Sabri Moudallal: The voice of authenticity
Performance of the “classical” urban art traditions evokes this urban soundscape. One of the most celebrated of Aleppine performs is the legendary Sabri Moudallal (1918-2006). His quavering voice (a characteristic of older, Ottoman vocal styles) reminds audiences of the call to prayer, of which Moudallal was considered as one of Aleppo’s premier performers. Moudallal’s voice alone veritably conjures the ancient city itself; he was in many regards a representative of Aleppine heritage, sealing the metaphorical linkages between voice, place, and cultural authenticity.
In both the visual and aural expressions of the old city metonym, discourses of sentiment play an important role in structuring the experience of authenticity. I found that audiences at gallery openings and musical concerts often use the same aesthetic lexicon to evaluate artistic works: “Oriental spirit” (ruh sharqiyya), “emotional sincerity” (sidq), and even “enchantment” (tarab), normally associated with music and poetry, are commonly deployed to express appreciation of music and paintings. Moreover, many Syrians described their relationship to the old city and its depictions visual and musical with the term hanin, meaning a type of longing and yearning for the old city and its ways of living. When pressed, some would nostalgically reminisce about childhood homes, yet others recalled the social networks and “simpler” ways of living that the old city represented to them—especially for those living in newer neighborhoods. For them, Oriental spirit, sincerity, and tarab index regimes of affect and serve as meta-narratives of the self in which affect and sentiment are valued over rationality. These terms, quintessentially associated with cultural authenticity in the old cities, constitute a sort of bridging discourse between the visual and musical arts in Syria. The aesthetic linkages between these domains and media are hence affective and not (only) formal or stylistic.
Another metaphorical time-space of authenticity is the pre-modern (if not pre-historical) countryside, primarily the land and its people, the peasants (fallahin), whom many Syrians associate with “folklore” and “authentic” culture. For some modernists, such as the late artist Fateh Moudarres, the rural village constitutes the very location of authentic culture; in his view, one expressed by others as well, peasants are the inheritors of ancient Levantine and Mesopotamian culture and are therefore the most “authentic” Syrians (indeed, for some, the most authentic humans). The countryside is the source of many of the popular arts (funun sha‘biyya) and the cultural practices that give rise to such practices as the dabka or circle dance, songs about harvests, love and marriages, and so forth. These practices are thought to be timeless and eternal—in a sense without origin, dating back to pre-history. A number of contemporary Syrian artists capture many of these figures of authenticity in their works. Important symbols of rural authenticity in recent canvases and sculptures include sun-drenched landscapes, scraggly old olive trees, fields of wheat, peasants bent over in agricultural work, and especially peasant women wearing their colorful “folk” costumes and carrying jugs of water on their heads or ample hips. In these depictions (caricatures, almost), rural life is highly abstracted in terms of time, with peasants living in a sort of eternal past, and in terms of space, with “the land” (al-ard) coming to represent the nation and Syrian people as a whole, even when it is a highly specific local scene that is depicted, say, in a painting or in a narrative.
A number of contemporary Syrian fine artists capture many of these figures of authenticity in their works. Important symbols of rural authenticity in recent Syrian canvases include sun-drenched landscapes, scraggly old olive trees, fields of wheat, peasants bent over in agricultural work, and especially women wearing their colorful costumes and carrying jugs of water on their heads or hips. In these depictions (caricatures, almost), rural life is highly abstracted both temporally, with peasants living in a sort of eternal past, and spatially, with the land coming metonymically to represent the nation as a whole, even when it is a highly specific local scene that is depicted, such as a specific village.
Musically, artists evoke the countryside sonically via the use of instruments readily identified with rural folk music, especially the buzuq (a steel stringed, long neck, fretted lute), the mijwiz, a double pipe clarinet (see Racy 1994), shabbaba flute, and drums such as the tabl (a large kettle drum) and tabla (a goblet shaped drum). Certain rhythms are associated primarily with the countryside, such as the fast baladi beat, now incorporated into much Arabic pop music. Syrian composers incorporate these instruments and associated performance styles in their works to index rural culture, and many television serials, cinematic productions, and radio advertisements draw on this stock of (clichéd) rural themes and motifs to evoke the Syrian countryside.
These musical evocations index national identity through the metonymic identification of the countryside with the nation as a whole. Recordings by the Syrian oudplayer Hussein Sabsaby illustrate this metonymic move on the part of musicians. Sabsaby’s works (both compositions and improvisations) draw on both urban and rural motives, and are based in a number of what he called thematic circles (dawa’ir). Among these “circles” are what he described as rural themes (“folklore”) including desert/Bedouin themes. By drawing on these themes, he claimed that his music, while partaking of general Arab musical aesthetics, remains distinctively Syrian; “Syrianness” resides in a mélange of melodic and rhythmic motifs drawn from Syria’s musical heritage and which index the land and its peoples, just as a similar set would index the Iraqi nation, for example.
Vocal more than instrumental styles index these associations. The urban song traditions (both sacred and secular) are characterized by a limited range of vocal styles, most deriving from the Arab-Ottoman vocal traditions that are the basis for the “classical” repertoires today. Syria’s distinct geographical regions, however, are identified with distinct vocal styles: mountain, coastal, Euphrates, northern, southern, and so on. For example, a singer from Syria’s Mediterranean coast would easily be distinguished from someone from the Euphrates valley both in terms of dialect, vocal style, and thematic treatment in song texts. During my research I noted a strong propensity for these regional styles to be deployed strategically as sonic icons not only of the specific region, but of the pluri-ethnic nation as well through a process of sonic metonymy. At the Syrian Song Festival of 1997, for example, rural vocal and musical styles were extremely popular and spoke to a national audience through the medium of local specificity: a buzuq player from the Jazira region of northeastern Syria who won the instrumental competition, a female vocalist from the mountains near the Syrian Mediterranean coast winning the best vocalist award for a rendition of a traditional mawwal (an improvised song in colloquial Arabic strongly linked to folk culture), and so on. In contrast, the pan-Arab vocal and musical aesthetic characteristic of artists such as Sabah Fakhri tend to speak to the local from the perspective of the national and pan-regional level (this is evident both in terms of dialect, vocal style, and themes). Of course a nation has many voices, and these examples reveal the different ways in which metonymic relations bring the local and the regional together into the construction of the national.
In a similar manner the painter Fateh Moudarres emphasized the links between voice, geography, and Syrian culture with a statement in response to hearing some Kurdish music from Qamishli, in Syria’s Northeast: “That outlaw can draw the mountains with his voice!” For him authentic music was not only among the jasmine trees of the cities but also in the mountains, the villages, in any song that struck of geographical place. This was not necessarily limited to older songs either: Moudarres also enjoyed some (few) contemporary songs, such as those of the Saudi artist ‘Abd al-Majid ‘Abdallah, whose voice, to Moudarres’s ears, provided a sense of place and sounded “authentic.” In Moudarres’s discourse, one reflected in remarks by other artists, voice serves as a metonym for authentic places, especially the countryside; the countryside, in turn, serves as a metonym of the nation. This is especially the case in a country like Syria in which, despite rapid urbanization and the existence of ancient walled cities, agriculture still plays an important role of the national economy and in the national historical consciousness (for example in ideologies of Greater Syria and Mesopotamia as the first lands of agriculture).
Interestingly many of the songs in Syria’s urban repertoires also focus on elements of rural life. This is especially the case in the genre of light, popular songs called the qudud halabiyya, which usually come at the end of a performance of the classical urban repertoire in Syria. The qudud exhibit what Steven Feld (1996), following Murray Schafer (1977), terms an “acoustic ecology” in which rural and village lifeways are given voice in song. Many of the qudud evoke such themes as birds singing in gardens, lovers meeting at wells, jasmine trees, orchards, and other elements not particular to urban environments but more characteristic of nearby villages. A famous example from Aleppo is the song al-Bulbul nagha ‘ala ghusn al-full [The nightingale twittered on the branch of the jasmine tree], which mixes descriptions of the beloved with descriptions of bird song, aromatic plants and flowers, and springs. Many other songs in this genre associate the beloved with animals such as gazelles and birds, or with flowers and trees.
Through performing and listening to such songs Syrians establish and express a relationship to their environment that is at once romanticized, nostalgic in its appeal to urban dwellers, and infused with emotion and sentiment. Rural villages and lifeways come to serve as places rich in associations with cultural authenticity. Voice in particular becomes a sonic medium for the transmission of authentic sentiment in musical performance. In this manner the aesthetics of authenticity in Syrian song exemplifies the ways in which the countryside can be musically harnessed to construct an “acoustic ecology” of authentic space, a space that comes to play an important role in the elaboration both of a Syrian national ideology and an understanding of modern subjectivity in which emotion and affect figure prominently.
The countryside metonym might on first glace appear to carry the opposite connotations of the old city in terms of aesthetics and the subject matter of artistic expression. But closer examination reveals that metonymically the countryside and the old city are complementary. There is significant overlap in how the countryside and the old city operate as metaphoric gateways to and signifiers of cultural authenticity in the Syrian context. In fact, many of the artists I interviewed who identified the old city as a time space of authenticity also identified the countryside as one as well. For example, Fateh Moudarres, who instructed me to search for authentic music “among the jasmine trees” of the old city, also argued that authentic Syrian art must evoke a sense of place, and that this place is the Syrian countryside. He himself utilized natural earth pigments in his canvases to depict peasants and mountain folk; I once saw him casting sand on a still wet canvas in his studio to achieve what he described to be as this local specificity. In fact, according to Moudarres, any authentic art in any cultural tradition must have this geographical specificity, and for him it came—literally and figuratively—from the Syrian land itself. For other artists, local specificity came through other aesthetic moves: drawing on the rich calligraphic tradition of Arab-Islamic arts, or on mythology rather than the land per se.
Metonyms of inauthenticity
Since authentic culture is often defined in contrast to what some may consider inauthentic, we would expect to find certain metonymic expressions of inauthenticity as well. Indeed, such metonyms exist and sometimes focus on the same geographic places but at different times or with different people. In the old cities, the poor migrants who moved there after the flight of two generations of middle and upper class Syrians following Independence are associated in the minds of these elites with inauthentic culture: poorly decorated homes, crowded and dirty streets, noise, and so forth. Elite Syrians consider the culture of the urban poor in any neighborhood, old or new, to be inauthentic. Indeed much of elite and state-promoted discourses of preservation and restoration exhibits an anxiety about poor and rural inhabitants and a presumed loss of authenticity with their appearance in the old cities. In this regard discourses of heritage and cultural authenticity reflect deeper class antagonisms and anxieties that are exacerbated by the transformation of the old city into a site of authenticity under the rubric of World Heritage or national patrimony (turath).
Established elites also consider the nouveaux riches to be inauthentic because their wealth, as some anciens riches like to point out, comes not from family fortunes and land but from business dealings and especially corruption through association with the military and political elite. In this equation the urban Sunni merchants are authentic, while the newly urbanized members of the Alawite sect are inauthentic because, while “essentially” rural poor, they have acquired positions by virtue of having political connections. Even their religion is suspect in the eyes of the Sunni majority.
This is important when we consider the relationship between aesthetic practices and the dynamics of Syrian national culture. The cultural elite often dismiss state-sponsored artists and performers as inauthentic by dint of their association with the government. The abovementioned class and status anxieties in contemporary Syria thereby find expression in judgments of authenticity that transcend discussions of specific stylistic properties of the art object, performance, or performer under consideration. For this reason we have to take into consideration the class and other interests of artists and critics when evaluating their understandings of authentic Syrian culture.
Intersecting these class and political connotations we find nuanced discourses of emotion and affect that promote differing visions (and soundings) of authenticity and inauthenticity. Syrian artists and critics often associate “inauthentic” cultural practices of consumption and production with inauthentic emotions. One writer complained that the new Arab pop stars may sing of love, but they do not know “true” love; they lack the quality of “emotional sincerity” (sidq) and do no exhibit any “Oriental spirit” (ruh sharqiyya), hence the emotional states they evoke are artificial. Another argued that the great vocalist Sabah Fakhri—for many the veritable “voice of Syria” (like Umm Kulthum in Egypt)—to be inauthentic because his emotions are “vulgar,” not refined; this reflects his association with Syrian regime and not so much the qualities of his voice, though some few critics also found his lacking in one quality or another. A judgment of inauthenticity was pronounced on a wide variety of artists and works—poetic, musical, visual—by a variety of my Syrian interlocutors—teachers, taxi drivers, painters, musicians, and poets, among others. In the end, the perceived emotional qualities of a work more than any specific features (visual or musical) seems to determines the extent to which it may be judged to be authentic and hence amenable for the twin projects of creating modern subjectivities and elaborating a national culture.
Conclusions
“Where are you, oh string which unites the eyes and the heart, the poem and the icon, the symphony and the painting?” (Adonis 1998: 325).
This essay has sought to find such a “string” in the aesthetic experience of modernity in Syria’s art worlds. In both painting and music, but also in poetry and other media, modernity and modern subjectivities are constituted in a set of metonymic relationship between particular geographical spaces—the old city and the countryside—and the Syrian nation. These metonymic relationships not only describe space-times of cultural memory but also evoke rich domains of sentiment and sincerity that are powerful indexes of cultural authenticity in contemporary Syrian aesthetics. Contemporary Syrian expressive culture presents an argument for cultural authenticity in modernity, and not merely against it or as some form of an “alternative” or “counter” modernity. Syrian artists and intellectuals (of many political, ideological, and artistic stripes) tend to understand themselves to be a part of the modern tradition, even if recent history has denied them their full share of its benefits. As they paint, sound, and write the nation through their artistic activities, they draw on a well of inspiration based in (often contradictory) conceptions of heritage, and at the same time elaborate an understanding of modernity and modern subjectivities based firmly in discourses and practices of sentiment. This allows them to create a cultural space of being that is not simply an alternative to Europe but deeply engaged with it.
Adapted from Among the Jasmine Trees: Music and Modernity in Contemporary Syria. Wesleyan University Press, 2006.
References:
Feld, Steven (1996). “Waterfalls of Song: An Acoustemology of Place, Resounding in Bosavi, Papua New Guinea.” In Senses of Place. Steven Feld and Keith Basso, eds. Pp. 91-136. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press.
Schafer, R. Murray 1977. The Tuning of the World. New York: Knopf.
Adonis [‘Ali Ahmad Sa‘id]. 1998. “Introduction.” Contemporary Art in Syria, 1898-1998. Pp. 10-19. Damascus: Gallery Atassi.
