Palestinian Music and Song: Expression and Resistance since 1900
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Palestinian Music and Song: Expression and Resistance since 1900
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253011060 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press (Ips) |
| Publication date: | 11/07/2013 |
| Series: | Public Cultures of the Middle East and North Africa |
| Pages: | 240 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
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Palestinian Music and Song
Expression and Resistance since 1900
By Moslih Kanaaneh, Stig-Magnus Thorsén, Heather Bursheh, David A. McDonald
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2013 Indiana University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-01106-0
CHAPTER 1
Palestinian Song, European Revelation, and Mission
Rachel Beckles Willson
One of the earliest—perhaps the very earliest—publications of Palestinian song is a book of 360 pages produced in Germany in 1901 titled Palästinischer Diwan (Palestinian Diwan). The collector and editor was German theologian and linguist Gustaf Dalman (1855–1941), who went on to become one of the leading commentators on Palestine in the early twentieth century. At first glance the volume seems to be a rather limited source of actual song of the time, because the bulk of the material presented consists of song texts alone. Only thirty-two melodies are provided and many of these are rather minimal. The traces it offers could nevertheless be of enormous value to folklorists seeking a history for poetry and song in the region. And the book's wide geographical source base—most of the songs with melodies stem from as far afield as Madaba (now Jordan), Aleppo (now Syria), and what is now southern Lebanon—reminds us of the scope of conceptions of Palestine at the turn of the twentieth century.
My main concern here, however, is not a folkloristic one. Rather, I discuss the intellectual and ideological frameworks that led Dalman's book to be researched and published in the form that it eventually took. This would seem a crucial process to contextualize the song material, but it is also a valuable inquiry in itself, because it contributes to broader debates about Europe's relationship with the so-called Orient. On one level the Diwan must certainly be seen as an Orientalist product of some kind, but on another it challenges the primary models we have. Edward Said's landmark study Orientalism addressed nineteenth-century European prejudices and fantasies about Arabs in apparently general terms, but his work tended to focus primarily on the colonization of Egypt, and the majority of subsequent writers have followed suit. As recent scholars have begun to indicate, however, and as I will elaborate further through the example of Dalman's Diwan, in the nineteenth century the Palestinian region was viewed and treated quite differently from Egypt, received different types of researchers and travelers, and—because of how it was depicted in the Bible—had a very different place in the European imagination (Goren 2003; Kirchhoff 2005; Nassar 1997; Marchand 2009). Such theologically inspired work deserves fuller research today and may indeed set in motion further revisions to theories of Orientalism.
In the main part of the article I discuss how Palästinischer Diwan can be understood through three dominant facets of German Orientalist thought: linguistics, theology, and a field outside academia—namely, mission. In my fourth section I discuss Dalman's actual collecting processes and indeed his contact with singing Palestinians. I close by reflecting briefly on the legacy of the type of research practiced by Dalman and others of his time that has remained alive in conceptions of Palestine ever since.
The Orientalist Diwan
Most obviously, Palästinischer Diwan is a collection of song texts gathered in the "Oriental" field. It is apparently, then, exemplary of Oriental linguistics, in which Dalman was well schooled and highly productive. He was indeed already an authority in classical Hebrew and Aramaic when he decided to study Arabic with the Swiss scholar Albert Socin in Leipzig. Socin, who had considerable pedigree as an Orientalist, had settled in Leipzig following a professorship in Oriental languages at Tübingen (1876–1889), had been instrumental in setting up the Deutscher Palästina Verein (German Society for the Exploration of Palestine) in 1877, and had published extensively and regularly in its journal. His Baedecker travel guide was regarded as a standard work for several decades. At the time that he was consulted by Dalman, he was working on the final stages of his monumental collection and analysis of Arabic poetry titled Diwan aus Centralarabien (Divan from Central Arabia, 1900), a classic piece of Orientalist linguistic philology. It can serve here as a useful window on that approach and as one context for Dalman's book.
The 300 pages of its part 1 present 112 texts (a combination of poems, prose pieces, and stories collected by Socin in the field) and reproduces seven poems already in the public domain, with the addition of some corrections. Each of the texts is printed in Arabic script, with a transliteration on the opposite page, and is annotated with detailed notes about meter, language, dialect, and occasionally authorship and textual sources. The texts appear, almost without exception, in the order in which Socin collected them and are thus grouped according to the place of collection (Baghdad, Suk al-Shuyukh, Baghdad again, and Mardin). Also included in the volume is an "Excursus," which consists of detailed notes about some objects and concepts encountered in the poems (camels and saddles, for instance, which are also provided with illustrations). Although some of this section relates to use of language, it is primarily contextual in a more material sense, thus offering quasi-ethnographic support for the reader.
Part 2, a further 146 pages, offers German translations of all the texts, with some annotations relating to the meanings of those texts. Part 3, another 350 pages, consists of the introduction, the glossary, indexes, bibliography, and an afterword by the book's editor, Hans Stumme, a student of Socin who took over the final preparations for the publication directly after Socin's death in 1899. Socin's introduction gives an account of existing literature, his sources, and his method, and then goes on to analyze the corpus he has presented in terms of content, form, grammar, pronunciation, prosody, and syntax. Although it contains anecdotes about difficulties in collecting (with deprecating remarks about his informants), its emphasis is formal and focuses on the construction of a system through which the corpus can be rationally categorized. All of this is representative of German Orientalist scholarship of the time.
Dalman acknowledged Socin's help in the introduction to his own Diwan, which comes in line with that of Socin by constructing a corpus. Additionally, conforming to Socin's method, it includes materials from a combination of oral and textual sources. In obvious respects Dalman's aim was analogous to that of Socin—namely, preservation and archive creation, a project that he understood as urgent in the context of European colonization of the region. Like Socin, Dalman provided an account of his methods, gave the locations of collection, and offered a classification of his results in terms of poetic content, song types, form, and language. All of this was positioned clearly with reference to scholarly work on Arabic poetry.
The first significant distinction between Socin and Dalman emerges from their selection of texts. Whereas Socin's focus was on city poetry and posited an uncorrupted "original" composition for each of the elaborated poems he gathered from informants, Dalman presented the poetic practices of people he hoped were least influenced by composed poetry, art song, or city life. He sought out material from peasants and Bedouins and constructed it as a permanent accompaniment to their lives from cradle to grave. Where Socin valued original composition (art, even), Dalman sought nature. A second major difference between the two poets is that Dalman's collection could actually contribute very little—perhaps not at all—to the detailed philological research represented by Socin's Diwan. Not only is Dalman's main commentary comparatively short (less than thirty-four pages), but also he does not present the poems in Arabic script, just in a transliteration and in German translation. Footnote annotations refer not to scholarly questions of dialect, but specifically to meaning. The textual content is also the basis for thematic groupings of poems.
Part 1, for instance, begins with "Auf Feld und Tenne" (In field and barn), moves through "Beim Pflügen" (Ploughing), "Bei der Ernte" (At harvest), "Beim Dreschen" (Threshing), toward the final "Auf der Pilgerfahrt" (Making a pilgrimage); part 2 passes through stages of human life from birth to death. Each individual song is also furnished with an individual title in its German version—titles that describe the songs' content as if they were part of a Lieder song collection. The place where Dalman collected the song from is provided above the title, sometimes accompanied by the name of the informant, sometimes with the more general descriptor "farmer," "Bedouin," or "leper." On occasion an anecdote is also included, something that would be completely out of place in Socin's work. For instance, the song "Es ging mir unter die Sonne, dunkel ward mir die Nacht" (The sun went down for me, the night became dark) is presented by Dalman with the title "Liebesweh" (Lovesickness) and with a note that he heard a shepherd boy singing it near Essalt, at dusk (1901, 33). In other words, the book is user-friendly to the extent of being almost populist rather than scholarly.
There is yet one more obvious difference between the two works, one where Dalman pushes beyond Socin. This is their treatment of music, for whereas Socin limited himself to the song texts and to describing sounds with words, Dalman did not. Orientalist study of music was not developed to a level that came close to that of language and literature. Nevertheless, Dalman had consulted the several key authorities of the time, both those depending on contemporary experience such as Edward Lane (who wrote on Egypt [1836]) and the philologically based Kiesewetter's Musik der Araber (Music of the Arabs, 1842). As mentioned above, Dalman included thirty-two melodies in his collection, two modes or maqams (bayat and hijaz) in the form of scales, and even provided the tones available on specific instruments (the notes of flute and the double flute, the range of the zither, the open strings of the 'ud, violin, and rabab). See figure 1.1 for the listing of maqams and instrumental ranges, along with the first five melodies.
In three sections of his introduction devoted to "Poetic Forms," "Rhythm," and "Melodies," Dalman presents some general comments about the material collected. He identified no less than eighteen categories, for instance, including qasida, mawwal, 'ataba, zajal, and zalghutah, each of which he described briefly in terms of form and context (1901, xiv–xxii). He refrained, however, from attempting to examine the rhythmic nature of most of the songs he heard, explaining that it did not serve the interests of his book and that its challenges would necessitate extensive commentary. He limited himself to some basic observations about syllable counts, meters, and beats in songs where it was clear to him, also noting that poetic meters were often different from the beats in the melody (xxiv).
When it came to melody, Dalman reveals that he had attempted to identify the seventeen pitch levels within the octave that Arabic music theory claimed, but found that musicians in Aleppo came into difficulty when showing him them in practice (xxv–xxvi). Perhaps in response to this result, and his doubt that there really were so many identifiable pitches involved, his own strategy was to seek out similarity, arguing that Arabic intonation was "not far" (nicht weit) from Western tuning, because some of its instruments were tuned so similarly. He claimed this of the qanun and mijwiz, regional types of zither and flute, and peasant violin (Bauerngeige). He then differentiated between instrumental and vocal styles, stating that the intervals of singers varied immensely, and that local informants had told him that they were a matter of "taste" (Geschmack).
In consequence of this vagueness, even while Dalman presented interesting observations, his transcriptions are somewhat primitive for their time, not really exploring the nature of the Arabic intonation, rhythm, or ornamentation. To be sure, as he points out in other sections of the introduction, much of what he heard was spontaneous rather than crafted, because he looked mainly for peasant and Bedouin song as opposed to schooled song of urban regions; and it was presumably extremely flexible in terms of pitch, harder to pin down. In one respect his observations are in line with the broader experience of ethnomusicologists and musicians from both his time and our own: Arabic intonation practices have been, and remain, variable and individual (Marcus 1993, 40). Additionally, there are distinctions to be observed between "learned" practices (repertoires of sama'i and bashraf) and oral traditions developed in rural communities (Marcus 1992, 189).
Nevertheless, with respect to historical evidence of Palestinian song, what Dalman's melodies leave us today is rather in question. Songs 23 and 24 are exceptional in that they are notations of a song that remains popular today and that can indeed even be heard sung by Fairouz, "Al-Zaynu" (see figure 1.2). Such a trace may add to discussions of this song's history. Some of the others are recognizable in broad terms as rather typical examples of genres that are still familiar today ("'ataba," for instance). In general, however, Dalman has left us with traces of music that we can access only with great difficulty. The representation of the maqam bayat as a tempered scale (see figure 1.1 again), for instance, points us in two directions. Most specifically, it indicates that one of Dalman's signs—the F sharp—should actually be taken to represent a different note—namely, an F half sharp (for without this, the row of notes would not be maqam bayat). Indeed the very first song makes sense if read in this way (replacing the F sharp with F half sharp), with a result that it seems to be based on a maqam from the sikah family.
The broader point is that we can read Dalman's notes only extremely loosely. The melodic characters of the first five songs suggest that they draw on members of the maqam sikah family, and this interpretation can be made to work if we read Dalman's B naturals as B half flats, and his E naturals as E half flats. In other words, we have to change his notation substantially. In effect, we are creating our own musical texts to displace the primary research sources that Dalman offers us. Put differently, we are not using these as historical sources of music, but only witnessing them as signs of a serious struggle between Dalman's knowledge and skill, on the one hand, and the sounds he encountered, on the other. But of course the accurate notation of music was not his fundamental aim.
The Diwan of Revelation
Dalman's initial research was a response to one of the most pressing German debates about the Bible, which concerned the identity of the Song of Songs. An article by the German consul to Damascus, Johann Gottfried Wetzstein, had questioned the canonical status of this book. Basing his argument on songs he had heard at weddings in Syria, Wetzstein asserted that the book was essentially a collection of (secular) wedding songs. (The idea had already been put forward by Johann Gottfried von Herder, but Wetzstein seemed to provide material support [Wetzstein 1873].) Dalman explained in the introduction to his Diwan that he had traveled to Palestine with the explicit hope of engaging with this controversy; he intended to compare the Song of Songs with songs in the Palestine region.
The upshot of his research was that he dismissed Wetzstein's thesis. First, while there was no homogeneous practice of love-song singing at weddings in the region, love songs were sung by all groups (including Muslims). Second, he found no specific genre of "wedding song"; love songs were sung often and were associated only with weddings. Third, the content of songs did not correspond neatly to that of the Song of Songs; although bride and groom were occasionally invoked as queen and king, threshing was not mentioned in this connection and indeed for very practical reasons—namely, that weddings tended to happen in the autumn—when threshing was over (Dalman 1901, xi–xii).
Underlying the debate about the Song of Songs, however, was a supposition that Dalman did not relinquish. This is my second point. By the time that Dalman undertook his research, the exact identity of the people on the land had been a subject of (biblically inspired) speculation in Europe and the United States for several decades. Many proposals had been put forward that they were direct descendants of the people who lived on the land prior to the arrival of the Hebrews (Goren 2003; Kirchhoff 2005; Löffler 2008). From this perspective, Dalman's interest in people in apparently undeveloped rural areas (as opposed to Socin's preference for urban populations) has more to it than a Rousseau-inspired fascination with the primitive. Although Dalman was opposed to the simplistic connections between Canaanite tribes and the present-day population that circulated in Anglophone circles in particular, he nevertheless argued in his introduction to Palästinischer Diwan that the locals would give access to the Bible because they had not been subject to the changes brought about by modernity.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Palestinian Music and Song by Moslih Kanaaneh, Stig-Magnus Thorsén, Heather Bursheh, David A. McDonald. Copyright © 2013 Indiana University Press. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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Table of Contents
Introduction Palestinian Music: Surviving in SongMoslih KanaanehPart 1: Background1. Palestinian Song, European Revelation, and MissionRachel Beckles Willson2. A Musical Catastrophe: the direct impact of the Nakba on Palestinian musicians and musical lifeNader Jalal and Issa Boulos interviewed by Heather Bursheh3. Negotiating the Elements: Palestinian Freedom Songs from 1967 to 1987Issa BoulosPart 2: Identity4. Transgressing Borders with Palestinian Hip HopJanne Louise Andersen5. Performing Self: Between Tradition and Modernity in the West BankSylvia Alajaji6. Realities for a Singer in PalestineReem Talhami interviewed by Heather Bursheh7. Identity, Diaspora and Resistance in Palestinian Hip HopRanda SafiehPart 3: Resistance8. Performative Politics: Folklore and Popular Resistance during the First Palestinian IntifadaDavid A. McDonald9. Hamas' Musical Resistance Practices: Perceptions, Production, and UsageMichael Schulz and Carin Berg10. Palestinian Music: Between Artistry and Political ResistanceStig-Magnus Thorsén11. The Ghosts of Resistance: Dispatches from Palestinian Art and MusicYara El-Ghadban and Kiven StrohmWhat People are Saying About This
This is a book in which we see Palestinian music making Palestinian history. Crucial reading on resistance, with timely contributions by an impressive gathering of scholars, musicians, activists and organizers.