In this talk I formulate and apply a network analysis methodology for understanding the history of song on Egyptian radio, then link social network history to the wider history of Egypt. Music is a massively relational cultural form, involving interactions among composers, poets, arrangers, conductors, and performers, among others. The reality of music history thus emerges as a complex network of relationships, unfolding and changing over time. Song production, in particular, centers on poet-composer-singer collaborations. Most Arab music histories narrate lives of the biggest stars, presented in historical and cultural context, but neglecting the broader network of productive relationships. However many important musical figures are not celebrities, and the full complexity of the non-linear network can only be grasped holistically, via big-data empirical analysis, not pointillistically through the prevailing case studies of celebrities. Such holistic analysis reveals surprising emergent, structural patterns that are not apparent in any single narrative. Social network analysis (SNA) offers a powerful suite of tools enabling such an approach, including metrics for centrality and the detection of cohesive subgroups, analogous to the “invisible colleges” of scientists that de Solla Price (1963) discovered through examination of citation networks. Starting with a large dataset of tracks broadcast on Egyptian radio, including the poet, composer, and singer for each, I extract a network of poet-composer-singer collaborations, then apply SNA algorithms to reveal its social structure. Next, I interpret that structure in light of wider socio-cultural and historical factors in Egypt's modern history, relating patterns in the structures of collaboration to dominating political, economic, and media institutions (a) pre-independence, during a relatively freewheeling media period; (b) under Nasserist socialism, when state control of media was most total; and (c) in the subsequent infitah period with gradual loosening of media controls. My talk both sheds light on Egypt's musical history, and supplies a model and method that may be applied, mutatis mutandis, to other geocultural domains.

This paper examines songbooks published between the 1870s and 1920s by a small but active music publishing scene in Cairo and Alexandria. I have named these publications ‘songbooks’ as they feature collections of lyrics of vocal forms, including muwashshah, dawr, mawwāl, qasῑda, ṭaqṭuqa, nashīd and sung marches. As relatively unused sources, they reveal a live repertoire never placed on commercial records, as well as a connection between a nascent entertainment scene and a cottage print industry on Cairo’s Mohammad Ali Street. Song collections provide an alternative source for the study of aesthetic trends within popular entertainment but also provide evidence for the significance of sung practice as one of the sites of formation of a shared national culture. Their presence increased the circulation of a popular repertoire, from a word of mouth to something physically shareable - crucially before the emergence of the mass record industry. This forces us to rethink conceptions of musical literacy in their potential as pedagogical or performance props as well as a silent way to engage with poetry. My work shows that content broadened from derivations of older theoretical treatises and semi-pedagogical texts to something more reflective of a hobbyist interest in the commercial scene. It also reveals the divergences of interest in the ṭarab (musical ecstasy or engagement) aesthetic within a fast changing urban recreational scene. Music publishing represents the bridging between elite and non-elite claims over the definition of ‘local’ Egyptian musical culture. Books were often a result of the network shared between musicians, publishers, print presses, teachers, song-makers (composers, lyricists etc), instrument-makers and musicologists. For readers, books were a way to claim knowledge not of the songs themselves but of the culture of music-making, including through visual media like photographs and engravings of relevant artists and instruments. The gender and class implications of this are significant of course at a time of increasing access for women musicians and listeners. This work therefore contributes both to Arabic music historiography, but also to the emergent field of popular culture studies of the Middle East and Mediterranean during the late Ottoman Empire. In terms of methodology, I bring my performance insight into analyses of the content organisation, song selections and prefaces of the works as well as their implications on the ways that texts might have informed existing performance and pedagogies.

How does one bear witness to violence and injustice? Further, how does one represent trauma? The Israeli attack on the Gaza Strip and the immense loss of human life, as well as the almost total destruction of all infrastructure has left many with an inability to describe and speak to the atrocities that they are witnessing. The specter of death that continuously haunts Palestinians since October 7th has simultaneously resulted in the constant recording of the human cost of the attacks and a need, albeit challenging, to represent to the world the manifestation of trauma. This second layer–representation– is the focus of this paper. This paper seeks to explore how artists in songs like "Rajin," "Ya Tal3een," and "Palestine will never die" have used music as a medium to both bear witness to and represent the traumas of the Palestinians. By utilizing both the visual and the audio, these artists engage multiple sensory faculties in order to produce in the listener/viewer a multilayered empathetic response and therefore share the responsibility of witnessing. In that way, they not only record the trauma but are able to construct a narrative that represents the trauma to the audience and creates a space of recognition. In doing so, these artists utilize their music to record the moment, represent trauma, and in that way resist the attempts to obscure the suffering of the Palestinians.

This paper examines the concepts of the “Arab spirit” (al-rūḥ al-‘arabiyya) and the “Eastern spirit” (al-rūḥ al-sharqiyya) in music. Arabic-language books, newspapers, magazine articles, and radio broadcasts from the past century reveal widespread concern with the presence of the “Eastern spirit” and “Arab spirit” in music. At first, these terms were used interchangeably; however, the term “Arab spirit” came to dominate by the mid-twentieth century. This shift mirrors the substitution of the term “Eastern music” with “Arab music” that occurred in the 1920s as a reaction to the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the strengthening of pan-Arab identity (Vigreux 2001). Musicians, critics, journalists, and educators debated the following questions: 1. Does contemporary Arab music reflect the modern “Arab spirit”? 2. To what extent is music capable of generating a powerful “Arab spirit” that inspires national sentiment and national movements? 3. Have colonialism and Westernization adulterated the “Arab spirit” to the extent that it is no longer authentically represented in Arab music; if so, what can be done to reverse this phenomenon musically? The resounding call was to replace the sentimentality of Arab music with music of a national sentiment. Traditional ṭarab music, for example, was considered overly sentimental, engendering weakness and effeminacy in the “Arab spirit.” On the other hand, music based on national themes and collective feelings was thought to inspire strength, masculinity, progress, and revolution (e.g., Ahmad Zaki Pasha 1922). In this paper, I analyze the concepts of the “Arab spirit” and “Eastern spirit” within a Hegelian framework that holds that nationalism and nationalist movements emerge from the “spirit of the people.” I argue that the discourse concerning the “Arab spirit” in music––in addition to Arab music itself––was a catalyst for the pan-Arab nationalist movement. This research uses a mixed-methods approach, combining archival research with several years of ethnographic fieldwork in Egypt. By examining the crucial role of emotion, discourse, and the arts in nationalist movements, this paper seeks to contribute to the literature on nationalism in the Middle East.

When Egypt’s Musicians’ Syndicate was established in 1944, thanks in part to the efforts of singer Umm Kulthum, it was envisaged as a way to provide musicians with material support including healthcare, pensions, and help securing employment. Although the Syndicate continues to provide these services, in recent years it has hit the headlines instead for its increasingly spectacular policing of Egypt’s music scene: it has fined and arrested numerous musicians it deems to be threatening public taste, and even tried to ban an entire genre (mahraganat) in the name of preserving the country’s musical heritage. Using press sources, documents from the Syndicate, and ethnographic fieldwork with musicians and Syndicate officials in Cairo (2018-2023), this paper traces transformations in the Syndicate’s role and remit from the 1940s to the early 2020s, focusing on the shifting balance between its two functions: providing welfare, and excluding certain musicians and styles. I show that these two functions have always gone hand in hand, increasing in tandem at certain historical junctures. Since the 1950s, fines and levies against non-members have been used to fund members’ welfare provisions, and the violent exclusion of novel musical styles ensures continued employment for older, more established musicians who constitute the Syndicate’s main member base. Contrary to scholarship that suggests the Syndicate is increasingly interventionist, I show that the Syndicate has always been invested in policing the boundaries of the musical profession in ways that exclude certain (often already marginalised) artists. Drawing on recent scholarship on music-making in Egypt (Sprengel 2019, 2020; Karawya 2022; Simon 2022), I argue that historicising the actions of the present-day Syndicate can help us better understand its central role in shaping the country’s music scene, as well as illuminating the realities of cultural production under conditions of authoritarianism. I also draw on broader writing on the role of professional associations (al-niqābāt al-mihaniyya) in Egypt (Springborg 1978; Pollard 2014; Longueness and Monciaud 2011), to consider how these associations (the Musicians’ Syndicate included) function to compensate for the limits of the welfare state through their self-funded welfare provision programmes.