The 1930s and 1940s were a crucial time for the development of Middle Eastern radio broadcasting – particularly in the Levant. The 1930s saw the replacement of small, amateur broadcasting with state-controlled, national stations broadcasting entertainment and news on medium wave, which meant they could be heard in neighboring states. The 1940s saw the maturation of these stations and mid-century radio listening practices, despite World War II censorship, and the important transition from colony or mandate territory to nation-state. At the same time, these decades were also ones in which the use of gramophones for recorded music became more common, and both products became more affordable, at least for middle- and upper-middle class consumers. This paper examines gramophone and radio set newspaper advertisements from Arabic-language dailies in Lebanon and Palestine – two territories with consistent radio station broadcasting as well as urban fora for live music and cinemas – from the 1930s through the 1940s. It assesses the variations in boiler plate ad copy provided by the manufacturer, as well as Arabic or French language copy produced by the local seller to determine the extent to which local retailers emphasized sound-related issues like audio quality and ease of tuning or operation versus other product-focused claims, and the lack of related claims like loud volume or treble versus bass sounds. What do these emphases suggest about the retailers’ view of their consumers and the latters’ interests, expertise, and listening preferences? It also considers advertisements’ efforts to create a mood or image that sold the “benefit” of these products: modern living, access to news or other content from the outside world, improved leisure time, or access to religious services or readings. What do these foci suggest about the target consumers? It contextualizes these advertisements by noting their frequency and prominence relative to those of other, non sound-related products. Overall, this paper argues, the prominent but not exclusive focus of 1930s-40s radio set and gramophone advertisements in Lebanon and Palestine suggests a perception among local retailers that audio quality and technological innovation mattered to consumers, highlighting their increasingly sophisticated relationship to these sound-producing appliances. It also suggests consumers’ increasingly diverse listening interests, as well as the degree to which listening opportunities and occasions were expanding, thanks in particular to the increasing familiarity of radio broadcasting.

In 1914, Karl K. Kitchen wrote of the district of Beyoğlu’s diverse nighttime performance schedule (Kitchen, 1914). Just a few years later and as a product of wartime migration, African-American trombonist and composer Earl B. Granstaff who had performed before U.S. and Turkish dignitaries in Constantinople remarked to a New York Amsterdam News correspondent that black musicians were “occupying more and higher positions in Constantinople than in any other place.” Although Granstaff’s comment addresses the post-Armistice realities, he references a performance circuit that had begun in the mid-nineteenth century and that highlighted black artists. Istanbul was connected to the wartime and post-wartime landscape as a recipient of artists who were forced to leave other impacted European capitals as exemplified by the minstrel artists cum early jazz musicians George Duncan and Billy Brooks, who reported on this transoceanic network of performers. Notably, Beyoğlu’s European-styled theaters offered venues for touring cakewalk dancers and plantation revues, such as the duo Bonny and Freeman and lieder singer Arabella Fields. These performers were part of a transnational circuit of exchange and participation as part of the city’s transportation, commercial and technology endemic to its port environment that had been catering to the growth of a commercial cosmopolitan network that Kitchen references in 1914. Drawing upon a range of sources including foreign and Ottoman press, travel narratives, diaries, and visual materials, this paper plots Istanbul and post-Ottoman writers on a transnational latitude and in dialogue with other cities, e.g., Cairo, Alexandria, New York City, Berlin. In the aftermath of World War One, Istanbul took in a confluence of people ranging from U.S. navy soldiers patrolling “Turkish Waters” to foreign visitors, from refugees to relief workers, from circuit performers of musicians and dancers to impresarios. Contemporary writers in the pages of the illustrated press and newspapers documented sonic attachments to a changing visual world establishing an urban soundtrack: the tapping of police batons on the street, the “tiri tiri tam tam” whir of a jazz drummer in a bar, radio broadcasts in public spaces, and the city’s already present multilingual score. Listening for jazz in 1920s Istanbul documents this shifting urban, political, social, and cultural terrain. This paper understands jazz as a product of diaspora and occupation, movement and rescue, recovery and redefinition. It argues that listening for jazz complicates and reconfigures the city’s morphology in the post-Armistice period.

When Radio Tehran published its programming schedule in 1940 it clearly assumed multiple audiences, but not multiple “Iranian” audiences. It broadcasted news in Persian and foreign languages, and, offered programing in “Western” and “Iranian” music. However, it did not broadcast in any minority language (Arabic being construed as “foreign”). By 1958, its programming schedule had changed. Different forms of popular and classical Persian music were in the schedule. Programming seemed aimed at different “classes” of people (e.g. industrial workers, tribes) and interests (religious, some minority cultures). Much of this was in response to the geo-politics and related domestic upheavals of World War II and the Cold War. However, press, diplomatic, published archival and oral history accounts suggest there was something more at work – something more widespread, less overtly political: the personal regulation of listening environments at home and in public. As much as the Pahlavi state tried to cultivate national infrastructure for radio listening, it is also true that people did not receive these efforts passively. Middle class households that could afford to, set aside time and space within their households for radio listening, integrating and prioritizing their consumption of Radio Tehran broadcasts along with other ways controlling the listening culture of their households -- with live musical performance and gramophones, for example. These private listening environments created avenues to receive public communication from outside, but they were not unregulated avenues. Similarly, it is clear that people brought their own conceptual “filters” into public listening environments (e.g. cafes, bazars, schools). Iranian state records and British diplomatic reports from the mid-20th Century struggled to rate the efficacy of propaganda with respect to these complex patterns of (mostly public) listening behavior, even when such behavior could not be fairly described as political or oppositional. The more diverse broadcasting schedule of the late 1950s, therefore, can be understood also as the reflection of a more sophisticated of the diverse listening culture in Iran and an attempt to forge a more common “national” listening culture by engaging that diversity. At one essential level, it seems to have worked: radio seems to have become valued as a way for ordinary people to gain some direct access to the political elite -- to be spoken to, if not listened to.

Set to purge the public space of manifestations of “eroticism” (shahvat), “prostitution” (fahsha), and “degeneration”(ibtizal), the Revolution of 1979 in Iran led to the refashioning of performing arts and the creation of new genres, some of which came to function as committed arts assisting in “eternalizing ” the revolution. Among the new genres, “rhythmic movements” (harikat-i mawzun) emerged to cast silent performing bodies moving to pious sound to enact religious or revolutionary narratives. Unlike the Pahlavi era (1926-79) cabaret dancer of the urban popular entertainment scene, these dancing bodies not only avoid evoking sexual passion in the audience but they are sublime enough to enact the holy figures of Shi‘i Islam such as Fatima, Zaynab, Ali, and Husayn. While witnessing these contemporary stagings of early Islamic history, the audience hears the voices of holy figures from a house speaker—to further sense their ascending superiority to pedestrian human beings. The rhythm, mood, and melody of the music to which the other cast members dance signifies their role as virtuous or as representing vice, as well as their relationship to those sacred characters. Focusing on sound in these productions and its interrelations to movement and the sensory experience of performers and audiences, this paper aims to decode, analyze, and historicize the aesthetic aural and corporeal criteria of the post-revolutionary stage. Deploying several post-revolutionary theatrical productions as case studies, this presentation will first trace the genealogy of sound and movement of rhythmic movements to the pre-revolutionary high art of "national dance" (raqs-i milli), a hybrid twentieth-century genre that sought to showcase the aesthetics and biopolitics of modernity and nationalism on stage. It further analyzes rhythmic movements by identifying its motifs borrowed from religious, vernacular Iranian, and international performative forms, and by exploring the politics behind such selection in light of the moral, aural, and movement codes of the post-revolutionary stage. Making use of the Pahlavi era Islamic discourse on shahvat and the socio-historical associations of dance and music of the popular stage; the (Marxist) revolutionary notion of committed arts and its hierarchization of feeling that undermined recreation; and the contemporary clerical responses to the veil, music, and performance, this paper interrogates the moods and sensory experiences permissible for rhythmic movements on the post-revolutionary theatrical stage.