technical jargon is avoided, and an interdisciplinary approach embracing ethnology and material culture considerations makes this volume relevant not only to musicologists and anthropologists, but likewise to the general reader interested in tourism.

Although scholars have long been aware of the crucial roles that gender plays in music, and vice versa, the contributors to this volume are among the first to systematically examine the interactions between the two. This book is also the first to explore the diverse, yet often strikingly similar, musics of the areas bordering the Mediterranean from comparative anthropological perspectives. From Spanish flamenco to Algerian raï, Greek rebetika to Turkish pop music, Sephardi and Berber songs to Egyptian belly dancers, the contributors cover an exceedingly wide range of geographic and musical territories. Individual essays examine musical behavior as representation, assertion, and sometimes transgression of gender identities; compare men's and women's roles in specific musical practices and their historical evolution; and explore how music and gender relate to such issues as ethnicity, nationality, and religion. Anyone studying the musics or cultures of the Mediterranean, or more generally the relations between gender and the arts, will welcome this book. Contributors: Caroline Bithell, Joaquina Labajo, Jane C. Sugarman, Carol Silverman, Goffredo Plastino, Gail Holst-Warhaft, Edwin Seroussi, Marie Virolle, Terry Brint Joseph, Deborah Kapchan, Karin van Nieuwkerk, Svanibor Pettan, Martin Stokes, Philip V. Bohlman

Following their entry into Austria and the Sudetenland, the Germans attempted to impose a policy of cultural imperialism on countries they occupied during the World War II. Almost all music institutions came under their control. The objective being to change the musical fabric of these nations and subject them to the strictures of Nazi ideology.

The Spanish Republican exile of 1939 impacted music as much as it did literature and academia, with well-known figures such as Adolfo Salazar and Roberto Gerhard forced to leave Spain. Exile is typically regarded as a discontinuity - an irreparable dissociation between the home country and the host country. Spanish exiled composers, however, were never totally cut off from the musical life of Francoist Spain (1939-1975), be it through private correspondence, public performances of their work, honorary appointments and invitations from Francoist institutions, or a physical return to Spanish soil. Music and Exile in Francoist Spain analyses the connections of Spanish exiled composers with their homeland throughout 1939-1975. Taking the diversity and heterogeneity of the Spanish Republican exile as its starting point, the volume presents extended comparative case studies in order to broaden and advance current conceptions of, and debates surrounding, exile in musicology and Spanish studies. In doing so, it significantly furthers academic research on individual composers including Salvador Bacarisse, Julián Bautista, Roberto Gerhard, Rodolfo Halffter, Julián Orbón and Adolfo Salazar. As the first English-language monograph to explore the exiled composers from the perspectives of historiography, music criticism, performance and correspondence, Eva Moreda Rodriguez’s vivid reconception of the role of place and nation in twentieth-century music history will be of particular interest for scholars of Spanish music, Spanish Republican history, and exile and displacement more broadly.

Music, Education, and Religion: Intersections and Entanglements explores the critical role that religion can play in formal and informal music education. As in broader educational studies, research in music education has tended to sidestep the religious dimensions of teaching and learning, often reflecting common assumptions of secularity in contemporary schooling in many parts of the world. This book considers the ways in which the forces of religion and belief construct and complicate the values and practices of music education—including teacher education, curriculum texts, and teaching repertoires. The contributors to this volume embrace a range of perspectives from a variety of disciplines, examining religious, agnostic, skeptical, and atheistic points of view. Music, Education, and Religion is a valuable resource for all music teachers and scholars in related fields, interrogating the sociocultural and epistemological underpinnings of music repertoires and global educational practices.