Making Music in the Arab World: The Culture and Artistry of Tarab

Cambridge Middle East Studies #17

by A.J. Racy

A. J. Racy is well known as a scholar of ethnomusicology and as a distinguished performer and composer. In this pioneering book, he provides an intimate portrayal of the Arab musical experience and offers insights into how music generally affects us all. The focus is tarab, a multifaceted concept that has no exact equivalent in English and refers to both the indigenous music and the ecstatic feeling associated with it. Richly documented, the book examines various aspects of the musical craft, including the basic learning processes, how musicians become inspired, the love lyrics as tools of ecstasy, the relationship between performers and listeners, and the influence of technological mediation and globalization. Racy also probes a variety of world musical and ecstatic contexts and analyses theoretical paradigms from other related disciplines. Written in a lucid style, Making Music in the Arab World will engage the general reader as well as the specialist.

Genres: Music, History

264 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2003

Reviews

[Cody · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book takes for its subject the typically urban style of music native to Egypt, Syria, the Levant, and to some extent Iraq, and the ecstatic effects and sensibilities associated with it. The term "tarab" stands in for the music itself and the ecstasy it produces and is the focus of the culture that surrounds it. I don't know where else I could have found such a wealth of information (much drawn from the author's own experiences as a performer and much, too, from the work of other scholars of the past and present and both Western and Islamic cultural spheres) on the cultural context and worldviews surrounding this music, its technical and formal aspects including modes and their associations, the texts and traditions its vocal works are based on, and the musicians, listeners and lyricists and their differing and active roles in the creation of this distinct art form. While the genre is foreign to me, much of what Racy describes is directly comparable to my own modest experiences as a musician and, I think, to a lot of past mindsets and cultural commonplaces of early music in Europe. The prose is not exactly exciting but it is clear and generally lucid, and there are striking passages that reveal a lot to the reader. The book also includes a lot of illustrative anecdotes from the lives of great tarab performers including Umm Kulthum, and it deftly avoids reducing its subject to an essential (or inevitable) expression of Arab culture, rather placing it firmly within its context and expanding the scope of those explorations to include ecstatic musical experience in other cultures worldwide. This is a really revealing book that "casts the gems" of a great musical tradition in human culture over its readers, both in its local particularities and universal qualities.

[Fadil Alturki · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a great book. Full of details and details to anyone who knows nothing about Arab Music and Eastern Music. The author (Dr. Ali Jihad Racy) is a composer, a virtuoso on Buzuq and Nai and yet an expert in multicultural music.

[Ameliedanjou]

Not sure I'll finish this - it's not quite the subject I was looking for. I still want to read his paper on the Cairo Arab music conference in 1932.

[Kareem Mansi · Rating 4 out of 5]

كتاب جميل جدًا.