Researchers studying the cultural history of music throughout the Middle East have long sought creative methodologies to overcome the absence of archival sources, notated manuscripts and audio recordings. What is often left for us are biographical writings on individual musicians, occasioned by these musicians’ celebrity. These are often replete with unsubstantiated and unreferenced material at varying levels of reliability. Scholarly studies of individual musicians often attempt to situate them within the history of a particular musical genre, while the broader historical and social significance of their lives is eclipsed by these efforts to historicize the development of musical arts throughout the region.
Given the global geographies of movement and exchange that shaped the development of music in the Middle East during the twentieth century, a further challenge for scholars is reckoning with the fluidity of analytical categories that have often come to be synonymous with the musicians we discuss, and others like them. The nation-state, cultural ‘area,’ ethnic group, and normative binaries of gender and sexuality are all frameworks that have been applied anachronistically to these musicians and their music in efforts to recruit the memory and meaning of these celebrities as part of social and political legitimation strategies. By examining discourses that produce meaning about these artists, we aim to examine and problematize this work of appropriation.
Each of the papers on this panel takes the life, work and commentary upon a particular musician as its focus, drawing on concepts and frameworks across disciplinary boundaries. Moving beyond historical narratives of ‘the music’ itself, we will show how music-centered and socio-historiographical methodologies dealing with ‘the individual’ can provide nuanced perspectives on constructions of class, gender, nation, and race, and how they were intertwined with politics, cultural production, and global mass media during the early twentieth century. By studying individual artists with an ear to the cultural flows that shaped their careers, travels, social networks, class and gender positionalities, musical productions, and audiences, our aim is to expand our collective understanding of social and cultural life, and the production thereof, throughout the early-twentieth century Middle East. We will also explore how the interpretation of the musical past has been constitutive of the region’s political present, noting how current contestations and social constructs of class, race, nationality, and gender throughout the region are informed by both acknowledgements and erasures of the individual in cultural history.
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Mohsen Mohammadi
Like many other societies, minorities practiced Iranian music disproportionately. While Muslim liturgical singing and preaching were not known as music, a big portion of entertaining musicians were religious minorities, such as Jews and Armenians, or ethnic minorities and nomads. For those minorities, music was a shameful disgrace, and they often switched to other careers to eliminate the ignominy often attached to musicians. Nevertheless, minorities throughout Iran made immense contributions to the nation’s music history, and have been remembered in different, and often uneven, ways.
Morteza Neidavoud (1900-1990) was born to an Iranian Jewish family. He learned music from the masters of his time, Agha Hoseyn-qoli and Darvish Khan. Thanks to Ezra Meir Hakkak, a Jewish firm based in Iran and Iraq, the young Morteza dominated the first recording session of Persian music after WWI. In 1940, Radio Tehran was established and Morteza Neidavoud became a leading musician in live radio performances. The Iranian music scene changed dramatically after WWII, and Iranian traditional music was marginalized for several years by more popular music genres. These changes brought Morteza Neidavoud’s music career to an end. After the Iranian Revolution in 1979, he left Iran and lived the rest of his life in California. His last public performance was in Los Angeles in 1984, at the age of 84. Of all of Morteza Neidavoud’s many recordings in the 1920s and 1930s, Morgh-e Sahar (The Bird of Dawn) has become the most iconic, travelling far beyond the borders of Iran. Owed to its social justice themes, the song became an anthem of the protests against the Islamic regime after the 1979 revolution. Morgh-e Sahar reintroduced Morteza Neidavoud to Iranians, and this time, being musician was an honor. In addition, since protest was against the Islamic regime, Neidavoud’s Jewish background helped his popularity.
By looking at the life and the legacy of Morteza Neidavoud, this paper attempts to reflect on how the social meaning of music and musicianship has changed in Iran over the twentieth century. This presentation considers Neidavoud’s social status in three moments: his emergence as a popular musician in the early twentieth century, his initial reemergence as a national icon in the 1970s, and his second re-emergence as a protest icon in the early twenty-first century. In comparing these moments, I interrogate the values of, and in, music for musicians and the audience, and how these values change over time.
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Gabriel Lavin
Prince Mohammed Mohiuddin (1892-1967) is regarded as one of the most influential musicians of the twentieth-century in the Republic of Turkey and throughout the Arab world. A multi-instrumentalist, he was a performer of both Western and Ottoman classical music on the cello and oud (al-‘ūd). Hailing from the Hashemite bloodline, his father Ali Haidar Pasha was the last Ottoman Emir of the Hejaz and the holy city of Mecca. Although Mohiuddin spent most of his life living between Baghdad and Istanbul, it is less commonly known that much of his early career was in New York City, 1924-1932, where he moved after the establishment of the modern Turkish republic. This paper explores the social networks that shaped Prince Mohiuddin’s American career, as he capitalized upon his identity as a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad from the city of Mecca while performing in live concerts to North Ameircan elites, record companies, and one of the first radio broadcasts intended to introduce American audiences to non-Western music. It suggests that his goal of popularizing the oud in the United States contended with emerging notions of “global” culture propelled by early American entertainment industries, which propagated orientalist tropes, as well as the supposed universality of the Western arts.
The 1920s in the United States, aptly known as the roaring twenties, was a watershed decade for media and entertainment industries. New technologies like the radio propagated an increasing variety of musical styles to American audiences, providing novel presentations of musical culture not only from within the United States but also around the world. A global community of musicians trained in European classical music had also congregated in New York City and performed for radio, Prince Mohiuddin among them. Yet while the global import of European art music was often equated with the “universality” of music itself, media industries also propagated musical entertainments founded on ideas of racial and cultural difference. Themes of a timeless Orient were increasingly popularized in American consumer culture, no less a proper noun than “Mecca” becoming a metaphor for consumer destinations, which established catchy marketing tropes for music and a host of other products during the early twentieth century. Prince Mohiuddin navigated the extremes of these poles within the entertainment industry as a musical and social virtuoso, while he participated in shaping and challenging the emerging American consciousness, both scholarly and popular, of Middle Eastern musical culture.
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Munira al-Mahdiyya (c.1885-1965), dubbed the ‘Sultana of Ṭarab’, was one of the most influential and successful Arab female singers of her generation. As a lower-middle class woman with minimal education, she began working in the less reputable rank of the female singing profession as a 'alma, before quickly rising to the top of the Cairene musical performance scene that she would dominate for two decades.
Al-Mahdiyya deliberately and frequently subverted gender roles in ways that rendered her a figure of rebellion. This, combined with her vocal support and participation in the 1919 uprising might be more fully understood in the immediate context of her profession, alongside personal, artistic, and other practical considerations.
Cultural histories have generally focused their discussions of Al-Mahdiyya’s career on the period in which she was already an established figure of some wealth and renown. This has been due to an emphasis on press accounts, interviews, and promotional material rather than the recordings and performances she produced. As such, scholarship has largely reflected upon the social impact of journalistic representations of her as a controversial celebrity that transgressed gender boundaries of a Muslim Egyptian woman.
In this paper I seek to both broaden and complicate discussions of Al-Mahdiyya’s socio-cultural impact through a discussion of the interplay between her personal and professional lives. Whilst it is acknowledged that she helped reconfigure not only the repertory but the social parameters of her profession, questions remain: how did her personal background and career trajectory contribute to this reconfiguration, and how did her identity as an artist — her choices of content, style of delivery, environment and professional demands — help shape it?
To answer, I pair a chronological discussion of biographical circumstance in the context of social change with musical and literary analysis of her surviving recordings. In so doing, I hope to render audible Al-Mahidyya’s own navigations of social norms, and particularly those relating to class and gender within her profession. In doing so, I make an argument for a more nuanced approach through reflections on socio-economic circumstance, creative motivations and individual agency.
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Hazem Jamjoum
Dahi bin Walid (1898-1941) was one of the first generation Bahraini recording artists of sawt music, the urban genre that has come to be prized as the ‘classical’ urban musical genre of Bahrain, Kuwait and Qatar, often historicized as having its roots in the Abbasid court. Histories and commentaries relating to this genre, whether lay or scholarly, are central to the construction of a notion of urban culture in the Arabo-Persian gulf, and by extension to the national and regional identity construction more broadly.
Practically every study of modern Gulf and Bahraini sawt music gives attention to bin Walid and his colleague Mohammad bin Faris (1895—1947). What is consistently left out is that bin Walid was born into slavery and became the chattel ‘property’ of that very same colleague, whose aunt was the head wife of Bahrain’s ruler and who gifted her nephew her musically gifted captive.
The relevant writings in Arabic are generally based in oral history and personal recollections. In these, bin Walid’s social status is largely absented from the discussion on his life, and only mentioned in passing if at all. European language ethnomusicological scholarship, has been based in these same sources, and when they have picked up on bin Walid’s African origins, it has been to repeat tropes of “Africa” in order to offer them as a possible explanation for his competence as a percussionist, or in the more pernicious cases, to focus on stories of bin Walid as having eavesdropped and stolen from the repertoire of the royals.
I begin this paper by tracing the life-story of bin Walid, enmeshed in the Indian Ocean pearl trade and the musical life of its seafarers, and his struggle to gain recognition as a composer and lead performer in his own right despite known attempts by members of the royal family to relegate him to the role of accompanist. In the second part of the paper, I analyze successive waves of writing on music in Bahrain and sawt music in the Gulf that has actively whitewashed bin Walid’s life in their work to construct modern Bahraini and urban Gulf identities and authenticities.
