Recording History: Jews, Muslims, and Music across Twentieth-Century North Africa

by Christopher Silver

A new history of twentieth-century North Africa, that gives voice to the musicians who defined an era and the vibrant recording industry that carried their popular sounds from the colonial period through decolonization.



If twentieth-century stories of Jews and Muslims in North Africa are usually told separately, Recording History demonstrates that we have not been listening to what brought these communities Arab music. For decades, thousands of phonograph records flowed across North African borders. The sounds embedded in their grooves were shaped in large part by Jewish musicians, who gave voice to a changing world around them. Their popular songs broadcast on radio, performed in concert, and circulated on disc carried with them the power to delight audiences, stir national sentiments, and frustrate French colonial authorities.



With this book, Christopher Silver provides the first history of the music scene and recording industry across Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, and offers striking insights into Jewish-Muslim relations through the rhythms that animated them. He traces the path of hit-makers and their hit records, illuminating regional and transnational connections. In asking what North Africa once sounded like, Silver recovers a world of many voices—of pioneering impresarios, daring female stars, cantors turned composers, witnesses and survivors of war, and national and nationalist icons—whose music still resonates well into our present.

Genres: History

298 pages, Kindle Edition

Published June 28, 2022

Reviews

[Shahd Yousef · Rating 4 out of 5]

I cannot apprehend the amount of research (because I presume that a lot of this info is not even directly available in English) that writing this book entailed for it to read so easy and digestible!!!!!! It deserves a second read to appreciate its bandwidth, and that’s how you know you have stumbled upon a great piece of work.
To me, music has always been a profound medium of knowledge - one of my favorite mediums to glean wisdom from. There is no medium on earth that leans on its own history like music. “Music remembers what history has forgotten”. By iterating upon itself and paying tribute to its predecessors, you can study time, linguistics, dialogue, pop culture, and so much more. “Could his [Yafil’s] enigmatic quality derive from the persistent use of a paper trail that is by definition too thin and whose materiality is too narrowly constructed?”
Among these intrinsic attributes, you have music’s aural attributes and its physicality, which I can go on forever about, but ultimately deepening our understanding of their societies, all while tracking the innovations available to them.
Situated at the nexus of MENA and Jewish history, this book is an acknowledgement that music is of consequence, layering the 20th century with a soundscape that enriches its historical landscape.
“By attuning our focus to music as a process, involving impresarios and intermediaries as much as it did instrumentalists and vocalists, it locates North Africa as an integral nodal point in a global industry - still little understood - which supported among the most monumental technological innovations of the last century and a half: the phonograph and the record”.
This book was enlightening, not only in its presentation of a complex history during pre/post/interwar eras and vaunted historical figures, but in its sought-out theories derived from his internal sources, and its quest for listening to and dissecting for us the context behind the myriad of music of this era & culture - approaching it at times as the music’s audience once did. It almost felt like the warm storytelling of a grandparent. Thanks Prof!!!!!!

[Anas Taleb · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book is so well written, i really enjoyed reading it