In much of the world, the colonial encounter has played a pivotal role in the creation of modernity (Mitchell 2000). In the realm of musical practices, these periods of encounter contained negotiations in which players sought to demonstrate both a national identity and a cosmopolitan, often viewed as European, modernity. Over the past 150 years, Arab music in Egypt has undergone major changes in terms of performance practice, genre, and musical instruments, many of which relate to European colonialism. Among the most significant of these changes has been the introduction and establishment of the violin as one of Arab music's principle instruments. Adopted from Europeans in the second half of the 19th century, the violin came gradually to dominate the large music ensembles (firqat pl. firaq) of the mid 20th century, and now features more prominently in contemporary popular music recordings than Arab instruments. Beyond merely creating changes in sound itself, the violin provided and continues to form a bridge between European and Arab music, visually and symbolically linking Egypt to the Europe. Based on over a year of ethnographic fieldwork (2005, 2008-2009) in Cairo, as well as historical research on past performers and media, I argue that the violin acts as a key instrument within Egypt's formal and informal modernity projects in the 20th and 21st centuries, as described by authors such as Walter Armbrust (1996, 2000). Violin players and composers describe the potential of the violin as a site for musical development and exploration, a characterization that parallels the use of the violin in songs and films. The violin's discursive connection to the "local" and tradition on the one hand, as well as the "modern" and Europe on the other, makes it a powerful tool in the creation of a cosmopolitan present linked with the past. My ethnographic work shows how the instrument's use by players and composers continues to mirror and forward the production of modernity in postcolonial Egypt.

The formation of the Turkish Republic required the shaping of Turkish citizen subjects. While many studies have traced Ataturk's project and the application of philosophical writings of Ziya Gokalp and other intellectuals for state-mandated cultural reforms, the impact of commercial recordings as a continued privately-owned public sphere has yet to be investigated for its continued links to the Ottoman period on the one hand, and its contrarian position to state media on the other. The early establishment of recording subsidiaries in Ottoman Turkey led to a strong recording industry that functioned as a sonic public sphere that sounded in tension with state controlled broadcast media until 1994. While state ensembles shaped Turkish classical and regional music, recording studios continued a variety of musical genres and styles developed during the previous Ottoman period, with the first recordings pressed in 1903. How does one evaluate the contrasting images of Turkish society in which diverse communities were represented in commercial recordings, while the state radio shaped a singular view of Turkish national identity through musici This essay examines how ethnically-marked genres were used in commercial recordings as negative portrayals to shore up normative Turkish ideals of male and female gender roles. Drawing from journal articles and literature from the 1920s-1940s, sonic portrayals in commercial recordings of monologues, kantos, and karagoz segments, as well as visual information from advertising and record catalogues, this study focuses on the tension between state discourses on the one hand and alternative public sphere commercial discourses on the other in order to examine how these discourses converged to shape male and female citizen-subjects. Based on the evidence of these sources, I claim that normative ideals of the new Turkish "male" and "female" were in large part encoded through stereotypical portrayal of ethnically-marked "male" and "female", thus providing a repertoire of stylized characteristics to guide every-day behavior.

Jewish religious law has historically excluded women's voices from prayer services in the synagogue, based on the Talmudic injunction, "kol b'ishah ervah" ("a woman's voice is erotic by nature"). In part because of such legal restrictions, formal liturgical education and performance became gendered in Jewish communities, including those of the Middle East. In the case of Sephardic Jewry in the Ottoman empire, for example, male children generally attended Talmud Torah religious schools to learn Hebrew scripture and liturgical leadership, while girls learned Ladino songs orally from their mothers and grandmothers. Until recently, ethnomusicological scholarship has likewise separated such gendered music-making into two distinct categories: male music as Hebrew-liturgical-literate and female music as Ladino-folk-oral. This paper will join a growing body of literature challenging the strict gender dichotomy in past scholarship on Jewish religious music-making, drawing upon fieldwork conducted in Istanbul in 2005-06 and the potentiality of new ethnographic sources, such as oral history, to complicate our musical and historical understandings. Specifically, the testimony of a musically adept Jewish woman growing up in 1930s Istanbul, Janti Behar, confirms the participation of Jewish girls and women in musical life on the street, in homes and from tree perches, exposed to and learning the ambient Turkish art music forms underpinning Hebrew-language religious music sung in synagogues. Further, early 20th century memoirs provide detail about diverse live 'alaturka' (Turkish style) music-making and lessons in Jewish homes, activities that girls, mothers and other female relatives joined in. It is through clear evidence of Jewish participation, both male and female, in so-called 'non-Jewish' music that breaks down the Hebrew/male vs. Ladino/female dichotomy, suggesting a more generative distinction between Hebrew-language and Turkish-language art music. With this alternative distinction in mind, we can understand how Janti Behar acquired the broader musical forms of which Hebrew religious music was a part, enabling a measure of in-synagogue performance as a girl, as well as an opportunity to make a record of Turkish art music. This paper will analyze Janti Behar's musical life outside of the conventional gendering of Jewish religious music, contextualizing it in her Istanbul neighborhood and home-life of the mid-20th century, and articulating the musical distinctions between a girlhood and womanhood lived within communal restraints and a changing Turkish society.

Napoleon Bonaparte's 1798 invasion of Egypt provides the date by which historians of the Middle East designate that region's abrupt entry into the modern era. Napoleon's military forces were accompanied by members of the French Commission of Sciences and Arts. These civilian invaders were charged with implanting Enlightenment ideals of the new French Republic into Egypt as rationale for their colonial expansion into Ottoman territory. Thus, Egyptians felt the "shock of modernity" from the impact of intellectual as well as military invasion. French presence of three years was followed eventually by British occupation until 1922. Much of the political and cultural history of Egypt's colonial period involved complex interactions of resistance and attraction to European ideas and practices. Egyptian rulers introduced European-type military, political, and cultural reforms, while Egyptian and other Arab intellectuals debated the merits restoring a lost Arab heritage through carefully selected Western concepts and techniques. This discourse, centered in Egypt, came to be referred to as the modern Arab "renaissance," seen by later historians as primarily a literary and political movement. Musicological writings from this era indicate that music was also a significant feature of renaissance thought. In this paper I examine, from an ethnomusicological perspective, contributions of musical practice and theory to renaissance discourse of reform and redefinition. I demonstrate that my study of Arabic musicological texts from the later years of the renaissance period indicate that music was considered an important ideological component for the shaping of a modern Egyptian identity. For this study, I discuss accounts of official court patronage of music and musicians during the last decades of the 19th century. I focus on the court-supported singer Abduh al-Hamuli, described as "a reformer in the garb of a singer" who would lead Egyptians to "the right path for restoring the legacy of the East...." I describe the tensions expressed in writings on music, as their authors attempted to reconcile preservation of musical authenticity with attraction to innovation in musical styles and techniques based on European models. I conclude by analyzing the role of music within the broader discourse conducted by Egyptian intellectuals debating potential benefits of adopting Westernized modernity within an -Islamic context. I also discuss relevant issues of social theory related to understanding a non-Western society's conceptualization of processes of modernization. .