The Arab Avant-Garde: Music, Politics, Modernity

“The Arab Avant-Garde pursues a highly original inquiry into Arab music, politics, and modernism. This volume will serve as a significant point of orientation for a generation of Middle East scholars ready to move beyond the more familiar ethnomusicological positions in the study of music.”–Martin Stokes

“For too long, discussions of the musical avant garde have focused solely on Europe and North America, to the almost complete exclusion of other parts of the world. This ground-breaking volume offers the first critique of such universalizing pretensions, opening up the hitherto unexplored spaces of a rooted and vibrant Arab avant garde scene and presenting a range of alternative voices, voices which have been doubly marginalized, by local traditionalist discourses on the one hand, and by Euro-American appropriation of the center ground on the other. This is essential reading for anyone interested in the music cultures of the region, and more broadly in the richness and multiplicity of contemporary avant garde musical expression globally.”–Laudan Nooshin, City University London

“Conceptually rich, minutely detailed, and theoretically provocative, these essays should inspire scholars and performers alike to rethink their notions of cultural identity in the Arab world. In the wake of revolutionary changes in the region, The Arab Avant-Garde is both timely and prescient.”–Jonathan Shannon, author of Among the Jasmine Trees: Music and Modernity in Contemporary Syria

“This is a must-read book. Packed with high-minded critiques by renowned scholars, it launches a heated debate on the Arab modernism that has been depreciated by the deliberate imposition of Western models and Eurocentric visions. The critiques explore the colonial and postcolonial discourses on originality and experimentation and consider how the Arab avant-garde has behaved over years of struggle for self-determination and cultural identity. The transformation of modern Arab music into a contemporary space for experimentation, visions of cultural modernity, and spatialized practices is examined, and the volume as a whole concludes that Arab modernism has fundamentally defined itself through the expression of tonality beyond the typical Western scales. Moving smoothly between traditionalism and anti-traditionalism–examining such social spaces as musical theater, improvisation, hip-hop, folk music, and electronica–this volume breaks new ground, regarding the avant-garde as a key paradigm of the notion of cultural modernity.”–A.S. Jawad, Choice

THOMAS BURKHALTER is a researcher at Zurich University of Arts, editor-in-chief of norient.com, and author of Local Music Scenes and Globalization: Transnational Platforms in Beirut. KAY DICKINSON is an associate professor at Concordia University and the author of Off Key: When Film and Music Won’t Work Together. BENJAMIN J. HARBERT is an assistant professor of music at Georgetown University and the director of the documentary Follow Me Down: Portraits of Louisiana Prison Musicians.