Emergent accounts of the summer 2015 protests over the waste crisis in Lebanon generally focus on strategic decisions taken by groups of protestors as the movement evolved, growing at first until, in many ways, fizzling out in autumn. This focus occludes the material and relational force of sounds that informed these decisions. In this paper I assemble a sonic account of the 2015 protests, among the largest and at times most socioeconomically diverse movements in the country’s recent history. In a place where official history remains endlessly deferred, a history of the recent past--even piecing together memories as they flash up--is necessarily fraught. I endeavor here not to tell a history “as it was” per se, but rather “as it was sounded,” heard and recorded by many different people. At the core of this paper lies a conflict between unity and division in vocal and aural practices among protesters. We understand that some vocal practices served to unite the people: chants, songs, hip hop ciphers, cries of anguish or pain. Others worked against that unity: crucially, the speech act of calling out “mundasseen" (infiltrators). Aural space was also configured as a site of contestation. Away from the class-mixing dabkeh of Souq Abou Rakhousa, the street trucks blaring old-guard protest songs of Ziad Rahbani and Julia Boutros faced off against contemporary challengers, live and recorded, for sonic prominence. By considering interviews with participants, accounts of the protests on social media and in periodicals, and audiovisual artifacts, I argue that the sonic realm helps us understand the fate of the protests as they were unfolding: the middle class, fearful of the historic meddling of politicians via their loyal working-class subjects, were bound to win out sonically over the working-class protestors. And yet this Pyrrhic victory, whose costs outweighed its gains, ultimately destroyed the potential of the protests to bring about desired sociopolitical transformations.

In Women’s Voices across Musical Worlds, Jane Bernstein writes about female musicians who have transcended the boundaries of performance to assume a commanding position within their society. She argues that these women have not only reflected the hope, anger, pride, and longing of their communities, but touched the social conscience of their audiences, and in so doing have helped shape the course of history (2004). My paper examines the role of female singers in Lebanon during the last forty-five years, a period that includes the civil war of 1975 to 1990 and the social upheaval that continues up to this day. I refer specifically to four singers—Fairuz, Majida al-Rumi, Julia Boutros, and Pascale Sakr—who at different times and under different circumstances became influential on the Lebanese scene, especially during the war, advocating for peace and fighting for justice and human rights. Under such political and social circumstances, they have given voice to their people and have emerged as national figures, earning popular respect and extending their fame to other parts of the Arab world. The paper highlights their influence in areas such as female activism in a male-dominated society, empowering resistance, inspiring revolt by popularizing rallying cries, strengthening a sense of identity in a fractured nation by creating common causes, and using star power to address issues and problems that politicians do not dare get into. Drawing on research I have undertaken since 2010 on music, gender, and nationalism, on extensive personal encounters and audiovisual examples, and on interviews I conducted in Lebanon in the summers of 2010 and 2012, I show the role and power of music in reflecting political changes and embodying political meanings.

In May 1939, a diverse group of musicians, scholars, and dignitaries came together in Fez for what was dubbed the First Congress of Moroccan Music. Held at various sites in the old Medina and the Ville Nouvelle, the congress’s goal was to both promote Moroccan musical patrimony and to address scientifically how to preserve this heritage in the age of musical modernity. In this, it was strongly influenced by the Cairo Congress of Arab Music, held just seven years earlier in 1932; some of the attendees participated in both congresses. Like the Cairo Congress, the participation of both European and Arab delegates revealed the wide-ranging, and sometimes contentious, aims of the diverse assemblage, which ranged from Musée de l’Homme musicologists, to Orientalist composers, to local groups that performed national identity and modernity in ways that inherently countered French colonial claims. This paper will analyze the contributions of three congress participants: Spanish musicologist Patrocinio Garcia Barriuso, French musicologist Alexis Chottin, and Moroccan musicologist Idriss ben Abdelali. Using Garcia Barriuso’s comprehensive recollection of the congress, Ecos del Magrib, as a foundation, it will also analyze his work on “Hispano-Muslim music” and his role as delegate for the Spanish Protectorate. Chottin and Abdelali were meanwhile employed by the French Protectorate’s Service des Arts Indigènes; each thus served as an ambassador of sorts for the value of musicology in the French Protectorate. Yet as I will argue, the framing of their work, the assumptions in their scholarship, and their very subjectivities were informed by their respective investments in a French or independent Morocco. Garcia Barriuso’s third position as a Spanish colonial actor both complicates and reinforces this colonial-national dichotomy. Ultimately, what the Fez Congress represented was a crisis of nation, empire, and modernity, held at the intersections of nationalist and imperialist visions for Morocco. In my paper I ask: what potentially new or hybrid visions for Morocco were produced in the work of these participants? And why was music a meaningful site for their expression? Set against the backdrop of interwar French North Africa, burgeoning nation-state and Arab nationalisms, and the development of metropolitan ethnomusicology, I treat music as a uniquely powerful concept, both sociohistorical text and agent of transformation, which particularly during the Protectorate became an important discursive site for “the Moroccan soul.”

The enduring linkage between al-Andalus and Fes perpetuated by the Fassi socio-political elite has privileged Andalusian music in Moroccan public life and education: both mirroring its inherent class stratification and impacting the viability of indigenous cultural traditions. The pre-independence backstory must be examined to place the Fassi phenomenon in context. This paper argues that the Gramscian concept of cultural hegemony was a critical factor during 20th-century colonial rule, with the French and Spanish Protectorate administrations (1912-1956) appropriating music to advance their own agendas, in the guise of cultural preservation. Fernando Valderrama Martínez witnessed a cultural revival in Tetuán during his 26-year tenure as Asesor-Jefe de la Enseñanza Marroquí de la Delegación de Educación y Cultura Española. The ostensible rationale was restoring the “musical treasure” of the nawbat (Valderrama 2005); yet this program effectively reinforced a process of Hispanicization in doing so. French cultural policy “respected pre-colonial customs and traditions” (Sater 2010), Résident-Général Hubert Lyautey advising Prosper Ricard, appointed to the Service des Arts Indigènes, that “Morocco’s display...will be composed of examples of the local arts” (Mokhiber 2013). These “preservationist logics” (Wyrtzen 2015) would commodify elements of Moroccan culture, rendering it “static.” This examination of the status of musical genres during the Protectorate era sets the stage for analyzing the post-independence resurgence of the Andalusian tradition, which had lost favor under French rule, and explores the consequences of Protectorate and post-independence cultural policies on the corpus of Moroccan musics.

In recent years, the forces of globalization have transformed artists’ approaches to self-expression and artistic production on the material and theoretical levels. The musical genre of hip-hop, with its own global culture that invites worldwide participation, especially reflects these globalizing trends. Scholars pay much attention to hip-hop artists in the Arab world, but the literature thus far has either focused on hip-hop as a homogenizing global culture or as a political tool toward national liberation, particularly with respect to endogenous Palestinian hip-hop. However, researchers have largely ignored the ways in which artists produce and perform their work to these dual audiences simultaneously, and hip-hop artists in the Arab diaspora provide a perfect example of this dual performance. This paper argues that the collaborative work of hip-hop artists in the Arab diaspora shows the new directions of identity production in a swiftly transforming international order. The artists’ songs build cooperative networks for the creation and dissemination of art, transferring power to the multitude and democratizing production. Their lyrics and performances also globalize markedly indigenous symbols, introducing them to an international awareness. Since diasporic artists occupy a liminal artistic space, their art provides new inroads to understanding identity formation in the context of still-accelerating globalization that is defined by renegotiated relationships with the self, the nation, and the global community. The artists’ collaborations, like the genre in which they take place, engender a space for ideological exchange and identity formation that crosses borders and transcends ethnolinguistic divisions, permeating both the global and the local. These collaborations dually illustrate this process of identity production: the artists, whose identities lie in both national and international spheres, navigate a new identity calculus through hip-hop, a genre with a global culture yet distinctly local roots and practitioners. Through close reading of song lyrics as well as consideration of clothing, promotional materials, instrumentation, and public activism, the paper provides a holistic picture of the artists and their diasporic connections, especially focusing on how hip-hop uniquely facilitates their collaboration. It considers the cases of Arab diasporic artists like Shadia Mansour, Omar Offendum, and The Narcycist, as well as of their collaborations with other non-Arab artists. The paper sheds light on how their collaborative art represents new egalitarian and transnational directions for artistic expression and the formation of identity in a rapidly-evolving world, rooted in hip-hop’s globally-relevant culture and the artists’ experiences as children of globalization.