Learning Music in Syria
I conducted most of my research among intellectuals and artists, including many who consider themselves to occupy a middle-ground position in these debates: devout Muslims who are also practicing professional musicians. Although some Syrians might not have thought my studies to be serious enough, for one reason or another, one prerequisite of my engaging in debates in the field was learning the critical language used by Syrian intellectuals to discuss aesthetic issues. Regarding music, this required that I acquire numerous tapes for different artists, learn to follow the melodies and modulations, appreciate vocal qualities, and differentiate between strong and weak performances. Achieving this aesthetic awareness required intensive study and listening, often carried out in cassette shops over glasses of tea or small cups of coffee. It also meant taking music lessons and learning an instrument. Prior to my arrival in Syria, I had studied the oud for several months in Cairo with a private teacher.31 This came about almost as an accident. While studying Arabic in Cairo, I had hoped to get acquainted with more Egyptians in order to learn the local dialect better. I also was pursuing a preliminary investigation into Islamic discourses in non-traditional domains and had decided that musicians might be an interesting group in which to study contemporary forms of Islamic practice and discourse, precisely because of music’s ambiguous status in Islam.
In Egypt, I learned many of the basic modes and several popular Egyptian songs. I began to appreciate what numerous musicians told me are the three most important elements of a good song: the melody (laḥn), the lyrics (kalimāt), and the performer’s voice (ṣawt). For a song to be good—and also “authentic”—it had to have a strong combination of all of these elements; lacking one of them is enough to make the song or the artist weak, if not “inauthentic.” Despite my studies in Egypt, my understanding of the modes and technical skill on the oud remained limited, due in part to the complexity of the task, my own limitations, and my instructor’s limitations as well.
Arriving in Syria in the late fall of 1996, I sought an oud teacher and found both a teacher and friend in the Aleppine virtuoso Muḥammad Qadrī Dalāl. Through our intensive sessions on the musical modes, the major genres and history of Arab music, and oud technique—over an hour a day almost every day for several months—I came to appreciate better the subtleties of the music and to become familiar with the terminology and critical discourse of music in contemporary Syria. Nonetheless, much of my fieldwork time in fact was spent convincing Syrians that I, as a foreigner, actually could understand their music and appreciate it. Many Syrian musicians and others expressed the common and not entirely unfounded belief that Arab music is too complex for Westerners and non-Arabs in general to understand; in fact, many Arabs do not understand it. Oftentimes I was told that a period of a year or two or three is insufficient for a non-Arab to understand the music and write anything intelligent about it. Quite accurately, one scholar suggested that I would probably be suspicious of him if he went to America and proposed to write a study of American jazz after only a year or so of study. One would need ten years in order to understand the music and its intricacies, not to mention the language, he suggested (and he had a valid point).
My position as a foreign music researcher meant that I was expected naturally to be ignorant of the music though praised for attempting to learn it. Yet, it also meant that I had to prove myself constantly before the suspicions of those who thought Arab music to be ineffable for non-Arabs. Whenever an oud was available, I generally was asked to play for people in order to demonstrate what I could do, and especially as a test for any manifestations of “oriental spirit”—that key yet elusive element of Arab musical aesthetics. Sometimes I was asked to sing songs, quizzed on specific modes, or enjoined to explain what I had “discovered” in their music. Only after many months of fieldwork was I able to convince people that I had at least a modicum of “oriental spirit.” My public lectures (in Arabic) on musical topics and performances in public contexts convinced some of the doubters that I had entered, if only in a rudimentary way, the heart of their music and understood some of its secrets. In this fashion, my own performances as well as the recordings and performances of Syrian musicians became an integral part of my search for the keys to authenticity in Syrian music and culture.
Listening, Aesthetics, and Forming a Tape Collection
As much as knowledge of the genres and styles and skill on an instrument, it is one’s skill as a listener that forms an essential component in announcing musical cultivation and taste. I constantly was asked, “To whom do you listen?” and given suggestions for tapes, specific recordings, and concerts. The question of what one listens to and what recordings are in one’s collection are absolutely critical in marking and defending claims to authenticity. Among nonspecialists, a claim to listen to Umm Kulthūm,
Forming a collection of cassette tapes (and, recently, compact disks) is another component of determining and even performing one’s musical taste as a symbol of wider “culture” (thaqāfa).33 When I began my oud lessons, my teacher instructed me that the first thing I must do aside from obtaining a decent oud and practicing four hours every day was to begin collecting good tapes and listen to them regularly. Listening is considered a creative act among Syrians, and one’s collection of recordings announces one’s level of discrimination and culture. My teacher, for example, argued that he listens to “everything,” and indeed he has recordings from numerous diverse musical cultures to prove it. Another musician friend went to great lengths to show me his “jazz” tapes that for him symbolized his cosmopolitanism.34
Most Syrians listen to music on cassettes, which form the backbone of a thriving “cassette culture” (Manuel 1993). Although first-run recordings are available in the market (the so-called “original” recordings or aṣliyyāt), most are bootlegged copies from original tapes, reels, and CDs, or copies of other copies. The quality of tapes hence varies tremendously, though a number of specialty stores have arisen that deal in high-quality cassettes, usually costing two or three times what a standard tape might cost (for example, SYP100 to 150 versus SYP50).35 It is not uncommon to see audience members with rudimentary tape recorders at concerts, and not long after the concert bootleg versions of these tapes will appear in the market, now often in poor-quality MP3 format on CD. Yet, “bootleg” is hardly the appropriate term. Until 2001 and the enforcement of laws protecting intellectual property in Syria, “copyright” was not a word found in the colloquial dictionary; even with the new laws, Syrian artists rarely if ever receive any remuneration from the sale of recordings. As one musician and studio owner put it: “We have no rights in the market.” In a way, the circulation of cassette tapes and MP3s has democratized the music market in Syria.36
The majority of music shops in Damascus and Aleppo carry the average run-of-the-mill recordings of the most recent pop stars as well as a handful of tapes of older masters. However, a few stores specialize