Orientalism and Musical Mission: Palestine and the West

Orientalism and Musical Mission

Orientalism and Musical Mission presents a new way of understanding music’s connections with imperialism by drawing on new archive sources and interviews and using the lens of ‘mission’. Rachel Beckles Willson demonstrates how institutions such as churches, schools, radio stations and governments, sent from Europe and North America since the mid nineteenth century, have consistently claimed that music provides a way of understanding and reforming Arab civilians in Palestine. Beckles Willson discusses the phenomenon not only in religious and developmental aid circles, where it has had strong currency, but also in broader political contexts. Plotting a historical trajectory from the late Ottoman and British Mandate eras to the present time, the book sheds new light on relations between Europe, the USA and the Palestinians, and creates space for a neglected Palestinian music history.

rachel beckles willson is Professor of Music at Royal Holloway, University of London. She has published numerous articles and two monographs on music politics, giving special attention to the former Eastern bloc and Israel/Palestine. Her most recent book was Ligeti, Kurtág, and Hungarian Music during the Cold War (2007). Beckles Willson originally trained as a pianist at the Royal Academy of Music in London and the Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest, before reading for a PhD at King’s College, London. She has taught a wide range of courses, including Music and Orientalism; Communism and Music; and Intercultural Performance. Between 2008 and 2010 she was based at the Humboldt University in Berlin, supported by a Fellowship for Experienced Researchers from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. Alongside her scholarly pursuits, Beckles Willson is an active musician, performing as a pianist, saxophonist and ‘ūd player.

Orientalism and Musical Mission Palestine and the West rachel beckles willson

c a m b r i d g e u n i v e r s i t y p re s s Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi, Mexico City Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107036567 © Rachel Beckles Willson 2013 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2013 Printed and bound in the United Kingdom by the MPG Books Group A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Willson, Rachel Beckles. Orientalism and musical mission : Palestine and the West / Rachel Beckles Willson. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-107-03656-7 (Hardback) 1. Music–Social aspects–Palestine–History. 2. Orientalism–Palestine. I. Title. ML3917.P35W55 2013 306.40 842095694–dc23 2012038177 ISBN 978-1-107-03656-7 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

This book is for the wonderful friends who were there, 2007–10.

You standing at the doorsteps, enter and drink Arabic coffee with us (you might sense you’re human like us) you standing at the doorsteps of houses get out of our mornings, we need reassurance that we are human like you! MAHMOUD DARWISH

Contents

List of figures [page ix] Acknowledgements [x] A note on terminology and transliteration List of abbreviations [xiv]

[xiii]

Introduction [1] Orientalism [4] Mission and the instrumentalisation of culture Shifting perspectives on Palestine [15] Methods [23]

part i holy land, 1840–1948

[10]

[35]

1 Revelation [37] Recovering German Orientalism [39] Anglican and American imposition [62]

2 Distinction [76] Stage 1: Informal encounter. Mary Eliza Rogers and Titus Tobler [78] Stage 2: British strategy. The Palestine Exploration Fund, 1865–1918 [87] Stage 3: Negotiations with Jews [98]

3 Education [116] Territories for music [118] Peopling the land [137]

4 Separation

[159]

The tripartition of air [162] Europe, Jews (and Arabs) [166] Arabs, British [169] Another mission, another separation [178]

5 Provincialising mission [181] Moving out of the waiting room [183] Another route forward [192] Beyond religion [197]

vii

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Contents

Contact zones [201] A gestural postlude [208]

part ii state(s), 1987 onwards 6 Culture

[213]

[215]

Beyond the waiting room [220] Contact zones and occupation [239]

7 Dialogue [259] Concerts as simulacra [262] Reading simulacra [270] On the borders of performance

[279]

8 Musical missionaries [292] Europe’s demise and Palestine’s potential [293] Cultural heritage and the construction of civilians Music against violence [304]

9 Conclusion

[310]

Glossary [318] Interview database [319] Archival sources [322] Bibliography [325] Index [352]

[299]

Figures

Figure 1 Gustaf Dalman’s Palästinischer Diwan (1901), p. 354. [44] Figure 2 Dwight Elmendorf, ‘Shepherd’s Pipe, Sling and Scrip’ (Plate XX) from A Camera Crusade through the Holy Land (1913). [68] Figure 3 From the programme booklet for The Second Annual Palestine Children’s Music Festival. 2 May 1942. Housed in the archive of the Friends Boys School, Ramallah. Reproduced by permission. [135] Figure 4 School Song Book [literally: The Collection of School Songs], Jerusalem, 1921. Housed in the archive of the Friends Boys School, Ramallah. Reproduced by permission. [188] Figure 5 ‘The Song of the Institute for Teacher Training’ from the School Song Book [literally: The Collection of School Songs], Jerusalem, 1921. Housed in the archive of the Friends Boys School, Ramallah. Reproduced by permission. [190]

ix

Acknowledgements

x

My first expression of gratitude is to the sponsors of my research. The Arts and Humanities Research Council provided a Small Grant in support of preliminary work in 2006, and its Research Leave scheme enabled me to complete an initial draft of the manuscript in 2010. In between, a Small Grant from the British Academy funded my fieldwork and research assistance from 2006 to 2008, and a Fellowship for Experienced Researchers from the Humboldt Foundation allowed me both to focus my time on research while living in Berlin from 2008 to 2010 and to undertake further fieldwork in 2009. In Berlin, the Humboldt University provided my institutional base, where Professor Hermann Danuser was my welcoming host. The Music Department at Royal Holloway, University of London, also covered some of my expenses, and allowed me time to carry out the research. Without such support the book would not, of course, have been thinkable. I also extend thanks to everyone who has provided me with time and information. This includes staff at the British Library, the BBC Written Archives Centre, the British National Archive, the Central Zionist Archive (Lee Rotbart in particular), the Friends Girls School in Ramallah (Diana Abdel Noor in particular), the Israel State Archive, the Jewish National Library, the Library of the Diaconate of the Evangelical Church in Germany, the Middle East Centre Archive at St Antony’s College Oxford, and the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin. It also includes all the interviewees listed at the back whose testimonies enrich the book so profoundly, as well as those who helped but preferred to be anonymous. Additionally, I would like to mention colleagues with whom I collaborated to organise a conference entitled ‘Negotiating “the West” Music(ologic)ally’, namely Harm Langenkamp and Barbara Titus. Along with all the other scholars who contributed to that event at the University of Utrecht in April 2011, they enriched my thinking substantially. Over the years I made a number of friends in Palestine and Israel who provided not only information, but also fantastic conversation, entertainment and hospitality. I thank in particular Noam Ben Ze’ev, Michal Grover-Friedlander, Khaled Jubran, Nizar Rohana and Abigail Wood.

Acknowledgements

Back in the UK, I benefited similarly from the friendship of Gwyn Daniel, Nada Elzeer and Avi Shlaim, and I am deeply grateful to you all for sharing your expertise and helping me through some of the vicissitudes of this project. I also thank Nada Elzeer for her multiple translations and transliterations of Arabic sources, and Musab Hayatli for his added help with transliteration. My thanks also go to Annika Forkert and Doris Lanz for their corrections to my German translations. I was wonderfully supported by other friends and family throughout research and writing in both Berlin and London. Your interest and tolerance, as well as your capacity to make me laugh, were priceless. Particular thanks to Hilary Behrens, Tony Conway, Lena Dickson, Misha Donat, Dan Leech-Wilkinson, András Schiff, Jim Samson, Julia and Peter Sherwood and Adrian Thomas. Never forgetting Christopher Raeburn, who sadly is no longer here to thank. When I made a final research trip to Jerusalem in the spring of 2010 I bought myself an ‘ūd, an instrument that has been a rather special companion to me while working on manuscript revisions. In short, it provided me with a sense of a life beyond the book, and a refreshingly joyful activity alongside gruelling work at the end. The friends that helped me play it, compose for it, or who played Arab and Turkish musics with me, were hugely important: my thanks go to Khyam Allami, Neçati Çelik, Ross Daly, Anna Karayianni, Michel Moushabeck, Elizabeth Nott, Nizar Rohana and Burkard Wehner. Finally, I have been fortunate to have had the entire manuscript read critically by several scholars. I thank in particular Yossi Bartal, Joseph Massad, Martin Stokes, and two anonymous reviewers for Cambridge University Press, each of whom allowed me to improve the text substantially. My gratitude also goes to Victoria Cooper at Cambridge University Press, whose interest and conviction in the project enabled me to bring it to completion. Any errors remaining are my own. *** Parts of Chapter 1 were presented at the Royal Musical Association Dent Medal Study Day, Institute of Musical Research, London, October 2009 (paper title: ‘Revelation in the Holy Land’); and the American Musicological Society Annual Conference, Philadelphia, November 2009 (paper title ‘Revisiting 19th-century Colonialism: Western Musical Interventions in Ottoman Palestine’). Parts of Chapter 3 were presented at Utrecht University, June 2008, in a paper entitled ‘Music – Palestine – Occidentalism’, and at the Humboldt Universität, Berlin, in January 2009 in a paper entitled ‘Music, Mediation, Mission’.

xi

xii

Acknowledgements

Parts of Chapter 5 were presented at a conference held at Merton College, Oxford (Music and Representation), March 2010 (paper title: ‘Twisting the Representation of Western Music’). Parts of this chapter are published in Representation and Western Music, edited by Joshua Walden, Cambridge University Press 2013. Other sections of Chapter 5 are published as ‘Hearing Palestine’ in The Story of Jerusalem, edited by Issam Nassar and Salim Tamari. Northampton, MA: Olive Branch Press, an imprint of Interlink Publishing, 2013. Parts of chapters 6 and 7 were presented at the Society for Ethnomusicology Annual Conference, Mexico City, November 2009 (paper title: ‘Said in Ramallah’) and at the Middle East and Central Asia Music Forum, Institute of Musical Research, London, November 2011 (paper title: ‘Music’s Necessary Complicity’). Parts of Chapter 8 were presented at the Royal Musical Association’s Dent Medal Study Day, Institute of Musical Research, London, September 2011 (paper title: ‘Music and Doing Good’). A version of Chapter 8 was published as ‘Music Teachers as Missionaries: Understanding Europe’s Recent Dispatches to Ramallah’, Ethnomusicology Forum (November 2011). Reprinted by permission of the publisher (Taylor & Francis Ltd, www.tandf.co.uk/journals). *** The extract of poetry at the front of this book is from Mahmoud Darwish’s ‘State of Siege’ from Butterfly’s Burden, translated by Khaled Mattawa. Copyright © 2007 by Mahmoud Darwish. Translation copyright © 2007 by Fady Joudah. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc. on behalf of Copper Canyon Press, www.coppercanyonpress. org. I also acknowledge kind permissions from Actes Sud, and from Mr Riad N. El-Rayyes, for printing the Arabic original of this text. Figures 3–5 are reproduced with kind permission from Jeries Abu El-Etham, Headmaster of the Friends Boys School, Ramallah.

A note on terminology and transliteration

In Part I, which addresses the period between 1840 and 1948, I refer to the majority population of Palestine as ‘Arabs’. In Part II, which begins in 1987, I refer to the same group as ‘Palestinians’. My transliterations of Arabic words conform to the practice of the International Journal of Middle East Studies. I have reproduced several names in the form in which they are most commonly seen in English, however, and on occasion this is a variation on standard transliteration that reflects local pronunciation.

xiii

Abbreviations

APES BNA BSF CMS CZA EKD FBS IPO ISA JEM JPOS NLI PA PACBI PBS PEF SIDA

xiv

American Palestine Exploration Society British National Archive Barenboim-Said Foundation Church Mission Society Central Zionist Archive Evangelische Kirche in Deutschland Friends Boys School Israel Philharmonic Orchestra Israel State Archive Jerusalem and the East Mission Journal of the Palestine Oriental Society National Library of Israel Palestinian Authority Palestinian Campaign for the Academic & Cultural Boycott of Israel Palestine Broadcasting Service Palestine Exploration Fund Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency

u Introduction

I’ve become very, very impatient with the idea and the whole project of identity: the idea, which produced great interest in the United States in the sixties and which is also present in the return to Islam in the Arab world and elsewhere, that people should really focus on themselves and where they come from, their roots … That strikes me as colossally boring and totally off the mark. I think that’s the last thing that we should be thinking about in a way. What’s much more interesting is to try to reach out beyond identity to something else, whatever that is. It may be death. It may be an altered state of consciousness that puts you in touch with others.1 Among these multicultural societies, there are, it is true, all sorts of inequalities and disparities, but each national identity is fundamentally capable of acknowledging and coping with these problems if there are suitable models of coexistence (as opposed to partition) provided by humanists whose mission, I believe, is precisely to provide such models.2

During his brilliant, controversial and sadly curtailed career, cultural theorist and literary critic Edward W. Said had two particular passions, namely Western classical music and Palestine. Playing the piano, attending concerts and writing about music were the main expressions of the first; the second emerged through membership of the Palestine National Council, writing and international lobbying.3 The two seem to have occupied quite discrete spaces for most of Said’s life, but they came together in 1999. That year, within Weimar’s Cultural Capital of Europe programme, he contributed to music workshops involving Jews and Arabs led by conductor Daniel Barenboim. The success of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, the ensemble that grew out of that collaboration, has tended to place its founders under spotlights. As a Palestinian and a Jew working together, they could seem to offer a model for resolving the problems of Israel and the Palestinians. 1 3

2 ‘Edward Said talks to Jacqueline Rose’ in Bové 2000: 25. Said 2004: 49–50. See Said 1991, 2006, 2009 (a collection of many earlier articles); and see – among others – Said 1992, 1995, 2001.

1

2

Introduction

Interested observers might be left with the impression that these extraordinary individuals, their friendship and shared passions, were the forces behind the orchestral project. And such views probably have some truth. Yet there are always broader contexts to consider, whether they involve history, politics or any other matter. The last decades have seen the emergence of a range of attempts to address the conflict of Palestine that use music, along with several Western classical musical initiatives that seek explicitly to involve Palestinians. These are in themselves examples of a much broader contemporary phenomenon in which the arts are brought into sites of political conflict or other strife. My book seeks to explore this phenomenon as it connects with the Palestinians. As my title indicates, one key will be provided by Said’s important and much-discussed legacy in theorising European and US relationships with ‘the Orient’. The intertwining of political imperialism and cultural practices that he observed characterising the nineteenth century has not been banished to the past: rather, it continues to take new forms today, and it offers one context for considering the appropriation of Western classical music for an initiative connected to the Middle East. In broad terms, then, I will be contributing here to research that addresses relationships between Western music and ‘the Orient’, Western music and its musical ‘others’,4 and broader discussions about cultural imperialism in music.5 What I expose should also resonate with general studies of music’s connection with place,6 and add to sociological research already undertaken on the global dissemination of Western classical music.7 My other key theme, mission, is plainly a broad one that intersects in part with imperialism. Postcolonial methods have triggered some deeply critical inquiries, in contrast to the turn of the twentieth century, when histories of mission were largely affirmative. We can now read about missionary encounter in a range of locations, with beautifully nuanced approaches.8 But it is one of the most recent developments in the study of 4

5

6 7 8

See, among others, Born and Hesmondhalgh 2000; Head 2003; Locke 1991, 1993, 1998, 2005; Said 1994. Erlmann 1999; Feld 1994; Guilbault 1993; Lipsitz 1996; Meintjes 1990; Slobin 1993; Stokes 2004; Taylor 1997, 2009. Stokes 1994; Whiteley, Bennett and Hawkins 2005. Curt Kraus 1989; Farhat 1991; Lau 2004; Pasler 2004. Bhabha 2005: chapters 5–9 (all were published earlier as individual essays). Comaroff & Comaroff 1991 was pathbreaking in its historical depth. For more recent work related to Palestine, see Marten 2006; Makdisi 2008; and see Murre-van den Berg 2006, for a collection of relevant essays by diverse authors. Other major studies include several relating specifically to gender, such as Starkey 2008 and Stockdale 2007.

Introduction

mission that has shaped this book even more, namely a trend in constructing historical trajectories that link the nineteenth century with the present day. For example, DeMars has traced the history from ‘single-issue movements’ of the late eighteenth century that were led by dissenting British Protestants towards today’s transnational networks for aid distribution. Similarly, Berman has observed German philanthropy in Africa develop through nineteenth-century missions of (Christian) ‘civilisation’ through to late twentieth-century ‘humanitarian’ interventions.9 My book places music in this frame. What I offer is a discussion about changing relationships between ‘the West’ and the Palestinians since the mid nineteenth century, as mediated through Western classical music. It should demonstrate that the Palestinian case can contribute to discussions about both international aid and the political appropriation of the arts in a range of disciplines.10 My historical chapters in Part I begin in the early nineteenth century, a time when American and European travels to Egypt, India, Palestine and elsewhere were on the increase. I begin by exposing how visitors heard music in the region – thus complementing recent work on European Orientalist writing on music. But I suggest a parallel movement as well, one that scholars have tended to treat separately, namely the spread of music education (and consumption) in Europe. The two movements are undoubtedly connected: they are developments of eighteenth-century European Enlightenment, combined with the growth of industry, travel and a new bourgeoisie. And they converged when music was dispatched worldwide by missionaries and colonisers, as McGuire’s work on the Tonic Sol-Fa movement in Victorian England has demonstrated.11 In Part II I focus on more recent years, probing the consequences of a widespread belief that Western classical music can have beneficence on a global level, discussing initiatives led on the West Bank and in Israel. Such projects, I suggest, share a legacy of nineteenth-century European idealism, and often a conviction that the symphony orchestra can transcend some of the dilemmas of an alarmingly fractured world.12 Said himself said of the

9 10 12

DeMars 2005; see also Berman 2004; Keck and Sikkink 1998. 11 Sommer 2005; Steigerwald 2004; Yúdice 2003. McGuire 2009. Recent examples abound elsewhere, including the Pacific Music Festival, which was established in 1990 by Leonard Bernstein, aspiring to symbolise and enact a utopia of peace, and the ‘World Orchestra for Peace’, founded by Georg Solti in 1995 to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the foundation of the United Nations. As its website proclaimed in 2008, ‘The “P” of PMF [Pacific Music Festival] stands for “Peace”. Bernstein’s passionate wish to contribute to world peace through music is carried on every year through PMF.’ The festival no

3

4

Introduction

West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, ‘strange as it may seem, it is culture generally and music in particular that provide an alternative model for the conflict of identities’.13 What he was expressing was not only an individually cherished view, but one version of an optimism that has swelled, in recent decades, regarding the capacity of the arts to take over where politics have failed. I hope that my historical perspective may provide a fresh contribution to the emerging field of research into music and ‘conflict transformation’, which tends to deal primarily with the present.14 Ultimately the book is about the pressure to join the global march to nationhood and modernity as defined by Western industrialised nations. It is structured through a series of ideas that articulate moments in the history of interactions between Europeans (and to a lesser extent, North Americans) and the Arabs of Palestine. Each chapter relates to a specific period as well as an idea, with some overlapping between them. In the centre of the book, in a chapter entitled ‘Provincialising mission’, I decentre the historical missionary and reflect more closely on the lives of Palestinians. I finish the book with a return to the legacy of Edward Said. Before beginning properly, I offer some theoretical reflections to outline the framework further.

Orientalism Among the many critical responses to Said’s Orientalism, Robert C. Young’s statements stand out today for their incisive summation. The book set an important challenge, Young writes, namely the ‘creation of an object of analysis called “colonial discourse”’.15 By this he refers to the book’s brilliance – it demands very serious reading – but also its flaws. Said’s proposals triggered so many objections, after all. In what ways could alternatives to the colonising discourse be found? How could one deconstruct the monolithic duality of Orient and Occident? What scope was there for less conflicted and more sophisticated theoretical bases for looking at colonial relationships? Young also made the significant point

13

14 15

longer uses this text on its own site, but it can be found at www.polyphonic.org/resource/ pacific-music-festival/ accessed 9 October 2012. Said’s speech on being awarded the Prince of Asturias Award for Concord in Spain in 2002. To hear Said’s delivery, see Smaczny 2005 (DVD, Track 5). See, for instance O’Connell and Castelo-Branco 2010; Urbain 2008. Young 2004: 216.

Introduction

that even while Said claimed ‘the Orient’ was essentially an invention of colonial powers, he did not address the ‘dislocation’ that this inclusive invention embodied. In fact, Young argued: Orientalism did not just misrepresent the Orient, but also articulated an internal dislocation within Western culture, a culture which consistently fantasizes itself as constituting some kind of integral totality, at the same time as endlessly deploring its own impending dissolution.16

Young’s expression elegantly captures the way in which a fantasy of totality is challenged by fear of its lack, and how this leads the fantasy to be reinforced, through construction and containment of the fear. Orientalism, as I conceive it here, is an integral part of Western culture, one that is in a relationship with other parts of Western culture that have been less ambivalently embraced. In order to develop my argument, I will move against the grain of one of Said’s observations, namely that Orientalist writers tended to ‘excise’ themselves from their texts. According to his arguments, the disguises that Western travellers wore in the Middle East, and their deception of the people they met (dressing as Muslims and feigning devotion for instance) allowed them the position of unseen observers. This apparent invisibility, he suggested, facilitated apparently ‘objective’ accounts of what they had seen. Mitchell takes the argument further in his exploration of Egypt’s colonisation, connecting the hidden spectator to modern practices of surveillance and control. Both he and Said focus on cases where they can separate Western observers from the Orient under scrutiny.17 Their approaches tend to generate quite sharp differences between the observer and the observed; they also render the imposition of colonial power rather clinical, and do not consider the fact that disguises and deception often fail. To an extent, Said’s approach was a product of the literature he chose, because he gathered examples primarily from European writers who were not engaged directly in actual colonising and thus did present their own separation. But this selectivity has marked our theoretical grasp of Orientalism. And arguably even the work of Homi K. Bhabha,18 although it sought a more dynamic model for grasping colonial encounter on the ground, made the problem all the more acute. While he identified colonial discourse as ambivalent, and thus allowed for interaction and resistance by local people, it is not clear whether such people were responding to discourses – or were simply resisting physical 16

Young 2004: 180.

17

Mitchell 1991: 27–8.

18

Bhabha 2005.

5

6

Introduction

impositions by colonisers (whether or not they were dressed up). ‘Colonial discourse’ – once considered as a force in the site of the colony – shifted in (and perhaps completely lost) significance. It re-emerged as a product of Western academic thought, floating and disconnected from the place.19 One of my interests here, conversely, is Orientalist texts that inscribe the presence of the author within them (as a sign of ‘the non-Orient’), or compare the Orient with objects or practices that are explicitly of the nonOrient (types of music, for instance). Such texts can be used to expand Young’s point about dislocation very clearly, for they embed the author (or other signs of the non-Orient) within the Orient. They create combinations thereby, even relationships between ‘the West’ and ‘the Orient’. They can be read, I suggest, as signs of what was ‘necessary’ at the time. By this I mean that the posited relationships contained the dislocation within Western self-conceptions, or even enacted its potential resolution (a restored fantasy of totality). Palestine is a particularly rich location in which to focus on this type of writing. Understood as the site of sacred history, it was very much part of the West’s self-construction, even if an ancient religious part. Its visitors, therefore, travelled there in order to find (or recover) a part of themselves; and their writings often make their personal connection explicit. Even when they were involved in colonial acquisition, writers wrote individual testimonies and placed themselves in the texts in order to affirm their deep connection with the land. By addressing the integral place of the author, I find a new perspective on Said’s ‘vacillation’, his somewhat unreconciled observation that writers both glorified and reviled what they considered as ‘the Orient’. Bhabha’s theorisation of ‘ambivalence’ is helpful on a general level, but the Palestinian case must once again be related to the Bible. Visitors to Palestine glorified this text, and hoped indeed to find traces of the biblical history in everything they encountered. When they failed, and when they were confronted by realities that were strange to them, they retreated to revulsion.20 While the pattern is similar to the one triggered by the notion that Egypt could be stripped back to its ancient glory, it was more personal and pervasive. It was also more insistent. It was, after all, accompanied by a vast

19

20

See also Young’s critique of Bhabha’s ambivalence in terms of his use of psychoanalytical concepts without consideration of history or context. Young 2004: 183–8. These tendencies are discussed by scholars such as Issam Nassar (1997, 2003, 2006), who has focused on visual representations of Palestine and Billie Melman (1992), who has explored female missionary ethnographies of Palestine.

Introduction

and manifold influx of missions; and led eventually to the ‘return’ of Jewish people, the apparent reversal of an expulsion described in the Bible. Said’s insight that Orientalist vision was ‘textual’ is important here. His general argument was that Orientalism involved English and French impositions of literary ideas on regions whose current situations were unknown, and that the region was ‘overridden’ thereby. This was certainly the case in Palestine, but the biblical connection and nineteenth-century Protestant thought in particular mean that German sources are crucial. These were not addressed by Said, and have not been discussed by scholars of music subsequently. In my first two chapters, ‘Revelation’ and ‘Distinction’, I thus consider a broader range of Protestant writing on Palestine than has been explored to date, in order to make this neglected religious context clear.21 While my main interest is not to create a history of Palestinian music, this does start to hint at ways in which such a project might be begun. Music historians have been fascinated to explore Jewish settling in the region from the late nineteenth century onwards, but we have no literature that addresses the musical activities of Arab Palestinians prior to 1948.22 The writing of Protestant visitors can offer us some starting points. The religious context is also crucial for grasping the nature of the modern thought introduced to Palestine by settlers from the West. To understand this, it is worth considering theories of nation that have challenged the modernist stronghold established by writers such as Benedict Anderson,23 Ernest Gellner,24 Eric Hobsbawm25 and Terence Ranger.26 Whereas the latter group identifies national sentiment as a recent phenomenon, writers such as Adrian Hastings and John Gillingham, benefiting from expertise in the Middle Ages, argue for much deeper roots. Their main sources are English attitudes to the Bible, a book that provided a model of a cohesive group of people surrounded by ‘others’. Hastings described attitudes in the eleventh century as follows: ‘England is seen in 21

22

23 26

Bloechl 2008 is an extremely valuable study of an earlier period of Protestant activity in musical contexts. For work on French Orientalism related to music see Pasler 2004, 2006; for research in English travel writing see Zon 2007. For a polemic response to Said that attempts to rescue Orientalist art and music from the charge of imperialism, see MacKenzie 1995. The work of scholars such as Al-Taee (2010); Head (2003); Locke (1991, 1993, 1998, 2005) and Pasler presents a more productive set of critiques, building beyond earlier approaches with a range of nuances and refinements. For the main Jewish studies, see Hirshberg 1995 and von der Lühe 1998, 1999. Bohlman 1992 is of a yet more specific nature. 24 25 Anderson 1983. Gellner 1983. Hobsbawm 1992. Hobsbawm and Ranger 1993.

7

8

Introduction

biblical terms, a nation to be defended as the Israel of the Old Testament was defended’.27 He also observes that Protestants’ later energies in translating the Bible and production of the Book of Common Prayer were crucial to the shaping of modern national consciousness in England.28 The English came increasingly to identify themselves with the ancient Israelites, battling against others (usually Catholics), in their search for freedom. On one level this further expands my argument that ‘Palestine’ – as the site of the biblical history – must be understood as part of the West. Although the Crusades came to an end, the imaginings did not, and they were boosted by textual production. But it may also shed light on developments towards the modern state of Israel. Hastings has considered the function of the Bible in this context as well, where it emerges as a multipaned mirror, available for all national constructions: The Bible, moreover, presented in Israel itself a developed model of what it means to be a nation – a unity of people, language, religion, territory, and government. Perhaps it was an almost terrifyingly monolithic ideal, productive ever after of all sorts of dangerous fantasies, but it was there, an all too obvious exemplar for Bible readers of what every other nation too might be, a mirror for national selfimagining.29

At base, Hastings is observing the formation of a social and political structure (the nation) that is ostensibly secular, but that derives its authority from Christianity. In doing so, he raises a central question of postcolonial research, namely how to articulate aspects of a society that do not conform to the apparently universal march towards national, secular modernity. In my Chapter 2 I start to engage with this matter, joining other writers in assessing how the music of an emergent nation’s ‘others’ – in this case that of the Arab Palestinians – is audible (or inaudible) alongside the emergent nation (Israel).30 How, I ask, did the modern tools of distinction – reason, science, mechanisation – combine with the religious conception of the land of Palestine? And how was the music of the majority population – all too easily categorisable as the biblical Philistines, as McDonagh has shown – heard in the new situation?31 Recent postcolonial work has moved away from Said’s focus on representation towards the mechanisms of imperial management. Timothy 27 29 30

31

28 Hastings 1997: 42. See also Gillingham 1992. Hastings 1997: 58. Hastings 1997: 18. Bohlman’s work on Jews and Roma in Europe is particularly important in the field. See Bohlman 2007. McDonagh 2004.

Introduction

Mitchell and Ranajit Guha, to take just two distinct examples, attempt to explicate the introduction of political and social modernity in Egypt and India respectively, and their contributions are important backcloths for my Chapter 3, ‘Education’ and Chapter 4, ‘Separation’. In these chapters I shift my balance between ‘the Orient’ and ‘the non-Orient’, to trace ways in which Western imported music was involved in attempts to transform the population of Palestine. My discussion of educational practice involves some specific confessional relationships: many Protestant educators had sought initially to teach (and indeed convert) Jews, while some considered their work as a crusade against Islam. But on another level, I am engaged with the very broad project of ‘people production’ that was a component of modernity at large. I ask what the musical tools of control were that were introduced to Palestinians. How did these conform to the broader project of modernisation? And how did they coexist with the notion that Palestine was the site of the most ancient heart of the Christian West? These questions are also important to my study of the Palestine Broadcasting Service (PBS) (1936–47) in Chapter 4. This British organisation divided air time into Arabic, English and Hebrew hours, and offers a parallel to the case of British identity-creation in India. Chakrabarty’s observation on this parallel space is apt; ‘[j]ust as the British sought to give India a standardized legal system, they also attempted to fix and officialize collective identities (such as caste and religion) in the very process of creating a quasi-modern public sphere in India’.32 The PBS fixed the divisions in the public sphere, and used ‘culture’ (not only language, but also music) to inscribe and reiterate the boundaries. I hope my discussion provides a model of how music can be seen to shape relationships between various notions of ‘the Orient’ and ‘non-Orient’ – not only in terms of tradition or composition (as other scholars have discussed),33 but also in mechanisms of control. At the beginning of this section, I referred to the problem of Orientalism’s apparent monolithism, its apparent lack of alternative to a colonising discourse. One consequence of this, critics argued, was the repeated erasure of experiences falling outside the remit of Western constructions: the problem was that of the speech of the Subaltern. Poststructural theory has seemed to offer some alternatives – seen in the work of Bhabha, Derrida and Spivak most notably – but deconstructive approaches do not serve every cause. I have been concerned in this book to construct some 32 33

Chakrabarty 2002: 83. For a relevant discussion of the complex repertories of Syrian Jews, see Shelemay 1998.

9

10

Introduction

kind of history, because – as will become clearer below – it seemed to me crucial to take recent historical research into account before engaging with Palestine, and also to hint at least at ways in which histories of Palestinian music might yet be written. Yet the very act of constructing history – as Chakrabarty has argued so incisively – is inseparable from the secular modern notions of nation, and thus forecloses a great deal. Perhaps the best one can do, then, is ‘provincialise’ the project by decentring it. Thus in my epilogue to Part I, ‘Provincialising mission’, I try to recontextualise relationships between ‘the Orient’ and ‘the nonOrient’ by drawing on sources from Palestinians who interacted with colonisers. These do not offer anything as coherent as a counter-narrative, but they may, in combination, reveal a set of alternatives and points of friction. Chakrabarty argues that subaltern histories should make the ‘unworking’ of history visible; I hope that by the end of that chapter, I have made the ‘unworking’ at least partially audible.34

Mission and the instrumentalisation of culture Edward Said’s involvement in, and celebration of, the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra imply a theoretical twist in his thinking on which several writers have remarked.35 He wrote within an intellectual tradition shaped most obviously by Theodor W. Adorno, and he was committed to reading music’s content as a source for certain broader social relations while preserving it as a realm of relative autonomy. Music was at once above material existence, and yet also a mirror of the same. While he never renounced this position, with the West-Eastern Divan he simultaneously attempted to use music’s mirror in reverse and elevate earth into music. The quotation with which I opened this chapter evokes the broader political picture: there he argued for an attempt ‘to try to reach out beyond identity to something else’ which might be, he said, ‘an altered state of consciousness that puts you in touch with others’. Etherington has characterised the effect as an ‘instrumentalization of musical ethics’.36 One context for Said’s new interest may be the rise of a phenomenon often referred to as ‘the instrumentalization of culture’. As theorised by sociologist George Yúdice, this is a product of a new configuration of the 34 35 36

Chakrabarty 2008: 96. See Beckles Willson 2009b; Etherington 2007a, 2007b; Tregrear 2007. Etherington 2007a.

Introduction

relationship between thought and world. Building on Foucault, Yúdice proposes that the former’s epistemes of resemblance, representation and historicity have been followed by ‘performativity’, which ‘draws on the previous epistemes … yet recombines them in a way that accounts for the constitutive force of signs’. Yúdice’s ‘performativity’ refers to the agency of symbols and symbolic processes as they move across the globe, the ‘processes by which identities and the entities of social reality are constituted by repeated approximations of model (i.e. the normative) as well as by those “remainders” (“constitutive exclusions”) that fall short’.37 Cultural practices and products are mediators in this scheme, bearing ideas and symbols that are adopted and adapted for diverse meaning-creating purposes. That the performative phenomenon is so apparent today, he argues, is in part a product of the intensified global reach of leading powers, and the interdependency of politics, economics and cultural expression. He also claims it is a function of the post-cold war era, in which the USA has no longer any need to assert art’s autonomy to counter Soviet utilitarianism. The result is that ‘it is nearly impossible to find public statements that do not recruit instrumentalized art and culture, whether to better social conditions, as in the creation of multicultural tolerance and civic partnership through UNESCO-like advocacy for cultural citizenship and cultural rights, or to spur economic growth through urban cultural development projects and the concomitant proliferation of museums for cultural tourism’.38 The dance festival in the favela, the drama project in the refugee camp and the choir in the housing estate are all part of this new instrumentalisation of culture and performativity. Thus, moving beyond earlier theorisations by Gramcsi and Williams, Yúdice conceives culture as a ‘resource’. This framework is one context for Part II of my book, in which I engage with the period since the mid-1990s. Thus in Chapter 6, ‘Culture’, I look at ways in which Palestinians have been recipients of financial aid for a range of musical activities; and in Chapter 7, ‘Dialogue’, I look specifically at ways in which music is projected as a mechanism for intercultural communication. However, the material I uncover is somewhat distinct from that explored by Yúdice: it is closer to Said’s hopes of ‘an altered state of consciousness’. Yúdice’s theory allows no space for such a hope. He comes to the conclusion that culture’s transcendence has in recent years been too

37

Yúdice 2003: 31.

38

Yúdice 2003: 10–11.

11

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Introduction

profoundly challenged to survive, and submits that ‘the idea that the experience of jouissance, the unconcealment of truth, or deconstructive critique might be admissible criteria for investment in culture comes off as a conceit perhaps worthy of a Kafkaesque performance skit’.39 We need to look beyond this framework, then, for further reference points. As my title indicates, and as has already emerged in part above, the main additional framework I have chosen is mission. The reason for this overflows the rationales discussed above related to Orientalism. Whereas Yúdice’s discussion of culture suggests a new episteme, the dissemination of Western classical music in the post-cold war period indicates continuities. Many of the claims that facilitate it are old ones that have survived despite enormous social and technological change. Their survival is, I suggest, bound up with the religious associations that adhere to Western classical music. An entry point to this matter is offered by William D. Hart’s response to Said’s commentaries on religion and music. Hart argues that Said constructs his method (‘secular criticism’) as a conscious resistance to two temptations, namely the culture into which one is born, and the systems and methods one adopts consciously later on. Said viewed these two temptations as leading to ‘religious criticism’, something which orders and canonises, while closing off inquiry. Indeed religion itself was ‘an immoral and demoniac force’ for Said, because it provides ‘moments of collective effervescence, divine madness’.40 Hart also observes, however, that Said’s writings on Western classical music appropriated ‘religious and theological languages of autonomy’. While denouncing the cultural effects of religion as disastrous, Said suspended Western classical music artfully between ‘autonomy from social relations and the simple reflection of them’, and proposed that it can be grasped as an elaboration of civil society. Hart finds that Said’s understanding of Western classical music echoes experiences of religion described by writers such as Friedrich Schleiermacher, William James and Alfred North Whitehead and comments in response: ‘Perhaps it is a displacement of these notions? How ironic if it is.’41

39 40

41

Yúdice 2003: 16. Hart 2000: 10. Hart bases his discussion at this point on Said’s The World, the Text, the Critic (1983), but elsewhere refers to other texts, in particular his exchanges with Michael Walzer about interpreting the biblical story of Exodus. There, as Hart points out, Said polarises ‘monotheistic politics’ with ‘secular and decent politics’. See Hart 2000: 4. Hart 2000: 37–8.

Introduction

In fact this ‘displacement’ of religion (into music) is not an individual phenomenon, but a historically well-established one. Early nineteenthcentury German philosophers linked aesthetics with theology, and their regard for music’s divine edificatory qualities (and its ability to stand for the ‘unsayable’) was sustained by composers and writers well into the twentieth century.42 It may be ironic that the same tendency was exemplified by the work of one of the most important cultural critics of the late twentieth century. But Said was by no means alone in preserving it. As the research I present in chapters 6, 7 and 8 will suggest, there are many musicians trained within Western classical traditions who sustain related sentiments. It is, then, an ongoing practice and discourse that must be placed in conjunction with theories of the globalisation of culture put forward by Yúdice and others. What can help articulate the combination is a broader theoretical vision, one that takes into account the power of mediated culture today. For this, Baudrillard’s Simulacra et Simulation of 198143 is a useful starting point, as it provides a theory of changes in ‘the order of signs’ over a long historical period. After the modern age of mass production, commodification and confused categories of ‘original’ and ‘copy’, in our current time of ‘postmodernity’, Baudrillard identified a complete breakdown between representation and reality. Signs relate only to one another, representations do not copy, but actually precede, reality, and claims to connections between reality and representation are merely functions of the sign world itself.44 In the context of ‘expedient’ culture, perhaps the most important point to note is that Baudrillard identifies representations as models, or replications of models – as opposed to images of reality. The potential for cultural forms to enact forms of utopia is great, then; and Western classical music – long conceived as a mediation of a better place – was probably somewhat predisposed to contribute.45 In 1991, Fredric Jameson reflected on this ‘society of the image or the simulacrum and a transformation of the “real” into so many pseudoevents’, and placed it in the context of the relationship between the arts

42 43 44

45

For commentary see, for instance, Bowie 2001: 613–19 and Fletcher 2001: 465–72. For English publication see Baudrillard 1994. Baudrillard developed his theory of simulation over a decade, starting with ‘Requiem for the Media’ of 1972 (English translation published in Baudrillard 1981) and culminating, arguably, in Simulations (Baudrillard 1983a). For an account of historical shifts in the order of signs, see ‘The Orders of Simulacra’, in Baudrillard 1983b: 83. For readings of specific popular repertories through Baudrillard, see Tata 2004 and Bloechl 2005a.

13

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Introduction

and capital.46 On the one hand, he argued that there had been ‘an explosion: a prodigious expansion of culture throughout the social realm, to the point at which everything in our social life – from economic value and state power to practices and to the very structure of the psyche itself – can be said to have become “cultural” in some original and yet untheorised sense’.47 On the other, he argued that the semi-autonomy of the arts had collapsed into an apparent utilitarianism. The consequence was that whereas previous notions of semi-autonomy allowed cultural forms potential for criticism of politics and society (as Jameson expressed it, the ‘possibility of the positioning of the cultural act outside the massive Being of capital’), this distance had collapsed. Manifold forms of cultural resistance today, Jameson argued, ‘are all somehow secretly disarmed and reabsorbed by a system of which they themselves might well be considered a part, since they can achieve no distance from it’.48 Jameson is far from alone in his observation about capitalism’s disempowerment of culture. One of many other commentators, Slavoj Žižek, suggests that recognition of the problem has gone so far as to become accepted, and indeed a cog within social ideology. Whereas Marx argued that ideology was an invisible force within which societies functioned –‘they do not know it, but they are doing it’ – the current situation can be grasped with the notion that ‘they know it, but they are doing it anyway’. As Žižek elaborates, ‘one knows the falsehood very well, one is well aware of a particular interest hidden behind an ideological universality, but still one does not renounce it’.49 The force of Jameson’s insights, however, is that they move beyond ideology, identifying that the situation is a ‘genuine historical (and socioeconomic) reality as a third great original expansion of capitalism around the globe’.50 His periodisation is a persuasive one, and his diagnosis of the current phenomenon as an intensification of globalisation – another wave – allows us a deeper historical apprehension of our position. This depth must return us to question Yúdice’s post-cold war watershed, however. It seems to me that there is a case for thinking carefully about precedents for culture’s apparently new ‘expediency’, its function as a ‘resource’ in the most intensely global age. Tony Bennett has pointed out that there was a transformation at the end of the eighteenth century which saw a significant cultural shift in practices of government. It is worth quoting Bennett at some length, because the period saw, he says, the emergence of new fields of social management in which culture is figured forth as both the object and the instrument of government; its object or target insofar as 46 49

Jameson 1991: 48. Žižek 2008: 24–6.

47 50

Jameson 1991: 48. Jameson 1991: 49.

48

Jameson 1991: 49.

Introduction

the term refers to the morals, manners and ways of life of subordinate social strata; its instrument insofar as it is culture in its more restricted sense – the domain of artistic and intellectual activities – that is to provide the means of a governmental intervention in and regulation of culture as the domain of morals, manners, codes of conduct etc.51

If we take Jameson seriously, and if Bennett is right, then what may be needed is recognition of recent changes, but less neglect of history.52 The periodisation in Palestine’s receipt of European missions offers a parallel of a kind to Yúdice’s periodisation, and this book inevitably articulates that. Yet one of the arguments I present, through my use of the idea of mission throughout the book, is that we should look carefully for a deeper past. My account here carries of course a risk that those looking for detailed accounts of the place of newly imported music in Palestine will be disappointed. Recent research into music’s connection with political strife and conflict has tended to be ethnographic, based on the present and sometimes with an explicitly affirmative or engaged approach.53 I hope what I offer can provide something of a counterweight to such work, however, and an intervention that gives such strivings, and our current dilemmas overall, a rather longer – and perhaps somewhat troubling – history.

Shifting perspectives on Palestine To talk about Palestine today is not a straightforward thing. The word itself, after all, is loaded with a conflict beyond which it seems impossible to think, and beyond which it is perhaps crucial not to look too far until a resolution is found. Yet the current situation is only one of a number that can be traced through the period I address in this book, because ‘Palestine’ has appeared to Europeans and North Americans on a number of different horizons. I suggest there have been four main phases, and introduce these here as a way of introducing my own framework, and in order to expose the context offered by music scholarship to date.54 51 52

53 54

Bennett 1992: 26. Jameson’s periodisation has also been criticised, implying as it does that nineteenth-century economies were purer, less ‘cultural’ and commodified. See, for a discussion and further references, Featherstone 2000: 189ff. For two recent edited collections see O’Connell and Castelo-Branco 2010; Urbain 2008. The convention of using the word Palestine to refer to this region is generally taken to date from ancient Greece, when a Greek translation of the Hebrew word Peleshet was used by Herodotus in the mid fifth century BC. See Jacobson 1999 for a discussion of the matter.

15

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Introduction

Stage 1: A sacred province of a declining empire When Western rulers began taking an interest in Palestine during the nineteenth century they were rekindling a connection that had been dormant for a long time. The change can be understood in the context of European military advances on the region – in particular on Egypt – and the notion of opportunity that was enhanced by ideas of an Ottoman decline.55 In 1831, Palestine came into focus rather sharply when Egypt’s Muhammad Ali occupied neighbouring Syria. The Egyptian regime was relatively open to Western venture, and it facilitated in an increase in European and American visits and investments. Subsequently, when the Ottomans strove to regain the territory, Prussia, Austria and (most effectively of all) England joined the Russians to help drive the Egyptians out (and ensure that Russia was not the sole power to whom the Ottomans had a debt). In consequence, the Ottomans then opened the doors further to European interpolation. By 1838, Jerusalem had come to house a British consulate, one of the earliest imprints of a massive spread within the region. On the other hand, the renewed Western interest must also be seen as a consequence of a much less-discussed paradigm shift in conceptions of the Bible and the so-called Holy Land. In this field an earlier starting point can be found, when in the mid eighteenth century, German Orientalist Johann David Michaelis proposed that the Bible should be explicated through research into the geography, botany and zoology of Palestine, along with the customs and language of the current inhabitants. Thanks to his fundraising efforts, six scholars set out on a journey to the Orient in 1761 that was financed by the King of Denmark. Only Carsten Niebuhr lived to tell the tale on his return in 1768, but his findings were sufficient to suggest that the prevailing topographical understanding of the region was sorely in need of adjustment.56 His reports revealed the region, troublingly, as ‘quite alien, remote, and primitive’. What ‘might make it relevant, much less

55

56

The administrative divisions of the Ottoman Empire did not refer to Palestine as a unit, but rather to provinces of Acre, Nablus and Jerusalem. In the thinking of Europeans, however, the Palestinian region had an identity as a whole – even while some of its borders would be hard to pin down. In Gustaf Dalman’s Palästinischer Diwan (1901), which I discuss in Chapter 1, it includes Aleppo, Beirut and Damascus. This moment has been heralded as the ‘dawn’ of the modern Middle East by writers working within the paradigm of stagist history. For a sensitive discussion of this periodisation of the Middle East’s ‘modernity’, see Beinin 2001: 9–12. Marchand discusses the background to Niebuhr’s trip, but a more detailed account is provided by Goren 2003: 30–7.

Introduction

normative, was hard to fathom’.57 The proliferating interventions of the ensuing decades can be grasped as attempts to rectify the situation. The same concern for the Bible can be traced through developments within Europe that were to be crucial to the settlement of Palestine, namely the expansion of missions to Jews. England saw the founding of the Baptist Missionary Society (1792), the London Missionary Society (1795), the Church Missionary Society (1799), the British and Foreign Society (1804) and the London Society for Promoting Christianity among the Jews (1809).58 In Germany and Switzerland, institutions to emerge included the Preussische Hauptbibelgesellschaft (1814), the Basler Missionsgesellschaft (1815), the Gesellschaft zur Beförderung der Evangelischen Mission unter den Heiden (1824), and the Gesellschaft zur Beförderung des Christentums unter den Juden (1822).59 Some of these organisations focused on Jewish conversion, but many were imbued with millenarian ideas, and discussed ‘restoring’ Jews to Palestine. Basing their claims on interpretations of the biblical books of Isaiah (59:20), Jeremiah (31:33), Romans (9–11) and Revelation (20–1) many Anglicans claimed that Jews should be gathered together, brought to the Holy Land, and converted.60 When Palestine’s short-lived Egyptian regime opened the doors to European investment, missionaries were able to take up residence there in order to further their objectives. The London Jewish Society had already arrived in 1831, for instance, and the (Swiss) Pilgermissionsgesellschaft would settle in 1833. By the end of the nineteenth century there was a range of settlements and further proposals for settlement projects, some commercial, some philanthropic or protective (in reaction to persecution of Jews) and some anti-Semitic. Many of the efforts were reinforced in 1841 by a new bishopric in Jerusalem supported by Queen Victoria and Frederick William IV of Prussia. My first horizon, then, was defined by Christian – mainly Protestant – thought, coupled with religious and imperial colonisation. It is not one that has been addressed by music scholars at all; in fact music of the region at this time is completely neglected. The nearest we can get is the information about contemporary Arab practices available in Racy’s work on urban 57

58 60

Marchand 2009: 40. When John Lewis Burckhardt’s Travels in Syria and the Holy Land appeared in 1822, it was received in Germany as ‘welcome light’ on ‘dark regions of Biblical geography’. Cited in Kirchhoff 2005: 124. 59 Tibawi 1961: 5. Foerster 1997: 185. Löffler 2008: 56. For a fuller discussion see Vreté 1972. While the idea of moving the Jews was common to England and parts of the German Confederation, the Second Coming was discussed most in England and North America. Kirchhoff 2005: 90–2.

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Introduction

music in the Mashriq, and Feldman’s work on Ottoman court, tavern, coffee-house and Sufi repertories and practices.61 Research on Egypt – the development of which impacted on Palestine – forms another potential backdrop. El-Shawan’s studies of modern transformations brought to Cairo, and Racy’s research on the development of the recording industry, combine to offer sources on the development of musical genres and the rise of the media there from the turn of the twentieth century onwards.62 Yet the mix of ethnicities that Ottoman Palestine encompassed suggests that more localised work is necessary before many over-arching comparisons can be made with these sources.

Stage 2: A site for Jewish settlement Palestine’s majority population under the Ottomans was Arab Muslim, and even in 1914, following the mass immigration that had commenced in the early 1880s, the proportion of Jews was only 7.5 per cent.63 Nevertheless, when the British took over Palestine, Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour’s statement of 1917 became the basis for the region’s organisation in the following way: ‘His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object.’ The majority population, on the other hand, emerged in his declaration as ‘non-Jewish’, and was to be somehow allowed to retain its rights despite a new state (predominantly of immigrants) in its midst,64 ‘it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine’.65 61 63

64

65

62 Feldman 1996, 2002a, 2002b; Racy 2002. El-Shawan 1980a, 1985; Racy 1976. An estimated 10,000 Jews lived there prior to the first wave of Russian arrivals (1882–1903) and after the second wave of immigration (1905–14), the community had increased to an estimated 60,000. They lived within a population of 798,389 people (657,377 Muslim, Druze, Shia, with estimated nomadic figures, plus 81,012 Christian). These figures include estimates for many who were not registered as citizens. McCarthy 1990: 13, 22. McCarthy’s study of Ottoman statistics for three years prior to the Declaration (1990) concludes that the Jewish population was 7.4 per cent. Six years later, and three years after the Declaration was published, the figure had risen to 9 per cent, according to the League of Nations’ Interim Report on the Civil Administration of Palestine. Shlaim 2009: 7ff. The closing clause, ‘or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country’, extended Britain’s putative beneficence globally. The statement is frequently constructed as a response to Zionist pressure, and as part of Britain’s (somewhat miscalculated) strategy for gaining the support of Russia and America. For more on British desire to court Jews in Russia and America, see Pappé 2004: 67–9. For a more detailed discussion of the matter see Shlaim 2009: 3–24. For a discussion of Balfour’s own transformation see Segev 2001: 40–1.

Introduction

The effect was not only to crystallise a dichotomy between Jew and non-Jew on an ideational level, for when British rule in Palestine was formalised by the League of Nations in 1922 it became legally official.66 We do well to note that a parallel development inside Europe would lead the Nazi regime to make a distinction between Jew and non-Jew as well. There the polarisation was ‘Jew’ against ‘Aryan’, whereas in Palestine the British set ‘Jew’ against ‘Arab’. Music scholars addressing Palestine in this period have tended to focus on the Jews. The classic study by Hirshberg, for instance, plots the institutionalisation of Western classical music in the region through the work of immigrants from the late nineteenth century onwards.67 In von der Lühe’s studies of the Mandate period, the Jewish focus is also predominant, because her main context, despite her mapping of settlement of the Palestinian region, is European persecution of Jews.68 Bohlman’s study of a single Jewish institution in Palestine – the World Centre for Jewish Music in Palestine (1936–40) – is of a yet more specific nature.69 Local Arabs and their musical practices are peripheral to these histories, functioning as sources of inspiration for Jewish composers’ European-style Orientalist compositions, as hostile figures of protest or, very occasionally, as potential pupils in Jewish educational ventures.70 There are correlates to these studies in the broader field of research on Palestine: Hirshberg conforms to historical studies of the ‘modernisation’ of the region, for instance, whereas Bohlman’s and von der Lühe’s contributions belong to postHolocaust displacement studies. These frameworks have largely precluded engagement with the Arab population.

Stage 3: The state of Israel The ensuing phase in research was dominated by the consequences of the 1948–9 war in Palestine. Whereas in 1946 the population was approximately 67 per cent Arab, 31 per cent Jewish and 2 per cent ‘Other’, the 66

67 70

By that date wartime mortalities had been compensated and the population had grown, particularly in Jewish groups that now represented 11.3 per cent of a total 823,684. McCarthy 1990: 30. 68 69 Hirshberg 1995. von der Lühe 1998, 1999. Bohlman 1992. Hirshberg does address Jews from Arabic-speaking lands in his book, in the instances in which they find a place within the Jewish institutions. He addresses the case of the Iraqi–Jewish ‘ūd player Ezra Aharon, for instance, who relocated from Baghdad to Jerusalem in 1934. A more detailed study of Aharon is available in an article (in Hebrew) by Amnon Shiloah (2003), which focuses on the way that the Iraqi was absorbed into the Jewish community of Jerusalem. Shiloah’s work (including his studies of Arab music more broadly) is exemplary of a position that seeks cultural affinity between Jews and Arabs.

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Introduction

boundaries were shortly to be redrawn radically. In a moment of horrific violence ‘Palestine’ was obliterated, and a new state was placed within it, creating a colossal Arab refugee population in surrounding areas.71 In 1948, there were 1,358,000 Palestinian Arab citizens living in Palestine, of whom approximately 873,600 lived in the region that would become Israel.72 When the Israeli state was formed, however, it included only 155,000 non-Jewish Arabs, meaning that 718,000 died or became refugees in Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria.73 The establishment of the state of Israel, defined as a ‘Jewish state’ even while a sizeable percentage of its population were non-Jewish Arabs (at the time of writing this, it is over 20 per cent), marked the moment in which people identifying as Jewish shifted from being recipients of state and religious violence (and missions), to national players, having new relations with internal and external ‘others’. The impact on the Palestinian Arabs, and their sense of being Palestinian, was a physical and psychological splintering, combined in many cases with an attempt to counteract the situation by establishing a new unified identity. The event is known as the Nakba, or the ‘catastrophe’, and it is the hinge of this book. Khalidi identifies it as an effective tabula rasa for Palestinian identity.74 But it was a complex leveller, through which the key shared experiences were loss of homes, villages, towns and lands, the complete blockade on return, the ongoing lack of statehood and, in many thousands of cases, no legal citizenship of any kind. During the first decades of Israel’s existence, Western interest in the Palestinian population was almost completely displaced by recovery projects following the Second World War and the not unrelated concern for Israel. Music scholarship undertaken in and/or reflecting on this period comes in line with this situation, maintaining its primary focus on Jewish musical practices in the region. One framework, however, also allowed space for considering the Palestinian Arabs within Israel, and was developed by a number of Jewish writers there. Within this Palestinians emerge as classic ethnographic ‘others’, understood in terms of their rural ‘traditions’.75 71

72 73

74 75

McCarthy 1990: 36. McCarthy also provides figures for demographics based on religious identity, with the proportions of 60 per cent Muslim, 31 per cent Jewish, 8 per cent Christian and 1 per cent Other. See McCarthy 1990: 37. McCarthy 2002: 306. McCarthy 2002: 306. McCarthy notes that ‘this number depends on the somewhat imprecise estimation of the numbers who lived on both sides of the border before the war, and so should be taken as a mean estimate. However, statistically it cannot be wrong by more than 5 to 10 percent.’ Khalidi 1997: 193–5. For instance, Bar-Yosef 1998; Cohen and Katz 2006; Shiloah 1974.

Introduction

A further historical moment is crucial to note. Following the Six Day War of 1967, Israel became an occupying power, controlling and settling on lands that had for nearly twenty years been part of Syria, Jordan and Egypt. This triggered further Palestinian migration from both Gaza and the West Bank region that had been controlled by Jordan (the latter lost an estimated 161,000 people, 20 per cent of the Palestinian population there).76 Whereas the new state’s borders had been ratified by Western powers in 1949, these territories taken in war have never been recognised internationally as part of Israel. Nevertheless, Israel has not been obliged to renounce them, and has developed a military capacity outstripping any nation in the region. 1964, however, saw the establishment of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, which had the support of the Arab League. The PLO was a political and paramilitary group that campaigned for a correction to the Nakba through the restoration of Palestine within the borders of the land ruled by the British Mandate. The emergence of the PLO and the fall-out from the war of 1967 had significant effects on scholarship related to Palestine. The ensuing years saw the rise of a new ‘radical’ scholarly agenda in the USA which attempted to redefine the terms of discussion. Researchers drew on new archival evidence and made analogies between US involvement in Vietnam, and its support for Israel.77 A further shift in scholarship occurred following Israel’s declassification of a number of government papers in the late 1970s. Israeli writers described collectively as ‘the New Historians’ challenged the prevailing histories of Israel and forced a new look at the impact of Jewish settlement on the region, and in particular the events of 1948–9 that led to the refugee problem.78 It would nevertheless be some time before such work impacted on music studies, in which there was little or no emergence of interest in Palestinians until the 1990s. The same is true in the broader sphere of international relations, which is why this book falls into two discrete sections with a gap of several decades in between.

Stage 4: Palestine as a proto-state In 1993, the then leader of the PLO, Yasser Arafat, was allowed to return to the region that he had left in 1949. One trigger for the changes allowing that return was the first Intifada of 1987, the popular Palestinian uprising 76 77 78

McCarthy 2002: 309. These figures, he notes, are approximate guides only. Stein and Swedenburg 2005: 2–4. The leading voices are Benny Morris, Ilan Pappé and Avi Shlaim. For a summary see Shapira 1995.

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Introduction

on the West Bank. This energised the national movement in Palestine itself, and recentred Palestinian politics in Palestine rather than in the Diaspora. But further international agendas had played into the mix by this stage. The close of the cold war in 1989 had led the USA to transfer its primary concerns away from the former Soviet Union and towards the Middle East, with Palestine in receipt of intense scrutiny. Thus, while US military forces drove invading Iraqis out of Kuwait (ending the Gulf wars), Secretary of State James Baker undertook shuttle diplomacy between Israeli and Arab leaders. The consequent face-to-face conference hosted in Madrid in the autumn of 1991 made minimal progress, but the subsequent meetings hosted by Norway resulted, in 1993, in a set of agreements known as the Oslo Accords, and the following year saw the founding of the Palestine National Authority (PA). This administrative organisation of governance for Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza Strip was intended by many to be a five-year interim authority that would negotiate with Israel regarding territories and responsibilities in the region. The new negotiations and the PA transformed the region in the eyes of international powers, because Palestine could now be recognised as a protostate. Palestinians were to become ‘citizens’ under a governing authority with which international bodies – governmental and non-governmental – could legally cooperate. One consequence was a huge influx of foreign investment in the West Bank, intended to build the infrastructure and civil structures to support a new nation. Additionally, there was an openly critical stance towards Israel’s occupying presence on the ground. This new situation has led, for the first time, to the emergence of a body of literature about the music of the Palestinians, within which two main frameworks can be identified. The first emphasises Palestinian protest and self-determination. Such research is not limited to the music of those living within the region, but looks more broadly to the refugees and the international community of Palestinians elsewhere.79 Key concepts are ‘resistance’ and the performance of a Palestinian ‘nation’, and Israel is little discussed, but configured as an oppressor. The second framework constructs Palestinians in a binary interaction with Jewish Israelis. Some writers explore interaction very affirmatively,80 whereas others 79

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For instance, Ladkani 2001; Massad 2003; McDonald 2006a, 2006b ; Oliver and Steinberg 2002. Palestinians inside the region have themselves contributed to this literature too, for instance Elias-Khoury 2004. An edited volume (Kanaaneh, Thorsén, Bursheh and Donald in press) is a continuation of this endeavour. For instance, Al-Taee 2002 and Brinner 2009, which looks at the way that certain Arab musicians joined the Israeli World Music scene briefly in the mid 1990s.

Introduction

imply or thematise a more hostile interface and a struggle for Palestinians living within Israel.81 In short, then, the prevailing paradigm for writing about Palestine is dominated by the current political configuration, namely a dichotomy between Palestinians and Israelis and the question of statehood.

Methods Politics and history That I take a different approach to the subject may be in part a product of the changing political landscape. Nearly two decades have passed since the Oslo Accords of 1993, and the possibility of a Palestinian state seems to many to be further away than it has ever been. Nevertheless, there were more specific triggers during the research process as well. One of those was interviews with Palestinian musicians active in the cultivation of Western classical music, whose personal genealogies were connected to Protestant mission. Another was an encounter with hitherto neglected Germanlanguage sources, a direct product of my time spent in Berlin supported by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. In combination, these discoveries led me to want a very different framework, one indeed that challenged the current paradigm of dichotomy. They led me to sideline two areas of contemporary debate, the first of which is Zionism. The reason for this is simple: my interest is in Arab communities, the main ‘others’ in the project of nation-building that Zionism constituted. Additionally, the history I construct – which begins prior to nineteenthcentury Zionism – leads Zionism to emerge as a form of settler colonialism, much in line with recent arguments by scholars such as Gershon Shafir and Gabriel Piterberg.82 Furthermore, settler colonialism is distinct from other forms of colonialism, because it does not attempt to enslave ‘natives’ or transform them through mission (Jews were largely uninterested in nonJews); it seals such ‘others’ off from its intentionally self-sufficient territory and spreads itself territorially. Thus the ‘others’ in whom I am interested did not tend to receive missions – the subject of my study – from Zionists. Second, I do not take up the Palestinian nationalist cause. This did suggest itself to me repeatedly as I undertook research, because a situation 81 82

Kaschl 2003; Radwan 1997; Regev 1995. Piterberg 2008: 51–93, in particular.

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Introduction

in which people live in immense strife between and around nations but who have no national institution themselves, is an anomaly that needs urgent resolution. The need for Palestinians to have a government, citizenship and control over (the borders of) their land is indisputable. Yet on a theoretical level, to read history and cultural formations entirely through that need for a national framework is to collapse the exploration entirely into the dominant march of progress. And the latter has been roundly critiqued in academic literature of the last decades.83 A further point is that questions posed by this book revolve primarily around the Western classical music tradition, which is only occasionally in meaningful contact with the Palestinian national struggle. So what emerges from my study is a critical response to the ways that my own heritage (including national identity, Protestantism and Western classical music) has infiltrated and partially colonised Palestine (following a long line of colonisations including Romans, Persians, Hebrews returning from exile, Byzantines, Muslims and Ottomans). There is a prevailing assumption in Europe that one should seek ‘balance’ in approaching the situation in Palestine/Israel. In engaging with the situation, however, I myself came to the conclusion that ‘balance’ is a highly problematic notion. First, it involves a prejudgement on the position one should take, namely to place conflicted parties on the weighing scale and make sure that it is level. Second, it presumes that it is possible to take an external position and judge – with superior wisdom – ‘objectively’. Once I had been in the region a number of times, and read a range of literature, I shed the idea of balance, and replaced it with that of accuracy, conforming to the ideals of scholarship more generally. In fact, and as Sara Roy has stated, in imposing a ‘balance’ on a situation so profoundly unbalanced, ‘not only does the process of inquiry become severed from the local realities it is called upon to examine, it has the effect of displacing sustained attention to those realities and their damaging impact, blinding us to what is taking place before our eyes’.84 Roy’s research has tackled a material area, namely the economy of Gaza, whereas my own theme of music in Palestinian communities is ideational as well as material, and is thus harder to grasp so firmly. It is also more sensitive, because music is often emotional in impact, and functions as a space for multiple projections, offering a surface on which very understandable desires for ‘balance’, tolerance, cultural diversity and exchange 83 84

For one of the most recent reflections on the problem see Chakrabarty 2008. Roy 2007: xv.

Introduction

can play out. This is one of music’s social roles in this context, as is an extension thereof, its modelling of utopia. One of the burdens that music (scholarship) has sometimes carried is the expectation that it join that space, constructing hybridity or diversity. Indeed scholarship that does not join that often celebrated space may lead some readers to be disappointed. I present this book, however, intending to seek out the past and the present (rather than the utopian future), and challenge axioms and utopias (such as ‘balance’), indeed place those in a line of products generated in Europe and the USA that have been imagined appropriate for Palestine. Balance is often a position of stasis, whereas, as Roy and others have very reasonably argued, by revealing problems, and demonstrating how they came into being, such scholarship may remind us not only that problems come about through human agency, but also that they be changed by the same force.85

Sources I have found the most informative sources for tracing developments in the nineteenth century in the publications by foreign visitors to, and researchers of, the region. These range from privately funded publications by Swiss physician Titus Tobler to publicly funded reports by the British Palestine Exploration Fund; and they also include organs such as the Palästinajahrbuch, sponsored by the German Evangelical Church, and reports on missionary deaconesses in Palestine compiled at the Diakonie in Kaiserswerth, Germany. Given that my concern is primarily with the missions of Western visitors, the perspective provided by these various texts is broadly appropriate, but ideally it would be enriched with local documents. Regrettably, as Doumani argued some time ago and other scholars have also observed, grasping Ottoman Palestine in ways other than those suggested by ‘topdown’ media is extremely difficult, because other sources rarely survive.86 The case is particularly extreme in the field of music. Where possible, therefore, I have sought to nuance the vision offered by missionaries and researchers with recourse to memoirs written by locals. In particular, the diaries of the musician Wasif Jawhariyya, who lived in Jerusalem from the time of his birth in 1887, provide a fabulously detailed perspective on 85 86

Roy 2007: xx. Doumani 1995. See also Zureik 2003, which explores the related methodological problem for researching Palestinians, and Fleischmann 2003: 17–18, 21–2.

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Introduction

the city that is startlingly unholy, and a view of new arrivals that distinguishes itself from most other accounts.87 Looking beyond published reports and local memoirs, I have searched in archives for evidence of the ways in which music was used in education and broadcasting. Here, again, the perspective available is dominated by the aims and ambitions of outsiders, as legible in correspondence, school reports and minutes of meetings. Some documents do provide useful information about musical performances, which can reveal not only ambitions, but actual events and the level of local participation. Unfortunately, many institutions that might be expected to have archives (St George’s School in Jerusalem, for instance) do not. Even where archives exist (for instance at the Friends School, Ramallah), they are very patchy, testimony to a repetitively ruptured development. The PBS, the subject of Chapter 4, is a particularly extreme example. I have found relevant sources scattered in no fewer than six archives, but after reading and listening to materials in London (two separate locations), Jerusalem (two separate locations), Caversham and Oxford, the picture I offer is still shaped by the partial nature of what remains there. It is also shaped by my own limitations. Had I had command of written Arabic and Hebrew, I could have asked different questions, and indeed read more materials. This was particularly clear to me while researching the PBS, because I encountered a substantial number of documents in Arabic in the Central Zionist Archive. It is very unlikely that these refer to Western classical music, but researchers seeking to move beyond my contribution here may well make important discoveries. Whenever I encountered Arabic sources that were evidently related to music – memoirs and song books primarily – I had them translated professionally. For obvious reasons, Part II is built up from a less restricted source base. There is published material available from funding agencies, schools and other organizations which provides details not only about strategy, but also about finance. Yet there are also rich sources in the field, in the form of musical performances, workshops and other teaching situations. All this enabled me to take a different approach from that pursued in Part I. I drew basic structural data from funders and publications, such as the scale of money offered, the institutional rationale and the feedback mechanisms for impact assessment. But individual performers and teachers actually working in the region could offer much more nuanced information. So

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Nassar and Tamari 2003, 2005. For an account of these diaries see Tamari 2000, 2006.

Introduction

I conducted over seventy interviews with funders, administrators, musicians and teachers (both Palestinian and foreign), some of whom I met on more than one occasion. My aim was to address some general questions about their work with music while also allowing them to present what they themselves found most important. (Interviews are listed in the Interview database at the back of the book.) This strategy resulted in a very different process from the one that led to my writing Part I. Obviously, my position as a researcher with respect to the sources was very different, and so I introduce this here in more detail.

Ethnographic research Unlike many commentators on Israel and Palestine (and most commentators on associated musics), I have no personal connection with the Palestine region, which I visited for the first time as a tourist and researcher in December 2005. I am neither Arab nor Jewish, was brought up in London within a loosely Protestant framework, was baptised but never confirmed, and I have felt no attachment to any church since growing up. My primary starting points were a personal and professional interest in, and experience with, Western classical music, curiosity about Daniel Barenboim’s interventions and a sense of horror in the face of British policies in the Middle East. I undertook my first fieldwork near Seville, where Barenboim and the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra were rehearsing in 2006. Beyond a study related specifically to the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, I wished eventually to research the place of Western classical music in parts of the Arab world. From conversations with orchestral players from Israel, the West Bank, Jordan and Egypt (Arabs from Lebanon and Syria were absent from the workshop that year), I gained some very basic perceptions about the dissemination and development of Western classical music by Arabs in these regions, as well as contacts for future work. So this book is an outgrowth of that very preliminary field research.88 The basic narrative of my encounters in the region itself begins some six months prior to the time with the orchestra, when I had spent a week in Israel and the West Bank on holiday. This visit was a combined result of family interests and my slowly emerging research project. I had discussed the latter with a postgraduate student at Royal Holloway who was from 88

I published two articles on the orchestra: see Beckles Willson 2009a, 2009b.

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Introduction

Israel, and a Palestinian musician working at the University of Chicago (Issa Boulos) whom I encountered while I was a Visiting Scholar there: they each provided me with a list of people to contact. In fact, the Christmas/New Year timing was not fortuitous, so I had a lot of phone conversations but only three meetings,89 getting going properly only a year later, in January 2007. At that time I met contacts from the previous trip again, and attended a children’s music workshop organised by the Barenboim-Said Foundation in Nazareth. As my Interview database indicates, this enabled me to interview a number of European teachers and Palestinian administrators; and I also spent time chatting informally with the Palestinian children taking part in the workshop. I was still building up a very basic picture of the situation both in Nazareth and on the West Bank, but in the same year I visited on two more occasions and also several times in 2008 and 2009, by which time my research questions were more refined and I was able to focus on specific institutions and events. On these visits, I based myself partly in Ramallah and partly in East Jerusalem, travelling occasionally to other sites such as Jenin and Nablus to attend concerts or visit music schools. It would be impossible to make a general statement about how my various interviewees identified me, but the mutual contacts that allowed me to meet each one of them must have shaped their thinking. Mariam Said, for example, whom I had met while a Visiting Scholar at New York University earlier in 2006, introduced me to administrators (Salwa Duaibis and Muna Khleify) working for the Barenboim-Said Foundation at the orchestral workshop in Nazareth, and this certainly secured their generous help in building up a picture of what they understood was happening. Yet as I discuss below, there was a rift between the Barenboim-Said Foundation and the main provider of music education in the region, the Edward Said National Conservatory, so my interest in researching projects with which Barenboim was associated placed me in a dubious light with other new contacts. I certainly made at least one mistake in the early stages, and this warrants presentation here, because it adds a dimension to conclusions I present in chapters 6, 7 and 8. One of the suggestions made to me by a foreign teacher (with whom I spoke on the phone in December 2005 in preparation for my very first visit) was that I should meet the Director of the National Conservatory, Souhail Khoury. So I made about five 89

These were with an Israeli musicologist (Ruth HaCohen), an English cellist (Shirley Smart) and a Palestinian Israeli ‘ūd player (Nizar Rohana) who taught at the National Conservatory.

Introduction

phonecalls and spoke to one of the Conservatory administrators with this in mind, and was asked to call back later each time. Today, with the perspective on the institution that I have developed in subsequent years, my method of approach is baffling to me, and it also seems rather disrespectful, although it was in part a consequence of my previous work in Hungary, where the only way to reach people had been the telephone (letter-writing reliably failing to generate any response). But the Director of the National Conservatory stands at the top of a powerfully hierarchical institution and has an immensely full schedule of activities; meanwhile I had no one speaking for me, and I myself had not offered any reason as to why he should give me any of his time – or indeed provide me with information. (It is of course possible that he had heard of my interest in the Barenboim-Said Foundation, which would have worked strongly against me.) I made further attempts later in 2007, aware that one of my Palestinian contacts had spoken to him about me, but he was extremely busy, and moving constantly between the various branches of the Conservatory. The nearest I got that year was an interview with the Deputy Director, Heather Bursheh. I did meet Khoury eventually, however, in the summer of 2008, when I attended performances by students that were part of the National Conservatory’s ‘Marcel Khalife Music Competition’. The meeting was a combined result of my network and chance: one of the jury members for the so-called Oriental competition turned out to be Issa Boulos (see above), who made the unprompted and friendly gesture of inviting me along to a lunch with Khoury and the other jurors. During that lunch, much of the conversation was in English rather than Arabic, because aside from the Palestinians, one juror was Turkish, and another was French. I was therefore able at times to lead the discussion towards questions that were of importance to my research, related mainly to the place of the National Conservatory in music education (both Western and Oriental) in the Middle East as a whole. Additionally, I was able, after lunch, to request a meeting with Khoury alone, to which he agreed, and we met a week later. He was extremely helpful: presumably the seriousness of my interest in the Conservatory had become apparent to him through my friendly contact with Issa Boulos, my questions over lunch and my attendance at many other rounds of the competition in the meantime. But in short: the entire field was fraught, and after the initial stages I lost my illusions of being regarded either as an impartial researcher, or automatically as someone whose good intentions should be understood from her very presence and interest.

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Introduction

During the same period, I made contact with, and interviewed, more Palestinians working with Arab music and music education. Those discussions were immensely helpful in shaping my general knowledge of the situation, especially given the dearth of published information available. I do not draw on them substantially here, however, because they do not impinge directly on the questions I ended up addressing. These led me to focus primarily on the testimonies of newcomers and outsiders to the region. Many such people were European and American music teachers, who I met easily while spending time in Ramallah attending concerts. The interviews and conversations cited were part of a broader process in which I observed teaching, workshops and joined in group conversations. The occasions listed in the Interview database are the ones during which the musicians focused specifically on my interest in their work, and talked while I took notes on, and in a few cases recorded, their statements. I conducted the bulk of these semi-structured interviews in 2009, by which time I had gained a lot of basic information informally. I found all teachers willing to give me their time, and we generally met in public places such as cafes. I asked very broad questions, and took a noncoercive approach, so although my initial questions were almost the same, the interviews were very different from one another. I frequently used the expression ‘could you put into your own words’, trying to create a space in which the interviewee could present an individual perspective on a subject about which divergent opinions circulated. Some teachers used the opportunity to get things off their chests, complaining about their precarious situation in the region, their treatment by their employers (both Palestinian and European) and alienating experiences they had had in Israel. Others used the occasion to reflect on subjects that concerned them, such as the inappropriateness of bringing an elite Western art form to the region. I sensed a remarkable degree of trust from them, and in some cases it may have been connected to some kind of need. For one thing, their move to Ramallah had changed their thinking and challenged them quite fundamentally and discussing it with someone from outside may have been mildly therapeutic. I suspect there was also a faint hope of exchange between us. One teacher was keen that I would ‘expose’ the injustices of the employment situation in print, while more than one wanted to read my work, to draw from it in ongoing discussions among teachers about cultural imperialism. I was able to offer no promises, doubtful that my eventual writing would fulfil these functions; all I could do towards an ‘exchange’ was to pay for our coffee, and to say that I would let them know

Introduction

when I published something. All interviewees were willing to have their names included, but I have chosen to provide only their country of citizenship, and additionally, in appropriate cases, the country in which they were living before they moved to the West Bank. The other main group of foreigners I interviewed comprised people involved in putting on concerts, whether cultural emissaries working for foreign governments, festival administrators, or performers. In these contexts too, I found people very happy to tell me about their work, and – again – I found a few of them keen to reflect a little on their concerns. I took a non-coercive approach in these interviews as well, but in general I had more specific questions than I had for teachers. Frequently, after all, I was interested not just in the general framework that had led to and shaped their involvement, but the logistics of, and strategies for, very specific events. In some cases, I requested exact figures for funding; in other cases administrators provided me with printed material (I met locally based administrators in their offices). In certain cases, I followed up quite closely on particular comments, trying to bring interviewees to a precise formulation without putting words into their mouth. A number of interviews took place on the telephone. It is extremely difficult to tell whether they would have been any different in person, which was the context for the majority (but not all) of the others. It is worth perhaps observing here what the chapters of Part II do not aim to offer, namely an empirical assessment of the impact of the most recent interventions. Early on in my research I spent considerable time chatting with groups of children at music workshops and at music schools, and I talked with some parents. I did gain many impressions, but I did not have the time to develop a really rich archive of information that could serve to weigh up the impact that the new investments were having. Almost all I heard was positive: children and parents were delighted to have a new activity in their profoundly challenging lives, thrilled to be offered the opportunity to learn to play instruments and excited by the opportunities to get up on stage. And they understood the opportunities as empowering, part of their resistance to occupation. This sounds positive, of course, but I am wary of the link that is made all too often between such feelings, and ideas according to which musical experience can displace painful histories and transcend material struggles. The complexities of the situation on the ground may, I hope, be studied in the future in the detail they deserve. I return to this below.

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Introduction

It is also worth noting that I was not the only person doing questioning. On one occasion I was cross-examined myself. This was one of my most memorable encounters, and it began with a chance meeting with a young man in a youth club in the village of Birzeit. My interest was in local opinion about another youth club that was about to open in the village, because it was to be the venue of a concert that night (a part of the Sounding Jerusalem Festival, of which more in chapters 6 and 7). The young man (he asked me not to reveal his real name), wanted to know who had funded my research before he answered any questions (but not before he had offered me a seat, a cigarette and a bottle of coke). When I told him that it was a branch of the German government (the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation) he laughed, and said that it was a typical European strategy to pay scholars to get information about suspect foreign territories. He set this against the USA strategy, which he said would never be so delicate; and he explained that as a sociology graduate of Birzeit University, he was well-versed in theories of colonialism. I protested, but was embarrassed to hear myself generating a feeble statement about the fact that my research had been an individual proposal not a German government-driven initiative. So I stopped, and elected to laugh at myself – and his perception of varied global strategies – instead. He didn’t laugh with me, but helpfully gave me his trenchant position on the other youth club before returning to his friends. The interviews gathered in the field coalesced into a personal ‘archive’ on the situation from which I was able – in combination with other sources – to build Part II. Plainly the nature of this archive is different from the depositories I use in Part I. It has a more obviously personal nature, for a start: even if other researchers went with the same questions, they would have been viewed differently and provided with different answers. Yet I hope that building some theoretical continuity between parts I and II means that the shift of gear between the two sections is not too jolting. Some readers may wish that I had worked more on ethnography, and developed a deep empirical assessment of the impact of recent ‘missions’. I did build up a sense of the varied impacts in the locality while working, but for several reasons did not attempt to develop this extensively in the book. First, any such empirical enquiry – taken seriously – would necessitate a very different physical situation (including my sustained presence in the region, which is not practical, given my employment situation). Second, my expertise was not suited to such a task: I have never spent prolonged periods in Arab or Muslim communities and do not therefore

Introduction

have the depth of understanding that would be required; nor do I speak Arabic or Hebrew. Third, while developing the framework for the project, I discovered sources that led me to what seemed a fascinating long-term historical perspective; this perspective, moreover, drew on some of the linguistic and historical skills that I did have. One cannot do everything within a single volume, and I hope what is lost in depth is gained in breadth. My politics, and the politics of this book, inevitably touch on the background question of a (Palestinian) nation, but with considerable ambivalence. National frameworks established in the region since the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire seem to have divided large interconnected regions of it arbitrarily and problematically. Moreover, global politics – on which nation-building rests – is troublingly selective in its interests and favours. Yet resolutions published by the ‘United Nations’ do state that Palestinian refugees have the right to return to the land from which they were expelled in 1948–9 (Resolution 194, article 11), and that Israel should return to the borders it occupied prior to the Six Day War in 1967 (Resolution 242). Regrettably, there is no sign that these statements are going to be adopted by the Security Council and thus acted upon by global nation-builders. If the Resolutions did not stand there so vacuously, and if a solution to Palestinians’ anomalous statelessness became a mission of Western political powers, then we might actually be able to speak honestly of the oft-invoked ‘balance’ between various population groups. We might indeed observe the joys of spontaneous intercultural creativity. Until then, Palestinians stand as largely voiceless and extremely painful signs of the partiality and cruelty of the Western national project.

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part i

Holy land, 1840–1948

1 Revelation

We have already on former occasions pointed out in something like details the lines of pursuit which are properly the objects for our attention, and shown that beside the intellectual pleasure of adding to the common stock of knowledge of mankind in such ways as may be followed in other countries, the historic records, the numismatics, the geology, the botany, the ancient languages, the fragments of architecture, nay, the very climate and meteorology of Palestine may be studied in close connection with Divine Revelation; how religious and political developments and the most energetic and durable institutions of mankind have sprung out of this country and its adjacencies, such as the Sinaitic revelation, the Mohammedan imposture, the Rabbinical monstrosities, the Hermit and Convent systems, besides that latest of divine revelations which surpasses all other considerations, and is now extending itself over the world, wherever ignorance requires a guide, or human sorrow requires a comforter. Now all these are linked, bound, and centred upon this region, which by adoption we have at present the high privilege to designate as our home.1

When James Finn, British consul in Jerusalem, presented these words in 1853, he revealed the principal way that Palestine figured in nineteenthcentury European imaginings. In short, it had an existence hovering between material ground and Christian transcendence, rather akin to the Bible. That Finn was living in Palestine at all, and could refer to what was then an Ottoman province as ‘our home’, are signs of the renewed Western interest in Palestine that grew in tandem with encroachments on Egypt. Yet as I discussed in my Introduction, that interest was of a distinct nature. Whereas Egyptian penetration was dominated by commercial and military ambitions, claims to Palestine were almost all based on modern Bible study. Exploration and settlement were led by Protestant

1

Finn 1878: vol. II, 111–12 (my italics). The Jerusalem Literary Society was founded in 1849, and the entire text of Finn’s address to it in 1853 appears on pp. 109–20. An account of the development of the society and the short-lived English College can be found on pp. 89–109.

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groups, and were sufficiently dramatic for a commentator of the time to identify a ‘peaceful crusade’.2 Said has said of Napoleon’s scholars in Egypt that their work was ‘reconstructive’ and ‘presentational’, and has demonstrated that they sought to ‘stage [the country’s] antiquity, its wealth of associations, cultural importance and unique aura for a European audience’.3 A similar pattern can be traced in Palestine, where the region’s Christian mapping and routes of pilgrimage had long been guarded by the Franciscan order of Catholics, the Custodia terra sanctae (established in 1333). New Protestant arrivals challenged Catholic authority with reference to research into both Palestine and the Bible. The American Edward Robinson (1794–1863), for example, established a method of renaming and mapping places in the region through a combination of Bible readings and discussion with the local population.4 His perspective and others similar supplanted what had been a ‘legendary topography of the Holy Land’ with ‘the historical, Biblical topography of Palestine’.5 We might suggest that whereas visitors to Egypt ‘tried to grasp the Orient as if it were an exhibition of itself’,6 those in Palestine constructed it as if it were a book of itself. Maps, reports, photographs, drawings and critical bibliographies of past representations were all subsumed into a biblical chronology of the land. The broad concern of this chapter is to demonstrate that placing ‘revelation’ centre stage, and considering it through music, may serve to set much-discussed interventions into ‘the Orient’ in a new light. Most obviously, the theme of revelation will spotlight interaction between secular and religious authority, indeed the often symbiotic relationship between the two. It will also allow for the integration of German sources, which have often been neglected on the grounds that they are not relevant to the study of imperialism. I join a number of scholars in arguing otherwise –

2

3 4

5

6

On this ‘peaceful crusade’, see Schölch 1986: 68–73, and for the original text, Tobler 1868: 321–2. Basic historical sources on the religious colonisation of Palestine are Goren 2003; Kirchhoff 2005; and Löffler 2008. Said 1994: 141–2. Kirchhoff 2005: 127. Robinson ‘identified’ hitherto unidentified locations mentioned in the Bible by drawing on names that were used by the contemporary Arab population for places on the land. See Kirchhoff 2005: 121–30; also Goren 2003: 29–66. Philology – one of the disciplines that underpinned this new work – was largely a Protestant field (indeed it had contributed to the Reformation). Röhricht’s Palestine bibliography of 1890 indicates not only that at least 3,515 publications on the region appeared between the years AD33 and 1878, but that 1,776 of those were published in the period beginning in 1830. Mitchell 1991: 29.

Revelation

and the connection with religious authority is a crucial bridge.7 Thus in the first part of the chapter, I discuss a scholar whose work lay at the intersection of academic research and mission, the German Gustaf Dalman (1855– 1941). His 360-page book of Palestinian folksong called Palästinischer Diwan (1901), and the institute for research that he directed in Jerusalem (1902–14), each illuminate ways that Lutheran notions of revelation were delivered to Palestine in the late Ottoman era. Moving on, I then look more broadly to consider the (generally biblical) place of music in some English and American travel writings and diaries from the same period and earlier. By the end of the chapter I hope to have shown that we gain by expanding our perspectives on nineteenth-century Orientalist thought to reflect more closely on its explicitly participatory quality. ‘Revelation’ required presence, both on the land, and in the various texts that made it evident.

Recovering German Orientalism In search of revelation Studies by Goren and Marchand have already revealed the extent to which German academic research of ‘the Orient’ was informed by religious debate. The reason for this was primarily structural: centres for Oriental studies were established in the fields of both linguistic philology and theology.8 And in the case of Palestine research, there were obvious geohistorical reasons as well. Kirchhoff argues that scholarly engagement with Palestine should be compared with Western advances on Ottoman Greece. 7

8

Many references above indicate the wealth of material available on German relations with the Orient, but for a concise critique of the Saidian view that brackets off German sources, see Jenkins 2004. German-language research has been little addressed in Anglophone scholarship, but Marchand 2009 now offers a broad study of German Orientalistik, contextualised fully within the history and contemporary situation of the German region. Goren 2003 is strong on the networking of the centres that became foci of Palestine research, and provides a good overview of their development (see 167–77). See also Kirchhoff 2005: 143ff. A substantial network of university centres developed in the German Confederation during the nineteenth century, of which an early example was in Leipzig. This was established by Heinrich Leberecht Fleischer (1801–88) a scholar of languages (Arabic in particular) who also initiated the foundation of the Deutsche Morgenlandische Gesellschaft (German Oriental Society) in 1845. Another centre was in the town of Halle, established by Professor of Theology Wilhelm Gesenius (1786–1842). Gesenius’ specialisms were in oriental philology, biblical exegesis, and comparative and historical linguistics. He had absolute authority in his time as a teacher of Hebrew, and his pupils included Franz Delitzsch (1813–90).

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As is now well understood, philhellenism paved the way for acquisitive topographical investigations of Athens and the region. Kirchhoff identifies a similar process with respect to Palestine. The equivalent of Athens was Jerusalem (the two ancient centres had long been paired and contrasted in literature), the counterpart to Homer was the Bible, and topographical investigations were similar (even if they were to be a great deal more contested because of competing histories and religions). The academic field in which all this took place was Oriental studies.9 One consequence of this framework was that most scholars researching the region ignored beliefs about the land other than those they could connect to the Bible, and failed completely to give consideration to the residents (who were predominantly Muslim). To a considerable extent this was a product of the popular Enlightenment vision of the time, according to which the Arab world had been in decline for several centuries, and could be of interest to Western research only through texts from its ‘golden age’ that peaked in Baghdad in the tenth century.10 A further contributory factor, however, was that Europe’s developing concept of humanist research was by no means secular, indeed was deeply embedded in Christianity at least until the First World War. It was axiomatic that contemporary Islam was irrelevant to Christian Bible study. This context was not conducive to research into music of the Middle East. Raphael Georg Kiesewetter’s study, Die Musik der Araber (The Music of the Arabs) of 1842 is from one perspective an exception to prove the rule.11 But it is a philological study, not engaging with living Arabs, and from this perspective conforms to the notion of Arab ‘decline’, falling in line with a few contemporary studies of the Quran.12 Dalman’s study

9

10 12

Only the local uprising was not sought – indeed the perception that the local population was uncivilised, and thus completely unable to govern itself, was understood by some (in direct comparison with Greece) as advantageous. Kirchhoff cites Helmuth von Moltke, who later became Field Marshall General of the Prussian army. Moltke made a direct parallel between Greeks and Palestinians in 1841, and asserted that Europeans would take over the leading positions of a ‘Christian Principality of Palestine’ without opposition. See Kirchhoff 2005: 71–2. 11 Lockman 2004: 73–8. Kiesewetter 1842. See also Bohlman 1986. Abraham Geiger defended the Quran from the normative European charge of heresy, and read it historically. Gustaf Weil developed Geiger’s ideas further, but he maintained the prevailing view that Mohammed was not a true prophet, and denied the Quran the spiritual substance that Muslims themselves attributed to it, subsuming it thereby into the historical– critical frame that had developed in German philology. (For Geiger and Weil, see Marchand 2009: 121–2.) Theodor Nöldeke also understood the Quran as spiritually obsolete when he wrote his Geschichte des Qorâns (1860). As Marchand observes, his spiritual refusal extended to the Hebrew Bible too, but this was not typical of the time. (For Nöldeke, see Marchand 2009: 176.) The point here is not only that the Quran was secularised by such writers to a greater

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published in 1901, Palästinischer Diwan (Palestinian Divan), is thus truly remarkable for its ethnographic approach. The book consists of a sizeable repository of song texts, commentary and some melodies, and allows us a window on the intellectual and religious contexts that drove German research on Palestine. It is a profoundly telling example of German Orientalist scholarship of the time, emerging at the confluence of three dominant forces, namely linguistics, theology and – a field arguably in tension with academia – mission. I discuss them in turn below.

The Orientalist Diwan Palästinischer Diwan can be grasped most obviously as a collection of song texts gathered in the ‘Oriental’ field. On one level it is thus exemplary of Oriental linguistics, a field in which Dalman was well-schooled and highly productive. Work towards it nevertheless required study beyond his Hebrew and Aramaic, and he turned to the renowned Swiss scholar Albert Socin, in Leipzig, for advice and assistance with Arabic. Socin had considerable pedigree as an Orientalist. He had settled in Leipzig following a professorship in Oriental Languages at Tübingen (1876–89), 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 Dalman consulted him, he was working on the final stages of his monumental collection and analysis of Arabic poetry Diwan aus Centralarabien (Divan from Central Arabia). This is a classic piece of Orientalist linguistic philology, and can serve here as one comparative context for Dalman’s book. The 300 pages of its Part I present 112 texts (a combination of poems, prose pieces and stories collected by Socin in the field), and reproduce 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 metre, language, dialect and, occasionally, authorship and textual sources.

degree than Judaic and Christian texts, but that the debate about Islamic cultures was of peripheral concern to Europeans. Julius Wellhausen’s contributions – Reste arabischen Heidentums (1887), Prologomena zur ältesten Geschichte des Islams (1899) and Das arabische Reich und sein Sturz (1902) – were works of highly differentiated research. But as he himself observed – shortly before he abandoned the field in favour of one that seemed to matter – it was rare that they generated much response. For Wellhausen, see Marchand 2009: 187–8.

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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, Suq 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 II, a further 146 pages, offers German translations of all the texts, with some annotations relating to the texts’ meanings. Part III, another 350 pages, is the Introduction, the Glossary, Indices, Bibliography and an Afterword by the 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 analyse the corpus he has presented in terms of content, form and 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 categorised. All this is representative of German Orientalist scholarship of the time. Dalman acknowledged Socin’s help in the Introduction to his own Diwan, which similarly includes materials from a combination of oral and textual sources.13 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 colonisation. Like Socin, he outlined his methodology, stated the place where he had found the music, and offered a classification of his results in terms of poetic content, song types, form and language. And he placed his research in the context of scholarly work on Arabic poetry. The first significant distinction between them 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 Bedouin, 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 13

Dalman 1901: x.

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major difference between them 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 his main commentary very short (less than thirty-four pages) but he does not present the poems in Arabic script, only in a transliteration and in German translation. Footnote annotations refer not to scholarly questions of dialect, but specifically to meaning. The meaning is also the basis for thematic groupings of poems. Part I, for instance, begins with ‘Auf Feld und Tenne’ (‘In Field and Barn’), moves through ‘Beim Pflügen’ (‘Ploughing’), ‘Bei der Ernte’ (‘At Harvest’) and ‘Beim Dreschen’ (‘Threshing’), towards the final ‘Auf der Pilgerfahrt’ (‘Making a Pilgrimage’); Part II 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 collection. The place that Dalman collected the song 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 the note that he heard a shepherd boy singing it near Salt, at dusk.14 There is yet one more obvious difference between the two works, one indeed 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), and the philologically based Kiesewetter’s Musik der Araber, mentioned above. Dalman included thirty-two melodies in his collection, two maqāmāt (bayātī and ḥijāz) 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 ʿūd, violin and rabāb). Figure 1 presents the first pages of his musical examples, including these maqāmāt, instrumental ranges and the first five melodies. In three sections of his Introduction devoted to ‘Poetic Forms’, ‘Rhythm’ and ‘Melodies’, Dalman presented some general comments about the 14

Dalman 1901: 33.

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Figure 1 Gustaf Dalman’s Palästinischer Diwan (1901), p. 354.

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material collected. He identified no less than eighteen categories, for instance, including qasīda, ̣ mawwāl, ʿatāba, zajal and zalghūta,̣ each of which he described briefly in terms of form and context.15 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 very extensive commentary. He limited himself to some basic observations about syllable counts, metres and beats in songs where it was clear to him, also noting that poetic metres were often different from the beats in the melody.16 While that discussion of genres could be seen as serving a broader purpose – revealing which of the ones recognised as regional were to be traced in the areas he visited – Dalman’s discussion of maqāmāt and melodies was less productive. He revealed that he had attempted to identify the seventeen pitch levels within the octave that Arab music theory claimed, but found that musicians in Aleppo came into difficulty when showing him them in practice.17 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 Arab intonation was ‘not far’ (nicht weit) from Western tuning, because some of its instruments were tuned so similarly. He claimed this of the qānūn, mijwiz, regional types of 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 he presented interesting observations, his transcriptions are somewhat primitive for their time, not really exploring the nature of the Arab intonation, rhythm or ornamentation. To be sure, as he points out in other sections of the Introduction, much of what he heard was very 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. And in one respect his observations come in line with the broader experience of ethnomusicologists and musicians from both his time and our own: Arab intonation practices have been, and remain, variable and individual. Moreover, there are distinctions to be observed between ‘learned’ practices (repertories of samāʿiyyāt and bashraf-s) and urban traditions

15

Dalman 1901: xiv–xxii.

16

Dalman 1901: xxiv.

17

Dalman 1901: xxv–xxvi.

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on the one hand (on which theoretical writings have generally been based) and oral traditions developed in rural communities.18 The question remaining is the extent to which the transcriptions provide evidence of Palestinian song of the time. Songs 23 and 24 are rather interesting, because they are notations of a song that remains popular today, called Az Zeinu.19 Some of the others are recognisable in broad terms as rather typical examples of genres still familiar today (ʿatāba, for instance). In general, however, they raise more questions than they answer. The representation of the maqām bayātī as a tempered scale 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 maqām bayātī). (See Figure 1.) 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 maqām from the sīkāh family. Then, the melodic characters of the first five songs (see again Figure 1) suggest that they draw on members of the maqām sīkāh 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 very substantially to make sense of it.20 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 latter is something we will encounter in the next section.

The Diwan of revelation Theology and Bibelforschung (Bible research) thread through the Diwan in four interconnected ways. First, Dalman’s initial research towards it was a response to one of the most pressing German debates about the 18 19

20

Marcus 1992: 189; 1993: 40. This song can be heard sung by the Lebanese singer, Fairouz, on YouTube. See www.youtube. com/watch?v=EIggrXHaDos This paragraph is indebted to my discussions with two Palestinian musicians, Issa Boulos and Nizar Rohana. The discussions were completely independent, starting with a request that they each tell me how they understood the melodies. Each musician interpreted Dalman’s notations in the same way. I am particularly grateful to Issa Boulos, who went through all Dalman’s songs with me (Jericho, January 2012), and subsequently sent me several of his own reconstructions of some of them, as mp3 files.

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Bible, which concerned the identity of the Song of Songs, one of the shortest books of the Old Testament. While the main subject of this book – love, courtship and consummation – had long been read as metaphors for human union with the church or the realm of the spirit, an article by the German consul to Damascus, Johann Gottfried Wetzstein, had questioned the book’s canonical status. Basing his argument on songs he had heard at weddings in Syria, Wetzstein asserted that it was essentially a collection of wedding songs, and that such songs could still be heard.21 Dalman explained in the Introduction to his Diwan that he had travelled 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. He challenged the idea that songs that contained analogous descriptions of beauty could have remained unchanged in songs since biblical times. He also discerned that there was no homogeneous practice of love-song singing in the region. Additionally, he was unable to find a specific genre of ‘wedding song’: while love songs were sung often, they were only associated with weddings when stated within the text (and when these took place). Moreover, 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 never mentioned in this connection, and indeed for very practical reasons, namely that weddings tended to happen in the autumn – when threshing was over, and money and time were available for festivities.22 Underlying the debate about the Song of Songs, however, was a supposition that Dalman did not relinquish, one that we encountered above through the ideas of Johann David Michaelis, penned in the mideighteenth century. This is my second point. By the time 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 USA 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. 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

21

22

The idea had already been put forward by Herder, but Wetzstein seemed to provide material support. Wetzstein 1873. Dalman 1901: xi–xii.

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with the primitive. Although he 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. Even while these [the mindset and customs of local people] cannot be considered the direct heir or continuation of ancient Israelite or even Canaanite folklore, the tribal relationship and similarity in general life-circumstances have brought such a far-reaching analogy to ways of thinking, living and working, that Biblical research cannot find any supporting object-lesson more effective that than of Palestinian folklore.23

The point of studying the people, then, was to understand the Bible better. In a sense, this projected European theology onto the Palestinian population – and then sought to research that projection. But it was more peculiar than that, because the projection was also a real imposition. This is my third point. In the most basic terms, it was an imposition of Christian belief on non-Christians, by assuming the supremacy of the Bible above all other texts and indeed all cultural practices. Dalman’s theological position conforms to a very large extent to the New Lutheran movement that had been centred in Leipzig since the 1860s, which struggled to reconcile the still adhered-to transcendence of the Bible with its evidently historical quality. For Dalman, the crux of the matter was the relationship between the Old and New Testaments. Reading the Old Testament, he argued in 1896, was a matter of posing historical questions without neglecting the text’s revelatory quality (Offenbarung), and balancing the two by building a very particular link between the New and the Old Testaments. This entailed observing that the Old Testament had prophesised Jesus, that the community (of the New Testament and beyond) had recognised Jesus as Christ, and that Jesus had called the community ‘Christian’. It also meant that today’s ‘Christian’ community should understand its historically prophesied nature and regard the entire body of scripture as the word of God.24 This circular process affirming the incontestable truth of Jesus was essentially an elaboration of his statement some ten years earlier, according to which the history of ancient Israel was a ‘revelatory history’

23

Dalman 1901: v.

24

Männchen 1987: 67–8.

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(Offenbarungsgeschichte), which could not (even in academic work) be separated from belief (Glaube).25 In practical terms, such convictions led many Christians to seek a spiritual transformation of the people of Palestine. Dalman argued that the entirety of Palestine was transcended by Jesus: ‘the land that was consecrated by His life, passion, death, and resurrection. All other memories from the time of the Patriarchs to the Crusades pale before this fact, which is comparable in significance only with the creation of the world itself.’26 And he elaborated the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke to make clear what he wished would happen: When will the time come, in which the hidden candle will be placed in the candlestick, and Christians, Jews and Mohammedans will find the bond in the person of Jesus of Nazareth that unites all people?27

Although Dalman’s hope may seem to take us some way from the Palästinischer Diwan, his first trip to the region had only been possible thanks to an award he received in light of an article he wrote on the word of Jesus.28 Moreover, the same interest framed the actual research. Even though Dalman gathered material from both Muslims and Christians on the land, he drew most fundamentally on guidance from newly grounded Christian organisations, whether the hospital of the Brüdergemeine mission in Jerusalem, schools or churches. Additionally, while he gathered materials (travelling through Constantinople, Ephesus, Athens, Smyrna, Jerusalem, Tiberius, Safed, Aleppo, Antioch and regions east of the River Jordan to Damascus), he also preached. Staying for seven months in Aleppo at the Scottish Free Church Mission, he gave sermons every Sunday, usually to Germans (and one Jew), but on occasion to an Arab congregation through an interpreter.29 Bearing all this in mind, then, it is time to turn to my final context for the Diwan.

25

26 27

28

29

Dalman’s own term was ‘gläubige Theologie’ (a believing theology). The expression emerges in Dalman’s letters to Heinrich Müller dating from 1886, housed in the Archive of the Brüderunität Herrnhut and discussed in Männchen 1987: 28 (italics reproduced from Männchen). Dalman 1900a: 90–1. Dalman 1900a: 175.This is a reference to the Gospels that relate Jesus explaining that the candle of faith should not be hidden, but placed in a candlestick in order to bring light to the house. See Matthew 4:20–2, Mark 4: 20–4, Luke 8:15–18 and 11:32–4. More specifically, the article discussed the word of Jesus in the light of the Aramaic language and post-canonical rabbinical texts. Männchen 1987: 59. Männchen 1987: 60.

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The missionary Diwan In this section I want to place Palästinischer Diwan in the context of mission, in which Dalman was steeped until the age of about forty-seven. He had attended a missionary school as a child, namely the Herrnhuter Brüdergemeine (Moravian Church of Herrnhut), which also ran the Theological Seminar where he was a student and then teacher (1874–7 and 1881–7 respectively).30 Founded in 1722, the pietistic Brüdergemeine was the oldest missionary establishment in Germany, and led the way with work on Jewish conversion. In this respect, it intersected closely with Dalman’s other primary institutional affiliation, the Institutum Judaicum in Leipzig, where he taught from 1887 until 1891, and was director from 1893 to 1902. Founded in 1886 by Dalman’s teacher and later employer, Delitzsch, the Institutum Judaicum was intended to prepare theology students to work as missionaries. Dalman was one of the first Protestant scholars of Palestine to know Hebrew and study the Talmud (another was Delitzsch). He supported Jewish emancipation and published protests about anti-Semitism, and the fact that he specialised in rabbinical sources probably compromised his academic career.31 His concern for Jews and Judaism was split two ways, however. His first stance was putatively benevolent, following a Christian duty to comfort Jews (Paul had said that God blessed everybody, especially Jews), because Christians should be grateful to Jews for their own existence. Dalman regarded Jews as in need of forgiveness for their original human sinfulness and wished to lead them to Jesus to enable them to transcend this problem. The second strand in his thinking was sharply critical. While he contested racial anti-Semitism, he regarded Jews’ denial of the Second Temple as a fundamental problem, indeed saw this denial as having led to their persecution. His arguments at times elaborated classic anti-Semitic tropes: Jews were fickle and might convert to Christianity for material reasons, for they had a profiteering nature.32 Plainly his interest in Hebrew and Judaism was there primarily to serve conversion. As he himself put it: 30

31

32

Biographical information and theological discussions relating to Dalman can be found in Männchen 1987. It precluded his being considered for a full professorship at a German university, for instance (he worked as an extraordinary professor at the Theological Faculty of Leipzig University from 1885 onwards, gaining a teaching assignment for Hebrew and Aramäic grammar). See Männchen 1987: 60–2. For detailed discussion of the broader situation regarding the research into Judaism of Germany see Wassermann 2002. At base this reveals a social anxiety about the rise of the bourgeois Jewish community and the threat it could pose to the educated Protestants of Germany. Männchen 1987: 87–8.

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If the missionary is to follow modern Jews in their philosophical lines of thought, the Talmudists in their legal quibbling and dodging, and the Cabbalists in their mystical speculations, in order to entice them from there into the ‘healthy lesson’ of the Gospel, then he must know at least the principles of these fields of Jewish knowledge and thought.33

All this provides a crucial context to two song books that I suggest are miniature precursors to the Diwan, namely Yiddish poetry and song compilations from Jewish communities of Galicia and Russia.34 Published in 1888 and 1893, they are based primarily on scattered textual sources and strive to contribute to a potential library of Yiddish material that would be of both linguistic and ethnological value. Yiddish poetry, Dalman claimed, was one of the few sources of Jews’ ‘natürliches Empfinden’ (natural sentience), and could thus be a means through which Germans could come to understand Jews.35 The content of the two compilations overlaps in part, but the later book presents the poems as songs with musical notation, and some songs even appear with harmonic accompaniments. Dalman’s Foreword explains that their original composers were not aware of ‘our’ metres and harmony and that the melodies did not exist as fixed entities; but that the aim of this notation and arrangement was to grasp their ‘basic character’ (Grundcharakter).36 Dalman’s missionary impulse is crystal clear here. Let us not forget that he argued that missionaries should get to know Judaism in order to be equipped to move Jews ‘beyond’ it. In his Introduction to the first Yiddish collection he criticised anti-Semites for drawing exclusively on old Jewish songs for their source material. His own purpose, he wrote, was to make contemporary Jewish material better known.37 His collections were there to serve missionaries, then, their user-friendly presentation a pragmatic means to create a useable resource. They were also, he argued, to ‘serve’ Jews, who would value a Yiddish ‘library’ greatly. In this light, it is striking that the last poem of the first volume, ‘Israel und sein Maschiach’ (‘Israel and its Messiah’) by Mark Löw (presumably a baptised Jew), celebrates the coming of Jesus, and that it received special attention from Dalman in his Introduction: Obviously it remains true that only the songs at the end of the collection really solve the riddle of Israel’s past, present and future, and explain clearly what these people need. The key that the poets of these songs know is Jesus of Nazareth, the

33 34 37

Dalman, Kurzgefaßtes Handbuch der Mission unter Israel: 46, quoted in Männchen 1987: 82. 35 36 Dalman 1888, 1893. Dalman 1888: iii. Dalman 1893: 2. Dalman 1888: iii-iv.

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Holy land, 1840–1948 ‘covenant of the people and the light of the peoples’, in whom all the entwined threads of the world’s and the peoples’ life are so wonderfully disentangled.38

His citation is a reworking of Isaiah 42:6, an Old Testament source that Christians such as Dalman read as prophetic of Jesus’ coming. Jesus was the covenant that the Lord had promised: King James Bible: ‘I the LORD have called thee in righteousness, and will hold thine hand and will keep thee, and give thee for a covenant of the people, for a light of the Gentiles’.39

Dalman was thus providing both a song through which Jews themselves should learn their future, and simultaneously (re-)interpreting a text recognised by Jews, specifically to make it affirm the truth of the future that he himself envisaged for them. Even while Palästinischer Diwan offers a great deal more than these little collections, I contend that it has a strong link. First, it reveals the hierarchy within Dalman’s thinking that we have already encountered. A development from land to Jesus is reflected in the placing of the Christian songs at the culmination of Part I, which starts with the cultivation of the land and moves to pilgrimage. The two Christian songs that close Part I are thus in the very centre of the volume. Second, each of these indicates Dalman’s core beliefs. One is associated with St Barbara’s Day (the closest, apparently, that Dalman could get to a Christmas song), and mentions a ribbon connected to baptism. The other, associated with Easter, affirms Dalman’s interest yet more transparently, as it addresses Jesus, and the conflict between Christians and Jews. The Jews’ unhappiness here is set into relief with the happiness of the Christians, as if a message from Dalman for Jews to change: The feast came, we celebrated it. We visited the grave of our lord: Our Lord is our patron, Through his blood he gained us, And the Jews are sad, But the Christians are happy, Your eyes were bursting, oh Jew!40 38 39

40

Dalman 1888: viii. Lutheran Bible: ‘Ich, der HERR, habe dich gerufen mit Gerechtigkeit und habe dich bei deiner Hand gefasset und habe dich behütet und habe dich zum Bund unter das Volk gegeben, zum Licht der Heiden.’ Dalman 1901: 161.

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The Diwan could not present as clear-cut a case of missionary zeal as the Yiddish collections, because the appropriate context – and material – was lacking. Whereas the Yiddish collections emerged from Germany in an environment in which Jews and their conversion were a widespread concern, in Palestine, Ottoman law forbade proselytising to the majority population, Muslims. (As we will see in Chapter 3, that did not actually stop pedagogues completely.) Thus Dalman would not have found a Muslim equivalent to ‘Israel und sein Maschiach’ in Palestine (and even conceiving such an equivalent is difficult, given that Islam already recognised Jesus: the song would have to renounce Mohammed and go ‘back’). Additionally, the songs Dalman found could not fit into the sectarian groups that structured his thinking. Only five song texts of the several hundred that he included were specifically religious, namely those in his section ‘Auf dem Pilgerfahrt’ (‘Making a Pilgrimage’), three of which were Muslim and two of which were Christian.41 The parallel with the Yiddish collections is nonetheless unmistakable. We might say that Palästinischer Diwan projects a moment in which conversions would take place in Palestine. Perhaps Dalman even entertained the thought that in a distant post-Ottoman time his book could be of use in converting. His presentation, foregoing Arabic text and technical discussion, is in line with his ‘handbook’ collections of Yiddish material. Also, he proposed that the ‘Gesangsleben’ (‘song life’) could be the ‘key’ to a study of the Palestinian Volk’s ‘inner essence’ (‘Erfassung seines inneren Wesens’), which is reminiscent of his interest in the ‘natural sentience’ of Jews.42 Moreover, he wrote that it was intended to be a ‘reliable aid to study’ (‘ein zuverlässiges Hilfsmittel zu Studien’).43 Presumably this was not only for those interested in Oriental linguistics, the Bible, or theology, but also for those who had a mission.

The framework for hearing music If the contexts for Palästinischer Diwan make clear that German research strategies were by no means ‘academic’ either in Europe or Palestine, it is all the more obvious from a research initiative that was already mooted at the time of the German Emperor’s much-celebrated visit in 1898.44 This is the Institute for Archaeology of the Holy Land, founded in 1902 by the German Evangelical Church, where Dalman was the first director. 41 44

42 Dalman 1901: 158–62. Dalman 1901: vi. See Berman 1998: 142; Goren 2003: 347.

43

Dalman 1901: vii.

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The only employee in permanent residence at the institute (living there until 1914), he hosted a group of visiting researchers every year. Thus he generally invited one senior scholar to be with him for nine months, and six less experienced researchers (often pastors) to visits for periods of three to five months. He created a curriculum and led them on trips through the region, also editing the institute’s annual publication, Palästinajahrbuch, until 1927 (while his successor in Jerusalem reconstructed work at the institute in the wake of the First World War).45 Ultimately, this meant that he disseminated his ideas both in Palestine and in Germany (and probably beyond). The move to Jerusalem marks a distinct caesura in Dalman’s approach, in that his main interest was no longer a mission to the Jews, but the development of research at the institute.46 The framework was related, nevertheless, because for Dalman the land was always the Holy Land, even in its very climate, geology and ecology.47 In 1913 he published a short text outlining what this meant for research. It was axiomatic, he wrote, that researchers apprehend Palestine as the location of sacred history, and bring with them their entire inner being (‘den Gesamten inneren Menschen’). This supplied a bedrock, he wrote, to which they should add all means of scientific enquiry. They would be in a position thereby to encounter ‘the spirit of the divine revelation’ within the sacred history. And this was the ultimate goal of the research process.48 Local Arab music found a place within the framework, because music seemed to Dalman to be a part of the land. While researching Palästinischer Diwan, song had accompanied him everywhere, had indeed woven itself into his image of the country to the extent that he couldn’t think of it without those tones.49 So the research process was to be an encounter with the land. As Dalman explained, this would involve the land’s visible elements, such as the bare cliffs of Judea, the towering mountains and the blue lake of Galilee and the waterfalls and the forests of the East, all of them in the clear light of the Oriental sun. Yet it would also involve aural ones, namely the wistful tones of the shepherds’ pipes and the ʿatāba songs of the ploughmen.50 This regard for the land led Dalman to a rare position at the time, namely one of respect for local agriculture. His attitude is doubtless open to critique, for it was romantic and ultimately proscriptive: the destiny of the people there was to be agrarian, he claimed, because the land leant itself 45 48

46 Goren 2003: 350–1. Männchen 1987: 142–3. 49 Dalman 1913: 4 (my italics). Dalman 1901: vii.

47

Männchen 1993: 207–8. Dalman: 1913: 4–5.

50

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to that.51 One can trace the position in an article by one of his visitors, who noted that both folk songs and folk tales were inseparable components of agrarian practices. He had wanted to hear a song sung at the mill, and the woman he asked told him he’d have to come back when she was at the mill.52 If song was inseparable from (agricultural) practice, then it was in fact a part of that practice (which was a destined product of the land). Dalman himself contextualised his own musical research in the local climate and season: he addressed rain songs again, for instance, and rather than understanding feasts in religious terms, he defined them seasonally as ‘the high points of the year’.53 Dalman’s concern for the land was not only romantic, but was also a way of negotiating the inherent tension between his seeking of biblical revelation on the one hand, and the religious practices that he encountered on the other. Emphasising the climate and the land was, after all, a way of getting beneath the official religion. In examining harvest practices, for instance, he argued against any interpretations of associated prayers that relied exclusively on Islam. Instead, he claimed they indicated a connection with European ‘Naturzauber’ (natural magic) that was intended to restore the fertility of land. They suggested a practice of bewailing Tamuz-Adonis, of which he had read in Ezekiel 8:14. Islam had simply taken this over (without understanding it), he said.54 In fact, when handled sensitively, the result of this historically layered approach could be very productive. A renowned scholar of Islam, Paul Kahle, worked alongside Dalman at the institute in 1909, after which he published three articles in the affiliated periodical. While grounding these firmly in secondary literature, and constructing them as contributions to research of Islam in general, he argued that the value of work in specific locations was its attention to the diversity of Islamic practices. In the Jerusalem region this was, he argued, in part related to the religions that had been there before the arrival of Islam (thus, implicitly, Christian, or even pre-Christian practices). He did not attempt to speculate about the connections, but described a range of local beliefs that displayed strong connections with the land. The musical ones included the fact that Dervish music could be heard from underneath a sacred tree, and that a sheikh heard music from a sacred stone whenever a member of the tribe had died.55 Kahle also described a number of songs sung at springs, rain processions, and the famous Nebi Musa festival.56 51 54

Männchen 1993: 210. Dalman 1917b: 18.

52 55

Schmidt 1913: 134. Kahle 1910: 92, 97.

53 56

Dalman 1917b: 17, 22. Kahle 1910: 94; 1912: 162ff., 165ff.

55

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In general, nevertheless, sound material was a part of a particular material and religious economy that may be understood within two specific theological contexts. The first is that of the Moravian Church in which Dalman was educated, and with which he worked until the age of fortyseven. One of the most cherished ideas with Moravian thought was that all worldly activities were potentially acts of worship, embodiments of a ‘liturgical life’: even apparently secular activities had sacred significance.57 From this perspective, study of the material attributes of the Holy Land – whether or not they appeared sacred on their surfaces – could be keys to accessing Jesus. Closely connected to this framework is the second context, namely Dalman’s stated belief in the spirit of God as a force working through human beings. Männchen extrapolates the various ways of this working in a transhistorical arc. First, she identifies it as a power operating in individuals in Old Testament history, whose words are an organ of God’s revelation; it is also a power within the holy community of Israel, within which it was possible to actually write of God’s revelations; finally, it is a force in the history of revelation, which serves the future too.58 This perspective can reinforce the idea that the researchers themselves, in absorbing experiences (including music) from the land, could be ‘living liturgically’ while carrying out research. We can trace one of the boundaries to such liturgical living in a text revealing anxiety about the effects of musical encounter. This concerns the dhikr, which Dalman experienced and found affecting. He explained that during the movements, drumming and coloratura singing during the ceremony ‘the barriers between man and God are to be broken through in unmediated experience’.59 He also stated that this overflowed true Islam, demonstrating the need to come closer to God. His willingness to give full consideration to local quests for the divine is remarkable for Europeans of the time. Yet the experience was distinct from Dalman’s understanding of the divine revelation his own team of researchers was to seek, and he closed his reflection with a key theological concern. Whether God really began where human consciousness ended, he wrote, was a separate question. Such music, then, was an important enhancement of an experience of Palestine and the Bible, and was something of acknowledged emotional impact; but he did not trust it. He separated it from his theological reflections, and his quest to grasp the revelation of Jesus on the land.

57

Crews 2008: 30.

58

Männchen 1987: 67–8.

59

Dalman 1917b: 27.

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On the surface of things, his anxiety might seem to be a simple rejection of Islam. But his interests in the land were not exclusory or simplistic. So we might better read his position as part of a Lutheran concern for history and the material traces thereof. Dalman wrote elsewhere of the paradox he sensed about the question for divine revelation, namely that even while it was distinct from its ‘outer facts’ (‘äußerliche Tatsachen’) or ‘conditions’ (‘Bedingnisse’), it was only through engagement with the ‘external conditions’ of the history that one could encounter its spirit.60 These external conditions were not only archaeological remains, but rather, all aspects of the land and its people. Yet his account of the dhikr intimates his sense of a site of collapse, or erasure: history and indeed reason give way to an ecstatic sensation – a loss of qualities that were important components within his research theology. We have gathered so far that the basic task was to enrich Christians’ encounter with the Bible and bring music into a form in which it could add to an archive of material. In this sense, songs collected were essentially adding to the archive that Palästinischer Diwan had launched.61 But how, in practical terms, was the collecting task undertaken?

Musical exchanges While Palästinischer Diwan provides some basic information about Dalman’s sources, it is two articles by one of his visitors, the Reverend Raimund Graf, which offer most detail on the process of tapping them.62 Graf travelled in the region, guided by Dalman, and had been asked by him to collect song melodies from people they met. Each of his articles thus presents song texts in Arabic and German, along with melodies gathered, and some quite detailed discussions about the varied ways in which he gained access to them.63 Graf ’s accounts, however, leave us wondering why Dalman did not use the recording equipment at his disposal during 1912.64 Even when the collecting work involved sessions arranged 60 61

62 63

64

Dalman 1913: 4. Kahle’s work also fits into this mould by reproducing song texts. Articles by several other writers do too. See Baumann 1908; Graf 1917, 1918; Rothstein 1910. Graf 1917, 1918. Graf 1917, 1918. Dalman’s guidance was presumably also behind an article by Baumann describing a wedding which included stave representations of songs. Baumann used the stave to show how the knee-bending and clapping of the dancers integrated with the song, and to affirm his argument that the melodic range of Arab melody was generally exceptionally narrow. Baumann 1908: 70. It had been sent to him by Erich von Hornbostel, founder of the Phonogramm-Archiv in Berlin.

57

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especially for local people to come and ‘deliver’ music, the team seems to have been unprepared. On one trip in which Graf tried to amass ʿatāba, he could not persuade musicians to repeat themselves, and sometimes they were not in the mood to sing.65 He also hoped to be able to rely on a harmonium on one occasion, and then had to make do without.66 As he said blithely, this did have the advantage that his ear wouldn’t be influenced by the fixed pitches of the harmonium, but it meant that everyone had to be very patient. He suggested (perhaps rather ungratefully) that one of the informants was not over-endowed with this quality, for he sang for only ‘a few hours’. From Graf ’s reports we gain a sense not only of the practical difficulties, but also ideational ones, because musicians could not really be expected to serve the primary goal of the institute in obvious ways. Graf ’s account of his experience with one Is’id ibn Hassan [sic] serves to illustrate.67 He had established a fee for the performance before the music began, after which he had allowed himself to be swept away by his sense that the musician’s soul melted into his instrument. Graf perceived that ibn Hassan became increasingly passionate, created a dialogue with music, and varied the tone colour and strength. His body was rocked by his passionate expression of love. Yet Graf then learned from his landlord standing by, who was laughing, that the song was actually a direct request to Graf himself. The musician had made an appeal for a new overcoat. Graf was further taken aback when ibn Hassan responded to his attempt to notate the next melody by asking for an increased fee. This action, reported Graf, was repeated after the ensuing song too. On leaving the house, ibn Hassan apparently helped himself to a bag of onions. Graf was startled once again. There was no sight or sound of divine revelation. Yet another problem was that writers’ own responses to music fell outside the framework officially set out for the institute, because they were highly emotional. Indeed, they led on occasion to fantastical entry-points into the Bible, and an apparently facile style of reportage from which Dalman generally set the institute apart.68 For example, Baumann wrote of Arab song that it seemed ‘to our ears’ to be highly monotonous, but that the longer one listened to it the more interesting it became, and that 65

66 67 68

Graf 1917. This article also contains descriptions of difficulties with notation, and Dalman’s help therewith (Graf 1917: 118–19, 130–1). Graf 1918: 127. See Graf 1918: 127–9. This article includes six song texts and eight melodies. He stated that the institute’s role was not to gain experiences that were only ‘phantasie- und gefühlsmäßig’. Dalman 1913: 4.

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the same thing was the case with the ‘almost unbearable twanging and screeching’ (‘Näseln und schreien’).69 As he sat and watched dancers in the flickering firelight, and heard the trilling of women singing in the background, I gave in entirely to the undeniable poetry of the event. In silent grandeur the starry heaven of Abraham arched over this piece of holy land, intimately closed in by the darkness of night, whose children had amiably set to their unsophisticated festivities without a care, unaware of the doubts and responsibilities of European culture.70

The same author, towards the end of an extensive description of dancing, singing groups of men and women, remarked that ‘So hatten wir das Schauspiel vor uns’ (‘thus we had the spectacle before us’), and compared the practices to passages from the Bible.71 Even though there was little left on the land to show the earlier Christian presence, he said, the promise of the patriarch and the continuation through father and son was what provided the joy of the peasants. Despite the confusion of peoples over the centuries, he said, a drop of ‘ancient Israelite blood’ has surely remained, a drop of Lebensfreude (joie de vivre) that lives in the present, untroubled by past and future.72 If this returns us to a rather basic observation, that the search for revelation was too proscriptive to allow for a very rich musical discovery, it also brings me to my fourth point in this section, that of practical competition with Islam. Rather in line with his ambivalent response to the dhikr, Dalman found the massed gathering of Muslims to prayer affecting, yet said that it recalled the ‘discipline with which Islam holds its adherents to violence, which led it once to armed battle against paganism, Synagogue and Church’.73 He also noted that Muslims were ‘still’ hostile towards Christianity. The solution he recommended was a competitive one. He wished to exemplify another persuasion, precisely the sort of work that his institute led, in fact. Thus he and his visitors travelled through the land accompanied by Muslims, he said, and worked together despite their differences. The future of the Holy Land should be like that,

69 72

73

70 71 Baumann 1908: 70. Baumann 1908: 71–2. Baumann 1908: 74. Dalman’s apologia for Baumann’s illustrative (and fantastical) writing can be traced in his Introduction to the volume in which this appeared. Reflecting on the many travelogues appearing in Europe that were ‘empty if not misleading’, he stated that those appearing in the Palästinajahrbuch could be corrective, because they would be properly researched. Dalman 1908: 1. Dalman 1917b: 26–7.

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he said; it would be peaceful coexistence between Christianity and Islam. ‘Then it will become apparent’ he wrote, ‘who the greater Muslim, meaning devout, is – the prophet of Mecca or the crucified Nazarene’.74 Through collaborative research of his theology, then, the superiority of life with Jesus might become apparent of its own accord. And he strove wherever he travelled to leave evidence that he and his companions were God-fearing and laid trust in their Saviour. The activity, he explained, was connected to the institute’s position within the German evangelical colony.75 There were, nevertheless, very generous dimensions to Dalman’s engagement with local music because his wish to influence was combined with a passion to ‘serve’ regional culture. When he published song texts – which he very frequently did within his articles – he was creating space for, and disseminating, the voices of people in the region, for further interactions.76 And a telling instance of how his support of local music could be combined with his religious sympathy can be gleaned from this text, extracted from a report on a German service in Arabic in which he participated in Hebron in 1921: The Prussian order of service was used in an Arabic translation; instead of chorales, Arabic songs were sung in a powerful voice, following folk tunes. The language of Ishmael, and the Reformation belief in him who broke the bread for his own in Jerusalem, were conjoined here in the city of Abraham’s grave.77

Arab music, we recall, was in Dalman’s view an authentic part of the people and the land. That it was perpetuated was desirable, then. And that the people on the land should ultimately become aware of the revelation of Jesus (in the form of a Lutheran liturgy) was no contradiction to the cultivation of their musical practices, because the latter were parts of the ‘outer conditions’ of the Holy Land, which were indeed media through which divine revelation could be reached. Once again, Dalman’s heritage in the Moravian church should help us understand his perspective, because openness to different types of music, and indeed the drawing on local musics in foreign missionary contexts, has long been a constituent part of Moravian activity.78 The sheer act of making research objects as Dalman

74 76

77

75 Dalman 1917b: 34. Dalman 1913: 4, 1917a: 4–5. A particularly striking instance is the end of Dalman’s annual report in 1909, in which he presents a spontaneous ‘poetry competition’ between two of his travelling companions by reproducing their texts in German and Arabic. The texts reflect on the beauty of the landscape through which they were travelling and their love of their homes. Dalman 1909: 25–6. 78 Dalman 1921: 84. Reed Knouse 2008: xi.

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did was a process of legitimating Palestinian cultural forms, and moving against the grain of prevailing attitudes among Europeans. Daniel Miller’s reflections on relationships between materiality and immateriality led him to claim that the creation of material is a one-way street: ‘just as there is no pre-objectified culture’, he wrote, ‘there is no post-objectified transcendence’.79 But the practice of creating material objects can also point beyond itself, towards a further moment of transcendence. For Dalman, I suggest, the transcription of an ʿatāba was the creation of a physical trace of the Holy Land. As such, it joined the range of other physical traces that were intended to serve a process of interaction that might result, ultimately, in divine revelation. It is unlikely that Dalman’s Muslim companions and helpers would have escaped such musical interaction themselves, because education in the Brüdergemeine entailed an intense and highly developed musical practice. Music was certainly a component of social meetings in Dalman’s Jerusalem home, which had a piano that his wife used for choir rehearsals.80 Moreover, given that he and his visiting scholars prayed together morning and night when on field trips, they probably sang together too.81 They certainly sang as they walked and at particular points on their journeys. One mentioned in his report that the bright tenor voice of one member of the party had kept them in good spirits even when they got drenched by rain, and it seems unlikely that this ‘Colleague Schmalz’ was the only one to sing.82 The same writer remarked that as they walked, ‘Großer Gott, wir loben dich’ (‘Holy God, We Praise Thy Name’) rang out over the land of the Jordan. His historical interest in pilgrimage song is also suggestive: within his description of a very cold night close to the town of Quneitra, he included the text of a song about the cold that had been sung by a pilgrim there in 1690.83 And on at least one occasion, the researchers exchanged songs with Bedouin from who they received hospitality.84 All in all, then, the institute was part of a rather complex exchange process, projecting itself physically and musically into the environment that it sought to discover.

79 80

81

82

Miller 2005: 22. Männchen refers to Hausmusik, and Dalman playing the piano. A male quartet was expanded by Dalman’s wife into a choir, which sang at missionary evenings and gave concerts connected to the Swedish mission. Männchen 1993: 57. One traveller’s diary included a list of biblical texts used as the basis of prayer for every morning and evening. See Siegesmund 1911. 83 84 Graf 1917: 129. Graf 1917: 137–8, 123. Gustavs 1913: 157–68 at 166.

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Anglican and American imposition On (not) hearing revelation Dalman’s interest in Palestinian music is in sharp contrast with the attitudes of most pious travellers, whose commentaries indicate extreme distaste. On one level, the context for this trend must be a widespread disparagement of ‘Oriental’ music already much discussed by scholars.85 It also falls in line with the European tendency to find the Middle East excessively noisy and gestural.86 A closer look nonetheless indicates some important localised trends. For instance, many visitors had a strong idea about the place before arriving but had not connected it with sound: widely circulated images of the region portrayed it as empty and silent. Melman observes that these qualities were of particular sentiment to Anglicans, who had ‘fuelled their spirit not by mediating the images of a Catholic Christ, but by rapturously poring over reproductions of landscapes … during the Second Revival of the mid-century, “empty” landscapes, which did not feature figures, could move audiences in a way comparable to that of Catholic iconography’.87 Issam Nassar argues tellingly that photographs of Jerusalem offer ‘a fixed and a silent image of the photographed object … silent, fixed in time and space’.88 He suggests, moreover, that the later photographs, which included people more often, were essentially biblical stagings, some even of ‘Biblical careers’ such as fishermen and shepherds.89 These were posed and still, also silent. Several travel writers did actually idealise silence, polarising it against the sounds with which they had to contend. One compared the sounds of Arabs with those of dogs, donkeys and camels, for instance, and presented silence as a quality that was beyond the Arabs’ reach: 85

86 89

See Bloechl 2005b, 2008 for attitudes among Protestants in the New World in the seventeenth century. Pasler 2004, 2006 provides a discussion of French disparagement in the context of nineteenth-century racial theory. Racy states that Western visitors to nineteenth-century Egypt were often startled by the strength of the emotions they identified in performers and listeners, but he does not offer a wide survey, or interrogate the positions taken by writers. Racy 2003: 1–5. See also Zon 2007, and for an early attempt to counteract denigration, Farmer 1914. 87 88 Hirschkind 2006: 14–15. Melman 1992: 214. Nassar 2006: 118 (my italics). The ‘framing eye of the photographer [could] remove the photographed individual from history and place him/her in a context relevant to Europe … Peasants appeared in the photographs with captions that referred to them with anglophile Biblical names and were classified into Biblical categories of people to whom the European viewer would relate (Samaritans, Jews, Mohammedans, Saracens … etc). And when the “ethnographic” divide was not used, “Biblical careers” were introduced and images of fishermen, shepherds and carpenters started to flood the tourist market.’ Nassar 2003: 149.

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peace and order are rather to the eye than to the ear. It seems an impossibility to the Arab to be silent. Work and amusement alike are accompanied by song. From morning till night they shout, scream, crack their whips; the very dogs, donkeys, camels of Syria make more noise than those of any other place within civilized ken, and here, with all the stimulus of expectation, of the presence of crowds, of excitement, conceivably even of religious devotion, it is not reasonable to suppose that they will keep silence.90

Another factor leading to denigration was a certain rivalry with nonWestern Christian groups. Elizabeth Finn, wife of the consul, was especially critical of what she heard in Jerusalem’s Holy Sepulchre church at Easter: The noise was fearful. All the bells of the adjoining convents seemed to be ringing; then two or three bells in the church itself were furiously rung all at once. Up above, in the Armenian gallery, a huge wooden nakoos (plank used as a bell), and somewhere else a metal one, were being beaten with hammers. The Copts and Abyssinians seemed to have begun their service in the little chapel adjoining the sepulchre itself, and were clanging brass cymbals with festival energy. During and amid all these noises the organ in the Latin part of the building pealed forth music which scarcely appeared to be sacred – I think it must have been some secular composition And when that subsided a little the chanting of the Latin clergy mingled with the other sounds; and processions of Greek monks passing by added their fearful nasal chant to the confusion and din.91

A further strand of criticism can be traced, emerging in direct contrast with Christian practices that were familiar, or cherished, by the visitors. For instance, surveyor and draughtsman Lieutenant Conder noted in his description of a Catholic mass in Jerusalem that ‘[t]he Latin ritual seemed simple and dignified, its music melodious, and its ministers reverential, when contrasted with the unearthly screeching and childish mummeries of the Oriental sect’.92 American explorer William Francis Lynch wrote of a Bedouin musician in 1850 that he gave ‘forth his nasal notes and his twanging sounds in most provoking monotony; the discordant croaking of the frog is music in comparison. An occasional scream or yell would be absolute relief.’ Going on, Lynch described sounds heard later that were reassuring: ‘At midnight, [we] again heard the bell of the convent of Mar 90 91

92

Goodrich-Freer 1904: 110. Finn 1869: 39–40. Like writers I mention below, she compared these worshippers’ ‘evil passions’ with the ‘calm gravity’ of the Easter Service where she herself worshipped. See Finn 1869 : 44. Conder 1879: vol. I: 333.

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Saba. It was a solace to know that, in a place wild and solitary in itself, yet not remote from us, there were fellow Christians raising their voices in supplication to the Great and Good Being, before whom, in different forms, but with undivided faith, we bow ourselves in worship.’93 Some writers expressed such views with particular sharpness in connection with the sound of Islamic practice. As we have already noted in Finn’s text at the outset of this chapter, the prophet Mohammed’s contribution was regarded an ‘imposture’. Thomson’s account of a Sufi ritual is a classic example and might be understood as a counterpole to the revelation that he and so many others sought: Generally someone goes off into convulsions, and, foaming at the mouth like an epileptic, falls to the ground, when the Zikr [dhikr] ceases. There goes one already. It is very kind and considerate in him to terminate the hideous performance so speedily. He is now supposed to be in a divine trance! There is nothing in all the customs of the East so outrageously repulsive and disgusting as this Zikr. The men look like demons yelling, and stamping, and foaming around the dead. If there be demoniacal possession in our day, it is seen, beyond a doubt, in this hideous ceremony.94

Another article about the dhikr, this one by British surveyor Lieutenant Mantell, noted that Europeans referred to it as ‘howling’.95 His account is less outraged than that of Thomson, consisting of a rather dry and blowby-blow description of events. But his sense that something is amiss can be traced from his references to singing. He breaks out of his matter-of-fact style each time he mentions it: The Zikr now began in earnest, with the beating of drums and clashing of cymbals; of the latter there were three pairs, which were used in turn by different derwishes in the ring. Two of the drums, being large, were beaten by men standing up behind the ring; the remaining drum was much smaller, and could be managed by a performer who was sitting down. This music was exactly the same as that which is heard at time of the pilgrimage to the shrine of Moses, and on Mohammed’s birthday, and other similar occasions. At intervals one or two of the number would break out into a loud and tuneless Arab song … 93

94

Lynch 1850: 277. Along similar lines, after nearly ten months of travelling through Constantinople, Damascus and the neighbouring regions, German Orientalist Heinrich Petermann arriving in Jerusalem found it ‘affecting … once again to be in an orderly Protestant Church, and to hear an organ, a German sermon, and German songs’ (‘ergreifend … wieder einmal in eine ordentliche evangelische Kirche zu kommen, eine Orgel, deutsche Predigt, deutsche Gesänge zu hören’.) Petermann 1865: 212. The occasion was Maundy Thursday in 1853. 95 Thomson 1861: 100. Mantell 1882: 160.

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The performance on the drums and cymbals described above lasted some seven or eight minutes, becoming towards the end rather painfully loud. At a pre-arranged signal it suddenly ceased, and one of the derwishes was left singing a rude chant … This was followed by a third prayer, and this prayer by a short but very violent Zikr. The sound certainly greatly resembled the barking of dogs, to which it has been frequently compared.96

Beyond all these tendencies, however, was one that was to have a much greater impact. As a second-generation coloniser wrote mockingly in 1913, new arrivals were often disappointed ‘that the land has changed, that the sweet singer of Israel no longer fills the air with his music’.97 Missionary William Thomson provides an example, struggling to account for the discrepancy between his idea of ancient Israelite music, and that which he heard around him. Reporting on a visit to a synagogue he wrote: ‘When they began what was understood to be singing, it was the most outrageous concert of harsh nasal sounds I ever heard’. Going on to explain that the same ‘nasal twang and grating gutterals’ was to be heard ‘in the singing of every denomination through the East’, he nevertheless sustained ‘no doubt’ that in the past, ‘the Temple service, performed by those trained for it, stirred the deepest foundations of feeling in the cast assemblies of Israel gathered at Jerusalem on their great feasts’. He then drew a neat line between those glorious past days and the ones in which Jerusalem now found itself: ‘They had also instrumental music, which these have not’, he observed, going to claim that ‘David himself was a most skilful performer’.98 The notion that there was an Israelite music that had once been, could be and perhaps should be resounding in the region was absent from Dalman’s work, even while he made comparisons with biblical sources. But it was implicit in two cases that I outline here, a (probably fictitious) account by American film-maker and lecturer Dwight Lathrop Elmendorf (1859–1929), and some (far more consequential) recollections by James Finn, whose comments I used to open the chapter. The two cases are usefully considered through Timothy Mitchell’s work on the colonisation of Egypt, according to which Europeans who arrived in the

96 97

98

Mantell 1882: 161, 162, 163. Baldensperger 1913: 15. The expression of disappointment from these commentators comes in line with Edward Lane’s ‘degenerationism’, a construction of Egypt in terms that suggested its descent from a noble historical moment to contemporary backwardness and primitiveness. Zon 2007. Thomson 1861: 683.

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region were accustomed to thinking of the world in terms of a representation, and brought with them a whole stock of ‘Egyptian’ images that they attempted to reaffirm on arrival. Mitchell constructs his theory with reference to Bourdieu and Said. From Bourdieu he takes the idea of the ‘stage’ the Westerners constructed on which to place local people’s lives, and on which to have them carry out actions predetermined by a script. From Said he takes the way that visitors artificially detached themselves from the process, as if their presence and their gaze was neutral and without effect in the region.99 As we will see from the biblical scripting of commentators discussed below, Mitchell’s account falls short of one highly significant style of reportage on Palestine. In brief, his frame cannot encompass the ways that writers there placed themselves within their own accounts. The significance of this will be clear in each example, and will return us to the dualistic status of Palestine – transcendent yet material – with which I opened the chapter.

On paths of righteousness Some years after his pilgrimage to Palestine in 1901, Elmendorf published a book of photographs entitled A Camera Crusade through the Holy Land. This is a classic piece of ‘biblical Orientalism’, a capture of Palestine in the interest of illustrating the Bible. According to Elmendorf’s Introduction, his faith had been ‘wavering’ before he made his journey; he had been ‘in doubt’.100 And he had been compelled to make the journey by Matthew 7:7: ‘Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you.’ Thus, as he explained: I went, I asked, I knocked: I doubt no longer, now I know. The journey on horseback through the Holy Land was a revelation to me; may my description of it be a help to many.101

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Bourdieu 1977: 2, 96; Mitchell 1991: 28. For Said, Lane was ‘both exhibit and exhibitor, winning two confidences at once’, displaying ‘two appetites for experience, the Oriental one for engaging companionship (or so it seems) and the Western one for authoritative, useful knowledge’. Said 1978: 160. Elmendorf 1913: vii. Elmendorf’s approach might be contextualised through the American Palestine Exploration Society (APES), which set itself up in 1871 in opposition to critical thinking about the Bible. A religious institution in the service of the church, it regarded its task as the ‘defence of the Bible’ against scepticism, indeed the verification of the Bible on the basis of encounters with the land. Elmendorf’s contribution, while not connected directly to the no-longer existing APES, is usefully considered in this mould. On American Palestine research see Ariel 1997; Kirchhoff 2005: 158–61; Moulton 1927--8; Vogel 1993. Elmendorf 1913: viii.

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This biblical scripting of his reason for travelling to the region is characteristic of the whole book, in which the photographs are presented with biblically inspired titles and/or alongside a list of references to the Bible. For instance, one picture shows three shepherds with the caption ‘Shepherds leading their flocks’ (even while the shepherds are sitting still), and another offers an arrangement of three objects, namely a leather bag (‘scrip’), a sling, and a mijwiz with a set of spare reeds, which Elmendorf identifies as a ‘shepherd’s pipe’.102 (See Figure 2.) In line with all illustrations in the book, each has a list of biblical references beside it. My main concern here is the event that Elmendorf stages, namely his own encounter with shepherds. But the pictures set a scene and provide props for that staging, so let us look at the one shown in Figure 2 first of all, in the context of Elmendorf’s explanation and the biblical references. It shows the items aestheticised into a still life, and Bourdieu might regard this as an ‘objectification’. But while the move shifts them from the environment in which Elmendorf encountered them, it places them into a dramatic biblical context. As Elmendorf explains in his commentary, the scrip contained stones that could be cast from the sling to bring wandering sheep back, which illustrated Psalm 23, as well as the words of Isaiah 53:6, ‘All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way’. 1 Samuel 17:40–54 could also be invoked, he said, for the sling took him ‘back to the time of David’, because according to that story, the future king of Israel slayed a Philistine by sinking a stone into his skull and then decapitating him. McDonagh has demonstrated how the literary construct of the ‘Philistine’ has been used to sustain nationalist mythology in modern Israel, and Elmendorf’s list of biblical quotations offers an exemplary demonstration of their early introduction.103 His references to the sling are exclusively from the Old Testament, and are connected with the Jews, understood as a people justly fighting the enemies around them. II Chronicles 36:14 is about the armaments that Jewish King Uzziah brought together in his war against Philistines, Meunites, and Arabs; Proverbs 26:8, in which Solomon advises on the foolishness of fighting, and 1 Samuel 25:29, where the sling is a metaphor for God’s safeguarding the Jews (David’s people) or casting out evil (the people of Nabal). We have already encountered 1 Samuel 17:40–54, in which David kills the Philistine using the sling.

102

103

For a thoughtful discussion of this instrument in connection with historical developments, see Racy 1994. The literary construct of the ‘Philistine’ has been used to sustain the Israeli national myth. See McDonagh 2004.

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Figure 2 Dwight Elmendorf, ‘Shepherd’s Pipe, Sling and Scrip’ (Plate XX) from A Camera Crusade through the Holy Land (1913).

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Similarly, Elmendorf’s references to music are almost exclusively bound up with embattled Jews. Once the Israelites have rid themselves of the Assyrians and the Egyptians – according to Isaiah 20:29 – they will have a song in their hearts akin to when they set out with the sound of the flute to the mountain of the Lord. Yet at times they should beware the flute, just as they should steer clear of wine – thus Isaiah 5:12 – because it causes them to lose their way (and indeed on occasion to be invaded by Assyrians, or collaborate unwisely in a Syro-Ephramite coalition). On the other hand, the sound of the flute (and harp, tambourine and lyre) may be a sign of revelation for Israel: Saul receives instruction in 1 Samuel 10:5 that he will go to the hill of God and be greeted by a band of prophets coming down from on high, their musical instruments ushering in the moment when the spirit of the Lord will come mightily upon him.104 All this constructs ‘the Holy Land’ as a hostile region in which Jews need protection, and in which Jews have a strong relationship to music. Elmendorf’s staging of his own place on the land takes a different line, one that moves the reader abruptly into the New Testament. The frame is provided by Psalm 23, for having noticed shepherds, he understood them to be ‘a beautiful illustration’ thereof.105 The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.

Elmendorf then used a verse from the Gospel of St John in order to organise his encounter with the shepherds. According to his account, he asked one of them to walk some distance away and call his sheep: the shepherd called (Elmendorf transcribed the call as ‘Br- Br-Br- Br-HaHa- Ha- Ha-’) and the sheep moved towards him. Elmendorf interpreted this as the enacting of spiritual leadership (as in the Psalm). Then, he himself called ‘Br- Br-Br- Br-Ha- Ha- Ha- Ha-’, imitating the shepherd’s call exactly. The result was negligible: ‘the sheep looked up, but they would not follow; they ran from me’. This, according to Elmendorf, proved the wisdom of Jesus’ words as relayed in John 10:5: ‘a stranger will they not follow, but will flee from him: for they know not the voice of strangers’.

104

105

The main references to the New Testament in Elmendorf’s list are involved with the scrip, and Jesus’ request that his disciples relinquish their worldly possessions (Matthew 10:10, Luke 9:3, and 22:35–6). Elmendorf 1913: 9.

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Two matters in particular are omitted from Elmendorf’s account. First, the identity of the people in whose lives he purportedly intervened. In fact, and despite his suggestive provision of texts about embattled Israelites from the Bible, population statistics, occupations and regional distributions would suggest that they were most likely characters who did not fit his script, namely Muslims. Second, the music of a ‘shepherd’s pipe’. This did not contribute at all to his main narrative, but was mentioned in passing, insofar as the shepherd produced ‘the weirdest melodies’ on it, and that these were protection from his being ‘crazed by solitude’. Elmendorf might have posed the question of whether such ‘weird’ music could truly belong to the spiritual leader he had identified in the shepherd. Two of the biblical citations that he himself listed (Matthew 11:17 and I Corinthians 14:7) could indeed have suggested prompts for him. According to Matthew 11:17, Jesus explained that people did not recognise John the Baptist as a prophet because he did not behave in the way that they expected – by dancing when they played flutes, for instance. Elmendorf may have taken this to heart, having already ‘recognised’ the shepherd as a character in Psalm 23. The fact that music did not fit his picture, but once categorised as ‘weird’ was not significant enough to disrupt it, reinforces the suggestion at the beginning of this section, that music was not a strong part of biblical Orientalist imaginings. It could only contribute in a vague way to the region’s remoteness and specialness without disrupting the projection. But the fantastical nature of the whole encounter is much more important. It may indeed be pure fiction (how did he communicate to the shepherd at all? Did he really put on this pantomime?). It seems essentially to be a literary device, designed to reinforce the remoteness and spirituality of Palestine. And the scripted role of Elmendorf himself as a worldly presence on the sacred stage is vital because without him there would be no proof. He came onstage to ‘demonstrate’ the shepherd’s essentially biblical nature and to set it against his own worldly one. As witness and testimony, Elmendorf established the truth of the biblical narrative and the biblical people in situ.

Fulfilling prophecy This role as witness is plainly an extreme case, but it serves to illuminate a recurrent – if multifaceted – feature of writings on the region, namely the emotional exposure of the author in the narrative. Even Dalman, who strove to detach his work from populist styles, revealed similar tendencies

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when he produced anecdotes about collecting experiences, when he tolerated self-reflexive imaginings by writers whose work he edited, and when he linked Palestinian music and the Bible within his own emotional landscape. As I discussed above, he argued that the sound of the shepherds’ pipes and the ploughmen’s songs were not only inseparable from Palestine, but also brought the Bible to life. ‘Palestine’ was unimaginable to him without its music; and this was conjoined in his mind with the Bible. Palestine thus joined the Bible as an intimate part of his existence and – the other side of the coin – he became visibly present as a part of Palestine. This combination of intimate connection and external presence could develop particular significance when combined with secular authority, especially in cases where the physical tasks of colonisation were explicit. I demonstrate this by returning to the memoirs of James and Elizabeth Finn, whose activities were at the intersection of church and government. Several of James’ commentaries refer to a new Ashkenazi Synagogue for Europeans, a project which he himself facilitated. They suggest that he was thrilled by his own work of enabling settlement, and thus improving Palestine (including a particular religious group of its population). On attending a ceremony there in honour of Queen Victoria in 1856, for example, he described prayers sung in Hebrew for the British monarch and Finn himself (and his family), followed by Hebrew chants and anthems. He was pleased with the ceremony, glad to think that ‘[n]ever, surely, could the Jews of Palestine go back again to the condition of oppression in which we had first known them’.106 He noted that they did not quite attain the singing standard of those he knew in London, but he observed that the singing of his protégés outstripped that of Jews who were already in Jerusalem. Finn’s engagement emerges equally strongly, and more passionately, from his reports on agricultural investments. He and Elizabeth secured a plot of land for agricultural development, and having arranged for Jews to labour without contact with Arabs, he found himself deeply moved by their singing: After operations were fairly started, I one day, after a hard day’s work, rode out towards the plantation, to see the men return from labour. They were met coming over the lanes and fields carrying their baskets and tools on their shoulders; a ragged troop, very ragged but very happy, singing a chorus in Hebrew, ‘We are labourers in the field of Abraham, our father’.

106

Finn 1878: vol. II: 464.

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Holy land, 1840–1948 My eyes filled with tears as the words came to recollection, ‘They shall return to Zion with singing, and everlasting joy shall be upon their heads’ (Isaiah xxxv.10), taking this as a very small indication of the better days to come for their nation.107

This text is particularly striking, because it justifies support for Jews by considering their presence in Palestine to be the realisation of prophecy. In other words, Finn’s own actions seem to bring about the fulfilment of the Biblical text. And he finds the moment resonating in music on the land – music that could indeed be understood biblically. We can return to Mitchell’s theory for a moment to clarify the significance of this. Finn’s texts attempt to ‘stage’ an illustration of Palestine related to biblical scripture involves placing himself on stage. The stage, moreover, is an extension of the Bible, and rather than merely repeating and affirming an imagined extension, or offering an objectified representation, the account portrays the author’s agency. Finn emerges as an active character in a neo-biblical event, indeed as supporting the realisation of Isaiah’s prophecy. Mitchell’s notion of ‘staging’ is thus apt, but here should be expanded to incorporate the active role of the writer, a self-staging that enters and interprets a script on the stage rather than representing it as a detached observer. The function of Mitchell’s theory is to set up a conceptual basis for the consequent colonisation of Egypt. Staging led to enframing, he argues, and the redesign of Cairo. A similar two-prong approach is useful in this context too, because there was a side to the Finns’ work in settling Jews that was highly pragmatic. James was a member of the London Society for Promoting Christianity among the Jews, while Elizabeth was daughter to one of Britain’s first missionaries to the Jews in eastern Europe, a leading Hebrew scholar and millenarist, founding member of the London Jewish Society.108 The way such English missionary groups conceived Jews, however, was rather particular. They had inherited, after all, a discursive tradition in which England was understood biblically, namely as a nation

107 108

Finn 1878: vol. II: 67. Reverend Alexander McCaul. In the context of reflections on the inspiration he gained from the River Jordan, Finn celebrates the fact that the peoples of Tahiti and Labrador, too, are ‘learning to sing of Him who sanctified that stream with His baptism’. Finn 1878: vol. II: 114. And as outlined in the Introduction to this book, conversion had particular resonance for Palestine. He was also supportive of conversion among Arabs, writing that the ones who became Protestants ‘were anxious to escape from the intolerable state in which they had been brought up, and to enjoy the liberty accorded them by their civil Sovereign’. Finn 1878 vol. II: 149. See Melman 1992: 179ff. for more on Elizabeth Finn’s missionary work.

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akin to ancient Israel.109 They also lived within an English tradition of selfconstruction as a ‘chosen people’, which during the nineteenth century was increasingly brought together with images of Palestine. William Blake’s Jerusalem (1804) is a well-known presentation of ideas already in popular circulation, which rapidly intersected with mainstream political, religious and academic discourses. Thus while in 1853 the Earl of Shaftesbury referred to Palestine as ‘a land without a people for a people without a land’, within twelve years the Archbishop of York had identified the new inhabitants – and they were the English: This country of Palestine belongs to you and to me, it is essentially ours. It was given to the Father of Israel in the words: ‘Walk through the land in the length of it, and in the breadth of it, for I will give it unto thee.’ We mean to walk through Palestine in the length and breadth of it, because that land has been given unto us. … [It] is the land to which we may look with as true a patriotism as we do to this dear old England, which we love so much.’110

In consequence, even where British officials such as Finn supported Jews’ settlement in Palestine, their contribution was shot through with ambitions for conversion and indeed take-over. The ‘nation’ the British conceived for Jews (mentioned by Finn above in connection to the synagogue) was ideally to be one of Jewish converts. This degree of entanglement prompts reflection on the ways in which we consider Orientalist reportage and intervention. Rather than embodying an external position, many Europeans had a sense that they already belonged to the region (or that Palestine was a part of them, just as the Bible was, and that therefore it belonged to them). The sentiments were most profound among English people, who also harked from the strongest colonial power of the time. Thus, rather than merely carrying out orders, they also followed religious convictions that they experienced with considerable emotion and personal engagement. Two final musical examples indicate 109

110

On England’s modelling itself on ancient Israel since the eleventh century, see Hastings 1997: 16–18, 42. This is a much-quoted extract from the stated goals of the Palestine Exploration Fund. See, for instance, Bar-Yosef 2005: 7. A yet more extreme position was taken by a small group of Germans led by Christian-Pietist Christoph Hoffmann, who stated in 1849 that the Jewish people to whom God had assured ‘the promised land’ were no longer in existence. Hoffmann also asserted that a group that he brought together and named ‘das Volk Gottes’ was now heir to the promised land. As competing claims over the Ottoman regions developed in the Crimean War, Hoffmann proclaimed that only ‘das Volk Gottes’ had the right to Palestine. Although the group’s early attempts to settle were unsuccessful, by 1868, calling themselves ‘Templars’, they had managed to form their first colony in Haifa. They spread widely. See Carmel 1975: 442–4, 2000: 11.

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the inimitably nationalistic quality of their religious attitudes, and serve thereby to lead us towards the shifting categorisations that I discuss in Chapter 2. Elizabeth Finn wrote two factional accounts about her life in the region, each of the two books a very roughly hewn evangelical Bildungsroman making Jewish conversion the primary theme. One of the main characters is a Jewish Orthodox child who becomes a piano-playing and composing Christian. Music is important to the narrative, as Billie Melman points out, because ‘the emphasis even in low-church liturgy, on sound and instrumental music, [is] to an orthodox Jew, suspicious’.111 Thus part of the Jewess’ ‘liberation’ from her Judaic suspicions involves initiation into Western music. In a key moment in Finn’s narrative, she describes the Jewess’ apparently thrilled but serious interest in the prospect of hearing Handel in London, and remarks inwardly ‘Verily, music is a bit of heaven.’112 She intimates thereby that the girl’s seriousness with regard to Handel is to be taken as a sign of her spiritual progress (away from her Jewishness). Another example can be traced from the Finns’ involvement at the first Protestant church in Jerusalem, where weekly singing practices took place in order that part-singing could compensate for the lack of organ.113 According to Ben-Arieh, Christ Church was the first large-scale modern construction in the Old City of Jerusalem when it was completed in 1848, and was funded by the London Society for Promoting Christianity among the Jews.114 And James understood the music precisely for its sign of times to come. His text is one of the clearest illustrations of the way that Protestants supported Zionism while they actually hoped it would become Christian: The service in our own Christ Church was well attended … The anthem sung had special interest – ‘Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is He that cometh in the name of the Lord!’ – in its reference to future as well as past, and inasmuch as Christian Hebrews joined in singing it with gentile Christians. An offering of a bottle of fine old Jerusalem wine was afterwards brought to the organist, and set upon the table by one of the oldest Jewish converts, in the fulness [sic] of his delight at this glorious song being thus made part of the day’s service; for, of course, he and his people linked it with the future of the Hebrew nation.115

The text shows Finn describing his role in a less emotive style than that traced in the context of the synagogue above. His role as a civil servant 111 112

113

Melman 1992: 208. Finn 1869: 113. She said that this was a paraphrase of an Arab proverb about the heavenliness of the natural environment, namely. ‘Verily, green is a bit of paradise.’ 114 115 Finn 1866: 404. Ben-Arieh 1984: 253. Finn 1878: vol. II, 234.

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carrying out the wishes of his employer is more apparent than his personal feelings, and on such occasions Palestine was only partly a place of personal revelation and spirituality. Because, as the quotation at the head of this chapter has already announced, it was also a place of British life, the latter conceived in an apparently blessed space shared between Christians and (converted) Jews.

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2 Distinction

In 1845 the feast was especially distinguished by the presence of the French delegation and forty practised singers, of whom most were French. At midnight, St. Catherine’s Church was packed with the colourful congregation. The service began. The organ rang out like the voice of a friend that one hadn’t heard for years. The glorious song of the union of French and a small number of Germans would have been perfectly suited to filling our dispositions with sublime religious feelings, had not the obtuse, unreligious, unsophisticated behaviour of the local Christians been a constant disturbance. The Franks who were present, few that they were, behaved with much more dignity.1

Swiss traveller Titus Tobler’s Christmas commentary intimates a supremacist attitude towards ‘the West’ that has been elegantly scorned by Trouillot as ‘always a fiction, an exercise in global legitimation’.2 Yet Tobler’s own legitimation is also somewhat particular, even while so pervasive among Christians at the time that he had no need to explain it. Bethlehem being a site of religious significance, he assumed entitlement to a certain type of experience there. The assumption triggered disparagement of the local people, who seemed to be obstructions. While the ‘Franks’ in his account are distinguished by their singing and comportment, locals are rendered different through an apparent lack of religious decorum. Themes of difference, ethnicity and race have been discussion points in music research for some time, but the Palestinian case offers a particular contribution to the field, precisely because such ideas were combined not only with European possessiveness but also with European obsessions about the biblical status of the region.3 Here, therefore, while exploring constructions of difference, I continue to develop the discussion of religion introduced in Chapter 1. I focus on Protestants to begin with, introducing the examples of this Tobler and the English Mary Eliza Rogers, both of whose writings stand

1

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2 Tobler 1849: 206–7. Trouillot 2003: 1. See, for instance, Born and Hesmondhalgh 2000; Brown 2007.

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out among contemporary reporters for the detail of their descriptions. I use them to develop my suggestion in Chapter 1 regarding the engaged, participatory position of writers on the region, and their differing views as to how music might be involved in its improvement. I then move on to consider the work of the leading research institution that followed on their tails, England’s Palestine Exploration Fund (PEF). Established in 1865 with the patronage of Queen Victoria, this combined scientific and strategic interests while placing the Bible at the heart of its concerns.4 (Equivalent German and American organisations do not offer comparable sources, because they were not supported by such colonial might.5) In the third section of the chapter I explore ways in which commentary on music was increasingly bound to negotiate the boundary between the categories of ‘Arab’ and ‘Jew’. One obvious contributing factor to this change was the rise of Jewish immigration. But the establishment of the British Mandate was instrumental because of the administrative establishment of the division between ‘Jew’ and ‘non-Jew’, as discussed in the Introduction above. The false dichotomy – given that so many Jews are also Arabs – has been subject to significant theoretical discussion of late, drawing on broader research into discursive differencing.6 Modernist thought was predicated on sharp categorisations, and the essentialisms playing out in discourses on Palestine are akin to those elsewhere. So the question in the third part of the chapter is how researchers, who were working in a context of music and broader cultural mixing, negotiated increasingly polarised and bounded categories of thought.7

4

5

6 7

Even while regional strategic interests are manifest, it was not until the end of the Second World War that the idea of Palestine as a separate state entered European governmental plans. Kirchhoff suggests that the region was simply too sought-after and contested to be gained without conflict, and that rulers preferred not to touch it. He goes on to characterise diplomatic and church interventions as ‘small solutions’, nonetheless. Kirchhoff 2005: 88–9, 92ff. The Deutsche Palästina Verein was founded in 1877 and developed in explicit rivalry to its English equivalent. Leading Prussian nobility were among its leading members, but its political representatives were fewer than those of the PEF. It published barely any commentary on music in Palestine. The APES, founded in 1871, was very short-lived and does not serve us well either. For discussion of the APES, see Ariel 1997; Moulton 1927–8 . Anidjar 2003; Raz-Krakotzkin 2007. Stokes 1994 is a classic collection of writings exposing music’s fluid and constructed role in identity formation, along with the spatial politics that are closely related. See also Bohlman 1999 for a discussion of music’s permanently shifting position in relation to claims about it. Calls for an end to ‘differencing’ have come from a range of scholars: see, for instance, Agawu 2003; Covach 1999.

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Stage 1: Informal encounter. Mary Eliza Rogers and Titus Tobler Mary Eliza Rogers travelled to Palestine in 1855 with her brother Edward Thomas, who was vice-consul to Haifa and then consul to Damascus. She lived in the region for at least four years while undertaking philanthropic ventures, painting with watercolours and writing. Although she was evangelical, she denounced the proselytism that surrounded her, and the relationships she forged with Muslim women seemed to lead her to rather sensitive attitudes towards local people. These can be traced in her book Domestic Life in Palestine (Rogers 1862). Tobler (1806–77) had no more training as a Palestine researcher than did Rogers.8 His father had been a Protestant pastor, but his own professional activities were medical and political (he was active in promoting liberal reforms to the canton of Appenzell where he lived). Early in his career he spent his spare time encouraging further education among doctors, researching regional dialects, then studying local demography and editing a newspaper. The big change came in 1835, when he took a holiday to Egypt, also visiting Bethlehem, Jaffa and Jerusalem. This led him to spend all his subsequent free time and funds (generated through private medical practice) on Palestine, and he was to make three further journeys to the region. He wrote with some interest and tolerance about Jewish and Islamic forms of life, thus illustrating a tendency that Kirchoff has described as a German ‘Christian patriotic’ conception of the region.9 However, his intellectual and financial independence allowed him a certain detachment from the primary institutions of academic and religious intervention. He was immensely prolific. From the vast array of commentators on nineteenth-century Palestine, Rogers and Tobler have achieved particular recognition. Rogers’ book was grasped by the PEF, when it was founded in 1865, as exemplary of the types of work that should be done on the region and Billie Melman found Rogers’ accounts of Palestinian women’s lives ‘unsurpassable’ in 1992. Tobler laid the groundwork for German-language writing on Palestine, and was taken as a model for the endeavours of the Deutsche Palästina 8

9

The best recent accounts of Tobler’s biography are Carmel 1998 and Goren 2003. For a much more detailed account, see the biography published by Tobler’s friend, based on diaries and accounts: Heim 1879. Kirchhoff 2005: 139–40. Tobler was in fact Swiss, but wrote in German and contributed primarily to German discourses.

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Verein when it was formed in the year of his death.10 He is still respected for his cartographic and bibliographic work, although research remains to be done on his immense output as an author of books and popular articles.11 In this section I examine three areas to demonstrate how the two authors thought about music, in terms of their sense of how Palestine should develop in the future. For Tobler, who thought structurally, music was interesting and sometimes extremely enticing but not directly relevant to the changes he wished to see. For Rogers, however, who sought to change day-to-day existence, it was a useful medium of interaction. I begin with the presence of Western classical music repertoires and technology in diplomatic circles in Palestine. In the following example, Tobler reflects on hearing Beethoven in the residence of Jerusalem’s French consul. First he considers the novelty of the piano in the region, then enhances this by toying with the notion that Beethoven himself would be surprised to hear himself in this context: The French Consul, Botta, received us every evening. He had a piano; Beethoven was played, most ceremoniously, an entertainment of high taste, through which the melancholy and banal thoughts unavoidably came to mind: ‘How astonished would Beethoven be, when he returned to the world and heard how his memory was celebrated in the play of tones in Jerusalem?’12

Moving on, his text moves beyond playfulness to intimate the long-term impact of musical intervention. Although this begins with incongruousness, the sense abates. Thus the distinctiveness of Beethoven’s music (blue sky) became somehow absorbed into the broader context of Jerusalem (rainy sky). Tobler ceases to find it odd that Beethoven is being played: the Western interpolation has become invisible and inaudible: Alone these words of astonishment with which we welcomed the renowned Maestro among us, lost their piquancy as they were repeated over time. Moreover, the familiar is every bit as wearisome as the common or the low, and it is impossible for the enthusiasm not to trickle away. Having floated to the blue heavens of music and art we fell yet more deeply into the rainy heaven of the holy city, and conversation became a Herculean endeavour.13 10 11

12

Kirchhoff 2005: 167. Stockdale describes Rogers as ‘racist and self-aggrandizing’, which is fair, but neither characteristic is unusual in authors of the time and place. And Stockdale is herself able to use the richness of Rogers’ texts to furnish her discussion about Palestinian responses to English arrivals – not all commentators offer sufficient material to allow that. Stockdale 2007: 195. 13 Tobler 1865: 437. Tobler 1865: 437.

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Rogers’ rather different view can be gathered from her description of an ‘inauguration’ ceremony for the first piano in Haifa, which had been obtained by the Dutch vice-consul. As ‘the only one’ in the town who could preside in such a way, Rogers agreed to play at the soirée shortly after arriving in Haifa with her brother. On arrival they met ‘the Governor and about twenty Moslem gentlemen, in their richest embroidered costumes’ in the drawing room, she reports, while ‘the antechamber was crowded with servants and lantern-bearers’. Noting local visitors’ comparison of their own efforts with hers, she showed them notated music, and took pleasure in their admiration of her fingerwork: The piano had been tried in turn by nearly all the guests, and they said, ‘We can not make it speak the same language which you cause it to speak, lady!’ I handed to them some pieces of music, saying, ‘Could you do so with the help of these?’ It was very amusing to hear their exclamations, and to observe the surprise with which they watched my fingers, especially when they found that I looked all the while at the book before me. They are accustomed only to see small and portable musical instruments, and they wondered at my command over one so large. They said, ‘The laborers at harvest-time do not work so hard or move their hands so quickly.’14

Going on, Rogers then reports on demonstrating to the assembled that the piano need not be merely an instrument of labour and pleasure, but also a tool of self-definition, and, indeed, of elevation. In her account she also implies that the piano could be an instrument whereby local attitudes towards women could be fundamentally challenged: They seemed to be more struck with the rapidity with which the keys were touched than with the sounds which were produced, till I played their national anthem, ‘Abdul Medjid’. Then they all seemed roused, and a clear-voiced singer, the Sims Reeves of Haifa, came forward immediately and sang. The rest of the company joined in chorus. One of the Beks seemed to appreciate music so much that I told him that if he would buy a piano for his wife I would teach her the use of it. He said, ‘my sister, our women are not capable of learning their heads are made of wood it would be as easy to teach donkeys as to teach them’.15

In fact although Rogers suggests resistance to the notion of music education, she goes on to report that it did spread. The implication is unmistakable: she has used the piano to transform local people and their environment, indeed to bring them all closer towards a bourgeois European society at the port: 14

Rogers 1862: 376.

15

Rogers 1862: 376.

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By degrees nearly every one in the town became familiar with the sounds of the piano, and it gave rise to many very pleasant soirees. This was the dawn of a new era in the history of the little European colony at Haifa, and music and singing were cultivated with energy.16

The two anecdotes suggest that while Tobler sensed the piano disappearing into the overwhelming situation of Jerusalem, for Rogers it was an effective medium of change. My second point of comparison between the two lies in their attitude to local women. Tobler’s vision was interwoven with admiration and prurience. He delighted in female hospitality, sometimes even suggesting that their way of singing through life might be imitated in the West.17 The most blatant example of his desire to capture them is an Orientalist self-staging as a quasi-predator. He set out in the text explicitly to dispel myths according to which locals spend their entire lives in prayer. The result vacillates between eroticism and quasi-scientific schematisation.18 First, its opening section introduces his description of women picnicking in a meadow, and continues by offering some advice: Should a European wish to court one of the veiled ladies in a well-rehearsed manner, it would be well worth his while gathering her water, using a bucket that hangs on a cord and can be dipped into a cistern. That in itself would be something to delight a Frankish lady’s man. Even if the lady is not the wife of the Pasha or the Mufti, she must be an Oriental, which is magic enough, but she might yet be the honourable lady of the Sheikh el-Cherâ [sic]. That is the promising secret of the veil.19

Moving on, Tobler then recommends an approach as follows: Now my friend, a word of advice. Do not go boldly; one must come close to the shy ones cautiously, if we do not wish to spoil the game all at once. So we measure our steps with the greatest care, and make them neither too long nor too short, neither too rapid nor too sluggish, so that they are most covetous, just as those of someone wishing to approach a sleeping angel without awaking her.

The result – on the rare occasions that one has success – will be a view of what lies beyond the veils, for these will be lifted by the picnicking women.

16 17

18 19

Rogers 1862: 376. See, for instance, an invasive description of women walking home from the market, singing. Tobler 1859: 76. Tobler 1853: 303. Tobler 1853: 301 (my italics). The meaning of the sheikh’s attribution is not clear from this context.

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The view will sometimes be attractive, and sometimes merely a ‘mechanically stupid compilation of eye and nose and jaws and chin’. But Tobler’s ultimate goal lies beyond the visual, for he wishes to capture the sound that accompanies the lifting of the veil. On evoking the accomplishment of this feat he makes a classic set of Orientalist moves. First he removes the sound from the meadow and places it in the context of rituals (weddings and celebrations of births), then he describes it as ‘strange’, next he suggests it is a living fossil (it is ‘certainly ancient’), and this he reinforces with reference to secondary literature (by means of a footnote).20 Finally, he advises that the ‘joy cry’ has two forms, one of which he reproduces on a Western music stave as if it were a melody. The cry warrants further study, he suggests, which indeed justifies his textual advice on how to track it down, and as if to persuade the reader to make his own approach to gather samples, he resumes a seductive mode, slipping into wonderment to confess that ‘from the mouths of young girls the salila, a type of whooping, sounds very pleasant, and for me it had a type of magic that I couldn’t describe’. Rogers’ contrasted approach to women can be gleaned from her reports on mourning ceremonies, something which fascinated most writers of the time.21 Unusually, though, she observed from within a community in which she had herself already established a place. From one of her descriptions, we are led to understand that professional mourning women were called upon as a solution to the difficulties that one might have with releasing grief. She described a recently widowed woman in the following way: Grief bewildered and almost stupefied her, she could not even weep. ‘Call for the mourning women, that they may come; and for such as are skillful in lamentation, that they may come; and let them make haste, and take up a wailing for us, that our eyes may run down with tears, and our eyelids gush out with waters.’22

In the subsequent part of Rogers’ description we gain a sense of her own entry into the context (note the biblical reference that expands the frame): 20

21

22

‘One hears something like the joy cry that is also to be heard at weddings and celebrations of births, that strange, certainly ancient expression of joy’; (‘man hört doch etwas und lieber das Freudengeschrei, welches auch an Hochzeit- und Geburtsfesten vernommen wird, jenen merkwürdien, gewiß antiken Ausbruck der Freude’). James Finn disparagingly understood public mourning as an unfortunate function of the ‘peasant class’, and regarded ‘the ‘frenzy of singing, howling and dancing’ as an ‘exhibition’ (Finn 1878: vol. II, 312). Tobler devoted a chapter of his first book to the varying burial practices across the region. Rogers 1862: 181.

Distinction

I joined the mourners on the third day. As soon as I entered the house, I heard the minstrels and the loud cries of the people. See Matthew ix, 23. I was led into a large, long room. Women were sitting on the floor in rows on two sides of it. An open space was left down the middle to the end of the room, where the widow sat apart, with her two youngest children lying at her feet … She kissed me passionately, and said, ‘Weep for me, he is dead;’ and then, pointing to her children, she said, ‘Weep for them, they are fatherless.’ I sat near to her… The wailing, which had been slightly interrupted at my entrance, was renewed with vigor.

Rogers then goes on to describe the attire of the women in detail, also noting their distraught appearances. During the few hours she spent in the company of seventy-three women, she herself was not only a welcome attendant, but was expected to participate: Three rows of women sat on the matted floor on the right-hand side, facing three rows on the left. They were all clapping their hands or striking their bosoms in time with the monotonous melody which they murmured. Presently an especial lamentation was commenced, to which I was invited to respond.23

Rogers describes this responsorial lamentation, and also provides its text, before proceeding to report in detail on a sword dance, and the ongoing singing. At this point, whereas most writers reported only generally on organised mourning, Rogers distinguishes between the various roles being played. Her comments about hysteria and self-control betray her Protestant prejudices, but she is able to provide a nuanced account nevertheless: As one by one the dancers sank overcome with fatigue, others rose to replace them. Thus passed seven days and nights. Professional mourners were in constant attendance to keep up the excitement, and dances and dirges succeeded each other, with intervals of wild and hysterical weeping and shrieking. I remained about two hours in the room, and occasionally I watched from a window which overlooked it. I could see that the leader had a powerful influence over all present. A certain tone of her wild wailing voice drew tears from the eyes and produced hysterical emotion in some cases. There are girls who have a morbid taste for the excitement thus produced, and are celebrated for the facility with which they fall into fits of uncontrollable weeping. The real mourners and the amateur actresses in these scenes are usually ill afterward, but the professional assistants do not appear to suffer from the fatigue or excitement, and they do not lose their self-control for a moment.24

23

Rogers 1862: 182.

24

Rogers 1862: 184.

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Rogers’ commentary includes reflections on what she herself was learning from her intimate encounters. It reveals that even while she was firm in her sense of superiority, she was unusually self-reflexive. Moreover, she provided her informants with names and biographical details, and offered accounts of their mutual attempts to communicate with one another despite very different terms of reference. My final point, which concerns Rogers’ and Tobler’s use of the Bible in their writing, is already suggested by Rogers’ text above. She used the Bible as a point of reference within her own narratives occasionally, simply referring the reader to a passage in the Bible without quoting it. She evoked an ideal, then, and suggested similarities; but she did not force the comparison in the way of many contemporaries. Tobler was also an unusual voice in his time, for he was cuttingly critical of the religious trend in writing about Palestine. He used his first text on Jerusalem to expose its dampeningly prosaic appearance, for instance, and to call into question the term ‘Holy City’.25 Nevertheless, and despite the range of sources he had at his disposal, he did have inclinations to appropriate the people for the Bible. His account of local music makes this clear. First he confessed that he did not greatly like the music he had heard, and went on to dismiss it by invoking thundering loudness, monotony and a generally low level of development.26 Having got such clichéd statements out of the way, however, he shifted into an ‘objectifying’ mode, representing what he had heard and seen quite precisely by measuring instruments, identifying their pitch capacities and describing the materials from which they are constructed. Local names of the instruments appear in transliteration and in comparison with secondary literature by Bremond, Harmer, Lane, Hammer-Purgstall and others. His account in this section is thus comparable not only with Edward Lane, but also with the cartographic methods introduced to Palestine by Robinson. And it is in line with his own measurements of Jerusalem’s old city. The instrument described in the following example he refers to as a double zummāra (‘Schalmei’, shawm): The pitch range does not even stretch to an octave, not our octave in any case (A, D, E, F, F#, G, B). The exemplars I have to hand are made of a yellow reed and 25

26

Pointing out that Jerusalem was not – as one imagined – in a valley, or surrounded by verdant lands, he wrote that it appeared to him meaningless on arrival, and that once he had made his way through the poorly paved alley, he found himself gazing at a puddle. Tobler 1839: 43–4. The mules and camels reminded him of the streets of Cairo and Alexandria, and the miserable situation of Christians rendered the term ‘Holy City’ entirely inappropriate. Tobler 1839: 82–3, 97. Tobler 1853: 308ff.

Distinction

are formed in three pieces, (a) with the pitch holes, (b) the piece inserted into that and (c) the mouthpiece. (a) of the larger exemplar measures 9" in length and 1/2" across, (b) is 3" in length once inserted, and 4" across, and (c) is 2" in length and 3" across. The length of the other exemplar, which has a more refined sound, is no more than 10" in total.27

What sets his account truly apart from Lane, however, is that within a discussion of various drum types, he reaches for the Bible. Its function – somewhat paradoxically – is to grasp an event in which music made by Muslim pilgrims affected him emotionally. It was so moving that he subsequently found himself unable to get a particular phrase out of his head. This phrase, on close inspection, turns out to be his own elaboration of two Psalms. So his gesture was a rhetorical ‘capture’, marking the boundaries of his religious knowledge and sensibilities, for the Psalms do not appear in the Quran that the pilgrims themselves celebrated: When pilgrims to Mecca were being solemnly collected up in the holy city in the lead up to Spring 1846, about eight men were playing tambourine and cymbals. They struck on every step, thus at first slowly, but then increasingly quickly and finally as fast as possible, at which point a timpani joined in. This tumultuous, rapturous music has something indescribably peculiar and melancholy, I cannot get it out of my head, nor the words ‘You timpani and cymbals: sound for Him!’28

This text warrants contextualisation in Tobler’s long-term view of Palestine, which encompassed a rather dramatic and sustained transformation. Thinking back on the years that had passed between his various trips to the region, he observed with pleasure in 1868: Truly in the short span of eight years, through the love of Christians and their competitiveness, just as through the enthusiasm of Jews for the land of their fathers, something extraordinary has been achieved. Thirty years ago an American missionary, an Italian doctor employed by Mehemed Ali, a so-called Baron Müller, a German gardener and a French drum major were with me here, and now such a mass of Franks, such capital from their spiritual activity. The peaceful crusade has begun.29 27

28

29

Tobler 1853: 310. He notes that the instrument is doubled, which would make it a mijwiz rather than a zummāra. Psalsm 149:3 has the timpani and sounding, ‘in tympano et cithara cantent ei’ (Hebrew Bible). Psalm 150:3–5 contains the cymbals and timpani (but not alongside one another). 150:3, ‘laudate eum in tympano et choro, laudate eum in cordis et organo laudate eum in cymbalis sonantibus laudate eum in cymbalis tinnientibus’ (Hebrew Bible). Tobler’s expression was: ‘Ihr Pauken und Zymbeln, tönt Ihm.’ Thanks to Melanie Wald-Fuhrmann for help with this passage. Tobler 1868: 321–2.

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Other comments reveal that he imagined a fundamental structural change ahead, in which the prevailing Turkish regime would be challenged in order to secure ‘a better future, in which the Frankish powers revolutionise the Turkish disorder in the promised Land, and implement a Christian order’.30 Moreover, by closing these comments with the slogan ‘Deus vult’ (‘God wills it’), he aligned himself with Pope Urban II’s declaration of the First Crusade in 1095. Although he seems to have imagined a religious cosmopolitanism, a land free for ‘Mohammedans’, Christians and Jews (as well as singing women, one assumes),31 he did not envisage that local people would have anything to do with its running. Rogers’ position was equally imaginative, but operated at a different level, exactly the day-to-day (interventionist) one. Her desire to come to know the non-Christian situation sensitively was in fact an important part of her strategy to make it more Christian, a component of her desire to reach women on a sufficiently intimate level to be able to help them transform themselves. She spent extended periods with women living in harems, and wrote in consequence that there was no point in ‘trying to prove that Christianity is true … that the Bible is a Divine Revelation’, because it would generate resistance and hostility. She argued instead that change had to be introduced gently from within, and that ‘any one who will help really to elevate [the women] and reform their homes, will be helping indirectly to strengthen and confirm Turkey as a nation, for the men will be more vigorous and noble-hearted when the women are made free’.32 Rather like the case of Dalman, it was close contact that gave her hope for change. Even while both Rogers and Tobler reveal through their writings their desires for change, they still managed to report on musical activities in ways that are informative today. They were indeed interested in the people they encountered and on a certain level respected the distinctions they identified, even while imposing – from their internalised biblical resources – Christian pre-eminence within their scripts. Regrettably, it is harder to come to the same conclusion about the next stage of Palestine music research, to which I now turn.

30 32

31 Tobler 1859: 6 Tobler 1868: 321–2. Rogers 1862: 394. For some reflections on how disturbing and dislocating such ‘elevation’ and ‘reform’ could be for women, see Stockdale 2007: 159–91, and on Rogers’ impact specifically, see Stockdale 2007: 164–6.

Distinction

Stage 2: British strategy. The Palestine Exploration Fund, 1865–1918 At its foundation in 1865, the PEF described itself rather peculiarly as ‘a society for the accurate and systematic investigation of the archaeology, topography, geology and physical geography, natural history, manners and customs of the Holy Land, for Biblical illustration’. Confusion over whether the land or the Bible was under investigation (or depiction) is equally blatant in Honorary Secretary George Grove’s explanation as to why a study of Palestine was necessary, namely that it was the ‘country … in which the documents of our Faith were written, and the momentous events they describe enacted’, and that ‘no country more urgently requires illustration’.33 Kirchhoff justifiably argues that while this desire to ‘illustrate’ was central to the PEF, it developed within a framework provided by the British national mythology that brought religious and scientific interests together. As both Moscrop and Kirchhoff have indicated, however, the PEF was also a product of strategic interests in the Middle Eastern region, and grew not only out of the Jerusalem Literary Society, but also from initiatives such as the Syrian Improvement Fund (designed for economic exploitation in 1864), and the Jerusalem Water Relief Fund (1865).34 The latter was not only philanthropic, but was also an aid to colonisation: without a reliable water supply, Jerusalem would be difficult for the British to settle in, whereas precisely this, as we have already seen, was strongly desired by the British. When the Palestine Exploration Fund was established in 1865, it absorbed the Water Relief Fund, including a team of Royal Engineers (and strong connections with the War Office). Indeed governmental support for the PEF was probably provided on the basis of the strategic value of surveys already carried out by the Water Relief Fund. The PEF’s conflation of scientific, religious and military interests fits neatly with the national mythology discussed in the Introduction, within which the English themselves became part of the nation of Israel. (I have already quoted the Archbishop of York’s expression of this sentiment in Chapter 1.) All the PEF’s publications, then, should be seen as products of a sense that there was a ‘country’ that needed England to claim it. In this

33 34

Grove 1865: 1. Moscrop 2000: 59. See also Kirchhoff 2005: 250ff.

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section I look from this perspective at two distinct historical phases, the first of which lasted until 1885, and was characterised by a claim to history and morals. In a fund-raising appeal published in The Times the PEF acknowledged that the Ottoman Empire was currently in control of the region by stating that the ‘blood-red standard floats with its white star and crescent from the walls of Jerusalem’.35 Having invoked a chilling symbol of warfare, it intimated a different ethos by asking why ‘the Christian world [should] give the Turk a moral victory too’ (my italics), and going on to say ‘the Mahomedan [sic] sees in the very city of Our Saviour a proof of the errors of Christian faith, and finds a proud satisfaction in the catholicity of his own’. Drawing authority from its patron the Queen, and from an illustrious collection of supporters already established, the PEF sought, by stirring popular fear of Islam, to energise subscribers in ‘wealthy, religious, and Protestant England’. The Archbishop of York was particularly forthright at a public meeting when he said that ‘I also think it is a sacred duty which we now undertake, to endeavour, by a new crusade, to rescue from darkness and oblivion much of the history of that country, in which we all take so dear an interest.’36 In this early phase of the PEF, then, Palestine was a region currently dominated by Islam, but also one from which ‘biblical’ material should be, on moral grounds, gathered. The duality led British observers to place locals into two broad categories: either they were Muslim (and thus rivals, even enemies, and the article on the dhikr I cited in Chapter 1 is a product of that), or they were Judeo-Christian (potentially idealised and captured for biblical illustration, as we have already seen, and will see more). The plan was that locals were thus studied as ‘manners and customs’, a field that appeared on a list in Grove’s ‘Original Prospectus’ and was to be modelled on Edward Lane’s book on Egypt. (It would ‘describe in a systematic and exhaustive order, with clear and exact minuteness, the manners, habits, rites, and language of the present inhabitants’.) However, in its early years, the Quarterly Statement devoted very little attention to this area of study, which is probably a combined result of the difficulty of finding traces of Christian ways in a predominantly Muslim population on

35

36

An extract was reproduced in the Palestine Exploration Fund Quarterly Statement of 1869: 16–17. Available at http://archive.org, accessed 10 October 2012. Cited in Kirchhoff 2005: 154.

Distinction

the one hand, and the primarily military-cum-strategic interests of the organisation on the other.37 Early PEF gestures towards ‘manners and customs’ in which music finds a place fall into two main types, the first of which served simply to make a distinction between the local population (regarded as bellicose) and the writers (peaceful). Orientalist E. H. Palmer provided a fleeting example in a report on his survey of the strategically crucial Suez region, where he and his companion Tyrwhitt-Drake ‘expected to meet with difficulties with the Arabs amongst whom we were going’.38 Even while wrapped up in the costume of scientific research, their efforts to investigate the region were a component of British strategy vis-à-vis French control of the region. Unsurprisingly, the explorers encountered resistance among residents, and indeed inflamed existing tensions between rival tribes. In Palmer’s account of an attempt to reach Abdeh, he uses music to gently amplify their belligerence: Here was a very steep and difficult pass, to the top of which our opponents were hastening, and as they saw us coming after them they began to get in a great rage, and bade us get back and be off out of their country as soon as possible, if we valued our lives. As we still kept on they waxed more and more excited, began firing off their guns and singing their war song.

And contrasting belligerence with the ostensibly philanthropic nature of his own presence, Palmer went on in his report to describe his interaction with a child at the scene. The framing of Western kindness to children within a context of hostile adults will be a trope to remember later in this book: A little boy at this point made his appearance, and hearing the sounds of war and seeing our own martial appearance and that of our two Jehalin, thought that his last hour was come, and, crying bitterly, besought us not to kill him. We quieted his fears and gave him a small coin, for which and for his life he seemed extremely grateful.

The second type found more general fault with precisely the people whose ‘manners and customs’ were to be the subject for a study. Such writings were transparently a product of the view that the local people should conform more closely to the Bible. A speech delivered by committee member the Rev. Dr S. Manning at the PEF’s Annual General Meeting in 1874 explained that the researchers’ duty was to eradicate discrepancies 37

Grove 1865: 1.

38

Palmer 1871: 3.

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existing between the Bible and the beliefs of the people of the land. The minutes of this meeting record that Manning claimed ‘[t]here is such a minute accord between the Land and the Book that they completely illustrate one another. Just as the pieces of a dissected map fit one to another, so do they coincide with the minutest possible accuracy.’39 His comment neglects to mention the scholarly disputes that had grown up in response to Anglo-English naming projects, that had indeed intimated that prior to the projects the locals had been in error. It was, he said, ‘a great result to have obtained – to have detected errors – to have dispelled superstitious delusion, which have grown up age after age from the traditions and ignorances of the innumerable tribes and races who have held that hallowed spot in Jerusalem’. His final comment (plainly a reference to the perceived belief systems of the ‘tribes and races’), apparently drew applause from those present: ‘We have not only to dig away vast mountains of debris, but to scatter vast clouds of prejudices. We must exorcise and cast out the idols of the cave before we can arrive at accurate knowledge; and it is only when error has been scattered that we can see facts in their true light. (Cheers.)’40 This polarisation of local ignorance against researchers’ wisdom was developed in one of the earliest articles on ‘manner and customs’. Dating from 1875, it was written by Charles Clermont-Ganneau, who worked for the French consul in Jerusalem while using his Oriental Studies, Greek and Hebrew to undertake archaeological work for the PEF.41 It is not clear what desire propelled him to put pen to paper on ‘The Arabs in Palestine’, as he called his article, but it was presumably not great affection. He proposed that studying the people would assist in the study of the Bible, but that such research would not involve ‘a few questions put to stupid and suspicious peasants as to the name of village, ruin, or valley’.42 Rather, it would comprise ‘close, minute, methodological observations of the manners, customs, legends, and superstitions of these peasants’ (presumably the same ‘stupid and suspicious’ ones). Behind this proposal lies the biblical chronology that visitors used to classify the people that they encountered, and that had by this time spawned an extensive discourse. Locals from the countryside were

39 41

42

40 Palestine Exploration Fund 1874: 230–1. Palestine Exploration Fund 1874: 231. According to Moscrop, he was an ‘amateur’, whose archaeological work was often ‘opportunistic and motivated by a desire to obtain artefacts, either for French museums or himself’. Moscrop 2000: 86. Clermont-Ganneau 1875: 202. This can be read as a critique of the work of Robinson et al.

Distinction

understood as ‘modern representatives’ of tribes that had been in the region when the ancient Israelites arrived.43 When the Israelites left and went into exile, these groups stayed. (Obviously such a chronology ignored, or treated as insignificant, the multiple invasions and shifts in population in the intervening centuries.) An extreme version of the chronology, along with a ruthless desire to find a place for the Bible in his text, emerges from Clermont-Ganneau’s eccentric assertion about women. Having decided that they engaged with more creative cultural practices than did the men, and indeed developed cultural practices that did not conform to mainstream Christianity or Islam, he pronounced that they were ‘behind their husbands by several centuries’.44 Within his value system, in which practices understood as pre-dating Islam were superior to Islam itself, ‘woman’ became a category of great worth. After all, she lay in close proximity to the Prophets: It would be extremely interesting to examine closely these daughters of Canaan, to study their special customs, their funeral dances, their marriage and mourning songs, their prejudices, their peculiar legends, their habitual forms of expression, and a variety of other matters, down to the details of their toilet, which Isaiah denounces as the arsenal of idolatry. Besides, it is among the women … that we shall find what artistic traces yet remain of a people who never really possessed any art but of the most rudimentary kind.

The next article on ‘manners and customs’ was by James Finn’s wife Elizabeth, and developed the theme of local belligerence by focusing on ‘clans, warfare, religion and laws’. Finn categorised the peasants as ‘Canaanites’, and in her text she addressed the reason for their putative lack of progress from that state quite sharply. The surface problem was their incessant enmity, the fact that they were ‘divided into clans’, each of which ‘wages its own petty wars with its neighbours’. She found – as did other writers at the time – the deeper reason for this to be their difference from her own political background, namely that they ‘have no

43 44

Clermont-Ganneau 1875: 208. Clermont-Ganneau 1875: 213. As Melman has argued, evangelicals had elevated women of the Bible ‘to paragons of Christian femininity. The Matriarchs, Sarah, Rebecca and Rachel; the women in the times of the Judges – Deborah and Hannah in particular; the women surrounding Christ, “last at the cross and first at the sepulchre”, Anne and the Marys, Dorcas and Phoebe, are all models, internalised by evangelicals in their daily life.’ The problem was, however, that ‘[c]ontemporary Middle Eastern women presented a glaring contrast to the idealised models of the past’. Clermont-Ganneau’s idealisation of their creative activities may also be seen as an attempt to compensate for the fact that they did not fulfil the role assigned to them in the thinking of the evangelicals. Melman 1992: 199.

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national life’. ‘[O]f national unity there is absolutely none’, she wrote; ‘there is nothing among them approaching to the cooperation of patriots as a nation, ready and willing to join hand in hand for the mother country’. Her political distinction had historical backing: the various groups ‘differ as the fragments of a nation may which has been broken up at an extremely remote period into distinct and hostile clans’, she wrote. And it had implications for the present, and the future: ‘this state of things [was] enough to explain, in great measure, the backward condition of the people at large’.45 This point served as a frame within which she presented some of the fighting witnessed on her travels, and, as did Palmer eight years earlier, she drew on music to enhance the description. Within an evocation of a rollicking battle scene, women gained her special attention. They ‘took the keenest interest in the warfare’, she claimed, and operated as sources of intelligence, ‘detecting plots or secret movements of the enemy’. Having offered the text of ‘one of their impromptu battle songs’, she infiltrated a biblical turn of phrase to lead to a further description of their music: Of course, the victorious army are greeted, when they return home to their villages, by processions of the women, who go forth to meet them singing songs of triumph. The woman most skilled in improvisation leads the song with a couplet or so extolling the acts of the hero and of the victors. Her companions then take up the chorus, ending with the Zughareet (the shrill El-el-el-loo [sic]), waving their long sleeves over their heads, and clapping their hands with frantic joy. Another couplet is then given, followed by the chorus as before.46

Up to 1881, then, PEF publications saw music used to scorn male Islamic practice (Mantell on the dhikr), to reveal a realm of the feminine that could support Bible learning (by Clermont-Ganneau) and to illustrate a realm of the feminine that related (almost biblically) to war (Elizabeth Finn).47 45 46

47

Finn 1879: 34. Finn 1879: 42–3 (italics are my own). The King James Bible has ten occurrences of coming/ bringing/going forth to meet. See Exodus 4:14, Exodus 19:17, Numbers 31:13, Judges 11:31, 1 Samuel 30:21, Proverbs 7:15, Isaiah 7:3, Jeremiah 41:6, Matthew 25:1 and John 12:13. Broader questions of ‘manners and customs’ were not addressed in the Quarterly Statement much more extensively, and in 1880 and 1881, the PEF, perhaps concerned about its neglect of this area, reproduced two partially ethnographic articles by the Reverend Klein, translated from their German publication in the Zeitschrift des deutschen Palästina Vereins. As Kirchhoff has demonstrated, German Palestine researchers were as keen as British researchers to connect the Bible with the land. However, German scholars guarded against such trite connections as were made by authors such as Clermont-Ganneau: they were concerned to ‘investigate the Bible’ rather than ‘illustrate’ it, and sought ‘parallels’ between practices recorded in the Bible and those to be witnessed in the present. Their style was thus less inclined to borrow from

Distinction

While these suggest a general hostility to Islam and a desire to interpolate the Bible, they do not suggest any ambition to take over control of the current population. In 1885, however, the PEF took a new rhetorical turn that suggests this direction. This is the second phase in my account, and it is characterised less by moral claims than by a quasi-regimented grab. It also moves away from the participatory style I have discussed above, and towards a new reliance on categorisation and mechanisation. That year it released a Circular announcing a fresh project, namely ‘on a large and exhaustive scale … the collection of modern Syrian customs, usages, traditions, languages, legends, and manners’, which would ‘without doubt prove fruitful in Biblical illustration’.48 The Circular was issued as an appeal to twenty-one institutions with Great Britain and two in America (ten were Christian), as well as to a long list of religious figureheads in Great Britain, and to the more nebulous ‘all scholars, archaeologists, and Biblical students who may be willing and able to render assistance and advice’. It stated that their help was required in the drawing up of questionnaires. The latter would be distributed among people located in the region who had already been selected by the PEF, and were described as ‘an organised machinery of agents’.49 Even while the Bible remained a key reference point, this was a new strategy. With an ‘agent’, after all, there would be no need for direct contact with local people. One of the earliest of these ‘agents’ was Philip W. Baldensperger, born in Palestine to German and Alsatian missionary parents, who lived there from 1856 to 1875 and from 1880 to 1892. He was indeed one of the favoured agents. His earliest set of ‘answers’, published in combination with the ‘questions’ he had been sent in 1893, drew approbation from Lieutenant Conder, who was generally dissatisfied with ‘replies of school teachers and educated natives’ (although he had been pleased to gather some that would provide ‘Biblical Illustrations’).50 The questions established the frame of reference for various fields of study, for instance the supernatural, and peasant religion.51 In response to the same questions,

48 50 51

fictional genres. Klein’s brief description of Bedouin singing for relaxation did say that the content was ‘often nonsensical’, but he did not make specifically derogatory or patronising comments about the people. See Klein 1880: 251,1881: 115–16. 49 Palestine Exploration Fund 1865: 215–16. Palestine Exploration Fund 1865: 216. Conder 1893: 323, 1889: 120. Queries ranged from general requests such as ‘Describe the Sacred Trees’, through specific mysteries such as ‘Why are eggs tied to the walls of houses?’, and on two occasions prompted musical description. These were related directly to the concerns at hand, ‘Have you seen them dance in honour of Welys, Nebys, or dead men?’ and ‘Are they accustomed to sing, dance, light lamps, or make sacrifice at the Kubbeh or Makam?’ Baldensperger 1893a: 208 and 1893b: 313.

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Baldensperger not only described appropriate scenes, but provided two song texts as examples. (It is worth noting that later researchers, working within a different methodological frame, met Bedouin who, having been confronted with such ‘exams’ themselves, had conjured up ‘hilariously wild tales’ as answers.52) One consequence of this approach was that the PEF published a series of ‘Occasional Papers on the Modern Inhabitants of Palestine’ without actually doing research (or much writing). The first such paper was written by someone introduced as ‘an intelligent native Christian – not educated in Western ways of thought – who went about in the villages conversing with the people in order to obtain this information’.53 No name is offered for this person, whose words were ‘literally translated from the Arabic – and … recorded here without any considerable attempt at verification or amplification’. The unnamed author offered narratives of how important events such as the festival of Nebi Musa unfolded, and included descriptions of dancing and singing. The Englishmen whose names do appear on the text give no indication of having witnessed the event themselves. Nor did they attempt to contextualise the test they offered in the – by then – considerable German-language literature available on the matter. Their lack of interest in ‘the modern Inhabitants’ themselves is palpable. Before this series got going however, the new shift towards systematisation waved in a new phase in the Quarterly Statement, within which various categories used loosely by earlier writers within their commentaries became headings of articles, thus firming up the perceived definitions of population groups. For instance, Clermont-Ganneau had proposed that ‘woman’ was a separate historical category in 1875; and both Elizabeth Finn and Klein had made a categorisation in 1879 that slotted inhabitants of the region into three types, namely townspeople, villagers and Bedouin.54 A series of articles by Baldensperger published from 1900 to 1901 takes these schemes further. His ‘Woman in the East’ series divided his subjects into ‘Woman in the Towns’, ‘The Countrywoman’, and ‘The Bedawin [sic] woman’, the last of which was of particular interest, because of the PEF’s concern for biblical history. She was ‘very probably unchanged through thousands of years. Just as Sarah, Abraham’s wife, lived in tents about two thousand years before Christ, we meet the same way of living amongst the nomads.’55 52 54 55

53 Abu-Lughod 1986: 24. Masterman and Macalister 1916: 170. Klein 1881: 111–12 (a German version had been published in 1879). Finn 1879: 33. Baldensperger 1901: 167.

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It was clear from the start that even if the categories were partially helpful, they were also partially dysfunctional. Klein tackled this head on, and observed that there were mixed regions where the categories did not work; Baldensperger noted (with apparent surprise) that some singing practices overlapped.56 As he put it, the ‘marriage customs of the Bedawín very much resemble those of the Fellahín, but there are some differences … the same style of songs are [sic] sung’.57 Klein’s explanation was based on his understanding of seasonal migration habits and subsequent contact between various groups. Baldensperger, however, drew on (ancient warring) history in an attempt to fit his experiences into the prevailing construction of the region as a warring jumble. Even while his findings about ululation at a peasant wedding could well suggest contemporary exchange among population groups, he insisted on an ancient historical explanation: This is invariably the same by Townswomen, among Fellahas and Bedaween, and the most remarkable feature is that the words are alike, that is, they are not adapted to country or town, but more generally to the Bedaween life, and prove that the Arabs of Palestine at least were always influenced by the conquerors of Arabia, who came as Bedaween warriors. Many, if not all, of their songs are mingled with love and war, and weapons.58

At the same time that the PEF put out its Circular requesting advice on constructing questions, it drew up a whole new list of categories that were intended to provide a framework, and music had a place of its own, albeit at number twenty of twenty-two: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

56 58

Religion and Morals. Land Tenure, the Village Commune, &c. Archaeology. Ethnology. Health and Disease. Superstitions. Legends and Traditions. Language. Agriculture, including Botany, &c. The Daily Life.

57 Klein 1881: 111–12. Baldensperger 1901: 173. Baldensperger’s interest in historical chronology found its most extensive elaboration in a series of articles under the heading ‘The Immovable East’. These emerged over two decades, and were complemented by a book of the same name. Baldensperger 1900: 183.

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11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

Industries. Arts and Architecture. Amusements and Sports. Birth and Marriage, Death and Burial Laws and Customs. Usages still surviving, which illustrate the Bible. Traces of the successive occupants of the Holy Land. Modern and ancient Literature. Proverbs. Science. Music. Natural History. Peculiar manners and customs not included under any of the above headings.59

It is not clear that this had a direct impact on the reporting of music. However, one article did appear in 1900 that constructed music as a discrete entity, namely R. A. Stewart Macalister’s ‘The vocal music of the Fellahin’.60 Macalister was an archaeologist who assisted on digs from 1898 onwards, a particularly turbulent period for the PEF in terms of leadership and research findings.61 Given this fact, a dearth of quality material ready for publication may lie behind this piece rather than a coherent PEF strategy, for it shows no signs of expertise. Yet it does bear the traces of the increased concern for categorisation, distinction and control thereby. And intriguingly, Macalister drew on the mechanism of the musical score to fall in line. We might think of this as his ‘agent’, for it mediated powerfully between himself and the people that he heard sing. But it can also be considered as one of what Bohlman has called ‘the tools of modernity’, in other words, a mechanism whereby a ‘new discourse of authenticity’ could be generated, ‘one made legible … by the readings yielded by machines’.62 Macalister’s use of the score is productively read alongside comments made in an article by the Reverend George E. Post in 1891, which polarised ‘the Oriental mind’ against ‘western ideals’, and inserted musical notation in between them as an ambiguous sort of litmus test:

59 61

62

60 Palestine Exploration Fund 1885: 216–17. Macalister 1900: 104–9. The archaeologist under whom he worked initially was forced to resign in 1900 and at that point Macalister took over his job as the PEF’s explorer and archaeologist in the region. See Moscrop 2000: 173–9 for a discussion of this period, including Frederick Jones Bliss’ demise and Macalister’s ascent. Bohlman 2007: 11.

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The Syrians love music, but it is usually either a dull monotone, in a minor key, or a series of wild sounds, which seem more like the inarticulate notes of a midnight forest than the regulated expression of the harmony of the soul. Yet such as it is, although hardly amenable to the laws of western notation, it has a power over the minds of the people apparently greater than that exercised by the more artistic harmony of Europe and America … Music is more or less obedient to law in the Oriental mind, albeit the intervals and harmonies differ very widely from western ideals. It has even been committed to paper, and, in a modified form, expressed by western notation.63

Macalister’s development of this tendency was poisonous, because he removed the ambivalence of notation entirely. To begin his article he made a historical distinction between two ‘classes’ of song, namely ‘extemporaneous flourishes and the set traditional melodies’.64 The former, he proposed, were ‘of later origin’ than the latter, which were ‘more interesting’. He went on to provide some examples of melodies on a stave, and then used this, his own representation, as a basis for alleging failure on the part of the music makers: The scale is divided into degrees similar to those to which Western nations are accustomed. In first attempting to reduce these melodies to writing one is puzzled by the appearance of quarter tones, which of course cannot adequately be represented in the staff notation; but after carefully comparing the performances of different singers on different occasions, it becomes clear that these are merely the faults of the rendering, and are not inherent in the melody.

Having dismissed quartertones as ‘faults’, and preposterously claimed a correctness for his own melodies, he homed in with more specific critical remarks about ‘renderings’: In some notes of the tunes here given there is a greater tendency to error than in others. Thus, in Example 2, the minim A, bar three is very apt to flatten – sometimes it drops to a barely sharpened G, while the following G almost retains its proper pitch. On the other hand, the F, the last note but one in Example 3, is often sharpened. Example 4 is badly treated, and sometimes the distortion is carried even as far as 4a, which is almost a different melody altogether … It is evident, however, that in the garbled form of the tune (Example 4a) the melody is unconsciously conceived as ending on the note here marked by a pause within brackets. I once heard 4b, which is Example 4 transposed to the Phrygian mode: I cannot but think that this was due to the bad ear of the singer.65 63 65

64 Post 1891: 130 (italics original). Macalister 1900: 104. Some fifteen years later he wrote another piece referring to music, which is equally uninformed. This one, ‘A Day in a Fellah Village’, had not originally been intended for publication, for it was only field notes that Macalister made for himself. See Macalister 1915: 106–7.

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Masterman’s treatment of music reveals how an apparently neutral mechanism – Western notation – could seem to remove the subjectivity of the author, whereas the latter was in fact dominating the reportage. His appropriation of the mechanism enabled him to thoroughly dismiss the music and musicians that he heard.

Stage 3: Negotiations with Jews The increased presence of Jews in Palestine shaped European commentaries very substantially. This final section thus explores the ongoing attempts to represent Palestinian Arab music in the changing context. I explore the three key sources, namely Gustaf Dalman, Abraham Zvi Idelsohn and Robert Lachmann, suggesting how each writer negotiated its presence.

Preserving the shepherds’ pipes (Gustav Dalman) When I discussed Dalman in Chapter 1, I explained his context in German research into the Bible and missions to the Jews, and I examined how his writings on Palestine displayed a competitive attitude to Islam, even while a friendly one. As the region changed around him, he was drawn to make some more pointed statements, however. I introduce this new position by comparing two reports of the same musical encounter with Bedouin. One was written by a visitor to the institute and one by Dalman himself. The visitor, the Reverend Arnold Gustavs, described rabab playing and singing that he said was the highlight of one evening. It was an unexpected pleasure, for the travellers had been unable to reach their target on one travelling day and were grateful to accept Bedouin hospitality. It was particularly welcome as this added to an experience of ‘antiquity’, and the highlight of the evening was listening to their host sing two songs, one celebrating the communal drinking of coffee, and the other lamenting the difficult times in which they now lived. Gustavs relished the nobility of the Bedouin’s performance and attributed it to the desert freedom in which he lived. Moving on, he romantically noted that the starry sky, the landscape and the music and surrounding sounds made it ‘an evening to dream of’ (‘ein Abend zum Träumen’). He then indulged in a reflection on the biblical past, and how it could still be traced around him, in the tent, the hospitality and the women serving their guests and men folk with milk and freshly baked bread.66 66

Gustavs 1913: 165–6.

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Dalman’s own report on the same event is rather different. He stated that the reason that they could not reach their destination before nightfall was that a new railway had destroyed an ancient pathway he intended to take, indeed a path that Joseph may have taken, and Vespasian too. Anyone wishing to make the journey must now cross two rivers to get round the missing part, he wrote. He then used the text of the Bedouin’s song to allude further to changes brought by colonisers. Going beyond Gustavs’ vague reference to ‘hard times’, Dalman’s representation celebrated the resistance that a tent gives to the war trumpets of foreigners, and the space it provided for sharing coffee with comrades.67 He used a song text, then, to enhance his political statement. While this might seem to indicate some remoteness from Dalman’s primary project, the seeking of revelation, it is actually very closely connected. One of his earliest discussions of the problems caused by modernisation and settlement appeared in 1910, in an article that attempted to construct the contemporary moment in Palestine on a timeline between a long and complex past and a possible future. He detailed the many changes since biblical times caused by the erosion and reforming of the landscape, the migration of flora (which in turn affected the diet of the inhabitants), the development of different types of grain mills, bread ovens, house designs, furnishings, clothing, tools and the keeping of animals.68 However, he suggested that current changes being brought from Germany and other parts of Europe were taking no account of the long-standing qualities of the land. He warned: ‘After many changes Palestine has become an Arabic land. New changes will and must follow the old ones. We should take care that they lead to the improvement, but not the ruin of the residents.’69 Essentially, he was taking an increasingly preservationist stance, one intended to safeguard the land – understood as ‘the Holy Land’ of Jesus. From an article he published in 1915, his concern seems to have been threefold. First, he was fearful that local practices were not being developed and elevated by new currents brought from outside, but were being erased. It was wrong, he said, that children in missionary schools did not know local folk songs.70 Second, he applied his theological convictions to criticise Jews who were not believers. New settlers favoured ‘Jewishness’ above ‘Judaism’, he wrote: they sang a ‘national song’ day and night, and school

67 70

Dalman 1912: 53–4. Dalman 1915b: 139–40.

68

Dalman 1910: 28ff.

69

Dalman 1910: 37.

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children were speaking a Hebrew language that had been invented at a writing desk.71 He also observed that the Jewish colonisation of the land led to peasants being forced to sell up and become dependent workers, and that local people were being similarly beaten out of the trade in the town.72 He accepted that there were Jews who grasped Palestine as their fatherland, with heartfelt love, and praised certain Jewish colonies for their agriculture.73 However, he warned that no colonisation could be effective unless it enriched the land and the people already there. While the first point makes clear his cherishing of the land (and its extension into the people and their practices already noted), the second and third points reveal his antagonism towards Zionism. This was ultimately a protective position. He had already perceived that Christians in Jerusalem were in competition with Muslims (who stood closest to the government); and he now determined that they were under threat from newly arriving Jews. The ‘enrichment’ of the land that Dalman envisaged could only take place along certain biblical lines, because the country’s grace was for him only a product of its history. The maintenance of a connection with that history was more valuable than new settlement. An ongoing engagement with the history could take place within the context of the natural landscape and the Bible, aiming for generation of ‘an image of its old ways’ (‘ein Bild von seinem alten Wesen’).74 Ultimately, the function that Palestine and its people had for the world was to be memorial, witness and clarifier of the sacred history (Denkmal, Zeuge and Erklärer). Männchen has argued that by this stage in his life, Dalman’s desire to convert Jews had been separated from his vision for Palestine itself. Plainly there is truth in this: already in 1900 he had observed that Palestine was not a place where missionaries should focus, indeed that ‘God has opened 71

72 73

74

Dalman 1915a: 34–5, 1915b: 132. In the last article on the subject published prior to the Balfour Declaration he described how a ‘revolution’ among staff and students at the Hilfsverein der deutschen Juden (Aid Association of German Jews) wished to make Hebrew the language of tuition (whereas no such demands were made of English or French organisations). He could not see the benefit of introducing this language (with its Polish vowels and European [westländlisch] consonants and which one could only understand if one knew the German and Jewish phrases behind it) to ‘multi-lingual Palestine’. It could never be the language of everyone, he said, and it would demand too much of children’s energy for education. Dalman 1917c: 46–7. Dalman 1915b: 132. In illustration of this, he quoted a verse from an early Zionist song text by Mordechai Ehrenpreis Feld, ‘Dort, wo die Zeder schlank die Wolke küsst’. The whole verse can be read in Berliner Vereinsbote, 10 September 1897: 7. Dalman 1917c: 48.

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the door wider elsewhere’ (‘In andern Orten hat Gott die Thür weiter aufgetan’).75 Nevertheless, they could not be separated out so cleanly. As Dalman reflected on Jewish immigration, he refuted the narrative according to which Jews had been driven out of the region. He argued instead that they had diverged from the path God set them, and migrated. It need not prevent them from winning back their right to the land of their fathers, he wrote, but they had to do this in the spirit of Isaiah 27:1, namely ‘Zion shall be redeemed with judgement, and her converts with righteousness.’76 In the end Dalman regarded Jewish settlement as a threat to Palestine’s function. If Jerusalem became another Berlin or Vienna, he said, if the country gave more space to plants imported from Australia and California than to indigenous ones, if Zionists replaced the melancholy ditty of the shepherd’s pipe with their Polish compositions, then Palestine would cease to offer the world anything.77 Dalman was subsequently obliged to develop his thoughts about Palestine outside the region, because he left during the First World War and the new British government did not allow him to have the position back.78 The British led their own research activities, in particular by founding the Palestine Oriental Society, which was intended to cultivate discourse between hitherto isolated scholars working on the ‘ancient Orient’. Its associated journal, The Journal of the Palestine Oriental Society (JPOS), was first published in 1920 and continued throughout the Mandate.79 It sought to allow for the construction of multiple histories and future peoples in the region, at a time understood as a ‘new epoch in the study of the antiquities of the Holy Land which was to be expected under a new and enlightened administration’.80 Dalman did not contribute to JPOS, but spent the two Mandate-era decades writing his multi-volume study of Palestine, Arbeit und Sitte in Palästina (Work and Custom in Palestine), a colossal account of the rural life he had experienced in the preceding years. This is his most celebrated work. It may seem to add little to observations so far, but its basic reaffirmation of 75 78

79

80

76 77 Dalman 1900a: 99. Dalman 1917c: 46. Dalman 1917c: 49. The reason given for this was the offence that Dalman had caused in 1914, when he withdrew from the PEF and published a stinging indictment of British war affiliation. Männchen 1993: 82. For the original text, see Dalman 1914: iv. The initiating archaeologist, American Albert T. Clay, gathered members of the future Mandate government together at his first meeting, including, for example, the Military Governor of the time, Colonel Ronald Storrs, who acted as host on the occasion. By the second meeting, Field Marshal Viscount Allenby had agreed to be patron. See the first volume of Journal of the Oriental Society 1920: 1, 5. ‘Introductory Notes’, Journal of the Oriental Society 1920: 1.

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Dalman’s convictions is important, given the new political context. Seven of the eight volumes appeared during his life, namely in 1928, 1932, 1933, 1935, 1937, 1939 and 1941, and their tone is different from that of his earlier publications because his political view of the land is not stated explicitly. Although, for example, he makes reference again to the night with Bedouin near Yarmuk in 1912, he is silent on modernisation, roadbuilding and war.81 Now his account appears within descriptions of several Bedouin tents he visited and presents the tent’s layout, the food, drink and bedding provided, only using the song text to demonstrate the Bedouin’s expression of love for his own form of home.82 However, the apparent invisibility of Dalman’s political position need not be read as a sign that his earlier concern about the country had evaporated. The speed of precisely the transformations to Palestine that caused him anxiety had increased rapidly, changes that were dramatic enough to render his books works of history in all but name. Infrequent references to Islam are still glossed occasionally with the by-then anachronistic expression ‘the official religion’.83 And rather than mentioning British rule, or discussing the new situation driving mass Jewish immigration, the construction of the region is within an (implicitly timeless) form, and with ongoing recourse to the Bible. Discussions of music, for instance, emphasise customs with biblical parallels: they dwell on the musical instruments of shepherds, and contextualise women’s singing with the Song of Songs. This does not rule out rich comparative discussion with Judaic practice: in a lengthy reflection on (largely Arab) rain processions and songs, for instance, there is information about their connections with Jewish customs.84 But, just as before, Dalman’s narrative built upwards from the properties of the land understood as ‘natural’, and elaborated a network of cultic, Jewish and Christian practices. The books are remarkable documents of an unchanging vision of a dramatically changing land.

Absorbing an armature (Abraham Zvi Idelsohn) Discussing the scholarly contribution of Abraham Zvi Idelsohn (1882– 1938), who arrived in Jerusalem from Berlin in 1906, may seem an unnecessary diversion. The focus of his formidable research, after all, did 81

82 84

In the Foreword to Volume I/1, he states only that he will not mention the circumstances under which he was prevented from completing his work in Palestine itself. See Dalman 1928: ix. 83 Dalman 1939: 21. See, for instance, Dalman 1928: 143. Dalman 1928: 136ff. For another example of his examination of Jewish music at festivities, see Dalman 1928, vol. I/2: 441–2.

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not lie on the Arabs of Palestine, whose interactions with Europeans this book sets out to explore. However, his work exemplifies a series of Europeled transformations in which Arab Palestinian music was caught up, so he is an extremely valuable source. Idelsohn was Russian by birth, but was raised in a German–Jewish environment. He had worked as cantor in Leipzig, Regensburg and Johannesburg prior to being persuaded to move to Jerusalem by the president of the Zionist movement, David Wolffsohn. His discoveries made a remarkable contribution to the music historiography of Jews, which, unlike research into biblical ‘Hebrew’ music, was a new branch of enquiry when he began.85 Discussions had emerged only at the very end of the nineteenth century and had focused on Ashkenazi liturgical traditions and folklore in Europe.86 Idelsohn’s attention, on the other hand, was drawn to Jewish music that he encountered in Jerusalem, which he found in communities of Abyssinians, Ethiopians, Moroccans, Iraqis, Persians, Syrians and Yemenites. He published his initial findings in 1913, when he made the controversial case in a small Zionist newspaper in northern Germany that synagogue music could only be grasped properly as a part of Oriental music in general.87 His claim was truly novel at the time, and he developed it in subsequent decades through recording, transcription and analytical projects that laid strong foundations for future research. But it can be understood not only through his experience in the region, but also in the context of broader developments in Jewish research which were a response to new Protestant enquiries discussed in Chapter 1. Although movement was initially very slow, Jewish people in Europe came increasingly, if critically, to take part in historical (i.e. secularised) discussions of religious sources.88 85

86 87 88

There was a long tradition of research into music of the Bible, in which the focus was on a construction of ‘music of the Hebrews’, or ‘Hebrew music’. For an account of the various phases in this research see Braun 2002. For a historiographical discussion about the concept of ‘Jewish music’ see Zimmermann 2004. Idelsohn 1913a. One reason for their initial resistance lay in the development in Jewish identity that ran counter to settling in Palestine, namely the trend towards emancipation and ‘enlightened’ acculturation within Europe. This had triggered research enquiries that sought to allow Jews a place within European history beyond the role of religious ancestors, indicated by the Verein für Cultur und Wissenschaft der Juden founded in 1819 and the subsequently formed discipline of Judaic studies (Wissenschaft des Judentums). These led, however, to a growth of Jewish interest in bringing historical thought to Palestine and the Bible – which was an assimilation of European thinking (even while it did not incorporate European ideas about emigration). A book published in 1819 in Vienna by the Hungarian Jew Salomo Löwisöhn, a collection of place names in Palestine, was the first work of modern Palestine research in Hebrew.

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A major landmark was an 1841 study by the Jewish scholar Leopold Zunz (1794–1886), consisting of an overview of texts on geographical themes written by 163 Jewish authors that dated from ‘the earliest times’ up to 1841. Zunz had accepted the ‘text-to-land’ turn that his teacher Friedrich August Wolf, one of the founders of archaeology, had elaborated with respect to Greece; indeed Zunz sought to make a place for Hebraic studies within the fields from which it had been ostracised, namely classical archaeology and philology.89 Zunz had also made the religion-into-history shift to join, and yet compete with, the Protestant movement, arguing that Talmudic sources were the most important of all for grasping the history of Palestine.90 In the ensuing decades, and despite considerable resistance from Orthodox leaders who objected to the secularisation of Jewish history, several further milestones can be identified. Steinschneider’s bibliographies of Jewish writings published in 1889 and 1892 are particularly significant. Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin has framed this move in terms of a Christianisation of Jewish historiography. He argues that Jewish historians accepted ‘the periodization of modernity as a new age of non-exile’, and were thus able to be ‘integrated into history in the sense of the history of the Christian West’. By banishing exile to the past, they wrote according to ‘the dominant Protestant-liberal model of history … the main idea was to fit the Jewish past into the autonomous linear model of history as part of the Jews’ assimilation to the West’.91 As Raz-Krakotzkin puts it, history deorientalised Jews, so that modern historiography, in all its main currents, came to depict Judaism ‘as a culture/religion/nation whose roots are in the East, but whose realization and fulfillment are part of the West’.92 Idelsohn’s research in Jewish musical practices included a recording scheme that was ongoing between 1911 and 1913 and financed by the Imperial Academy of Sciences in Vienna. On a fundamental level, there was no difference between his work and that of contemporary Protestants. It, too, involved a transformation of religious or mythological thinking into a more historical one. On another level, of course, it was rather different from the Protestant endeavour, because Idelsohn focused more exclusively on Jews, then a very small group of the population of

89

90 92

Kirchhoff 2005: 44–6 and 174–5. See, too, Marchand’s account of this development. Marchand 2009: 113–18. 91 Kirchhoff 2005: 173–85. Raz-Krakotzkin 2007: 541–2. Raz-Krakotzkin 2007: 542 (italics original). For references to counter-historical discourses see 542–3.

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Palestine. As Bohlman has put it, ‘[h]istory replaced myth and Jewish music entered modernity’.93 It is worth reflecting on his separate selection rather carefully in terms of the broader historiographical shift. Gil Anidjar has argued persuasively that European literature reveals the categories of ‘Arab’ and ‘Jew’ developing – and splitting apart from one another – during the nineteenth century. ‘Europe’ had been defined through highly selective roots in classical archaeology and philology, which initially distinguished it ‘from both Jew and Arab [while rendering] its role in the distinction, the separation, and the enmity of Jew and Arab invisible’.94 As we have seen, Jewish scholars brought the Talmud and other Hebrew sources into the spheres of archaeology and philology and entered ‘Europe’ thereby. Similarly, Idelsohn’s research thematicised a religious practice that could be taken as an authentic part of the history of the Protestants as well. As he would explain in a later publication, his collections were ‘of paramount importance to the elucidation of the synagogal chant in general and not less so to the investigation of the origin of the Roman ecclesiastical chant; for both have their root in the sacred chant of the Oriental Jews, which, thanks to the strict conservatism of the Orient, has preserved faithfully its ancient characteristics’.95 And yet he had observed that synagogal chant was tightly enmeshed with musical traditions of Arabs. Indeed, Arab maqāmāt provided the armature that had sustained liturgical music of Jews across the ages; they were thus the very ‘core’ of the Sephardic liturgical tradition in the Palestine region and well beyond.96 But Idelsohn was working at precisely the moment when the broader historiographical (and geo-political) current was urging a separation. So his early work necessarily entailed a negotiation of the categories. Two further articles from 1913 serve to illustrate, for they mirror one another, one focusing ostensibly on Arab maqāmāt, and the other on Hebrew sung poetry. In ‘The maqāmāt of Arabic Music’, Idelsohn presented what he hoped was a significant improvement on European approaches to Arab music hitherto.97 It was enabled, he explained, by his having learned ʿūd, having played with Arab musicians and having sung in choirs too. He offered not only a presentation of maqām theory published by the Egyptian musician and theorist Muhammad el-Kholy, but also examples of maqāmāt from eight historical and contemporary song books and a large 93 96

Bohlman 2005: 20. Bohlman 2005: 49.

94 97

Anidjar 2003: xviii. Idelsohn 1913c.

95

Idelsohn 1925: xi.

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number of melodies that he had gathered in Jerusalem. Additionally, he drew on Jewish sources. A Jewish song book published in 1595, for instance, emerges as a Hebraisation of popular Persian and Turkish melodies of the time. He also noted that Jewish cantors identified the Arab maqām, called mahur, as mixolydian; and he observed that they had a special affection for Arab maqām nawā, indeed used it for their Friday prayers.98 On closer inspection, moreover, it emerges that the information for his article was provided predominantly by Hebrew sources. Six of the eight song books discussed were actually Hebrew texts.99 From this perspective, his attempt to grasp Arab maqāmāt seems to have been shaped primarily by Jewish Synagogue practice. Indeed, recent scholarship has argued that Idelsohn’s ‘relations with the local Muslim community in Palestine seem to have been extremely sporadic’ and that his informers were mainly (Syrian) Jews.100 The partner article, ‘The maqāmāt of the Hebrew Poetry of the Oriental Jews’ offers a rather different perspective.101 Although we find the same song books discussed, they are defined as Jewish music, with the implication that this predated Arab influence. Thus, rather than presenting the first such song book of 1595 as a Hebraisation of popular Turkish and Persian songs, Idelsohn used it as evidence of the ‘Arabisation of Jewish songs’.102 Jewish songs had their own identity in the form of synagogue song and chant, he claimed, and maqāmāt had infiltrated these with an assimilation process similar to the way that European song had affected Jewish song. The pair of articles serves to exemplify the high degree of speculation involved in attempts to create singular and unidirectional musical genealogies. Yet the contemporary climate promoted projects of differentiation, and Idelsohn’s further striving for distinction was very much of its time. The early twentieth century, as recent scholars have revealed, saw the rise in sciences of both music and race and the application of new tools in apparently scientific conditions created illusions of clinical discrimination. We witnessed above, in the way that an archaeologist used the Western musical stave as a mechanism for charging Arab singers with incompetence, that the ‘tools’ of music can be turned to surprising purposes. And the musical tool that enabled Idelsohn to drive a wedge between Arab and Jewish music is no less intriguing. It was nothing other than Arab maqāmāt. 98 101

99 Idelsohn 1913c: 14, 21, 47. Idelsohn 1913b. 102 Idelsohn 1913b. Idelsohn 1913b: 323.

100

Seroussi 2005: 57.

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This emerges from Idelsohn’s discussion about the dependence of Hebrew song on Arab maqāmāt, in which he made the parallel suggestion that there were primitive Arabs who had never taken on maqāmāt. Bedouin and Fellahin, he wrote, had simply sung their nationalen Weisen as they always had done. This was a product of the insularity (‘Abgeschlossenheit’) of the Arab races (‘Stämme’), he claimed, along with their unchanged, primitive way of life (‘unverändert primitive Lebensweise’).103 He also criticised Arab music specifically in comparison with Hebrew song, and once again with reference to maqāmāt. Within an apparently technical discussion of maqāmāt in Hebrew sung poetry, he slipped in derogatory (and pseudo-biological) comments about non-Jewish practitioners of maqāmāt: To compose a new melody means to vary any group of notes and motives from the fixed maqāmāt in order that a new phrase emerges. That makes it clear that a musician is completely denied all originality from the start. Therein we recognise the rigidity of Oriental conservatism, which lamed the power of music perception just as it did with the qasidah. This 800-year tradition has become flesh and blood to all Arabic musicians, hence the monotony of Arabic music.104

As is well understood today, colonial encounters of this period saw the construction of ‘others’ as ‘different’, and their music as inseparable from bodily practices (generally in implicit comparison with Western classical music, understood as autonomous).105 Idelsohn’s position on his ‘others’ illustrates the tendency. Vacillating between the Arab people and Arab music, his discourse subsumes and melts them down, making musics and poetry synonymous with the minds and bodies of their practitioners. Yet here the maintenance of ‘others’ is complex, because the point of reference for the Self is not (the autonomy of) Western classical music, but a new construction of Jewish music. And as Idelsohn has explained, the latter is dependent on Arab maqāmāt. I will elaborate these two connected points to bring this section to a close, first with reference to the construction of Jewish music that emerged in full splendour in a ten-volume Thesaurus of Hebrew Oriental Melodies (1914–32)106. Codified in transcriptions, explicated in analysis and bound in a monumental series, the music in these books is testimony to the period’s belief in the power of collection, preservation and categorisation. While the point of the collection was

103 105 106

104 Idelsohn 1913c: 12. Idelsohn 1913b: 315. For a recent exposition see Bohlman 2007: 7. See Idelsohn 1925 for the first of ten volumes.

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plainly Jewish music, Volume IV contained a marginally extended republication of Idelsohn’s article on Arab maqāmāt. It is the framing of that republication that is of significance here. The inner relations of the article, we recall, suggest a very broad phenomenon (maqām practice) of which Jewish sung poetry provided a source. But the later publication subsumed maqāmāt completely into ‘Hebrew Oriental Melodies’, thus taking them from the diverse Arab and Turkish contexts in which they could be found. The significance of maqām is different, then, and closely related to the move to separate Jews from the broader Oriental category. Arab maqām is indeed disconnected, and instrumentalised as if a post-Diasporic history of Jewish music. The effect is to assimilate certain Arab traditions into Jewish history in order to establish continuity of the latter. Given the project’s creation of textual sources, and its solidification of oral practices into a monumental recorded and textual compendium, it might be read not only as a work of cataloguing, but as a European-style canonisation. Samson has defined canon construction as the ‘ideological … [manipulation of] an innocent repertory to confirm the social position of a dominant group in society’.107 The canonisation was anticipatory, fitting within a contemporary urgency that sought to see Jews become regionally dominant in the future, and also fitting the broader frame of development. As Kirchhoff has demonstrated, new research was appropriated by Zionists in order to justify claims to creating a nation in Palestine: thus the secularisation of Jewish historiography had paved the way for the geopolitical change (a nation).108 As we will see in Chapter 3, Idelsohn’s own research was symbiotic with his more explicit cultural Zionism: while in Jerusalem he worked as choral conductor, composer of ‘folk songs’, teacher and writer for the Hebrew press (where he used his Hebrew name Ben Yehuda). One further stage in Idelsohn’s thinking is worth observing, namely his book, Jewish Music in its Historical Development (1925), written in Cincinnati and published in New York in 1929. This takes us yet further by offering a full chronological history of Jewish music from the Temple to the present day (much in the spirit of Jewish scholars working more broadly on Jewish peoples).109 On one level it might seem to reverse the

107 109

108 Samson 2001: 7. Kirchhoff 2005: 333–52. Idelsohn’s construction of Jewish music was highly essentialised, based on the claim of an authentic core of Jewish music, characterised by modality, monody, prosodic rhythm, improvisation and oral transmission. Seroussi observes that Idelsohn neglects Jerusalem’s

Distinction

separation of the previous publication, because Idelsohn engaged more fully with the question of influence between Arab and Hebrew language and song. Engaging not only with maqām but also with rhythm, he fleshed out a crucial part of his thesis, namely that ‘the Jew, being of Semitic stock, is a part of the Oriental world, so Jewish music – coming to life in the Near East – is, generally speaking, one of a piece with the music of the Orient’.110 However, another component of his thesis drew on European conceptions of soil-based nation, and this suggests a development of the distinction between Jew and the broader Orient. Most crucially, Idelsohn announced the imperative of possessing a particular component of postEnlightenment European awareness, namely the folk song: Every nation that possesses its own soil, that has made a history for itself and that has created an individual atmosphere must, according to the established premises in musical science, have its own folk-song. Inversely, a folk-song must spring from a nation.

Going on to ponder the as yet non-national status of Jews, he proposed that since their biblical time in Palestine, Jews had carried a set of impressions of the land. This shared memory, he proposed, had brought forth its folksong. Idelsohn’s eloquent summary captured Diasporic discourses of the time, in which music could be the last remaining trace of a lost land: But are the Jewish people a nation? For two thousand years, they have been rent from the physical homeland that cradled their youth; they have been scattered over the entire earth … And yet through circumstances peculiar to them – circumstances that know no parallel in history – the Jews have never been divorced from the land where they developed from nomadic tribes into a nation. The topography, the atmosphere, the very soil of Palestine, was molded into their faith, their thought, their spiritual culture, and folklore. … Wherever a Jew settled … he carried his spiritual home in his heart … This spiritual nationality brought forth a folk-song as distinctive as the people itself. Just as to the Jew religion meant life and life religion, so to him sacred song has been folk-song, and folk-song, sacred song.111

110

current of Judeo-Spanish (Ladino) song cultivated among local Sephardim and Sephardi immigrants from Thessalonica and Turkey, for instance. And the specificity is clear in comparison with other constructions of Jewish music too, the folkloric cultivation of tradition characteristic of the Russian school gathered around Engel, for instance. See Seroussi 2005: 57; Zimmermann 2004: 16. 111 Idelsohn 1929: 24. Idelsohn 1929: 357–8.

109

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The apparently floating status of this Jewish nation coexisted in his work, of course, with real experience in Palestine, where he knew that much of the land was lived on by non-Jews. So we may ask what voice such nonJewish figures – absent from his ‘nation’ – could have in his work. The question is not only germane to this book. Rather, it is the fundamental question for people all over the world whose place is rendered questionable by the tide of modernity and the rise of nation states. It is the question for those who become ‘others’. Arab melodies collected by and published by Idelsohn in his 1913 article were not furnished with reference to their context, indeed they appear in a manner that alienates them completely from their original setting.112 They have no texts, for example, nor any indication regarding their source or function. And predictably, recent scholarship has looked critically on Idelsohn’s work outside the Jewish sphere. Bohlman has pointed out that even while ‘Islamic sacred music and Palestinian folk music pervaded the musical landscapes of and around Jerusalem’, when these find a place in Idelsohn’s field records they ‘seem to fulfill a catch-all function of “other musics”’.113 Ruth Katz has even suggested that those within later publications are actually approximations, rather than transcriptions, and the same may be true here.114 But Idelsohn’s focus is on maqāmāt, and his rather general suggestions are attempts to characterise a maqām rather than the melodies that ostensibly exemplify its elaboration. Thus each maqām is provided with a putative origin (Persian or Arabic, for instance), a meaning (place name, a person, for instance), and a character tendency. The maqāmāt were theoretical building blocks for music, but much of the music – that Idelsohn had apparently studied – went undiscussed. The obvious reason lies in the fact that even when apparently discussing Arab maqāmāt, Idelsohn’s research interest was actually the creation of a particular field of Jewish music. He was in search of building blocks with which to illustrate a history in which the Jewish musical traditions came to Palestine in a journey that overcame their Diaspora, and which allowed them to be grounded components of a new Israel.115 From this perspective, it is unsurprising that the music from the rest of the Palestinian population in the region was seen as being of only theoretical import. The building blocks for his history were not Arab people, but a selection of maqāmāt.

112 115

Idelsohn 1913c. Bohlman 2005: 34.

113

Bohlman 2005: 45–6.

114

Katz 1986, cited in Seroussi 2005: 52.

Distinction

The mechanisms and consequences of his method are deeply thoughtprovoking. Just as Western classical music achieved ‘autonomy’ through an often quasi-scientific discourse of ‘the music itself’, Hebrew music was revealed to contain a system of maqāmāt, a formal, theoretical entity. And Idelsohn’s scientific discourse – in which the ‘other’ was absorbed into the Self – had the power to deny the ‘other’ metaphysical space (the music of Bedouin and Fellahin, as we saw above, was reducible to human failings, rather than understood as meaningful in theoretical or other ways). And as elsewhere, the nation had the power to question the right of the ‘other’ to physical space and land.

Comparing and bridging (Robert Lachmann) When the German Jewish ethnomusicologist Robert Lachmann moved to Palestine in 1935, the context was very different from the one encountered by Dalman and Idelsohn. British policies had led to the establishment of a range of Jewish national institutions and Jewish immigration was rising enormously, not only from Europe but also from other areas of the Arab world. Lachmann’s work can be placed in this intense transitional period, and grasped as a response to a very difficult set of circumstances. Trained by Curt Sachs and Erich von Hornbostel, Lachmann’s primary tools were theories of comparative musicology. He had been a founder of the pioneering Gesellschaft der Musik des Orients (Society for Oriental Music) as well as editing the Zeitschrift für Vergleichende Musikwissenschaft (Journal of Comparative Musicology). While as steeped as were his contemporaries in an essential duality of European and Oriental, he was nevertheless critical of commentators who were disparaging of Arab musics. Moreover, he had detached himself somewhat from Hornbostel’s own evolutionary approach, stating specifically that the European notion that Oriental music was ‘on a low stage of development’ should be understood as a product of Europeans’ ignorance of such musical practices themselves.116 There are clear links to be traced between Lachmann’s historical views and those of contemporary trends in biblical research. He considered that local musical practices might be traces of the ancient past, whether the courts of the Abbasid Caliphate or the Temple of Jerusalem, for example. 116

Robert Lachmann, ‘“Oriental Music”, A Series of Twelve Talks on the Palestine Broadcasting Station (1936–1937) by Lachmann’. First lecture, delivered 18 November 1936, transcribed in Katz 2003: 328–78 at 329–30.

111

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However, as his research undertaken prior to his move to Palestine makes clear, he used this framework for asking questions rather than answering them.117 On setting out in 1929, for instance, to discover whether the Jews on the island of Djerba had music that could be traced back to the Second Temple, he reached a negative conclusion: the music was no more than four hundred years old.118 In this respect his work falls in line with a Finnish anthropologist of the Palestinians, Hilma Granqvist, who set out in 1925 to research ‘The Women of the Old Testament’, but who rapidly observed what she termed ‘Biblical dangers’, and abandoned her project in favour of an analysis of conditions on the ground.119 Research by Ruth Katz has revealed that Lachmann’s perspectives were incompatible with the growth of professional institutions in Palestine. Having been dismissed by the Nazi regime from his position at the Prussian State Library, he applied for and acquired some work at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. However, this institution had been from the start a Zionist initiative, one whose main role was to promote Jewish nationalism.120 When Lachmann – with the support of the then chancellor of the university, Judah L. Magnes – sought proper funding for his research, and indeed full affiliation with the institution, he failed to gain it. Magnes himself, whose primary interest was always interaction between Arabs and Jews, and who often worked against the university’s Zionist policies, was sidelined by the university during the same period.121 Lachmann’s project could not be incorporated into the university’s scheme. It is not difficult to imagine why this was the case. Not only did Lachmann’s profile reveal a profound engagement with Arab sources, but his first research undertakings in Palestine, too, were weighted towards the non-Jewish population. His first report to the university revealed four main areas of study, only one of which was Jewish, and that one in itself could do little for reinforcing the Zionist claim to the land: 1. Singing to the accompaniment of the Rabab al-sha’ir [sic] 2. Popular Arab song in Jerusalem

117

118 119

120

He reveals all these assumptions in his first lecture as above. See ‘“Oriental Music”’, transcribed in Katz 2003: 329–34. Lachmann 1978a. Her work came to follow contemporary approaches in ethnology. For her account of her decision to shift away from biblical strategies, and her critique of Palestine research to date, see Granqvist 1931: 1–14. 121 Segev 2001: 73–5. Segev 2001: 218–19, 410–11.

Distinction

3. Psalm singing by a Roumanian Jew 4. Singing to the accompaniment of theʿūd.122 Moreover, Lachmann highlighted the fourth of these areas for special consideration and even provided his informant with a name, thus making him a real, living, Arab musical resident of Jerusalem: At my request, the singer and player, a well-known amateur of Jerusalem, Wasif Gauharija [Jawhariyya], started a series of instrumental preludes and vocal introductions representing the different melody-types (maqāmāt) of Arab classical music, and promised to complete it on the next occasion. These records will be particularly useful for anybody who wishes to obtain a precise idea of the traditional Arab systems of melodies and scales.

The same bent is clear from his second report, in which Lachmann revealed again that his primary interest was not in Jewish communities. He had made a field trip to Nablus, and had gathered further Arab music, as well as extensive sources from Samaritan communities.123 His third report is perhaps the most significant, however, because it indicates Lachmann’s ongoing concern with the Arab world in two powerful ways, one cultural and one historical.124 First, his renewed encounter with the Iraqi Jewish musician Azuri Harun (later to be known by the Hebraised name Ezra Aharon), led him to undertake comparative work on ‘melody-types’ with the playing of Jerusalemite Wasif Jawhariyya. His framework of thought, then, was defined by a grasp of Arab traditions: Jawhariyya’s and Harun’s playing – while having developed in Jerusalem and Baghdad respectively – belonged together. Second, he referred to the playing of a Bedouin that could be usefully contextualised, he said, with a historic Arab source, the Kitab al-Aghani (The Book of Songs) by Abu al-Faraj alIsfahani. By invoking this source from the tenth century, Lachmann provided the Bedouin with a completely different context from any of those offered by the writers discussed above. In the closing line of his report he implied this further by invoking his earlier collections from Egypt, Tripoli and the Maghreb again, which would also contribute to the archive in Jerusalem. 122

123

124

‘Section for the Study of Non-European Music, First Report’, dated 14 June 1935, reproduced in Katz, 2003: 111–12. The ‘rabab el-sha’ir’ refers to the rababah played with traditional Bedouin poetry. ‘Section for the Study of Non-European Music, Second Report’, dated 21 June 1935, reproduced in Katz 2003: 114–16. ‘Section for the Study of Non-European Music, Third Report’, dated 7 July 1935, reproduced in Katz 2003: 121–2.

113

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Lachmann’s ensuing reports and applications for funding reveal a change in emphasis that was, Katz suggests, intended to appeal to those from whom he sought funds. Jewish and Judaic musics suddenly enter his field more substantially and indeed receive prominence at the top of his lists. However, at no point do they mask the diversity of the field of study – and thus the people of the region – that Lachmann perceived. Indeed, this field expanded beyond the categories already mentioned to include liturgical music of Copts, Armenians and Greeks, Arabic Quran readings and Scottish bagpipes.125 Additionally, Lachmann was building his broad interests further into the intellectual community: of three students working with him, only one was working on a Jewish subject. The other two were researching Western liturgical song and ‘Oriental Urban Instrumental Music’.126 That Lachmann’s work did not serve the prevailing vision of a Jewish national home is clear from this, but so too is the way that it actively threatened it. His recordings were rendering audible the diversity and vitality of musical practices that the by-then overbearing distinction between Jew and non-Jew sought to suppress. Additionally, they were part of a broader academic project – scientific research as such – that he perceived the Hebrew University to preclude. From his perspective, there was not even scope within that institution to develop Jewish music research in a satisfactory way, because that in itself should be comparative. As he expressed it: I have been at pains, on many occasions, to explain that the investigation of traditional Jewish music cannot be carried out satisfactorily unless neighbouring subjects, the music of the Oriental Christian Churches as well as Arab music, are studied along with it. I cannot help feeling that, outside, of course, the School of Oriental Studies at the University, this point is not generally accepted and that the reasons why it is not accepted are irreconcilable with a disinterested attitude towards research work like my own or, as a matter of fact, research of any kind.127

Although, however, the vision was in some obvious ways at odds with the climate, Lachmann’s comparative approach led him to accept many of the prevailing categories that were based on constructions of difference. The point to note is that he regarded this as positive, came to it, indeed, with a 125

126

127

‘Report of Activities of the Archive of Oriental Music from May 1936 to January 1937’ reproduced in Katz 2003: 166–8. These two were Edith Gerson-Kiwi and Sofia Lentschner. ‘Report of Activities of the Archive of Oriental Music from May 1936 to January 1937’, reproduced in Katz 2003: 167. Letter to Magnes dated 14 November 1937, reproduced in Katz 2003: 195–8 (italics are mine).

Distinction

particular perspective. Reflecting on the prevailing dichotomy constructed between Europe and the Orient, for instance, he observed that it was an opportunity for cross-cultural learning. Europeans should be able to leave all their prejudice behind, he argued, and he stated that the variety of traditional musical practice in Palestine could help the European to understand ‘his Oriental neighbour’.128 Similarly, while living through increasingly violent hostility between Jew and non-Jew, he presented his work as potentially instrumental, indeed as a bridge between precisely these categories and the people who subscribed to them: My work necessitates free intercourse with all the different ethnic groups in this country and the Near East generally. It may therefore be made to contribute, however modestly, towards aims beyond its immediate scope, towards a better understanding between Jews and Arabs … To ensure Arab cooperation I should be willing to share the direction of the Archives with an Arab provided that we can be sure of his fully understanding our intentions as regards both research work and cultural contacts.129

As we will see, his position anticipated ideas that would be dispatched to Palestine from outside the region some six decades later. The creation of ‘Distinction’ would have paved the way for a construction of ‘Dialogue’.

128 129

Lachmann, ‘Oriental Music’, transcribed in Katz 2003: 333. Letter to Magnes dated 14 November 1937, reproduced in Katz 2003: 195–8.

115

3 Education

At a special conference held in Jerusalem during the summer of 1940, the Palestine Music Teachers Club was organized to introduce and promote a unified music education programme in the regular curriculum of the Arab–English speaking schools of Palestine as well as to help spread more Love, Peace, and Happiness over the country through the medium of the ‘universal language’, Music! This pamphlet need not go into the educational values of music but does point out that one of the large objectives of music teaching is the attempt to bring each child into such contact with music that it may give him a richer, finer, and larger intake and outlet to his life. One aim is to present music as an emotional, aesthetic, and spiritual influence brought into the school’s curriculum chiefly to awaken and stimulate the pupil’s consciousness of beauty and his power to express it.1

The sentiments reflected in this rallying cry for music education are by no means unusual today. And nor were they unusual in Europe and the USA when their presumed author, Quaker music teacher Rolla Foley, used them to garner enthusiasm for his initiative in music education for Palestine. However, if we turn the clock back to the period in which this book begins, we find that the basic assumption – that music has broad educational value – is relatively new and not uncontested. It was only thanks to the spread of general education during the nineteenth century that music found a firm place. European philosophers, musicians and pedagogues disseminated notions of music’s beneficence increasingly broadly in the nineteenth century, and a set of basic ideas became gradually normative. Western music, newly imagined as a medium of harmony and moral elevation, gained a tangible presence in the lives of many Europeans and Americans thereby. It was constructed as existential, a matter of, and force within, day-to-day existence, and a medium through which people could grasp and indeed shape what they understood as their ‘inner lives’.

1

116

‘The Palestine Music Teachers Club’: 4 (College Press: Aleppo, 1943). Author unspecified, but presumably Rolla Foley. FBS: Historical Documents 1940–1949.

Education

The development of music education is not usually considered alongside studies of the Orient or Orientalism, but the relationship between the two is crucial to this book, and so I provide a short outline in the first section below. On one level, this enriches our perspective on attitudes discussed in chapters 1 and 2, because such education informed the perceptions of visitors to Palestine who were so intolerant of local music. On another, it is important to what follows, because it developed into a pedagogical and professional practice (understood in the broad sense developed by Macintyre).2 In other words, it became a relatively coherent set of activities with an attendant value system, perceived by its practitioners as something of an institution. The importance of this is that it could be transplanted globally. And the main institutions that supported this movement in Palestine were missionary schools. One context for what I present is Mitchell’s insight, drawing on Foucault, that modern schooling in Egypt entailed dramatically changed notions of place. These were created through the systematised rearrangement and ordering of humans and objects, along with new types of control or governmentality.3 A complementary context is the relationship of place and music: as Stokes has demonstrated, music does not ‘simply provide a marker in a prestructured social space, but the means by which this space can be transformed’.4 So in my discussion I explore missionary schools as components within transformational practices of territorialisation. One form of these encompassed the basic renting or purchasing of existing buildings, and the purchase of land for the construction of new buildings thereon. Another was the use of music when missionaries and teachers publicly performed their place in the region (whether through displays or parades or other types of performance). A further one was the development of repertories that were associated explicitly with place. Music was involved in ‘making space’ in such ways. I also connect with Mitchell’s observation that Egypt’s new control mechanisms could lead to ‘the production of the modern individual’.5 The power of disciplinary practices, as Foucault has argued, is that they are built into the individuals (who are, as subjects, formed by the institutions); and that the individuals come thereby to operate institutional controls (making externally applied coercion unnecessary). Gramit has already explored ways in which European music education can be grasped through Foucault’s notions of coercion and control, so in this chapter I add

2

Macintyre 2007.

3

Mitchell 1991.

4

Stokes 1994.

5

Mitchell 1991: xi.

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to his work to consider ways in which it was a tool of discipline in Palestine. Through what methods, I ask, did missionaries try to ‘produce’ individuals? Finally, I follow Mitchell once again to consider how internalised discipline is made externally manifest – and becomes a performance of power. The army appears as a machine, for instance, rather than a group of armed people.6 In what ways, I ask, might this help us conceive musical missionary practice? In the first part of the chapter, I address the rise of music education in Europe, Ottoman Palestine and Mandate Palestine. I then offer three case studies, each one from a different period: first, one of the earliest and most musically active initiatives, the (German) deaconesses of Kaiserswerth (1851–90); then the (English) Jerusalem and the East Mission (1898– 1914); and finally, Quaker missionaries at the Friends Schools (1939–47).

Territories for music I:

Europe

Bernarr Rainbow has constructed the growth of music education in nineteenth-century Britain as a ‘rebirth’, a gradual reintroduction of singing tuition into educational curricula that was the first such venture since the dissolution of the monasteries (and the attendant medieval Song Schools) some three centuries earlier.7 Given that the initial justification for the movement was its potential benefit to congregational church singing, the link is a persuasive one. Additionally, even while the new dissemination of music spread gradually in secular contexts as well, it was frequently affiliated with ‘moral’ projects and linked in various ways to the church. Group singing was understood increasingly as a means of luring people away from the bottle, and indeed as something that would improve the nation as a whole. In the words of Privy Council member J. P. Kay, it would form ‘an industrious, brave, loyal and religious people’.8 Singing and musical literacy were the key components. Britain had, however, lagged far behind other regions of Europe with respect to the promotion of music in secular contexts. Germany, for instance, witnessed a new movement in music teaching at the turn of the nineteenth century. Emerging in the context of Enlightenment education, its spokesmen fought to release music’s pedagogical values from their 6

Mitchell 1991: xi–xii.

7

Rainbow 1967: 156.

8

Rainbow 1981: 40.

Education

hitherto primarily religious contexts. The new theories and practices drew very substantially on writings of the Swiss educational reformer Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746–1827), striving to impart a highly systematic grasp of musical elements in the interest of equipping people to become united in song. As David Gramit puts it, a ‘rationally systematised “nature” effectively replaced the received chorale as the ground of musical knowledge, just as new methods in the teaching of reading replaced traditional dependence on the Bible or catechism in the foundation of literacy’.9 Gramit reads the resultant pedagogical ideas of Hans Georg Nägeli and contemporaries as an example of Foucault’s disciplinary practices in the modern age.10 Had such secularising currents come to dominate Germany entirely, then there might be little more to say about the matter here. However, both the religious revival that strove to counter secularisation, and the development of romantic ideas expressed in broader circles, ensured that music education remained wedded to sacred matters. Indeed, as is often the case with opposed perspectives, secular and religious arguments for developing music within education shared a core belief. This relied on the notion of the ‘Gemüth’, which at the time referred primarily to human feelings and moods.11 Whereas in the eighteenth century it would have been entirely peculiar to make such an assertion, in the nineteenth century spokespeople for music argued increasingly that music had direct access to human feelings, and could thus have a role in human development in a profound sense.12 Pedagogues claimed for the first time that music instilled joy and calmness, while ennobling and taming. They argued that it was linked directly to certain virtues, whether that of loving the fatherland or religious devotion. Music could enhance these qualities and many others. Such ideas were paralleled in the aesthetic writings of the time that sought to grasp music’s capacity to reach the intimate aspects of human experience. For example, the mystical religiosity of Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder (1773–98) can be compared revealingly with the proposals of pedagogue Julius Merling, for whom the primary essence of music was not virtuosic skill or theoretical system, but the ‘divine idea’ (‘göttliche Idee’).13 A particularly telling conjoining of aesthetics with ethics can be traced in the work of philosopher and psychologist Johann Friedrich Herbart (1776–1841). Characteristically for his time, he argued that the teaching of aesthetic judgement was at once the teaching of ethics and was 9 12

Gramit 2002: 103. Nolte 1982: 74–5.

10 13

11 Gramit 2002: 106–9. Nolte 1982: 74, footnote 1. Quoted in Nolte 1982: 147–8.

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the basis for moral instruction. But Herbart’s special significance lies in the fact that he was active in the field of pedagogical research, and indeed established it as an academic discipline.14 Given the broad dissemination of these arguments among pedagogues it is perhaps unsurprising, then, that the ability to sing well came to be associated with good character, and that teaching children to sing well (the adjective used was often ‘rein’, meaning pure or clean) could be understood as a way of making them better human beings. As Merling argued, the more noble the person, the more soul-filled (‘seelisch’) was the voice.15 It is well worth pointing out that this intellectual climate must have fostered some of the repulsion expressed by the writers I addressed in Chapter 1. After all, Merling also claimed that the rougher (‘roher’) the person, the more animal-like was his voice. Additionally, it is worth recalling Tobler’s complaint that the behaviour of local Christians had prevented music by the French choir from filling his ‘Gemüth’ with ‘sublime, religious feelings’. This was what he had been led to understand the choir could do. All these developments can be understood as a knock-on effect of very deep social changes in Europe itself. The new claims on behalf of music were generated primarily by economic necessity, as musicians observed their livelihoods threatened by political change and were obliged to argue for their necessity to the newly developing bourgeois society. This entailed reflecting on the concerns of the newly empowered and financed middle class, which included the ‘improvement’ of those who seemed to exist on a level beneath it. A. B. Marx’s famous review of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, as Gramit points out, unites and elevates ‘humankind’ in a gloriously harmonious song. But the reality of massed singing at the time was that it sounded anything but gloriously harmonious. So pedagogues sought to solve the problem of the ‘crudely singing rabble’, in order that a civilized and estimable Volk (A. B. Marx) could emerge from them.16

II: Ottoman Palestine An Ottoman law passed in 1869 required elementary schools to be opened in all communities and secondary schools to be established in large towns. The consequence in Palestine was an estimated ninety-eight new state schools, of which three were secondaries, by the year 1914, operating in 14

Quoted in Nolte 1982: 181.

15

Quoted in Nolte 1982: 86.

16

Gramit 2002: 93–7.

Education

parallel with learning practices ongoing in apprenticeship contexts and in private institutions attached to mosques (katātīb and madāris).17 The subjects taught at primary level were reading and writing (Ottoman Turkish), arithmetic and Ottoman history and geography; some of the more advanced primary schools offered geometry, chemistry and drawing too.18 Some of the earliest schools established by Protestant missionaries were opened before the crucial Ottoman law had been passed. The first Protestant bishop in Jerusalem, the Jewish convert Salomon Alexander, had founded these institutions to target Jews in the region: for him, ‘education’ was primarily an extension of Christian mission.19 The second bishop, Samuel Gobat, was less interested in Jews, and axed one of Alexander’s schools after he arrived in 1846.20 He himself opened schools in Nablus, Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Jaffa, hoping through them to convert Eastern Christians (which was legally possible from 1852). By 1856 he had six schools, with a total of 260 pupils.21 During the 1860s he went on to establish schools in places including Bethlehem, Beit Jala, Ramla, Jaffa, Nablus, Raidiah, Zebabdeh, Burkin and Shefa ʿAmr. Although they were small (with ten to fifteen pupils in each) and often did not survive long, some were taken over by other Protestant organisations.22 The London Jewish Society, the Church Missionary Association, the Church Missionary Society, the Berlin Jerusalem Evangelical Association, the Jerusalem Association in Hebron, the Carmel Mission in Haifa and the Augusta Victoria Stiftung all established schools.23 Yet more Protestant groups – whether from Germany, Scotland, America or elsewhere – did the same, as did a group of Quaker Friends, whose schools we will examine later in this chapter. Unlike the Ottoman state schools, most of these initiatives drew music into their daily activities. Instrumental tuition was probably only offered as a chance function of the presence of instruments and the skills of individual teachers, but singing was another matter.24 Music education through Tonic Sol-Fa was a familiar tool for missionaries working for the London

17

18 20

21 24

Tibawi estimates that about 8,248 children were attending new state schools by the beginning of the First World War and that about 8,795 were enrolled in private Muslim schools. Tibawi 1956: 20. 19 Ayalon 2004: 21. Tibawi 1961: 75 His two daughters were the first pupils of the deaconesses of Kaiserswerth (of the deaconneses, more below). Fliedner 1858: 201. 22 23 Tibawi 1961: 117. Colbi 1988: 112. Colbi 1988: 117. Tchaikov notes that in 1880, it was ‘desirable’, but not ‘essential’ for an assistant teacher to play the organ. See Tchaikov 1993: 34.

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Missionary Society and the Church Missionary Society (CMS), and a visiting German noted that the CMS School in Jerusalem had two and a quarter hours of singing and drill every week.25 At least one of Bishop Alexander’s schools (The Hebrew College) had music on the formal curriculum.26 German and Swiss missionary schools all placed general music on their syllabuses, conforming to the prevailing Continental theories of the time (that we will discuss below). The deaconesses of Kaiserswerth never worked without singing and the so-called Syrian Orphanage founded by the German Johann Ludwig Schneller in 1860 also taught music from the earliest years.27 Conder reports that the Templar schools at the German colony in Haifa taught both music and singing when he visited in 1872.28 Even where a choir was not developed separately within a school, pupils learned hymns and songs. Catholic groups reacted by increasing their own activities, indeed several new schools emerged from a range of Orders.29 It is more than likely that Western-type musical instruction developed in the Roman Catholic sector at the same time as in the Protestant church. Certainly, some of the earliest records of music tuition refer to the Catholic church. The first Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem (reinstalled in 1847 after more than half a millennium), Joseph Valerga, played the harmonium himself. The Patriarchate’s Jerusalem Seminary employed one Hanna Martha (by name apparently an Arab Palestinian) to teach music and Arabic in the 1850s, as well as one Cyrille Zohrabian (probably an Armenian) who taught organ there in the 1870s.30 As we will see in ‘Provincialising mission’, most of Jerusalem’s Western classically trained Arab musicians working professionally in the Mandate years had studied within the Catholic church. The turn of the twentieth century witnessed the establishment of European-style music schools run by and for Jews as a consequence of the first waves of Jewish immigration (roughly 1882 to 1914). The Hilfsverein der Deutschen Juden (Aid Association of German Jews), for instance, founded in 1901 in Germany, established a network of schools ranging from elementary to teacher-training level. Western music was a compulsory subject on the curriculum. There were more specialist 25 27

28

26 Eberhard 1906: 113. Tibawi 1961: 75. The curriculum included a singing lesson, which encompassed learning to read musical notation and practising both church and other songs. See reports from the organisation such as Fünfter Jahresbericht des Syrischen Waisenhauses in Jerusalem Vom Jahre 1865: 11. Basel: Pilgermissions Buchdruckerei, 1866. EKD: Reports of the Syrian Orphanage. Eberhard also mentions the Syrian Orphanage having two hours of singing per week. See Eberhard 1906: 118. 29 30 Conder 1879, vol. II: 308. Colbi 1988: 123–9. Tchaikov 1993: 33–4.

Education

institutions too, including the Bezaleel School of Arts and Crafts (1904) and the Music School (1910 in Jaffa and 1911 in Jerusalem).31 The latter ‘acted as an immigration catalyst’, recruiting thirty of its first seventy-five pupils from Europe and Russia.32 It was not set up as an exclusively Jewish institution, but certainly the branch in Jerusalem excluded impoverished local residents (primarily Arabs, but also Armenians, Greeks and Jews) because they were not able to pay the fees. New Jewish settlers were financially better off, thus by 1913–14, 37 per cent of their community attended music schools.33 Despite some hopes of a diverse studentship, these music schools came increasingly to serve not only the newly settled Jewish community in a practical sense, but also to foster the idea of a Jewish national community as such. This was most obviously a product of Zionism and the British support for that project. But it was also a result of the ideologies attendant on the musical education of the new Jewish population, many of whom came from Germany and who associated music with national pride and nation-building. (We will observe this more closely below.) When the Military Governor of Jerusalem supported the foundation of the Jerusalem Music School, his bequest required that it should ‘be open to all seeking instruction without distinction of race or creed’.34 But the following happened: From the beginning, three-quarters at least of the professors and 90 percent of the pupils were Jews. I therefore sent for the Christian and Moslem members of the Council and warned them that anxious as I was to keep the management and ownership of the School, as of my other enterprises, international and nonpolitical – nevertheless if their proportion of pupils were not materially increased in six months’ time, I should present the institution to the Jewish Community. After waiting six months without result, I duly handed it over.35

Hirshberg’s account suggests there was a further dimension to what happened. An internal crisis had led the school into difficulty, he writes, and rescue came from the Board of the Zionist Administration in Palestine. With the justification that there were more Jewish students in

31 33

34 35

32 Hirshberg 1995: 3, 38–40. Hirshberg 1995: 39. Hirshberg observes that Ashkenazi Jews were more enthusiastic. Long-standing Sephardi residents of the region were more likely to attend French and Italian schools for music lessons than risk exposure to the ‘enlightened spirit of the modern education of the New Yishuv’. Hirshberg 1995: 43. Storrs 1943: 316, footnote 2, quoting a letter from Storrs dated 1920. Storrs 1943: 316.

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attendance than those of ‘other denominations’, Hebrew became the language of instruction.36 The fate of this very short-lived international school brings me towards the main argument of this section, namely that all these new establishments had their own territorial claims on the region. In the period between 1840 and 1914 the growth of educational enterprises entailed new, restored and transformed buildings, leading among other things to an architectural transformation of Jerusalem. At first colonisers worked within the Old City: for instance, the Anglican Christ Church near the important Jaffa Gate (completed in 1849 and already mentioned in Chapter 1), was followed by four very substantial Roman Catholic institutions that shaped the Via Dolorosa – a Christian pilgrimage site – very significantly.37 Then, during the 1880s Prussians began establishing a Protestant hub in a Christian area of the Old City, which eventually included the Church of the Redeemer, a community centre, the institute that Gustav Dalman directed (see Chapter 1), and a school. A second phase of development took place outside the Old City walls, and the Anglican St George’s School (replete with Chapel) is exemplary. Funded by the Church of England and a lot of private donations, it was modelled on an Oxford college and located a short way outside the Damascus Gate. An educational enterprise run by the German deaconesses of Kaiserswerth straddled the first and the second development phases: first operating within the walls, in 1868 it moved its school into newly built premises (funded by the Prussian king) outside. Choirs trained at schools and churches took on a performative, representative function within the space. They moved about the city, mediating their territorial grasp in competition with mobile displays that had long been a part of the region. Muslim pilgrims gathering for the Nebi Musa festival had long drummed through and out of the city.38 Their audible amassing announced their importance to the place where they gathered (Jerusalem) but also the link between Jerusalem and the place to which they walked. The Franciscan order of Catholics founded a ‘Choir of the

36 37

38

Hirshberg 1995: 21–2. These were the Church of the Flagellation, St Anne’s Church, the Church and Convent of the Sisters of Zion, and the Austrian Hospice. Ben-Arieh 1984: 169–80. Finn’s recollections of the Nebi Musa Festival indicate that local music could be threatening. When Muslims from all over the world flocked to Jerusalem, he said, riots could break out between ‘equally fervid pilgrims on the Christian side’. ‘We always breathed more freely’, he wrote, ‘when the Moslem pilgrimages were over, and when their noisy drumming and shouting were at an end, and the usual quiet of Jerusalem was restored.’ Finn 1878: vol. II, 223.

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Custody of the Holy Land’ in 1850, its name staking a claim to the land, and its ‘protective’ role therein. Conder’s description of the Franciscan monks’ ‘march’ around the Church of the Holy Sepulchre – whose chapels were controlled by various different orders – indicates the music-territorial practice underway in a microcosm of the rivalrous Christian patchwork he experienced in Jerusalem more broadly.39 Conder’s account, like that of Goodrich-Freer some thirty years later, observed the varying types of choral practices in several other churches.40 Goodrich-Freer noted the care with which the Latin Patriarchate trained its choir, and the success of the Russian church in this respect. She described a festival of the Réparatrices that was simultaneously territorialising, sectarian and hierarchical. All six Catholic churches of Jerusalem brought their individual rites, choirs and communities to the church of the Réparatrices annually.41 This mapped the Réparatrices as a point to which all Catholics could attach themselves, as indeed a nodal point in Jerusalem. The choir of the deaconesses’ school, Talitha Kumi, was connected to a network of German institutions. It performed regularly to patients at the German Hospital, to lepers in the Jesushilfe home (Herrenhut), then in the Lutheran Church of the Redeemer (Erlöserkirche) each Sunday, as well as at a service for the Arab congregation led by Palestinians from Beit Jala. It sang to celebrate the Kaiser’s birthday, and when Kaiserin AugustaViktoria visited the school in 1898 it ‘gave a concert and welcomed her, singing “Gott grüsse Dich”’.42 Such territorial ideas spread within the adult population through music education too, thanks to ventures initiated by German and Jewish organisations in particular. One of the earliest Jewish examples was the concert society called the Violin of Zion, established in Jaffa in 1904, with a branch in Jerusalem from 1910. This was a competitive imitation of musical practices at the German colony, and it sought to ‘disseminate the art of music in general and that of Jewish music in particular among the Jews’.43 Even the opening speech drew on romantic ideas about music’s supremacy over language that Hirshberg traces to the German E. T. A. Hoffmann, using these as a way of constructing a new musical nation as a territorial ‘Violin of Zion’, whose ‘base is in Judea and its head is in Galilee’.44 When

39 40 41 43 44

Conder 1879: vol. I, 329–45. Conder 1879: vol. II, 293–315; Goodrich-Freer 1904: 157–8. 42 Goodrich-Freer 1904: 165. Melkon Rose 1993: 42. Hashkafa, 1908, quoted in Hirshberg 1995: 31. Hashkafa, 22 May 1908, quoted in Hirshberg 1995: 31.

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Idelsohn arrived in 1907 he contributed to the national project by teaching in a range of schools, founding several Jewish choirs, and publishing a Liederbuch effectively canonising his own newly composed Hebrew songs and arrangements of Hasidic tunes alongside two melodies by Mendelssohn and Schumann. The publication was welcomed by the Hebrew press as a contribution to ‘national revival’.45 The increasingly competitive aspect of the musical territorialisation can be traced in the way that institutions sought to project visual identities to complement their musical impact. The English St George’s School in Jerusalem was proud to have the first surpliced choir in the region, and this purple and white uniform was essentially a projection of Anglicanism in Palestine, fighting for recognition among a sea of other musical displays (there will be more to say about the orderly practice of surplice-wearing below). In the late Ottoman era, pilgrimage was on the increase and processions through the Old City became an increasingly intense part of the workings of the territory. We have already encountered a visiting French choir, and by the last decades of the Ottoman Era, displays were increasingly organised by the state (very likely in reaction to this expanding Christian influx).46 They announced themselves and enlarged their impact through trained musical groupings, frequently gathering large crowds of supporters and detractors. A recently arrived teacher at the Jerusalem Girls’ College wrote in a letter that she had seen: a great procession of cross-bearers, choir boys and men, all singing, then whole lots of monks, and last of all a scarlet robed cardinal, – who I found out later was a special Papal Legate. The City doesn’t like the Latins, because they are so unfriendly, and I thought he was going to be mobbed at one point, but the soldiers made a cordon round, and gradually the crowd melted away.47

III: Mandate Palestine The development of schools and choirs from the West was interrupted abruptly by the outbreak of the First World War, when all missionary schools had to close and give over their buildings to the 45 46

47

Hirshberg 1995: 13. For a full discussion of the development of the Nebi Musa pilgrimage through a series of political regimes, see Halabi 2007. Family letter from Miss Susanna Pearce Emery (1896–1986), then teacher at the Jerusalem Girls’ College (a Jerusalem and the East Mission [henceforth JEM] school), dated 21 September 1919. MECA: JEM GB165–0099. Box 1, file 1.

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army.48 Nevertheless, once the British Mandate government was in place, many were reopened very rapidly, and they provided almost the only secondary education available to Arabs.49 In fact the missionary schools and churches and their attendant population were the only sources of music education for the Palestinian Arab population in this period. The British government took over the Ottoman state primary schools, and established new primary schools too, but did not budget for the development of either secondary education or music education. Several documents attest to the difficulty of affording any artistic development at all in Arab schools. Shortly before the end of the Mandate government, the new Director of Education wrote that he intended to introduce music into the curriculum. But by that time the Mandate was about to end.50 The British government itself disseminated music-territorial symbols of Britain in earnest only in the later 1930s, with the PBS (of which more in Chapter 4) and the British Council. Founded in 1936, the latter was a product of a national desire for strategic dominance and its activities essentially aimed to counteract other European influences in the region (initially the French and Italian ones).51 It established schools and cultural clubs that housed libraries and provided venues for debates, lectures and concerts. Despite its strategic aims, the Council adopted a universalist rhetoric that claimed that ‘regional civilizations’ were no longer relevant and that today was the age of ‘one common, indivisible civilization’. The Council’s role was apparently to guide that civilisation, and to ‘bring messages of peace and good sense’. In Palestine this was intended to translate into a bifurcated cultural strategy ‘by which British cultural and social achievements [were] made known and interpreted to the Arab and Jewish people’, and ‘the development of the indigenous cultures [is attained] through the stimulus of association with British civilization’.52 48 49

50

51

Colbi 1988: 125. This is aside from two boarding colleges established by the British military administration. Ottoman state schools had continued throughout the war, and were supported by the Mandate government, which also established new ones. Tibawi 1982: 112. The outgoing Director of Education, W. A. Stewart, wrote a report entitled ‘The Fine Arts’ (a follow-up to his report on Arab Technical Education), in which he said that ‘no activities in the Fine Arts could be attempted officially in the Schools’. The reason he gave was the ‘preparatory state’ of the ‘educational background of the Government Schools’. October 1946. ISA: 129/22. Elsewhere, he expressed concern that villages paid taxes, but saw no return in the form of basic services (water, telephone, transport). See ‘Arab Technical Education in Palestine 1930–1946’ July 1946. ISA: 129/22. A radio announcement indicates that his successor, Bernard de Bunsen, planned to introduce music into the curriculum. See ‘Between Ourselves’, typescript of programme broadcast on the PBS’s English Section, dated 6 March 1946. ISA: 1879/1. 52 White 1965. ‘The British Council. Report for 1943–44’: 17, 19. June 1944. ISA: 128/14.

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The extent to which the strategy was followed through in a practical sense is difficult to ascertain. The Council provided funds for Jewish cultural institutions and its own clubs were open to non-Jewish members of the population as well. But the support that these gave to ‘national’ or ‘regional’ music-making among Arabs was apparently minimal. There were a few concerts of Arab music and some concerts of Western music that occurred more frequently. There is a peculiarity to note here, however: ‘concerts’ were often little other than gramophone listening sessions. Numerous recordings were sent from Britain to the Council for this purpose – in 1944, for instance, no less than 450 arrived.53 Thus the events involved a minimum of practical musical activity and participation by members of the local community and may well have been presented in a didactic manner. Some musical presentations were certainly expressly didactic. The Council report in January 1945, for instance, listed a cluster of events including two talks on ‘What is Music?’ by Mr. W. Morris at the institute in Haifa. On 22 January, there was a gramophone recital with commentary on works by Elgar, Handel, Bliss and Bach, which may well have had the same sense. There were also British music promotion sessions: ‘A recital of songs from Purcell, Verdi and Schubert was given by Mrs. Rogov-Vogal on 29th. At gramophone recitals in the Tel Aviv and Haifa Institutes during the month the following works by British composers were played: “Phantasie in A Minor” by Ireland, Trumpet Voluntary by Purcell, Concerto Op. 85 by Elgar.’54 Despite the Council’s rhetoric of ‘capacity audiences’ in its reports, it is far from clear how many people were drawn into the British space by such music educational activities, and it is very likely that it was rather small. The annual report of 1944 states that 250 people in Jerusalem attended lectures on ‘British History, Traditions, Economics and Literature’ (200 in Haifa), and that 290 people in Jerusalem attended lectures on Penicillin.55 It states also that there were five lectures on ‘Britain and the World’s Music’ in Haifa, where there were also ‘regular public chamber music concerts’, and that there were ‘occasional gramophone concerts’ in Jaffa. Yet it does not admit the number of attendees, and plainly the relevance of 53

54

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‘The British Council. Report for the First Quarter, 1945’: 2. Second Series, no. 10. October 1944. ISA: 128/14. ‘British Council Work in Palestine and Trans-Jordan. Monthly Report, January 1945’: 2. ISA: 128/14. ‘Palestine’, in ‘The British Council. Report for 1943–44’. London: June 1944: 18–21. ISA: 128/14.

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British culture to the local communities was questionable, the appeal of listening to records of English music rather limited. The reports do not detail any attempt to ‘develop’ Arab music; indeed, they only refer to very occasional concerts of Arab music. Ultimately, then, the British Council’s musical endeavours were unsustainable territorially. The case was very different for Jewish communities, who rapidly gained autonomy over their education system under the Mandate government. The subsequent drive for Hebraicisation lent schools a further ideological specificity and indeed a practical linguistic one too. A range of secondarylevel schools emerged for Jewish pupils where music was on the curriculum, and when the Hebrew University was established in 1933, it also opened a Music Division. In the same year, the Mandate Government supported the opening of the Palestine Conservatory of Music and Dramatic Art, which was the most important contributor to advanced Western music education.56 It developed in its first decade into three departments, one for general music education, another for training teachers, and a third that provided professional training for advanced students. Given that it has been held up as a beacon of Jewish striving to reach out musically towards Arabs, it is worth considering the extent to which it could conform to such a ‘cultural mission’ framework.57 The main thrust of the institution was the construction of a music life for the Jewish residents and immigrants (it was indeed extremely active in gaining immigration permits for German Jews). At the beginning there may have been ideas about reaching other groups, for the Director, Emil Hauser, inspected a range of schools including Arab government schools and the first report stated that ‘[m]usic is playing and will continue to play a vital part in creating harmony of life among people’, going on to connect this with ‘the peace of Jerusalem’. However, it is not possible to ascertain how many Arabs from Palestine were involved, because reports refer only to groups such as ‘Christians and Arabs’, as well as classic terms of ‘nonJews’ and ‘the rest’ – which included Arabs but also English, Bulgarians, Poles, Russians, Greeks and Armenians. The Conservatory administration turned to the Zionist Congress for help in 1939, moreover, referring to itself as ‘a voice in the Choir of Palestine’s Construction’. Much of the institution’s support came from Europe and the USA and was for Jews specifically. So this was not an institution with much financial or ideological energy for serving Arab residents. When the Mandate’s Director of Education,

56

Hirshberg 1995: 171–6.

57

Von der Lühe 1999.

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W. A. Stewart, claimed in 1946 that the Conservatoire had always ‘stood for the international freedom of music’ and was ‘open to students of any creed or race’, he was simply painting a cosmetic gloss on the political and fiscal realities of life in Palestine.58 The curricular focus of the institution was on Western classical music, expanding into Jewish and Oriental music as the years went on. The report for the years of 1934 to 1936 reveals that Lachmann had held a lecture on Arab music illustrated by ‘ūd player Wasif Jawhariyya and that Jawhariyya was on the staff as an ‘ūd teacher.59 He was indeed listed in the prospectuses of years commencing 1935, 1936 and 1937 as well. Jawhariyya’s own memoirs, on the other hand, state that he became a friend of Hauser and had an honorary position at the Conservatoire, without actually teaching there ‘because of all the fighting between Arabs and Jews after the start of the British mandate’.60 Hirshberg’s and von der Lühe’s observations that Ezra Aharon taught ‘ūd at the Conservatoire for several years must refer to a subsequent phase (and indicate that ‘Oriental’ music remained in any case very much a sideline). It is difficult to reconcile the idea of contributions from non-Jewish musicians such as Jawhariyya with the strongly Zionist ethos of the institution, which was present not only in fund-raising, but in general rhetoric and indeed curriculum.61 (I discuss Jawhariyya’s own education in Chapter 5 below.) The same explicitly Zionist ethos developed in the Hebrew Music Association (founded in 1921), which strove to compensate for the nonexistence of Hebrew folk music in Palestine.62 The initial attempt, which was linked with establishing a national opera, failed, but later attempts, drawing on the expertise of Russian folklorist Joel Engels and above all the energy of musicians such as David Schor and Salomon Rosovsky, saw the construction of a Jewish ‘national’ folk music for the region on European models.63 It could soon be distributed through a strong infrastructure, for

58 59 60

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’The Fine Arts’:1. ISA: 129/22. Archive of the Palestine Conservatoire, NLA: Mus 54 A6. Nassar and Tamari 2005: 520. According to Stewart, writing in 1946, the Conservatoire’s ‘board has recently been consulted by the P.B.S. about establishing a school of Arab music’. ‘The Fine Arts’. ISA: 129/22. A typescript report on the Conservatoire dated February 1944 reveals that the curriculum for teacher training was supervised by the Jewish Council (Vaad Leumi), but earlier on the Conservatoire had invested considerably in supporting new arrivals from Europe, and providing them with a Zionist vision for their new lives. See ‘1938/Report 1939’ (in German). This lists collaborative partners assisting in the settlement of new arrivals (p. 2) and reports on their ‘Zionist Education’ (p. 3). ISA: 1050/27. 63 Hirshberg 1995: 69. Hirshberg 1995: 78ff., 143–56.

Education

Jewish institutionalisation had led to the publication of scores, further establishment of schools, organised communal singing, performances, recordings, and, after 1936, the Hebrew section of the PBS. Whole auditoria of people gathered to learn ‘their’ folk songs. One composer remarked that in the mid-1930s this ‘was the only public event on Friday nights in Tel Aviv and the entire intelligentsia … used to attend’.64 Such activities excluded the non-Jewish population on rather obvious ideological grounds. Thus far, then, I have traced two categories of music-educational territorialisation. Into the first one fall the Christian institutions settling on the land, establishing rather modest musical practices as a component of much broader projects, teaching local people (including Arabs, Armenians, Greeks, Jews and others) and using them to project territorial affiliations through that music. Into this category we can place not only the missionary schools, but also the nationalist colonial British Council projects and the PBS (on which I will focus separately in Chapter 4). Into the second category come the Jewish institutions that took the land in order to establish institutions on European models which incorporated some peripheral ‘Oriental’ ideas but were generally for Jews alone. Such institutions differ profoundly from the other type not only because of the identities of their members, but because they came increasingly to embody and project a territorial affiliation that was rhetorically rooted in the land itself through recourse to the Zionist narrative of ‘return’. In the remaining part of this section I introduce a third project that has traces of each. It reveals a movement which, like the Jewish music schools, expanded territorially through musical practices themselves. Unlike them, however, it sought to involve the longer-standing residents of the land, and it invoked a rather broader set of ideals than them. In certain ways, indeed, it was a great deal more ambitious, foreshadowing the apparently inclusive ‘culture’ projects I will address in Chapter 6. It developed at the Friends School in Ramallah, a Quaker establishment that had grown steadily since the initial arrival of Quaker missionaries in 1869. Beginning initially with small schools in villages around the village of Ramallah, the Quakers had established a school for girls in 1889 (The Girls Training Home of Ramallah) with fifteen pupils from Lydd, Jaffa, Aboud, Jerusalem, Beirut and Ramallah. In 1901 they established a Boys Training Home, beginning again with fifteen students but expanding gradually, and from 1927 this had a Palestinian Arab as its principal, namely Khalil Totah

64

Composer Daniel Sambursky, quoted by Hirshberg 1995: 154.

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(1886–1955), scholar and teacher, formerly Director of the Arab Teacher Training College in Jerusalem. It is from the late 1920s that archival records provide clear examples of musical activities at the school, but the development that concerns us first of all is the work of American teacher Rolla Foley, who arrived at the beginning of the war in 1939, to teach music. Although many missionary schools had to close during the Second World War, the Friends Schools were not among them. Foley began relatively modestly and in line with the work of his predecessors, directing the school’s choir in an Easter Concert on 23 March 1940.65 Held at the YMCA in Jerusalem, a building built in 1933 and a popular public concert venue (of which more in Chapter 6), it combined An Easter Cantata (Roy Nolte, arranged by Noble Cain) with European choral music from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, mainly referring to the Easter theme. The concert was introduced by a prayer and a Bible reading provided by the American Consul General, and closed with congregational singing of the first verse of Perronet and Holden’s All Hail the Power of Jesus’ Name. In the following year, on 9 June 1941, Foley was more ambitious, collaborating with the String Ensemble from the PBS to put on a ‘Spring Musical’ in the school auditorium.66 Part of this was relayed by the radio on the English Children’s Hour. The programme combined some piano solos, string ensemble pieces, unaccompanied choir pieces and combinations of choir and string ensemble. Again, the American interest is clear from certain composers, but this is only one element within a programme that identifies many other musical territories. Alongside European canonical composers such as Bach, there are folksongs from Russia, Italy and Yugoslavia. The final piece on the programme was the song by Noble Cain setting Dana Burnet’s nostalgic poem ‘The Homeland’. Foley’s territorial expansion, however, had already begun by this stage. On May 10 1941 he put on ‘The First Palestine Children’s Music Festival’, consisting of a morning rehearsal and afternoon concert, which united pupils from the Friends schools in Ramallah with those from schools in Jaffa, Jerusalem and Bethlehem.67 There were eight participating schools, and about 400 children; a photograph printed within one of Foley’s publications reveals neat, orderly rows of children lined up on and in front 65 66 67

Programme preserved in FBS: Historical Documents 1940–1949. Programme preserved in FBS: Historical Documents 1940–1949. Programme preserved in FBS: Historical Documents 1940–1949.

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of the stage of the YMCA.68 Audience members were invited to contribute ‘to the expenses of this festival’ on leaving; otherwise the event seems to have been sponsored by the schools themselves, by local companies (who are advertised in the programme), and, perhaps by the PBS who broadcast the event divided between its Arabic and English programmes.69 ‘Part I’ of the concert comprised seven Arab songs. The background to this festival had been established by Foley in the summer of 1940, when he created a network between music teachers in the twelve schools and termed it the ‘Palestine Music Teachers Club’. Through it he strove ‘to introduce and promote a unified music education programme in the regular curriculm [sic] of the Arabic-English speaking schools of Palestine’.70 Members met once a month for ‘classes in teacher-training, methods, and material’. In the summer of 1941 the club arranged a music teachers’ conference at the Friends Girls School in Ramallah, and introduced a new territorial nuance, namely internal ‘Divisions’ – Jerusalem, Jaffa and Ramallah.71 Thus far, the ‘Palestinian’ network was comparable with connections between various ‘Jewish’ music schools in towns such as Haifa, Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Arguably, it was complementary. But when the Second Palestine Children’s Music Festival took place on 2 May 1942, its singers were drawn from much further afield, indeed out beyond British Palestine and into French Mandate territory. The programme booklet mapped its source schools on a line drawing that showed Palestine surrounded by a swathe of land divided into Syria, Transjordan and Egypt (see Figure 3).72 Labelled ‘Home Communities represented in the Second Annual Palestine Children’s Music Festival’, this shows the locations of thirty-five out of the thirty-eight towns and villages with participating schools, and these 68 69

70

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Foley 1942. This PBS involvement – given the station’s linguistically divided broadcasting – may have indeed structured the programme into Part I(‘Arabic Songs’) and Part II(‘English Folk Songs’). The ‘English’ certainly referred to the language in which songs were sung rather than the origin of the composer or folk song, but the designation ‘Folk’ was inaccurate, for there were three subsections, namely ‘Religious’, ‘Folk Songs’ and ‘Fun and Frolic’. This was how Foley constructed the club in 1942 in ‘Brief Notes on the Palestine Music Teachers Club’ in the programme booklet for ‘The Second Annual Palestine Children’s Music Festival’, 2 May 1942. FBS: Historical Documents 1940–1949. Programme for ‘The 1941 Children’s Music Festival’ preserved in FBS: Historical Documents 1940–1949. Programme booklet for ‘The Second Annual Palestine Children’s Music Festival’, May 2 1942. FBS: Historical Documents 1940–1949. As I discuss below, Foley’s map ignores the border created by the French, within their Mandate over Syria, between Lebanon and Syria. It had been in effect since 1926.

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included many placed outside Palestine, including the major centres of Amman, Beirut and Damascus. The event was sponsored by Edward Keith-Roach, Governor of Jerusalem, and was broadcast by the PBS. It was also reviewed in one of the main British newspapers, the Palestine Post.73 The following year, 1943, saw Foley putting on concerts in some of these new venues. In apparent acknowledgement of Lebanon’s striving for national independence (which would be officially established seven months later), he conducted the ‘First Annual Lebanon Children’s Music Festival’ in Beirut on 17 April.74 The ‘First Annual Syria Children’s Music Festival’ took place in Aleppo on 21 and 22 May. By this time, the Friends Board of Missions had elected to allow him to devote his entire time to what was now a regional project entitled the ‘Near East Music Teachers’ Association’, and his projected schedule included concerts at the Broumanna and Tripoli music festivals, and performances within Palestine in Nazareth, Haifa, Jaffa and Jerusalem.75 In a booklet compiled that year, Foley included the two new ‘Districts’ (Lebanon and Syria) within his listing of ‘The Palestine Music Teachers Club’; indeed, there were ten participating schools in the Lebanon, and twelve in Syria.76 But the regional expansion was reflected in an expanded territorial map in the programme book of ‘The Third Annual Palestine Students’ Music Festival’ produced in the same year.77 And in 1944 it was ‘The Near East Music Teachers Association’ that presented the ‘Near East Music Festivals’ in the various venues.78 Foley seems to have conducted every single concert. Through Foley, then, the Friends Board of Missions was establishing a regional network of children’s activities that was of a rather distinct character. First, it did not rely on a nationalist construction of the region

73 74

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da c. [R. Da Costa] 1942. The front cover of the booklet ‘1943 Children’s Music Festival’ lists these events. Programme preserved in FBS: Historical Documents 1940–1949. Letter from A. C. McInness, Chairman, on behalf of the Near East Music Teachers’ Association. Jerusalem, 14 September 1943. Angus Campbell MacInnes was son of a former bishop in Jerusalem, Rennie MacInness, and was serving as archdeacon in Palestine. The letter, addressed ‘Dear Friend’, was setting out the structure for the Association over the coming years, including its committee, all of whom were representatives of foreign missions. Copy preserved in FBS: Historical Documents 1940–1949. ‘The Palestine Music Teachers Club’ (College Press: Aleppo, 1943). FBS: Historical Documents 1940–1949. Programme of ‘The Third Annual Palestine Music Students Festival’, 7 May 1943. FBS: Historical Documents 1940–1949. See individual programme booklets for ‘Syria Folk Music Festival’ (Aleppo, 20 May 1944), ‘The Second Annual Lebanon Folk Music Festival’ (Beirut, 5 May 1944), for instance. FBS: Historical Documents 1940–1949.

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135

Figure 3 From the programme booklet for The Second Annual Palestine Children’s Music Festival. 2 May 1942. Housed in the archive of the Friends Boys School, Ramallah. Reproduced by permission.

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based on the Bible (as did Zionism). Nor did it carry a nationalist message about the country supporting the mission (whereas European organisations even prior to the Mandate tended to encourage Palestinian children and servants to respect the national monarchs and sing national anthems to hospital patients79). By referring to ‘Palestine’, ‘Syria’ and ‘Lebanon’, however, it did suggest the organisation of national affiliations for the majority of people of the region themselves; and programmes included songs promoting a sense of attachment to regions and nations. (It is worth noting that none of the programmes included Jewish song.) Second, and following on from that, it was inclusive in ways that opposed Zionism, which emerges from Foley’s provision of a breakdown of participants along confessional lines. Of course, the participants were simply a consequence of the schools that Foley drew on, missionary establishments that were dominated by Christians but were open to Muslims and Jews as well. However, the fact that he published figures indicates that he wished to promulgate a particularly mixed vision of the region. This was not only in line with the ethos of a great many missionary schools, but also with the ideals of the Quaker School Principal Khalil Totah, who strove throughout his life to emphasise the benefits of schooling that brought together Jews, Muslims and Christians and led them through a liberal curriculum.80 His position, moreover, had developed in explicit opposition to the Zionist movement and indeed the Jewish National Council. The latter, which had complete autonomy – unlike Arab schools which remained under British control – not only ran schools for Jews alone but steadfastly strove to absorb all Jews of the region, separating them off from other communities. It may have been therefore with some pride that Foley could publish figures in his programme booklet for 1943 that showed more than 12 per cent of his choir were Jews, over 79

80

Traces of this are abundant in sources about the JEM. For instance, after Christmas in Haifa in 1901 there was a tea party at the JEM’s Mission Home, where workers ‘went and fetched our patients up, two Jews and three Moslems … our Vice-Consul had allowed us to dress him up as Father Christmas … we danced round the tree … Then all of us stood up, and told our guests to stand too, for we were going to sing our National Anthem. We explained what that meant and talked to them a little about our good Queen. They were so delighted with “God save the Queen” that we were obliged to sing it over a second time for them, and so ended a very joyful Eastern Christmas.’ E. D., ‘Christmas at Haifa Hospital’, Bible Lands 8, April 1901: 91–2 at 92. BL: P.P.959.d. A former pupil, Melkon Rose, recalls being taught ‘new hymns and traditional English songs’ as a pupil in the preparatory school connected to the Jerusalem Girls’ College. (Melkon Rose 1993: 117.) He also recalls that Bishop Blyth’s Armenian resident maid slept in a room with a portrait of Queen Victoria ‘in an elaborate gold painted frame’ above the bed. (Melkon Rose 1993: 19.) Ricks 2009: 52.

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13 per cent were Muslims and around 75 per cent were Christians.81 As we move into the next section, we do well to keep in mind the photograph I mentioned above, and the orderly lines of singing children that the concerts entailed. The ‘Near East’ of the Friends Board of Missions comprised this ordering of diversity.

Peopling the land Musical production I: Singing women of the diaconate The Reverend Theodor Fliedner (1800–64) founded several educational institutes for women and children in Germany that were centred on a diaconate in Kaiserswerth, opened in 1836. The idea was that an ‘inner mission’ to lapsed Christians would lead to a renewal and moral improvement in society at large, and it developed initially in a ‘home’, the ‘Mutterhaus’ (Motherhouse) where Fliedner, a number of pedagogues, and his two successive wives trained women in nursing, teaching and community work.82 Their project had little appeal to women who were well-established in the bourgeois framework of the time, which entailed marriage and children. So Fliedner sought out women whose unmarried, childless status made them objects of disapproval. Such women could be offered a ‘family’ identity (under the father- and mother-figures of Fliedner and his wife) and a social standing and respectability (through their training as carers and pedagogues). The initiative rapidly overflowed its first framework of ‘inner mission’, and saw Fliedner sending trained deaconnesses overseas. Although the four who moved to Jerusalem in 1851 were ostensibly there to care for sick members of the Protestant community there, they immediately started looking for local girls to teach. Their intention was to make these girls 81

82

The confessional population figures that Foley provided for 1943 indicate that 1,032 Christians took part (11 denominations ranging from the largest group of 487 Greek Orthodox, through 258 Protestants, 14 Roman Catholics and a single Assyrian). Added to that were 184 Moslems and 167 Jews. Foley also offered a breakdown of his participants according to what he called ‘race’. This comprised 841 Arabs, followed by 296 Armenians, 169 Jews, 37 Assyrians and a scattering of others, such as British (13), Greek (10), and Turkish (5). Programme preserved in FBS: Historical Documents 1940–1949. For a sensitive account of the socialisation of the women, see Silke Christiane Köser, ‘“Denn eine Diakonisse darf ¼ kann kein Alltagsmensch sein”. Zur Konstruktion kollektiver Identitäten in der Kaiserwerther Diakonie’, in Friedrich, Friedrich, Jähnichen and Kaiser 2001: 109–21.

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pedagogues and carers, while converting them to Christianity too. The deaconesses’ superiors in Germany regarded their endeavours as a crusade, cross against crescent, and in a deep sense the idea was probably still one of ‘lapsed’ Christians, given that Islam was broadly understood as a later imposition on the (Christian) region. Music had a remarkably strong presence at the Mutterhaus and its affiliated schools, providing a very clear example of how disciplinary practice through music could constitute the ‘production’ of the deaconesses. Fliedner promoted singing as a medium of consolation, spiritual fortification, community-building and discipline.83 He drew on St Paul for justification of his practice, citing the latter’s admonishment ‘Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom; teaching and admonishing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with grace in your hearts to the Lord’ (Colossians 3:16). He also drew on Luther to argue that singing was a weapon against temptation, that it indeed brought strength directly from ‘above’: This singing of praises to the Lord is such a precious thing, a true means of grace which protects against sadness, multiplies delights one takes in the Lord, chases away the temptations of the devil, the world and one’s own heart, and brings new fresh forces from the top, like the man of God, Luther, described so beautifully, and confirmed by his own example.84

The disciplinary aspect of the training emerges in the fact that the women had to learn songs by heart (which was understood widely as a means towards Protestant piety), and that singing was scheduled at regular intervals in the daily routine. Additionally, Fliedner published a song book for the deaconesses (it ran to twelve editions) that functioned as a symbol of belonging akin to the uniform.85 Not only were they to carry it with them to daily services, but they had to hand it back if they quit. Many of its songs had texts relating directly to the ‘sisterhood’ of deaconesses under the authority of Jesus, and a daily routine of prayers and songs (specific to certain days) was to be maintained by all deaconesses, wherever they were in the world. Those sent to Jerusalem were thus connected to the ones back home in Kaiserswerth by virtue of the fact that they sang the same songs and offered the same prayers, at the same times of day. Thus music contributed to the project of sustaining, overseas, a very specific human (and singing) product.

83

Köser 2006: 429.

84

Köser 2006: 432.

85

Fliedner 1901 [184?]

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Like the deaconesses themselves, children at the deaconesses’ school in Jerusalem were taught to sing songs by heart. Annual reports indicate that they sang both German and Arab songs (even on occasion some French ones) and that singing was a basic subject on the curriculum. By 1855, one of the deaconesses was teaching a class to read music, and six of the children were singing in a choir at the services. A house organ, purchased in 1854 or 1855, provided accompaniment to both songs and prayers, replacing a piano that had long needed a substantial overhaul. Other deaconesses’ stations (in Beirut, for instance), report on pianos and piano lessons, but there is no sign of this in the early years of the Jerusalem station. The childhood education project was understood as one of deep social transformation and improvement, for it was to instil qualities in children that would forestall their doing harm in society as adults.86 Fliedner’s key ideals were humility, obedience, self-denial and purity, combined, of course, with the most important of all, piety; and these ideas can be traced in the song book. His primary intent therein was religious indoctrination, or, in his own words in the Foreword to the second edition, providing children with God’s wisdom. Drawing on the Bible’s praise for the ‘childlike’ to reinforce his position, he said that children were very fallible, but this was an advantage when it came to their openness to God. They could sing texts even though they did not wholly understand them, he wrote, because they absorbed thereby the means with which to respond to the forces of the world. In consequence, children learned serious religious songs between what Fliedner called the ‘soft’ ages of two and seven. Fliedner referred in his songbook for children to a book by (his colleague) J. F. Ranke on general pedagogy, which included a whole chapter on the teaching of singing. Ranke’s work emphasises the guidance that teachers should offer in preventing children from screaming and making sure that they sing ‘purely’ (rein), indeed he claims – in line with European theories mentioned above – that screaming rather than singing will actually cause wildness. Similarly in line with German theory, he states that singing has a ‘healing’ effect on children’s ‘Gemüth’. Song is indeed ‘the speech of the Gemüth’. Ranke claimed that a school without singing was like a butterfly robbed of its wings.87 With a passing reference to Luther’s famous poem in praise of music, he observed that ‘Frau Musica’ kept moroseness and discord at bay, brought peace and joy, and raised up young hearts to God.88 86 88

87 Köser 2006: 74. Ranke 1863: 338. For the complete text in German and English translations see Leaver 2007: 74–5. Leaver presents Luther’s understanding of music and theology in five points, all of which are borne out

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Reports on individual children at the Jerusalem mission use references to good singing as evidence of their progress.89 More generally, in a report by the director of the diaconate in Kaiserswerth, Julius Disselhoff, on his visit to Jerusalem, singing appears as one of three elements that distinguished his deaconesses’ pupils from the sordid environment that they would normally inhabit: On my ride to the Holy City I saw on many fields and roads ragged children, boys and girls, degenerated into squalor. The sight was nothing new to me. But however often one sees the deep spiritual degradation, especially that of the female sex, in the country from which Salvation came to us, it still triggers a deep pain through the soul. But how my heart and countenance was cheered as I rode up the last steep hill, and up on the edge of the slope saw our older girls and a little further back the younger ones, who came to meet me with a thousand joys, with flowers and songs; they were 110 in number. They come from the same situation as the wretched girls whom I had seen on the way, and would become stupified just the same were it not for our [school]. Some now are resurrected in a new intellectual and spiritual life. Even among the 26 Muslim girls we currently educate, there are several in which the Christian truth is beginning to become conviction and life.90

Similarly, music emerges in reports as a sign of unity – in contradistinction to the perception that the population of Palestine was otherwise discordant, and torn by religiously motivated and tribal fighting. Grasping music as a unifying mechanism in this way can be placed in the context of Mitchell’s discussion of modern schooling in Egypt. In an attempt to overcome apparent urban disorder there, new schools organised pupils into groups under supervisors, and introduced regimented practices of time-management and learning. Disciplined individuals appeared thereby as coherent and productive structures: ‘as the techniques of distribution create an appearance of structure, the techniques themselves are to become increasingly invisible’.91 In the following report from Palestine, the writer claims that the physical features that distinguish children from one another visually can be overcome, even that their less visible confessional diversity can be transcended. And it is music that triggers this sense in him:

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by Fliedner’s proposals. They are ‘Music is a Gift of God’, ‘Music Creates Joyful Hearts’, ‘Music Drives Away the Devil’, ‘Music Creates Innocent Delight’ and ‘Music Reigns in Times of Peace’. See Leaver 2007: 89–97. See, for instance, examples in ‘Vorhandner Kinderkreis’ in Dritte Bericht über die Diakonissen-Stationen im Morgenlande, von den Jahren 1856 und 1857: 22–8. EKD: Reports of the diaconate. Eilfter Bericht über die Diakonissen-Stationen im Morgenlande von 1. Juli 1872 bis 30 June 1874, 17–18. EKD: Reports of the diaconate. Mitchell 1991: 79.

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Looking back five years, we were happy then to see that the number of children entrusted to us had grown to more than twenty. Now fifty children jump and sing, eat and sleep, cry and laugh, pray and work in the small rooms, white, brown and black Protestants, converts, Greeks, Abyssinians, and Mohammedans. But whenever the various hearts and lips sing their ‘Praise the Lord, O my soul!’ or: ‘How blessed it is to be a lamb of Christ!’, it awakens such a sweet harmony that one’s heart laughs with joy.92

The unity that such writers imagined (and we will encounter an English manifestation below) was not in fact limited to Palestine itself, but was necessarily part of a broader project to unite Europe and Palestine in a transnational family. In this respect too, it can be compared with other modernising missions: Egypt’s interest in creating ‘order’ was on one level an attempt to come in line with Paris.93 The diaconate may seem only inexplicitly territorial in this respect, for although Fliedner had good links with the Prussian court and was thus able to secure funding at crucial moments, his work was not linked to a major government ambition. Yet the institutional tactics can be understood as an enacting of Rogers’ grassroots ambitions for Palestine discussed in Chapter 2. Deaconesses worked, initially at least, very closely with individual children and women. Their project was to transform society from within, and through the production of newly pious individuals. In terms of the actual practices, our main sources are missionary reports from Jerusalem. Those mentioning children’s favourite songs indicate that not all of the German religious songs they learned were taken from Fliedner’s song book for schools. Another distinction between theory and practice emerges from recollections of pupils’ fear of the Sisters, their living ‘under a regime of severe discipline’ with no recreation aside from ‘long walks in the country’ and being fed poor – if plentiful – food.94 (Even while some reports mention difficulties with ‘wild children’, they generally emphasise children’s joyfulness.) The gap between theory and practice acknowledged, however, it seems safe to assume, that the running of the school adhered as much as possible to the programme put forward by Fliedner. As mentioned above, the diaconate sought conformity from deaconesses themselves, wherever they were in the world. Thus it is worth reflecting on Fliedner’s daily scheme for school activities, in which the intensity of children’s contact with singing is 92

93 94

‘Das Erziehungshaus’, in Sechster Bericht über die Diakonissen-Stationen im Morgenlande von Mitte 1862 bis Mitte 1864: 8–13 at 8. EKD: Reports of the diaconate. Mitchell 1991: 64ff. Melkon Rose 1993: 38, 40–3 and 75. Melkon Rose’s mother and her sister attended the school and lived in fear of the ‘Sister Jamileh’, as did two of his cousins, who were very unhappy there. Because children boarded and the languages spoken were German and Arabic, children such as these, with Armenian parentage, did not learn to speak Armenian.

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remarkable. I have summarised his recommendations here for a morning in a form that should make clear how little they were able to do without musical punctuation or commentary. Morning 9.00 am A morning song to be sung first, then a prayer. The teacher tells a story from the Bible. The teacher says a biblical saying, the children repeat it. The children sing a suitable song. The teacher gives some visual practice (Anschauungsübung) or the children learn a suitable poem by heart. A physical exercise. A suitable verse to be sung. 5–10 minutes drawing. 10.00 am 15 minutes play outside. Bread and butter and a table song. 10.15 Back in the classroom another song. Oral and visual practice (Sprech- und Anschauungsübung) Song, folding or weaving (Falten or Flechten) or counting. 11.00 30 minutes play outside. 11.30 Storytelling or looking at pictures. Song and prayer.95

Fliedner’s recommendation for the afternoon was similar and was followed in his book by more general comments, including the recommendation that teachers should not have pupils doing any one thing for more than fifteen minutes. He added that between all the activities a short song should be sung, because it was recreational for the children. In fact, then, the scheme above may not do justice to the amount of singing that he wished to hear. And the constant presence of it would fall in line with Ranke’s notion that ‘the child’s life should resound in and find its expression in song’.96 That song was woven firmly into the fabric of the child’s daily activities is also clear from Reports on the deaconesses’ activities in Jerusalem. In 95

Fliedner 1901: 309–14.

96

Ranke 1863: 337–8.

Education

1868 they had a new building, separating the hospital from their school, which was named from then on ‘Talitha kumi’, taken from the Gospel of Mark 5:41, meaning ‘Damsel arise!’97 When they moved into new buildings, so they accompanied their move with song.98 By the end of the century they had not only a hospital and a hospice, but an elementary school, a kindergarten, a domestic skills school (Haushaltungsschule), a seminar for kindergarten teachers and a seminar for teachers. Presumably all these premises were opened in and sustained by song. Fifty former pupils were working as teachers in other institutions in the region, presumably interpreting their days and their pupils’ days in German song.99 Finally, it is worth noting that one of the primary aims of teaching children to sing songs was getting them to sing them to (and thus influence) their families.100 This was common to missionary approaches to children, but it emerges somewhat differently and indeed persistently in the case of the deaconesses with regard to pupils who have left the Jerusalem establishment. The hope expressed is that they will, despite leaving the institute, continue to sing the songs. Most striking, perhaps, are the methods employed by Fliedner when he established a sewing school for Muslim women in the Old City. At this stage it was illegal to try to convert Muslim citizens (which is one reason that orphans were so attractive to missionaries). But here, and with the support of one Jussuf Effendi, the deaconesses could ‘win an influence’. While they sewed, the women listened to Bible readings (in Arabic) and learned Arab songs ‘with Christian content’.101 They also learned some of the play-songs (Spiellieder) from Fliedner’s song book for children. Presumably they took these home to introduce to their children, too.

Musical production II: Singing soldiers of the JEM My second example is provided by the JEM, the outgrowth of a series of official British ecumenical interventions that had begun with the founding of the Diocese of Jerusalem in 1841. Such interventions had varying targets 97

98

99

100 101

The King James Bible represents the text as follows: ‘And he took the damsel by the hand, and said unto her, Talitha cumi; which is, being interpreted, Damsel, I say unto thee, arise.’ ‘Das Kinderhaus Talitha Kumi’ in Achter Bericht über die Diakonissen-Stationen im Morgenlande, von Mitte 1866 bis Mitte 1888: 6–15 at 8. EKD: Reports of the diaconate. Uwe Kaminsky, ‘Die innere Mission Kaiserwerths im Ausland. Von der Evangelisation zum Bemühen um die Dritte Welt’, in Friedrich and Jähnichen 2005: 355–85 at 361. Köser 2006: 74. ‘Die muhamedanische Mädchen-Schule’, in Achter Bericht über die Diakonissen-Stationen im Morgenlande, von Mitte 1866 bis Mitte 1888: 15–18. EKD: Reports of the diaconate.

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for their evangelism and proselytism over the years, shifting between Jews, Orthodox Christians, Roman Catholics and Muslims, and had been marked by clashes among themselves, as well as by their very low success rate in converting local people.102 But the appointment of a new Anglican bishop, Popham Blyth, in 1887 would eventually open a new era. JEM was intended to represent the Church of England as a whole, and was envisaged as a solution to conflicts between multiple missionary organisations from the UK. Nevertheless, although it was financed by the church, Blyth had to fundraise energetically throughout his residency in Jerusalem. This endeavour can be traced in our main source of information about music at JEM, its quarterly publication Bible Lands, first published in 1899. Before examining the interface between fundraising, music-making and ‘people-making’, however, it is worth reflecting briefly on a musical event described in Bible Lands which offers an entry point into how music contributed to the reinforcement of the mission. The event in question was a commemoration of St Bartholomew’s Day, a memorialisation of the Protestant massacre by French Catholics in 1572 that took place at the newly built St George’s Church in Jerusalem on 24 August 1899. It unfolded according to a commonplace of Victorian social–religious practice, namely a ‘service of Song’, or oratorio, framed by various prayers.103 The proceedings would have been familiar to missionaries in Jerusalem as well as to readers of Bible Lands (Ehrlich refers to oratorio attendance as ‘a tribal rite’ in Victorian society).104 The featured work was Christ and his Soldiers (1878), a compilation of hymn texts for performance to children, set to new music by John Farmer, music teacher at Harrow School in London. Through the chosen hymns, it presents a narrative of the birth, crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus in Part I, followed in Part II by a narrative of a new Christ in the form of Christians. The narrative was not spelled out explicitly to readers of Bible Lands, although reference to ‘Oft in danger’ may have hinted the main thrust to those unfamiliar with the work. The report focuses primarily on the characters involved in the performance: Dr. D’Erf Wheeler conducted the music. The harmonium was beautifully played by Mr. MacAllister. The treble soloists were Mrs Dickson, the British Consul’s wife, and Mrs Palmer; both have beautiful voices, and sung [sic] with feeling. ‘Hark the glad sound’ and ‘Hark a thrilling voice’ were both very well rendered. The men’s 102 103 104

See Colbi 1988; Tibawi 1961 for a more detailed discussion. ‘S. Bartholomew’s Day at S. George’s’, Bible Lands 3 January 1900: 29. BL: P.P.959.d. Ehrlich 1985: 68.

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solos were taken by Mr J. Elihu, who has a fine voice. Mr. Gibbons, who was ordained priest in S. George’s, on Trinity Sunday, was to have taken the tenor part, but alas! he died of fever shortly after his ordination. The choruses were all well sung, especially ‘Oft in danger’; and there was a beautiful quartett [sic] by Mrs. Dickson, Miss Blyth, Mr. Dunn and Mr. Elihu. The singers and congregation seemed fully to realise that it was a solemn service and not a concert; the whole thing was rendered with great simplicity and feeling.

Christ and his Soldiers does, in fact, follow a clear script. Jesus’ life unfolds in Part I among ‘captives’ of ‘Satan’s bondage’, among ‘thickest films of vice’ (Part I no. 2), and leads towards his place on the cross where ‘foul taunts and curses meet His ears’, and a ‘felon hangs on either side’ (Part I no. 7). After his death, an elaborated quote from Isaiah 53:6 (already noted in Elmendorf’s references) emerges: ‘All we like sheep have gone astray, And turned aside from wisdom’s way.’ Part I ends with the resurrection, the redemptive force of Jesus, and his ascension into heaven (nos. 10–12). Part II then enacts a command to undertake missionary work, and elaborates how this will be done. In effect this is a justification of the lives of the performers themselves in Jerusalem, a ‘staging’ of what they themselves are doing in their lives outside the ritual event. It opens with a citation from Revelation 2:10, ‘Be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life’, delivered by male voices only. Following a march, the next text is from Paul’s letters to the Romans (13:11), urging an awakening to follow Jesus. The militaristic ‘Soldiers of Christ, Arise, And Put your Armour On’ (Part II no. 17) is followed by an invocation of the evil surrounding the missionaries: ‘Christian, seek not yet repose; Cast thy dreams of ease away; Thou art in the midst of foes … Oft in danger, oft in woe, Onward Christians, onward go … Join the war and face the foe’ (Part II no. 18) These texts, then, place the Christians within a hostile environment (already experienced by Jesus), and demand that they should battle against it. There is one more layer to observe here. Performers not only staged their work, but also projected the idea that music had a particular role in it. Part I’s opening contains a celebration of Jesus’ coming in music: ‘Hark! the glad sound, the Saviour comes, The Saviour promised long! Let every heart prepare a throne, And every voice a song.’ At the opening of Part II on the awakening of the Christian community, this emerges again in ‘Hark! a thrilling voice is sounding: “Christ is nigh,” it seems to say; “Cast away the works of darkness, O ye children of the day!”’. At the end, the ultimate triumph of Christianity is to be celebrated in music: ‘Fight, nor

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think the battle long; Soon shall victory be your song.’ These musicians performed, through Christ and His Soldiers, the triumph that visitors such as Finn, nearly half a century earlier, had hoped would come to pass. The report gives no indication of people in attendance at the event, except by mentioning that the oratorio ‘was sung by the musical members of the congregation’. Viewed in terms of a conversion strategy, however, it was profoundly disjunct. First, it invoked historical hostility between Roman Catholics and Protestants (thus maintaining a wedge between Protestants and Catholics in contemporary Jerusalem). Then, the text constructed the putatively beneficent actions of the missionaries towards the local population, yet at the same time it explicitly demonised their enemies, namely nonChristians (the bulk of the local population). And Farmer’s music drew out these textual characteristics with classic types of musical illustration, such as switching from a minor to a major key to present the transformation from evil to goodness. The event, then, must point primarily to music’s role in a self-reproducing, rather than interactive, aspect of mission. But that was not, of course, the only role that it had, for there was an extended ‘family’ one as well. British colonies had long been described with recourse to reproductive familial notions: they were ‘offshoots of the mother country’ or ‘children’ of the same, for instance.105 In Jerusalem, this construct overlapped intriguingly with a vision of Jerusalem as the ‘Mother-City of Christianity’ – which prompts a question about the direction of traffic.106 If Jerusalem was mother, parishes in England were surely her children, implying a reversal. Bishop Blyth ironed out the contradiction by arguing that Christians in Europe had a duty to ‘give back’. As he explained, it was accepted that ‘we owe most religious gifts to the East; and we should try to give a little back to that land from whence we have received much’. He even drew a historical parallel between preReformation Rome and Jerusalem of the present time. Peter’s pence (the tax that the English had contributed to the English School in Rome during the fourteenth century) had generated ‘a truly colossal income for religious work under the Roman Church’, he said.107 Anglicans were, to be sure, potential ‘parents’ for the new English society in Jerusalem, and yet their existence was – on a deeper level – a product of Jerusalem itself.108

105 106

107 108

Hall 2007: 10. Another popular metaphor for Jerusalem was ‘cradle of Christianity’. See, for instance, Finn 1878: vol. II: 104. Bible Lands 2, October 1899: 13. BL: P.P.959.d. Bible Lands 2, October 1899: 13. BL: P.P.959.d.

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As if in some way a human cipher for the productive side of Jerusalem, the bishop’s wife, Mrs Blyth, was herself referred to as ‘The Mother of S. Georges’. Her ‘people-creating’ role was strong, emerging, indeed, in a hagiographical account of her music-making as closely affiliated to the work of God. As the report put it, ‘how she would slave away at the piano, patiently teaching a difficult part until it was mastered! How she never despised a seemingly musicless boy, but ploddingly kept on and on, until the heavenly chord in him began to vibrate, and his heart warmed to her sweet influence!’109 In this narrative Mrs Blyth labours to set something divine within a boy throbbing, and indeed warm his heart. This is what makes him musical. Some might read a sexual implication in Mrs Blyth’s stimulation of the boys, even while it is plainly sublimated into music. We could indeed contextualise the construction of Mrs Blyth with Spivak’s theorisation of the bourgeois female of nineteenth-century Europe. Spivak divides her theory into two poles, the first part of which is ‘childbearing and soul making’, or the making of ‘domestic-society through-sexual-reproduction cathected as “companionate love”’.110 Mrs Blyth certainly conforms to nineteenth-century models of women’s domestic music-making and teaching, for her musical productivity took place both in the library and the bishop’s drawing room.111 Moreover, her domestic practice was not exceptional within JEM establishments. Next door to St George’s at St Mary’s Home (for orphans), Miss Gardner, who was Head of the Home and Choir Trainer and Organist at St George’s, received pupils in her living room, as well. Evenings were spent there ‘in reading, writing letters, and sometimes in singing hymns … which the children always enjoy for they are very fond of singing, and take parts easily without accompaniment’.112 The second pole of Spivak’s theory is also pertinent, for it moves out of the domestic sphere to encompass ‘the imperialist project cathected as civil-society-through-social-mission’.113 The work of the bishop’s daughters is a perfect exemplification, for they took (newly resonating) boys out to the public sphere of the chapel choir by teaching them Tonic Sol-Fa.

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110 111

112

113

‘The Mother of S. George’s. By One of her Boys’, Bible Lands 39, January 1909: 103–5 at 105 (my italics). BL: P.P.959.d. Spivak 1985a: 244 (my italics). ‘The Mother of S. George’s. By One of her Boys’, Bible Lands 39, January 1909: 103–5. BL: P.P.959.d. Emmeline Woodhouse, ‘About S. Mary’s Home’, Bible Lands 39, January 1909: 106. BL: P.P.959.d. Spivak 1985a: 244.

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Charles McGuire has demonstrated that the Tonic Sol-Fa method was understood in Britain in the latter half of the nineteenth century as a means through which to support the spread of both (Protestant) ‘Christianity’ and ‘Civilisation’.114 Missionaries learned it as a part of their basic equipment, and plainly the Blyths’ daughters were among them. According to Bible Lands, ‘Hardly had the boys learned to read their notes [from Mrs Blyth] when one of her daughters took them up in the tonic sol-fa. In a short time the combinations of the scale were tolerably mastered, so that most of the singing at this time was done in this system.’ The mother brought the boys to life in her drawing room, then, and the daughters prepared them for life in society, introducing them to English ‘civilisation’. The specifically protective role of Miss Gardner can also be read through Spivak’s second pole, for she had to defend music from male ignorance. According to the bishop, while music had been dismissed by some male teachers as an unnecessary subject, ‘under the skilled and careful training of Miss Gardner, the music of S. George’s has become as popular in the school as it is successful, and the reverent and sweet singing of the choir is the result of much patient and interested work on her part’.115 He went on in a later article to say of Miss Gardner, ‘Long may she remain in Jerusalem! The services of S. George’s are a perpetual delight to all who attend them. They are devotional and congregational, and the singing of the choir and of the school boys is excellent. The boarders of both schools attend Mattins and Evensong, and sing with great heartiness and real pleasure.’ He was also faintly hagiographical: ‘Miss Gardner is much loved by the girls, who rely on her constant kindness and impartiality, the latter a great and rare quality, and almost more appreciated by the Syrians than any other.’116 If these accounts by the bishop seem to render the male role in the musical-people-production a negative one, it nevertheless emerged positively through the archetypal instrument of the church, the organ. The organ was the subject of a lengthy fund-raising project by Blyth, which gave way to a campaign for an organist, who, it was argued, would need to be a man because of the ‘climate’.117 (In actual fact, as we have seen, Miss 114 115

116

117

McGuire 2009. See also Lee and Southcott 2008. ‘The Story of S. George’s. From the Bishop. I. The Boys’ School’, Bible Lands 60, April 1914: 176–8 at 178. BL: P.P.959.d. ‘The Story of S. George’s. From the Bishop. 2. S. Mary’s Home’, Bible Lands 62, October 1914: 210–13 at 211. BL: P.P.959.d. ‘S. George’s Choir School’, Bible Lands 19, January 1904: 31–2 at 31. This was probably authored by Blyth, although no name is provided. BL: P.P.959.d.

Education

Gardner was organist for a time.) But the gendered aspect of the organ emerged primarily from scenarios of interaction. Blyth observed in January 1901 that whereas all village churches in England were furnished with an organ, St George’s in Jerusalem (which represented them all in Jerusalem) had to make do with a harmonium. The cost of paying an English builder to erect an organ would be £700, he wrote, and he referred in his article to a photograph of the (empty) organ chamber.118 Refraining on that occasion from requesting funds directly, in the next issue he constructed a role for the specifically female believers on behalf of ‘the Mother-city of Christianity’, setting them in a supplicatory position towards the male members of the church who should provide for the organ. ‘We greatly wish that a few of our lady readers would take up the collection’, he said, ‘half-a-dozen earnest English ladies (could so many take the matter up), would soon raise the £700, which perhaps many an English Churchman could give, were he aware of the need’.119 The sexual and reproductive underpinning of this request (the empty chamber, the female supplication, the potential male contributions) slipped out of sight when he made a direct appeal in the ensuing issue. Then he framed his request in biblical, almost sacrificial, terms, proposing that the organ would be ‘a most acceptable offering if someone would provide one’. But here the reason for his urgency became clearer, and can be understood in terms of both reproductive rivalry, and the need to stage a scene for Jerusalem itself. St George’s was in competition with churches in Jerusalem that were already replete with organs, he said, and Greek and Latin churches were ‘full of costly offerings of gold, silver, and jewel’.120 Potential donors were thus invited to provide an organ in order to contribute to a display: ‘our services are simpler and less ritualistic than theirs, but our buildings and their furniture should be completed and be of the very best’. The bishop then connected the organ to its most important function, which was in fact the generation of a new church population. Here the people-making roles proliferate, because for the organ to fulfil its greatest

118

119 120

Despite Blyth’s indication, the photograph was actually only printed in a later issue of Bible Lands. ‘The Bishop’s Letter’, Bible Lands 7, January 1901: 73–5 at 73 and ‘The Organ Chamber’, Bible Lands 11, January 1902: 133. In this issue it takes a whole page (whereas most photographs were smaller), and is referred to in a brief report on a fundraising concert held in London (143). BL: P.P.959.d. ‘The Anglican College, Jerusalem’, Bible Lands 8, April 1901: 87–8 at 88. BL: P.P.959.d. ‘Holy Week and East in Jerusalem’, Bible Lands 9, July 1901: 104–6 at 105 and 106 (my italics). BL: P.P.959.d.

149

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potential, it needed to lead a congregation, and that would in itself attract people to the church. As Blyth put it, ‘perhaps the most striking appeal that we can make here on behalf of the Church of England, is the presentation of such simple, congregational, and earnest services as are common throughout England. It is an appeal which … can touch the Jew and the Mohammedan also’. Going on, he remarked ‘we now are doing with a moderate harmonium what might be done in a large English Church with an organ’.121 Within three years, the organ in sight, Blyth built the final stage of his argument, which would conjoin the organ with the boys. The organ ‘entails choir boys’, he wrote, and they must be put to school … must be boarded, housed, and clothed at the Choir School House’.122 The subsequent covetousness of one writer’s comment about St George’s population is unmistakable: ‘We have Christians, Greeks, Latins, Anglicans, Mohammedans and converted Jews’, he wrote.123 At this point, Mitchell’s reflections on Egyptian schooling become pertinent again. This writer invoked the widespread notion that Anglicanism was in the business of healing local rifts: ‘In England this motley assemblage may not be very strange, but out here, considering the timehonoured, deep-set feuds that existed and still do exist among the votaries of these Faiths, one beholds with deep satisfaction and joy the beginnings of a unity.’124 And it was the school’s choir in particular that was understood as projecting that ‘unity’ – especially in combination with its uniform of surplices which linked members to one another for the eye. It was essentially a visual manifestation of order, an apparent ‘structure’ within which the various items – boys in uniform – were evenly distributed. And their diversity could be contained by that structure: ‘eight boys, of four different nationalities, now sing regularly at the two daily services in S. George’s Church’, wrote one commentator, also mentioning that these included Anglicans and Orthodox Greeks and Syrians. But the ultimate point was not a structure that could contain a range of local religions and lifestyles. All were to be trained to (wish to) conform to a very specific English model. One contributor, who wrote under the initials S. J., observed ‘with deep satisfaction and joy the beginnings of a unity’, and by that he meant ‘the Christian gentleman ideal’.125

121 122 123 124 125

‘The Bishop’s Letter’, Bible Lands 10, October 1901: 117–19. BL: P.P.959.d. ‘S. George’s Choir School’, Bible Lands 19, January 1904: 31–2 at 31 (my italics). BL: P.P.959.d. S. J., ‘G. George’s School’, Bible Lands 23, January 1905: 96–7 at 97. BL: P.P.959.d. S. J., ‘G. George’s School’, Bible Lands 23, January 1905: 96–7 at 97. BL: P.P.959.d. S. J., ‘G. George’s School’, Bible Lands 23, January 1905: 96–7 at 97 (my italics). BL: P.P.959.d.

Education

The point of the children, as this ultimately reveals, was their role in a two-prong production process of adults. The first prong was governmental. St George’s School was a fee-paying school, intended to attract only boys from wealthy families, because its purpose was to generate a body of Arab employees who would contribute to British institutions in the Middle East. And although music was not considered a respectable activity for English men on a professional level, it had by the end of the nineteenth century entered the curricula of private educational establishments in England, and had become a respectable vessel of (physical) discipline. Beyond choral practice, there were ‘drill’ activities, for instance, and photographs evidence their orderliness: rhythmical movements took place in unison and in neat visual formations. Drill was often conducted to music, which from 1907 onwards was to be supported by a band at St Georges.126 Tibawi claims that the goals set by the JEM were to be ‘primarily diplomatic, only partly pastoral and missionary’, suggesting a careful relationship with the Ottoman government.127 However, the second line of production at the JEM schools led into the Church of England. The mission’s first official ‘Rule’ stated: ‘The object of the Mission be the establishment and maintenance of Mission work amongst Jews in the Bible Lands and the furtherance of such work by the provision of Church privileges for English-speaking people resident in those lands.’128 As another writer, R. B., wrote of the orphanage in 1900 (note again the covetous language): ‘Our Orphanage is full now; we have 12 children … the children we have, will, I hope, make Missionaries in time, just as the black children have done in Africa.’129 The main medium for upholding and extending this activity was St George’s School choir, whose members would ‘require special training; and have special educational advantages, and future prospects’, according to the bishop.130 The point of the choir was ultimately to provide an education that led members to become teachers or take Holy Orders, ‘whether for our own or for any other mission of the Church of England’.131 And from a report celebrating the

126 127 128

129

130 131

S. George’s School Chronicle July 1907: 13. MECA: JEM GB 165–0161. Box 51, file 4. Tibawi 1961: 236. ‘Rules’, The Jerusalem and The East Mission Fifteenth Annual Report. London 1903: 3–4 at 3. MECA: JEM Box 75A/2. R. B. [¼ deaconess Ruth Berkeley], ‘Work at the Bishop’s Home’, Bible Lands 3, January 1900: 27–8 at 27. BL: P.P.959.d. ‘The Choir School’, Bishop Blyth, Bible Lands 23, January 1905: 95–6 at 95. BL: P.P.959.d. ‘The Choir School, S. George’s, Jerusalem’, Bible Lands 14, October 1902: 181–2 at 181. BL: P. P.959.d.

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fact that a graduate was to be funded by a priest from Canterbury to work for Holy Orders, it is clear that music had gained a highly valued place within the profile of the church as a whole: One of our oldest pupils is leaving S. George’s School. Benjamin J. Haddad, aged 21 years, a native of Nazareth, has been, since the school was opened in 1898, one of our scholars, and Sacristan at S. George’s Collegiate Church from the day of its consecration. During the five years he has made much progress, and for a term he has been acting as a junior assistant master. He is familiar with Arabic, German, and English. He can read and write French, but is unable to speak this language with fluency. Benjamin is also a musician: he plays the piano, and occasionally plays the harmonium at the week-day Mattins and Evensong. He is also more or less at home with the violin and cornet. Of late he has earned a little pocket-money by tuning and repairing pianos.132

An invitation to musical reason Although sources from the Friends School indicate that musical peoplemaking and ‘unity’ were treated differently from what we have seen so far, it is worth noting initially the thread that connected the three missions, namely the reference to religion. A report from 1930–1 stated that ‘in spiritual terms’ boys at the Friends Schools were ‘comparable with American boys’, and that the most obvious sign of this was ‘their love of singing hymns’.133 The same report revealed assumptions about the physical power of singing song by recounting that a ‘Moslem Turk sang “Watchman tell us of the night” very gently and reverently. We feel sure he was gripped by the message of Christmas.’ Even in 1943, the centrality of ‘God’ to musical activities was extremely prominent. That year Foley placed a text on the front cover of his booklet about the Music Teachers Club that celebrated the divine power of music. Music was ‘the instrument of God’, speaking in the text as the first person ‘I’, constructing itself as a vessel through which ‘spirits immortal speak the message that makes the world weep, and laugh, and wonder, and worship’, and as a force that rescues ‘the soul from the depths’ and opens ‘the lips of lovers’.134 On the back cover of the booklet, 132 133

134

This article is untitled, but appears in Bible Lands 19, January 1904: 34. BL: P.P.959.d. ‘Report of the Friends Boys School for the year 1930–1931. Undated, unsigned typsescript, 2 pages. FBS: Historical Documents 1930–1939. The anonymous text had appeared in multiple music teachers’ journals and music club publications in North America during the first half of the twentieth century. ‘The Palestine Music Teachers Club’ (College Press: Aleppo, 1943), FBS: Historical Documents 1940–1949.

Education

Foley printed four quotations from the Bible. All these referred to music’s connection with joy, or its function as a medium of praise for God.135 However, as the highly romantic text may already intimate, missionaries at the Friends Schools were less restrictive in their definition of religious expression than were the Anglicans and Lutherans. Whereas the diaconate was crusading in its rhetoric, and JEM – officially at least – sought to evangelise Jews, the Society of Friends aimed for ‘the deepening and freshening of the spiritual life of [Palestine’s] people’.136 In the field of music this translated into wider musical interests. Whereas deaconesses seemed to have learned Arab songs not because they were curious but because it was a basic communicative necessity, and there is barely any sign that early employees of JEM made any effort to understand music other than the European, at the Friends School there was an explicit attempt to engage with a range of musical song traditions.137 Concert programmes from the 1930s were particularly eclectic, indicating that children were exposed to folk musics from around the world, and by 1938, when a teacher called Miss Clay had spent a year at the school, there was a wide range of musical activities ongoing, much of which was understood as community-fostering rather than explicitly spiritual. Twenty children were learning the piano, there was a Glee Club (for learning part-songs) and music-literary evenings in addition to weekly ‘sings’, and other events.138 So the Friends Schools’ uses for music were broader and more international than those of the two institutions discussed so far. By engaging explicitly with ‘other’ musics, however, in particular those understood as ‘folk’, the Quakers elaborated on precisely the distinction through which the canonical repertories (and, implicitly, people) were understood. To examine this further I draw on a key text of the 1930s, Husserl’s so-called ‘Vienna Lecture’, in which the philosopher sought to define ‘spiritual Europe’, or ‘the philosophico-historical idea … of European man’.139 I argue here that Foley’s project was an invitation to join a 135

136

137

138

139

Psalm 95:1; James 5:13; 1 Chronicles 15:16; 2 Chronicles 20:21; ‘The Palestine Music Teachers Club’ (College Press: Aleppo, 1943). FBS: Historical Documents 1940–1949. ‘Report of American Friends Mission in Ramallah, Palestine. United Missionary Council, Beirut, May, 1931’ unsigned typescript, 2 pages FBS: Historical Documents 1930–1939. Reports from the mid-1920s, however, reveal that pupils did learn and perform some Arab songs, presumably a consequence of the fact that more locals came onto the staff. Reports housed at MECA: JEM GB 165–0161, Box 51, file 4. There are multiple programmes and reports preserved in FBS: Historical Documents 1930–1939. For this reference see booklet entitled ‘New Light. Commencement Edition’ dated 1938: 6. Husserl 1965: 149, 152.

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rather particular club, a musical extension of Husserl’s idea of ‘man’. It reveals how such apparent inclusiveness was necessarily partial, because of the limitations inherent in the club itself. We observed above that one of the deaconesses taught musical literacy, and indeed that learning to read music was a central part of the spread of music education in nineteenth-century Europe.140 Additionally, as we observed in Chapter 2, Western musical notation could be used as a means of judgement. Reverend Post referred to Arab music as ‘dull’, ‘wild’ and ‘inarticulate’, and observed that it was ‘hardly amenable’ to Western notation, while Macalister went further, representing songs he heard on a stave precisely in order to assert failures on the part of the singers. Both these approaches take the musical stave as a measuring system not only of pitch, but also of quality, and I have suggested the score became thereby one of the restrictive ‘tools of modernity’ identified by Bohlman. In this further context, I suggest they can also be treated as analogies to what Husserl called theoria. Through his use of the concept of theoria, Husserl distinguished between ‘Greek–European science’ and ‘Oriental philosophies’. His claim for the former was related to the insights of a philosophical tradition constructed from its ‘birthplace’ in seventh and eighth-century Greece to its later divisions into the modern sciences. He asserted that the ‘universality’ of this ‘spiritual structure’ guaranteed its capacity to illuminate the entire world. Set against this supremely perceptive force were ‘Oriental philosophies’. Husserl patently had little idea of these, but postulated that they were incapable of generating ‘absolute theoretical insights’ because they retained a ‘practical-universal’ and ‘mythical-religious’ character. In line with practices already observed, Foley engaged with folk musics from a range of sources and his approach to ‘the Orient’ was substantially more sympathetic than that of Husserl. Indeed, he realised that the local children in Palestine had ‘a rich background of native folk-music’, and worried, indeed, that ‘Eastern music is being threatened most seriously by outward influences’, and that ‘no pure Eastern music will be left after a very few years’.141 This concern led him to think about his own pedagogical input and to consult local teachers about their work. He found it ‘almost disgraceful’ that ‘the modern native student in the “Western School” had a bitter distaste for the ancient classical oriental tune’.142 Behind this

140

141 142

Rainbow observes that in nineteenth-century England, more emphasis was often placed on reading music than on the quality of the music itself. Rainbow 1981: 42. Foley 1942: 350. Foley 1942: 350 (all italics are my own).

Education

reference to history was a concern to defend ‘music’ from an implicitly prevalent disapproval of ‘street and radio ballads heard screeching from oriental radio stations and coffee houses’. Foley’s proposed solution to the problem emerged in 1943 when he outlined a project for creating a canon of Arab songs.143 It is not clear how he thought he could manage it, but he aimed to preserve the qualities of Arab music that Western notation neglected, such as maqāmāt, usul (rhythmic cycle) and orality. The strategy was to wed ‘a piece of great Arabic literature’ to existing folk melody, and thus create ‘a new and untried source of material’. He invited people to submit melodies for consideration by the Palestine Music Teachers’ Club to consider. Club members would choose some melodies to set to words and adapt for school use. Unsurprisingly, there is no sign that this process was ever successfully carried out. Foley himself collected and notated four Arab folk songs in a small collection of diverse folk musics (including Jewish ones) that he entitled Folk Songs of the Near East.144 He also gathered together a larger volume entitled Arabic Folk Songs for the 1945 Lebanon–Syria Folk Music Festival.145 But there is no evidence that the texts reproduced in these collections are pieces of ‘great Arabic literature’. And the musical notation, conforming to simple Western scales and rhythmic metres, neglects the very qualities that Foley had hoped to be able to preserve. His difficulty with encompassing Arab music within his framework is hinted at by his vocabulary, according to which Arabic performance style had ‘inconceivable turns and thrilling trills so charmingly “Eastern” in mood, mode, and tempo’.146 Foley’s collections demonstrate that he did grapple with the matter in a far more serious manner than any of the other missionaries I have discussed so far. He may indeed have been the first missionary in Palestine to put together an Arab song book in this way (we will consider a Palestinian project from over twenty years earlier in ‘Provincialising mission’ below). But his prime interest was in the type of music education that could already be easily accommodated within his theoria, and indeed, in inviting his pupils to experience that. Even before he had initiated his Arab

143

144 145 146

See ‘Arabic Music’, within booklet, ‘The Palestine Music Teachers Club’ (College Press: Aleppo, 1943): 8–9. FBS: Historical Documents 1940–1949. Copy preserved in the library of the Friends Boys School, Ramallah. Copy preserved in the library of the Friends Boys School, Ramallah. Foley 1942: 351 (italics are my own).

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folk music project he had published a compilation of European and American melodies entitled Friendly Tunes for the Near East (1942), set to texts in English. This very substantial volume outlines a curriculum of song learning and also provides some rudiments of tonal music notation and theory. Foley’s concern for notation is clear from his ‘Letter to the Boys and Girls Using this Book’, which explains how ‘troubled’ he had been to discover that local children had no written materials through which to ‘discover the beauties of written music’.147 He understood music in terms of nineteenth-century notions of the inner subject that I discussed above, so his song book was for ‘each one of you personally wherever you might be in the Near East’. With an expansiveness that rivals Husserl’s claim that theoria could illuminate the entire world, Foley claimed that the songs subsumed every eventuality, providing ‘you with the opportunity to express all the various moods of your busy, interesting world’. Given the rich background of folk music that Foley had already identified in the children, and the ways that this was doubtless part of their everyday lives, he was essentially offering a musical redefinition of the various moods that individuals might have and already be able to express. Moreover, he was making a qualitative judgement about musical means of expressing moods, because the collection was intended to construct a system of value. It was to form ‘the basis of an organized, progressive study out of which will grow a love for and an intelligent appreciation of, the best in music’. Foley’s strategy was potentially wide-reaching because he sought to bring local teachers into the same world. He found that although some had already been working with music, and even while they were ‘justifiably proud of their attainments, [they] were the first to realize the shortcomings of their methods, material, and system’.148 They lacked preparation, and ‘frankly and truthfully admitted their unpreparedness to play the role of “music teachers”’. The quotation marks placed around this category set it apart from its environment, presumably elevating it to an ideal against which local teachers could only feel inadequate. A further vision of England and America could perform the same function by implication. Along with the language obstacle, he explained that the ‘lack of Western music background in the country, the home, the church, and the school’ rendered music text-books from England or America unsuitable, as if to suggest that children in those countries were already musically

147

Foley 1942: 5.

148

Foley 1942: 349 (italics are my own).

Education

literate before they had been to elementary school.149 In fact, the situation he described with respect to Palestinian children – that they had learned tunes either ‘by rote while the words were probably read either from the blackboard or from a music copy-book’ – was probably equally valid for many children in England and America. But the most important matter here is that he wished to see all the children reading music from the book. They were to structure their musical perceptions through reading Western notation. If they themselves did not acquire and read the books, he said, progress would be limited and indeed ‘retarded’.150 At this stage, still prior to launching his project with Arab music, he noted his fears that Eastern music might be wiped out, but stated that his book was ‘no place for a discussion of Eastern music’.151 Two basic reasons for excluding Arab music can be traced from his discussion. The first was that ‘practically no teaching material exists’. Of course it was precisely this that had justified the creation of the song book in hand, but his point was that there were no existing publications from which he could draw. He had found only collections of hymns and love ballads. The second was that the texts of folk music had ‘no intrinsic value’.152 This was a reference to the spontaneity with which words were sung in response to particular situations, but was an absurd charge in light of the Western texts Foley selected. (Had he identified ‘intrinsic value’ in ‘Sing a Song of Sixpence’, or ‘Hickory, Dickory Dock’?) In fact, underlying the obstacles he had identified was the conflict inherent in the literary ethos of the Western tradition and the practice of Arab singing in the region. The perspective that Foley brought to this conflict can be intimated from the way that he understood ‘our immediate problem’ to be creating a music education curriculum. Plainly there were at least two problems, and one (the need to have widespread music education) was more pressing than the other (that Arab music was not entering modern participatory circulation). Their relative positioning has obvious connections with the colonial practices of hierarchical separation: as Chakrabarty has put it, some groups are able to enter the great European teleology, whereas others are kept in the ‘waiting room’. In fact, Foley did not divide the population, but he distinguished it from its own cultural practices through the mechanism of notation. He lamented the lack of teaching materials, ‘fixed words’ of value and notated folk songs, and he placed the acquisition of such materials out of reach. A ‘very

149

Foley 1942: 349.

150

Foley 1942: 353.

151

Foley 1942: 351.

152

Foley 1942: 350.

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complicated [notation] system has been devised’, he wrote, ‘but time will tell whether or not its many symbols and various complications will ever be simplified enough for the amateur musicians, not to dream of its introduction into a school system for eager youngsters’.153 Local song, then, was kept in the ‘waiting room’ of education, whereas local children themselves were offered a musical means to reflect on their lives. Moreover, the children were expected to use this means to change themselves: the song book would not only channel their moods but would also enable them to ‘adjust [themselves] more sympathetically to [their] environment’.154 Foley too, then, was engaged with the production of individuals. It is clear that his production line could not work consistently, however, given that the children were being introduced to musical and textual ideas imported from another environment entirely. And Foley was well aware of, indeed celebrated, the way that every event in Palestine was already ‘raised into its highest pitch of excitement, sadness, or enjoyment by song and dance’ and that every village was ‘proud of its songs and tunes’.155 Foley’s ‘environment’, then, was not really Palestine, but was essentially the world that he could teach, as expressible in Western musical notation. It was the world of Husserl’s theoria, the very world that Palestinians’ own song was apparently ‘not yet’ able to enter. But he argued that if children learned the Western notation system then they could themselves enter, and indeed receive a ‘happy, rich, and uplifting experience’.156 In the quotation with which I opened this chapter, Foley’s placing the terms ‘universal music’ in quotation marks can be taken as a sign of his sensitivity to the interface he sought to negotiate, and indeed an appreciation for the range of musics he had encountered. But he was essentially trapped in the model according to which the measure of the world was decided by both his teaching methods, and the Western musical score.

153 156

Foley 1942: 350. Foley 1942: 354.

154

Foley 1942: 355.

155

Foley 1942: 350.

4 Separation

Fry: … one had discussions, it was a matter of great interest … not that we could put on a programme on that subject. That wasn’t allowed, it wasn’t considered politically suitable, which I think was a great mistake … From what I saw of the Jewish people and the Arabic people at the time, they were reasonable people, they understood there was a conflict, and as to why, but there was no problem about talking about it to them, or getting men to talk to each other about it; and it would have been most interesting to turn a mind which was then available, like that of … Chaim Weizman … I would have loved to put him on the air in discussion with whoever might have approximated his opposite number from the Arabic Service … Cohen: Had the suggestion ever been made to the Chief Secretary, or to anybody? Fry: My God, such a thing would turn their hair white within a moment of time. It would never have been considered for a second. I wouldn’t even put it forward, I mean, it’s like asking someone to jump over the moon and expecting them to do it. It’s not a thing that even entered the mind as a possibility that you might consider. Oh, no. So far away were the two sides as far as the Government was concerned … no, it just wasn’t thinkable.1

When the British established their basis for ruling Palestine as a distinction between ‘Jew’ and ‘non-Jew’, they attempted to translate culture directly into politics. As Mamdani has theorised this shift being effective elsewhere, ‘a common cultural community signifies a common past, a common historical inheritance. In contrast, a political community testifies to the existence of a common project for the future’.2 In the Palestinian case, from the ethnic mix of Ottoman communities (a vast range of ‘common pasts’) and the manifold mix of Jewish communities who were mainly recent settlers in Palestine (another wide range of

1

2

Stephen Fry, Interview, dated 25 February 1965, conducted on the occasion that Israel’s leading radio station, Kol Israel, made a programme about the PBS. BBC WAC: E34/19/1: 13. Mamdani 2001: 23.

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‘common pasts’ that partially overlapped therewith), two political groups emerged. ‘Jews’ and ‘non-Jews’. One consequence was that the British regime came to support a quasi autonomous set of organisations that was almost exclusively for Jews, that was indeed a proto-government. The same vision led the regime to obstruct Arabs from the state forum and to offer them religious institutions instead, such as the newly invented Supreme Muslim Council, and the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem.3 The inevitable tension between increasingly powerful Zionist groups and disenfranchised non-Jewish ones led to violent clashes that peaked in 1929 and again in 1936, the year that the British launched their radio station, the PBS. This is the single institution through which we can observe musical negotiations between the three main groups – Arab, British, Jewish – and I use it in this chapter to crystallise the processes that I have introduced in more disparate contexts above. In essence, the chapter is a case study in the management of people through music (a topic that will emerge in a very different light later on in the book). As the quotation above makes apparent, the function of the PBS was not to nurture dialogue; indeed, it was to separate the two groups that the British government found itself ruling. Barbara J. Smith has pointed out that although the British constantly asserted that they treated these groups equally, the very vocabulary of the Balfour Declaration (discussed in Chapter 2) was revealingly differentiated.4 With respect to the Jewish National Home the British government was to be a ‘facilitator’ (with ‘best endeavours’), which implies an active and developmental process. With respect to the ‘non-Jewish’ population, on the other hand, the position might be best described as ‘protecting’. Nothing was to be done that prejudiced the group’s civil or religious rights. Smith’s analysis is an apt way of framing British support for the musical institutions established by Jews, and its lack of intervention in (or support for) Arab musical practices. And it can even be traced in the recollections of the last Director of the PBS, Edwin Samuel, who wrote that a ‘good deal of work was done by [the] Arab orchestras and the composers who wrote for them’, and ‘The P.B.S. encouraged local composers to write for the [Jewish] studio orchestra,’5

3 4 5

For a detailed analysis of the British administrative strategy see Khalidi 2006: 31–64. Smith 1993: 13. The quotation is from a book MS by Samuel, of which a copy of Chapter 14, ‘Broadcasting’, is preserved in the BBC WAC: 7 (my italics). See BBC WAC: E34/19/1.

Separation

However, this dualistic conception of British facilitation and protection masks the actions of one player, namely the government itself. The conception thus resonates with Anidjar’s critical presentation of ‘Europe’ to which I referred in Chapter 2. As Anidjar has pointed out, the selfconstruction of ‘Europe’ involved distinguishing oneself ‘from both Jew and Arab and [rendering one’s] role in the distinction, the separation, and the enmity of Jew and Arab invisible’.6 Just as it was the Balfour Declaration that created the distinction between Jew and non-Jew (in line with European thought of the time), so it was Mandate officials who first proposed the PBS (in line with Europe’s development of state radio at the time) – and broadcast the distinction.7 These officials ostensibly sought to offer entertainment and education, but they also needed to manage the local population, whether by ‘improving’ it, suppressing its attempts to establish private broadcasting initiatives, or simply controlling what it knew in order to influence how it behaved.8 And this population included British subjects as well, so it offers a useful case study in the shifting negotiations of the three players in the triangle. I begin the chapter by observing how the basic tripartition of airtime emerged, and then move on to examine the shifting relationships between concepts we have encountered several times already – ‘Europe’, ‘Arab’, ‘Oriental’, ‘Hebrew’, ‘Jewish’ and so on. For several of the English officials involved, the biggest players on the station were actually the church bells in Bethlehem, the tolling of which resounded through radio sets worldwide, thanks to the BBC relays.9 And according to a later recollection, the recording played last of all under the auspices of the PBS was the English National Anthem, this disk carefully preserved by the final remaining employee on site.10 But the point here is not English sentimentality with regard to Bethlehem, nor indeed is it British nationalism, but rather, the movements of the three players on the points of the triangle, and the ways in which Western classical music moved between those.

6 8

9 10

7 Anidjar 2003: xviii. Stanton 2007: 8–9. The phrase ‘improving’ occurs in ‘Report of Broadcasting Committee’, produced by J. E. F. Campbell (Chair), H. E. Bowman, W. Hudson and M. F. Abcarius: 7. This report was enclosed with the letter from Arthur Warchope, High Commissioner for Palestine, to Sir Philip Cunliffe-Lister, Principal Secretary of State for the Colonies recommending the establishment of a radio station, dated 23 December 1933. BNA: CO 733/266/7. Keating 1999: 76. Interview with Alex Josey, Controller of News from 1945, who took over as Director in the last months of the PBS. Interview dated 7 April 1965, conducted on the occasion that Israel’s leading radio station, Kol Israel, made a programme about the PBS. BBC WAC: E34/19/1.

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The tripartition of air The period separating Dalman’s remarks in 1915 about the use of Hebrew in Palestine, and the moment when Mandate officials considered it expedient to have 33 per cent of radio hours in this language in 1933, saw modern Hebrew become increasingly established in the region. The radio itself would nevertheless contribute to its ongoing dissemination, pedagogy and institutionalisation. This language was, after all, a newly carved one, a novelty for both the long-established Jewish population of the region (whose first languages were variously Arabic, German, Judaeo-Spanish and Yiddish) and the new arrivals (whose first languages were variously Arabic, German, Hungarian, Polish or Russian – among others).11 So the radio began to broadcast not only talks on the language, but lessons, as well. And right from the first exchanges about the station, language was a matter of discussion. The primary consultant for the future Hebrew section, the leading Zionist figure Dr Abraham Katznelson, requested that even correspondence about the section should be conducted in Hebrew. The Programme Director, G. C. Kennworthy, promised to fulfil this request.12 Their exchange reveals the willingness on the British side to support the Hebrew project, to place some of its own personnel at a linguistic disadvantage and also, within its own institution, to contain and separate the Hebrew section off from the Arabic one. In transferring the three languages to the sphere of radio, the government reproduced and – literally – amplified its tripartite division of the population. According to Stanton, this was a powerful process: ‘[f]irst the government, then the [radio] station, and finally the Palestinian communities themselves accepted and internalized [the] assumption that community, language, and listening hours were interchangeably linked’. The consequence was a notion of ‘[d]iscreet, non-overlapping listening communities’.13 These communities were patently political entities – insofar as they were linked directly to the British management of the region and the future foundation of a ‘Jewish National Home’. Nevertheless, the High Commissioner for Palestine, and all the British employees of the station, strove constantly to construct the PBS as a cultural institution. In doing this, they 11 12

13

Cooper and Spolsky 1991: 49. Letter to G. C. Kennworthy, 4 December 1935, CZA: J1 4006; letter from Kennworthy to Katznelson dated 6 December 1936. CZA: J1/4617. Stanton 2007: 18, 36.

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effectively normalised the political divisions already made (as well as the language cultivation project), and strove to make them seem natural and neutral. The strategy had three operational components. First, the station offered a new and enticing framework for cultural products (such as literature and music) divided linguistically. Second, it placed restrictions on religious expression. Third, it banned political discussions. In consequence, directors of Arabic and Hebrew sections were allowed to compile programmes of their own choice; but they were obliged to submit drafts and vet each other’s programmes for religious and political content. Thus they fulfilled the task set by the British, while at loggerheads with one another within the (British-chaired) Advisory Committee. Given that the station was established just as the General Strike unfolded (for which the PBS euphemism was ‘the troubles’), the recollection of one member of this Advisory Committee is unsurprising: it developed into a dog fight. It was just these two sitting there … looking at the advance programmes and trying to make out, after the troubles had started, that neither side was getting away with inciting hatred or war or what-have-you.14

Minutes of meetings are suggestive of ways in which all parties attempted to bend the rules, and also of the ways that British officials tried to avoid open discussion. A typical pattern was that one side would intimate an accusation by raising a question, and that a British official would respond obliquely and save investigation for a private forum. For instance, in a meeting of the Advisory Committee, Amin Bey Abdul-Hadi, the representative for Arabic Programmes, asked whether Jewish ‘liturgical music’ had ‘religious significance’. Rather than confronting the representative for Jewish Programmes, who was present, Abraham Katznelson, the Acting Programme Director said he would enquire and ‘take action accordingly’.15 The only areas in which the PBS allowed politics a public presence were news bulletins. These were written in English, translated into both Arabic and Hebrew, and then back into English for checking. Transmission was subjected to immediate (British) censorship at the click of a switch.16 The content comprised a British selection of items deemed of interest to the local population that strove to avoid fostering political unrest, thus 14

15 16

Ralph Poston, Interview, dated 23 February 1965, conducted on the occasion that Kol Israel made a programme about the PBS. BBC WAC: E34/19/2. Minutes of the Programme Advisory Committee dated 12 March 1936. CZA: J1 4617. Interview with J. K. Hutchens dated 23 February 1965, conducted on the occasion that Kol Israel made a programme about the PBS. BBC WAC: E34/19/2. This censorship is discussed in detail by Edwin Samuel (1970: 176ff.).

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following through warnings in the very first proposal for the station, according to which ‘[c]ontroversial opinions and biased views should be eschewed, especially on political and religious subjects’.17 By distancing itself from the political realities on the ground, then, the PBS functioned as a virtual reality, a neat tripartite division of apparently culturally distinct peoples. The very real material strife of those people, and the nature of their various interactions, was rendered inaudible. There was some confusion as to how music fitted into the categories from the start. In the earliest letter about the station, for instance, the High Commissioner implied that music could be chosen to attract the various linguistically defined communities: ‘one hour would be given in each of the official languages, possibly with musical items most likely to appeal to the community to which the broadcast is particularly directed’. He then set aside broadcast time that would be distinct from these communities by virtue of its foreignness or its inclusion of recorded music: ‘the remaining two hours would be devoted to the relaying of foreign programmes or to the broadcasting of gramophone records’. His proposal was based on pragmatic concerns (generating material easily and cheaply), but had a political significance insofar as it separated out a general ‘foreign’ category from the putatively equal trio, without clarifying what the connections between them might be. Moreover, it construed gramophone records as innocent time-fillers rather than culturally specific items. Indeed, it set them in contrast with the apparently awkward matter of language. As the report enclosed with the High Commissioner’s letter expressed it: ‘The language difficulty has also been considered by the Committee. Music, whether orchestral or dance music, is independent of language. The same is almost true of operatic or vocal music. It is only in connection with items consisting of news, lectures, readings, talks and stories that language becomes important.’18 An analysis of the very first outline programme draft, prepared for discussion at the first meeting of the Advisory Committee, reveals how 17

18

‘Report of Broadcasting Committee’, produced by J. E. F. Campbell (Chair), H. E. Bowman, W. Hudson and M. F. Abcarius: 7. This report was enclosed with the letter from Arthur Warchope, High Commissioner for Palestine, to Sir Philip Cunliffe-Lister, Principal Secretary of State for the Colonies, recommending the establishment of a radio station, dated 23 December 1933. BNA: CO 733/266/7. Letter from Arthur Warchope, High Commissioner for Palestine, to Sir Philip Cunliffe-Lister, Principal Secretary of State for the Colonies recommending the establishment of a radio station: 2–3, dated 23 December 1933. He enclosed ‘Report of Broadcasting Committee’, produced by J. E. F. Campbell (Chair), H. E. Bowman, W. Hudson and M. F. Abcarius: see 4–5. BNA: CO 733/266/7.

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difficult it would be to distinguish so sharply between music and language.19 Each of the seven days of the week were represented, in which the first hour was divided into fifteen minutes of alternatively ‘Hebrew’, ‘British’, and ‘Arab’ Children’s Corner, followed by forty-five minutes of ‘Arab’ programmes (including ‘Music’, ‘Talk’, ‘Story Teller’, and ‘News’). The second hour was plainly for the Hebrew-speaking listeners, but used the term ‘Hebrew’ for ‘Play’, ‘Talk’ and ‘News’, while referring to ‘Recital’, ‘Concert’, ‘Music’ and ‘Variety Programme’, as ‘Jewish’. This would seem to reflect a situation whereby Jews did not necessarily understand Hebrew, but should be provided with music that was specific to their identity as Jews. The third hour was broken into programmes that were each termed ‘English’ (rather than ‘British’), and included news, talks and variety programmes, also concerts and recitals further labelled as either ‘light’ or ‘classical’. The final two hours were divided into two sections. Forty minutes were labelled ‘Arab’ (without programme breakdown, but with a note to the effect that material was intended for urban listeners, whereas the earlier slot was for rural communities). Seventy minutes alternated between ‘Jewish’, ‘British’ and ‘programme of Common interest to British and Jewish’. These last two hours were presumably to rely on imported material, whether relays from the British radio station in Cairo, the BBC in London, or gramophone records supplied similarly. There are several assumptions to note here. First, ‘rural’ Arabs would receive programmes generated locally, whereas ‘urban’ Arabs would listen to broadcasts from Egypt, or commercial recordings from Egypt (and probably Beirut). Second, British interests would overlap with Jewish ones and be served by Europe, whereas those of urban Arabs would be isolated and be served by materials from the (British-occupied) Arab world. Each of these distinctions was yet clearer in the next programme outline draft, presented at the following Programme Advisory Committee meeting. ‘Arabic Programme for Rural Listeners’ was separated off from ‘Arabic Programme for Town Listeners’, for instance. And a new category had emerged, namely ‘European’.20 I turn to the implications of this before considering the urban/rural division of Arab listeners. 19

20

Preserved in CZA: J1 4006. From the minutes of the first Programme Advisory Committee (26 November 1935) it emerges that a ‘provisional outline had been prepared by Mr. Furness and Mr. Rendall … merely as a basis for discussion at the meeting’. The comments minuted about the outline seem to refer to this document, and the changes discussed can be traced precisely in the only other surviving outline of the period, housed in the same file. See CZA: J1 4617. Housed in CZA: J1 4006.

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Europe, Jews (and Arabs) The exact content of the ‘European’ category is difficult to pin down from early draft programmes because repertoire is often not specified. Programmes were simply described as ‘European Records’, ‘European Relay’, ‘outside Broadcast of European Music’ and ‘Palestine Concert of European Music’ in the second draft programme, for instance.21 Plainly, all of this came under the category suggested by the earlier outline and mentioned above, namely of British and Jewish ‘common interest’, and grew out of the successful acculturation of Jewish musicians into the European world of classical music during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Not only had a substantial number of Jewish musicians developed outstanding careers in a range of fields – composing, performing, writing – but their musicianship had been discussed in racial terms in connection with their Jewishness.22 There could be no doubt, then, that the figure of the ‘Jew’ belonged to the Western classical music field (even if the mode of belonging was a matter of discussion). However, such ‘belonging’ was not a framework of great interest to the director of the Hebrew Section, whose sights were set on maximising airtime for Jews alone. A few weeks after the station went on air, he complained that (contrary to initial proposals) there were more minutes devoted to Arabic programmes than to Hebrew. The response that came advised him that this was a consequence of the large amount of music broadcast, such music being ‘of common interest to English and Jewish listeners’ – whereas Arab listeners on the other hand were unlikely to be interested in much material outside the Arabic slots.23 While this framework was essentially the one provided by Jewish acculturation in Europe, Katznelson sought separation. He argued that some records were of no interest to Jewish listeners, and that they were played at a time of day that did not suit Jews. As his appeal was not accepted, ‘European’ music remained a (now somewhat forced) meeting point for common interest between British and Jews.

21

22 23

This last one would, of course, be performed primarily by Jews. In 1938, Karl Salomon estimated that 90 per cent of the performers of music in non-Arabic broadcasts were Jews (presumably he referred to live broadcasts, not recordings), remarking that the English part of the music programme was also meant for the Jewish community. Von der Lühe 1999: 254. For this second draft programme see CZA: J1/4006. For a concise discussion of this complex matter, see Gilman 2008. Programme Advisory Committee Minutes, 3 June 1936: 3. CZA: J1/4617.

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The implications of this fact for Arabs are extremely important, and can be explored in other pre-broadcast documentation. In the very first ‘Report’, compiled in December 1933, it seems that the only ‘Arab music’ to be broadcast would consist of relays from Egypt, or the presentation of recordings. There was no conception, then, that Arabs in the region could offer live music. In August 1934, when Salomon presented a proposal for ‘Vocal Music’ at the station, the position was similar, but more constructive: Arab musicians might be trained to sing into a microphone, he wrote, but an expert would need to be brought in, perhaps from Cairo.24 Salomon’s idea of what ‘Arabic’ music should be emphasised its otherness from ‘Europe’, indeed recommended that this division be preserved. Arab music he had heard locally, he said, was ‘corrupted by European influences’. A closely related position emerges in a proposal written ten months later by Robert Lachmann, who stated that only the ‘real thing’ should be aired, by which he plainly meant a construction of ‘non-Europeanness’. He rejected amalgams of what he termed ‘East’ and ‘West’, such as ‘taking an Oriental tune and adding patches of European harmony to it’, or ‘executing Oriental music on European instruments’. Both of these he connected to ‘artistic insincerity’. He was also wary about performers who claimed to have ‘knowledge of more than one style or tradition’.25 He sought simultaneously to create a place for music of the Bedouin and the peasants within the station. At this stage his proposal was not linked to providing Bedouin themselves with a broadcasting service, but was focused on providing a means for European and ‘Arab townspeople’ to learn about ‘their more primitive countrymen’.26 Audiences could become ‘acquainted with the character and emotions of the Bedouins’, he wrote, whose song ‘is their most typical and spontaneous expression, and reveals a beauty of its own’. He warned, however, that it might need an explanatory introduction. His proposals constructed a category, then, that was by definition exotic, distanced firmly from ‘Europe’ (and even, to some extent, from Arabs in towns). A further category has emerged from Lachmann’s text cited above, one which can be found in very significant circumstances elsewhere, namely ‘Oriental’. In the text of Lachmann it is a general term encompassing both

24 25

26

Karl Salomon, ‘Vocal Music’, dated 7 August 1934: 2. CZA: J1/4006. ‘A Few Remarks on Broadcasting Music from the Jerusalem Station’, 2 June 1935: 1–2. CZA: J1/4006. This document, in which Lachmann refers to Bedouin as ‘more primitive’, predates the lecture that I discussed in Chapter 2, in which he takes a different position.

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‘Jewish’ and ‘Arabic’ musics, set against those of Europe. Karl Salomon’s proposal about ‘Vocal Music’ written one year earlier was similar, in that it distinguished sharply between two categories, ‘Oriental’ and ‘European’.27 The category of ‘Oriental’ embraced ‘Hebrew Music’ (including religious music, and Hebrew popular music) and ‘Arabic music’ (where his comments only referred to the need to resource an expert, as mentioned above). Salomon had shifted position (and thus diverged from Lachmann) by November 1935, however, when he formulated a proposal for a week’s programme with an hour’s ‘European music’ daily.28 The genres he listed within this slot included the Palestine Police Band, organ concerts, chamber music, light music, and rather strikingly, ‘Jewish Music’. This was to be played on Saturdays, and was understood in five types: ‘religious’, ‘nonreligious oriental’, ‘folk songs’, ‘compositions of Jewish Authors’ and ‘compositions of non Jewish authors treating biblical subjects (in Hebrew)’. Salomon had made sure that ‘Jewish’ music had a place in Europe; and ‘Jewish’ had also become an umbrella that subsumed ‘Oriental’. (My discussion of Idelsohn in Chapter 2 should make the significance of this clear.) In the same document, Salomon noted that there could also be lectures introducing concerts, Jewish music and ‘special lectures on Oriental music’. This was all within the hour of ‘European music’. It is not clear what Salomon imagined here. Were Lachmann’s lectures on Bedouin music for ‘Europe’? Or might his reference be better understood with reference to a letter written one month later by Katznelson, who wished to see a music director appointed who would ‘stimulate the development of the various movements initiated by pioneers of music in the country – such as the study of Oriental Music’?29 Katznelson’s own idea was essentially that the radio station should not only ‘distribute a musical programme, but also … assist in its creation’. While his argument was that the study of ‘Oriental music’ could boost the creation of an ‘Oriental’ musical corpus, it is clear that for Katznelson’s instrumentalist thinking, ‘Oriental’ was not a broad category, but a mask for ‘Jewish’. Such masking techniques and sleights of hand can be traced elsewhere, too. In Salomon’s proposal about ‘Oriental music’, one of the ways he distinguished it from ‘European music’ was to assert that it could be

27 28

29

Karl Salomon, ‘Vocal Music’, dated 7 August 1934: 1–2. CZA: J1/4006. Karl Salomon, ‘Sketch for a Week’s Program of the Palestine Broadcasting Station on the Base of One Hour European Music Daily’, dated 5 November 1935. CZA: J1/4006. Letter (most probably from Katznelson, see earlier note) to Kennworthy 4 December 1935 (my italics). CZA: J1/4006.

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produced ‘in the original language only’.30 In a period in which so many songs – Arab ones among them – were being provided with new modern Hebrew texts, his construction was peculiar indeed. He himself would go on to praise the Hebraisation of Arabic music by the Jewish Iraqi Ezra Aharon.31 Edwin Samuel, Director of the PBS from 1945 to 1948, would comment at a later date about European Jews’ rooting themselves musically in the region: the ‘transition of Jewish music from East European forms to Middle East forms was rapid and noticeable’.32 When a separate ‘Music Section’ was established, it absorbed ‘English, ‘European’, ‘Jewish’ and some ‘Oriental’ musics – but it excluded ‘Arabic’ music – and the Music Committee was composed exclusively of Jews.33 The absence of any British presence on the Music Committee is revealing, reinforcing the implications of some documents that such committees were only advisory. But the absence of Arabs is important. The institution of ‘music’ had both separated Arabs from Jews and excluded Arabs from Europe. And the separations were firmed up when staff were appointed below the two British posts of Programme Director and Deputy Programme Director in September 1936. They consisted of Arabic and Hebrew Sub-Directors, plus ‘Sub-Director (Arabic Music)’, and ‘SubDirector (European and Hebrew Music)’.34

Arabs, British The firm distinction maintained between ‘Arabic’ and ‘European’ can be brought in line with the ‘protective’ aspect of the Balfour Declaration, insofar as it reflects a preservationist stance towards ‘non-Jewish’ cultural products.35 This is interesting, because the (aesthetic) preservationist 30 31 32

33

34

35

Karl Salomon, ‘Vocal Music’, dated 7 August 1934: 1. CZA: J1/4006. Cited in von der Lühe (1999: 269) from Jüdische Rundschau no. 47, 12 June 1936. Interview dated 5 July 1965, conducted on the occasion that Kol Israel made a programme about the PBS. BBC WAC: E34/19/2. For a valuable discussion about Salomon’s development of various types of ‘Jewish music’ on the radio, see von der Lühe 1999: 265–71. Listed as Mr S. Rozovsky, Mr E Hauser, Mr M. Rabinovitz, Dr Heinz Hermann, Mr Benno Frankel, Dr Lachmann, Mr Hermann Swet, Miss Yochevet Dostrovsky, Mr Walter Steinberg, Mr Joshua Gordon. A further name has been added in pencil, and is to me illegible. CZA: J1/4006. Letter from Arthur Warchope, High Commissioner for Palestine, to W. G. A. Ormsby-Gore, Principal Secretary of State for the Colonies, 24 September 1936: 2. BNA: CO 733/308/12 E420. A broader musical context is, of course, music research in general, for which the Cairo Conference of 1932 is emblematic. Racy 1991.

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position was part of a (politically) interfering one. Government policy became increasingly interventionist, because the British urgently desired to win the ear of Arab listeners and secure their political sympathy – to counteract broadcasts from Mussolini. Additionally, as Arab anti-colonial rebellion intensified, the region was increasingly unstable. The British thus sought to provide Arab listeners with entertainment that would lure them towards instruction. The entertainment varied over the years of the PBS’ existence. A summary overview of Arabic broadcasting from 1938 indicates a range of musics which amounted to about 60 per cent of the airtime intended for Arabs. Only about 10 per cent of this was provided by recordings, for the bulk was broadcast live from the studio (contrary to assumptions in proposals made in 1933 and 1934 about the absence of suitable Arab musicians). The PBS had a resident group that the report referred to as an ‘orchestra’, composed of two violinists, and one each of the following: qānūn player, ʿūd player, santur player, flautist and tambourine player. Programmes indicate a resident Studio Ensemble, to which this may refer, but there was also a Studio Takht, possibly simply a slightly smaller version of the Ensemble. These groups played both with and without singers. Soloists were also given short programmes to themselves, and the station broadcast vocal material in a range of historical and geographical types (Palestinian, Egyptian, Iraqi, Syrian, Turkish), and including both those ‘classical in form and otherwise’. There were also some monologues and recitation of the Quran, initially on a weekly basis and then with much more frequency.36 Later on there were two takht ensembles, a choir and also an orchestra of Western instruments in which both Arabs and ‘several Jewish musicians’ played (of which more below).37 The PBS’ methods of assembling this entertainment can only be reconstructed in rather general terms from the earliest sources. But the British attitude towards it, and even some recognition of the achievements of its Arab staff, can nevertheless be grasped from documents dating from almost the same moment, because some months after the PBS had gone

36

37

‘Broadcast Programmes from Jerusalem for Arab Listeners’. Report enclosed with letter from Warchope to Ormsby-Gore dated 8 February 1938. According to the letter, the document was prepared by the Director of Programmes. BNA: CO 323/1588/2. Samuel indicates it was twice daily. See his book MS preserved at BBC WAC: E34/19/1: 12 (see also footnote 4, above). The quotation is from Samuel (MS at BBC WAC: E34/19/1: 10 (see also footnote 4, above)), whereas the general overview is taken from Nuwayhid 1993: 262. Ajaj Nuwayhid was the Controller of the Arabic section from 1940 until he resigned in 1943. For a more detailed summary of Nuwayhid’s recollections, see Sahhab (in press).

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on air, the BBC launched an Arabic broadcast from Daventry (about forty miles South East of Birmingham) which targeted the Arab world in general. PBS staff in Jerusalem rebroadcast the programmes, researched responses among local Arab listeners, and offered advice to the BBC based on their own experience. The response by Stephen Fry, the then Director of Programmes, may have been sharpened by anxious rivalry, but is instructive here because it was plainly shaped by his experience with working with Arabs in Jerusalem. Fry attacked the BBC very directly in his comments. First, he suggested that the Daventry-based broadcast’s handling of Arab music had been unsatisfactory: ‘the announcer’s Arabic was acceptable and clear, though his fading of the Arabic music was not too clever’. Second, he remarked that other music had been inappropriate: ‘I gather that the Western music was not greatly appreciated.’ He recommended that the BBC should use ‘Arabic records … if you want to command the maximum audience’. He said, ‘Of western music, if you must use it, I would suggest a smattering of military band music and perhaps straight jazz with a strong rhythm.’38 He repeated the point more forcefully in a later letter, in which he said that ‘the Arab world in Palestine, Syria, Iraq and to some extent Egypt, are just laughing at the Arabic broadcasts that have so far been given from Daventry … they regard the entertainment side of the broadcasts as futile and utterly unacceptable’. Going on, he stated that it was ‘obvious, also, the Arab listeners are much more inclined to listen to stations which give them Arabic entertainment in their own idiom and which lead up to a new bulletin as part of the same programme’.39 Fry’s views can be traced within the PBS’ own programming in two ways. First, the slot entitled ‘Arabic Programme for Rural Listeners’ – including music, talks, and stories – was followed directly by a news bulletin in Arabic in early schedules.40 So, Arab music was an enticement. Second, Western classical music was a deterrent. Arab listeners were supposed to turn off the radio after they had heard the programmes intended for their specific group, and might be advised what time to tune in again. Their programmes were often followed directly by Western music.41 For example, ‘Records (E. H.)’ – i.e. recorded music for Europeans 38 39 40 41

Letter from Stephen Fry to M. A. Frost at the BBC, dated 6 January 1938. BBC WAC: E2/261. Letter to Sir Stephen Tallents at the BBC, 18 January 1938: 1–2. BBC WAC: E2/261. Schedules housed mainly in CZA: J1/4617 and J1/3426. ‘The Acting Programme Director undertook to try and include an announcement at the end of the Arabic village news (18.30–18.35) explaining that that was the end of the programme intended for the villages and suggesting any other items later in the evening in which they

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and Jews – appears directly after ‘Stories for Village Listeners (A.)’ – i.e. stories in Arabic; and ‘News Talk (A.)’ was followed by ‘Brahms Sonata played by Hofmekler and Taube (E.)’. There are many other such examples.42 The references to ‘Rural’ and ‘Village’ listeners returns us to the PBS strategy of splitting up each of the three communities further into special groups. Specific programmes targeted women at home alone, children at school, men relaxing together in coffee shops, men working together in factories, villagers gathered in village guest houses, children in family groups at home, men and women together at home, men at home alone or with other men, and families together at home.43 But the most important division may well have been that between ‘rural’ and ‘urban’ listeners within the Arab section. This placed one group of the population – ‘rural’ Arabs – at a maximum distance from ‘Europe’. As already noted above, the plan for these programmes was that they would not involve recorded music – whereas those for urban populations would. The division had been a component of British broadcasting strategy in India, and as we have seen from publications by nineteenth-century writers onwards, had a tradition in local research too. It was a classic manifestation of European historicism, whereby the ‘peasant’ was preserved as such, while other categories of people made ‘progress’.44 There were certainly differences in lifestyle across the region, just as there were different dialects that made communication a challenge. Yet as Doumani has shown in the context of the region of northern Palestine called Jabal Nablus, nineteenthcentury Palestinian peasants were actually engaged in complex transregional trade networks with urban merchants, thus there was no clear dividing line between them. Moreover, the peasants were not passive providers to urban populations, but ‘actively participated in the networking process, had choices and options as to what merchants to do business with, and possessed their own bargaining tools, such as nonpayment and relocation’.45 By 1936, even if the division still had some reality in terms of the locations of dwellings, the situation was marked by profound changes. Large numbers of peasants had gone to work in urban centres, and many rural regions were being transformed by Zionist colonisation. Moreover, as

42 43 44 45

might be interested.’ Minutes of the Programe Advisory Committee. 12 March 1936: 1. CZA: J1/4617. These particular examples come from draft programmes for Week XIII. See CZA: J1 3426. Stanton 2007: 35. For a discussion of this matter in the context of India, see Chakrabarty 2008: 8–11. Doumani, 1995: 81.

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Swedenburg has discussed in detail, peasants played a major role in the three-year revolt (against that colonisation) that unfolded in 1936.46 Providing Arabs in rural areas with music that they might like was actually a rather insidious appeasement strategy. Through a romantic historical construction of the ‘peasant’ it might seem to avoid precisely the circumstances with which the population lived (which would be bad enough). But it was actually closely indexed to the rebellious actions that they were taking. The paternalistic attitude of British managers masked and strove to suppress the agency of the rural population. For Ralph Poston, the PBS’ Deputy Director from 1938, who became Director in 1940, the radio’s function was to ‘[keep] the Arabs informed and [try] to quieten them down politically’.47 Poston was among many broadcasters who understood that local tastes had to be catered to if an audience was to be gained, and he benefitted from the fact that it was standard practice for research to be undertaken by, or on behalf of, the British. The High Commissioner listed the types of entertainment that ‘villagers prefer’, which were apparently religious items (including Quran recitations), male artists, soloists, short items, story-telling and folk songs. Such willingness to cater to local preferences was a function of the predominant British concern, people-management. Entertainment was simply part of luring listeners to talks on subjects such as ‘the advantages of cooperation and co-operative societies’.48 Plainly the idea was to explain to listeners the benefits of relinquishing their land and lifestyles cooperatively. C. F. Strickland’s announcement about the station had made this management goal particularly clear even while clothing it with a notion of ‘value’ to the Arabs: ‘Of particular value to the Arab rural population, the radio would be a most useful organ in the hands of the Government whenever there was need to explain some cause of friction in the country’, he said in a statement published in Palestine’s main daily newspaper.49

46 47

48

49

On this see Swedenburg 2003. Ralph Poston, Interview, dated 23 February 1965, conducted on the occasion that Kol Israel made a programme about the PBS. BBC WAC: E34/19/2. Document marked ‘CONFIDENTIAL, Reference No. P/48/34’ dated 10 January 1936. Prepared for The Right Honourable W. G. A. Ormsby-Gore, His Majesty’s Principal Secretary of State for the Colonies. Signed by Arthur Warchope. CZA: S25 22760. A longer version of villagers’ preferences (which is not much more informative with respect to music) was part of a report entitled ‘Rural Programmes for Arabic Listeners’ and enclosed with a letter from Warchope to Ormsby-Gore dated 8 February 1938. According to the letter, the document was prepared by the Director of Programmes. BNA: CO 323/1588/2. ‘A Palestine Broadcasting Station. Wireless for Palestine. Mr. Strickland’s Scheme’, Palestine Post, March 12 1933.

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But of course the radio was also an extension of the long-standing British evasion of real contact with the population (we have already encountered this in the PEF’s ‘machinery of agents’) and was unlikely to be effective in the manner intended. There were feedback mechanisms in place for literate listeners, and their correspondence was sometimes discussed at Programme Advisory Board meetings. In January 1938, for instance, it emerged that early evening Arabic news bulletins often contained information that listeners had already gleaned (presumably either from newspapers or from a Cairo broadcast), and that the late-evening one was simply too late in the day.50 British officials nevertheless often felt that the radio’s lack of efficacy was the fault of the rural population – even while noting that the British should change strategy. ‘I think that the fellah will only learn by what he sees and not by what he hears; certainly personal contact is necessary to make the fellah accept anything new in his methods of cultivation’, reported the High Commissioner.51 Other officials’ comments reveal anxiety about Arabs listening to programmes that were not intended for their particular subgroup. Minutes from a meeting of the Programme Advisory Committee record that this arose in the context of a discussion about ‘Rural Songs by Haj Rizq Yafawie. Mr W. K. Brasher observed that ‘in some villages (particularly Arraba near Jenin) instead of using the community receiving sets for two hours daily they used them for the entire programme’.52 His anxiety about this matter had already arisen some weeks earlier, when he proposed that villages should be given a talk on ‘How to Use the Wireless’.53 The solution proposed at that point had been a long-distance one, namely that information could be provided within another broadcast talk. The minutes do not record whether his ongoing concerns were resolved, only that the Director of Programmes ‘thought it advisable occasionally to let town listeners hear the village programmes and vice versa’.54 Of course this did not address the matter that may have caused Mr. Brasher more concern, namely that Arabs had stepped so far out of 50

51

52 53 54

Minutes of Programme Advisory Board Meeting on 19 January 1938. Two relevant documents are housed along with the Minutes, one entitled ‘Programme Timing’ and summarising listener correspondence, the other tabling ‘Present Timing’ and ‘Possible Rearrangement’. CZA: J1/3426. Document marked ‘CONFIDENTIAL, Reference No. P/48/34’ dated 10 January 1936. Prepared for The Right Honourable W. G. A. Ormsby-Gore, His Majesty’s Principal Secretary of State for the Colonies. Signed by Arthur Warchope. CZA: S25 22760. Programme Advisory Committee. Minutes, 11 November 1936: 2. CZA: J1/3426. Programme Advisory Committee. Minutes, 18 October 1936: 2. CZA: J1/3426. Programme Advisory Committee. Minutes, 11 November 1936: 2. CZA: J1/3426.

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line that they were accessing programmes intended for the other two target population segments, the British and the Jews. While this British position dominates the archives, however, it is important to observe that it was not the only one. Another was far more developmental, and can be traced in various forms. For instance, Lachmann, whose early thoughts I referred to above, favoured a different strategy for Arab music broadcasting as a result of his contact with local people. He discovered that there was considerable local interest in broadcasting and developing regional music, and in light of knowledge that the British wished to broadcast to ‘the rural population’, proposed that ‘their music’ be selected carefully for inclusion within programmes.55 Some months later he had more detailed proposals. Having grasped from a newspaper announcement that the Arabic programme was to be constructed primarily from recordings of urban music, he pointed out that such music could already be heard on stations broadcasting from Istanbul and Cairo. If the PBS were to reproduce that, it would both double up what was already available, and even have a detrimental effect on traditions that warranted ‘conservation’.56 The idea of ‘conservation’ is a product of the anxiety typical of Lachmann’s time, and indeed the construction of the ‘rural’ that was attendant on that. Yet Lachmann did not take a solely preservationist stance. Rather, he envisaged the radio as an engine for stimulating creativity and thus serving Arab music in the region. This idea was of course not part of the British interest. It was methodologically in line with the Jewish selfinterest. But it was specific to the Arab sphere: members of the Arab population … are looking forward to the musical programme of the Palestine Wireless Station as a means of intensifying the general love of music and of encouraging its practice. These expectations are, I think, easy enough to fulfil, if the wireless programme is prepared to take them into account … The audience would, of course, much rather hear local music from their favourites, who are known to them personally, than the urban music of Egypt etc. on which they are being fed to weariness. As to the singers and players, urban, rural and Bedouin, of this country, among whom there are excellent and inspired performers, they would, I am sure, be deeply disappointed at being invited to hear records from other countries instead of being given a chance to display their own

55

56

Letter from Lachmann to Judah Leon Magnes dated 7 July 1935. Published in Katz 2003: 118–20 at 119–20. Letter from Lachmann to Judah Leon Magnes dated 13 November 1935. Published in Katz 2003: 128–30 at 129.

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abilities. The hope of intensifying musical life in this country by encouraging local singers, and by holding out, to unknown singers, the possibility of being discovered by and for the wireless, would be extinguished. As a matter of fact, would it not be a more gratifying task for the Jerusalem Station to support the original music existing in this country, and thereby to promote its development?57

It is clear from programmes that something along exactly these lines developed, even while complemented by visiting performers from Beirut, Cairo and Damascus. On the opening day, the first Arabic programme did include Arabs from other regions: there were songs and ʿūd playing by the Egyptian Sheikh Mah ̣mūd S ̣ubh ̣ and buzuq playing and singing by the Syrian Muh ̣mmad ʿAbd al-Karīm, for instance. But there were also programmes performed by ‘The Studio Group’, made up of local players, as well as songs by the former Jerusalemite shoe-maker turned musician Yah ̣yā al-Sa‘ūdī.58 Just as al-Sa‘ūdī’s professional turn intimates the support that the radio could offer to local musical ambition, the presence of ʿAbd al-Karīm – possibly as a live performer even on this occasion – is a sign of the strong magnet that the radio would become in the Arab world.59 ʿAbd al-Karīm became an employee of the radio, greatly enriching local musical life with his Jerusalem residency. That the success of an innovative Arab music section came into conflict with British interests is only occasionally apparent from the archive. When the war started, the entire Arabic section was removed from under Post Office administration and taken on by the Public Information Officer. This was intended to increase control, to facilitate maximum influence over Arab political opinion. But the officer himself was only concerned with news and propaganda items.60 Occasionally a song text proposed for broadcast occasioned anxiety and a flurry of correspondence, but when Rex Keating arrived from Cairo to be Deputy Director of the PBS in 1945, he rapidly decided that the Arabic Section was working as ‘an autonomous State within a State’ and ‘behind a closed

57

58

59 60

Letter from Lachmann to Judah Leon Magnes dated 13 November 1935. Published in Katz 2003: 128–30 at 129. Programme preserved at BBC WAC: E2/261. See Nassar and Tamari 2005: 542 for a report on Yahiya al-Sa‘ūdī’s change of profession. Wasif Jawhariyya’s brother Tawfiq performed on the first day, as did a number of musicians mentioned by Jawharrieh in his memoirs as locals, violinist Jaleel Rakb, ʿūd player Ramez al-Zaaa, percussionist Basil Tharwat and Armenian santur player Artin Santurji, for instance. For more about this in terms both of regional music and regional poetry, see Sahhab 2004. Samuel 1970: 199; see also Ralph Poston, Interview, dated 23 February 1965, conducted on the occasion that Kol Israel made a programme about the PBS. BBC WAC: E34/19/2.

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screen’.61 Plainly, there was a high degree of independence even within the British propaganda machine. Certainly the various Controllers of the Arabic Section were culturally and politically ambitious, and each sought to develop an Arabic modernity for the region. The first two, Ibrāhīm Ṭūqān and Ajaj Nuwayhid (who took over in 1940), were prominent nationalist figures. Ṭūqān’s poetry indeed became particularly popular during the Arab uprising against the British in the early years of the PBS. Nuwayhid was one of the founders of the nationalist Independence Party (Hizb al-Istiqlal) in 1932. Presumably the British sought to control these figures by inviting them to take part in their institutions. The third Controller, who took over from Nuwayhid in 1944, was Azmi al-Nashashibi, who had worked closely with the British throughout his career. Nuwayhid’s memoirs indicate some rivalry with his British colleagues. For instance, he had an altercation with Crawford McNair, the then Director of the English Section, who Nuwayhid understood as ‘a musician who was first and foremost into symphonies and the type of music he likes’.62 According to Nuwayhid, McNair could not disturb him much, because ‘I was independent from him in terms of my post, the budget and all broadcasting matters’, yet he nevertheless ‘caused me as much covert nuisance as he could’. Nuwayhid went so far as to complain to the Public Information Officer, and resolved tensions through an interview with the Colonial Secretary General of Palestine, Malcolm MacDonald.63 The importance of Nuwayhid’s testimony, and a range of other nonmusical sources, however, is that they reveal the interest among Arabs both in modernising their own traditions and participating in types of cultural and political modernity that were less familiar to their communities.64 In other words, they did not wish to be kept in the waiting room. Nuwayhid refers to an ‘orchestra’, which was ‘the only common element between the three sections of the Broadcasting Centre, i.e. the Arabic, the English and the Hebrew sections’. It is not clear quite which orchestra he meant, because it seems from several sources that the main PBS orchestra (conducted in part by McNair), was largely Jewish.65 Samuel, however, also 61

62 63 64 65

Memo to Edwin Samuel dated 6 July 1946. MECA: Rex Keating Collection; GB165–0361, 2/ 1/1/41. Nuwayhid 1993: 267. Translations of Nuwayhid are by Nada Elzeer. Nuwayhid 1993: 266. Stanton 2007 discusses this at length, through close engagement with PBS programming. Von der Lühe lists members of the PBS Orchestra under McNair, which at that time consisted only of Jews. Von der Lühe 1999: 235.

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recalled an orchestra within the Arab section that played on ‘Western instruments [and] in which several Jewish musicians participated’. Additionally, he remembered that the Arab Section programmes ‘ranged all the way from traditional oriental songs and music on oriental instruments, through oriental music on Western instruments, to Western music introduced and explained in Arabic’.66 He wrote that a ‘good deal of work was done by these Arab orchestras and the composers who wrote for them in developing traditional Arab, Turkish and Persian melodies into harmonized orchestral productions’.67 The orchestra to which Nuwayhid referred was, he said, of ‘benefit’ to the Arab Section on a weekly basis because it was not financed from his budget. Moreover, an Arab musician was one of the conductors, namely Youssef Batrouni, who was an educator, and may well have offered the introductory lectures to which Samuel referred. Nuwayhid recalled his own involvement in the orchestra: ‘I composed a song entitled “The Song of Muhammad”, which the orchestra played beautifully’.68 In line with other cultural and political fields then, there was interest in being able to develop Arab musical traditions, and also a concern that Arabs not be limited to, and confined within, the preservation of those. Thus, rather as we have seen that Jewish leaders desired to do, Arab leaders wished to cultivate a tradition. And similarly, they had to wish to be excluded from the European forms of modernity that the British were making (partially) available.

Another mission, another separation Only towards the end of the life of the PBS can one trace any active engagement with the popular idea that music itself could play a direct role in civilising the population. As we have observed, the earliest proposals about the station assumed that music would have a place with entertainment, rather than educational, value.69 Ralph Poston, the PBS’ Deputy Director from 1938, who became Director in 1940, was frustrated by the

66 67 69

Samuel book MS. BBC WAC: E34/19/1: 10. 68 Samuel book MS. BBC WAC: E34/19/1: 10. Nuwayhid 1991: 262. Letter from Arthur Warchope, High Commissioner for Palestine, to Sir Philip Cunliffe-Lister, Principal Secretary of State for the Colonies recommending the establishment of a radio station, dated 23 December 1933. BNA: CO 733/266/7.

Separation

restrictions he faced on working with live classical music.70 And he departed unhappy in 1942. Similarly, Rex Keating, who had worked for the Egyptian State Broadcasting for ten years when he arrived in 1945 to be Assistant Director of the PBS, found the level of censorship and political control of the station was excessive, and regarded this as having prevented it fulfilling its potential. In 1947, however, he led the launch of the so-called ‘Second Programme’, which was modelled on the BBC’s Third Programme, and saw six hours per night devoted to ‘highbrow’, or ‘serious’ culture – a large part of which was Western classical music. According to Keating this was ‘the first attempt to secure the proper orientation of broadcasting in this country as an instrument of civilised thought and behaviour’.71 The irony of this budding civilisational mission lies in its distance from the realities of the British role in Palestine. Keating found Jerusalem to be ‘heartless … taut with arrogance and religious fanaticism, a world removed from easy-going, tolerant Cairo’, and his Egyptian experiences seem to have led him to be blind to what was actually going on.72 The idea that the Jewish community could gain independence, he claimed in September that year, was ‘just so much bluff; a protector is absolutely essential and what better shelter than good old tolerant, fair-dealing Britain! … In fact there is reason to believe that should a Jewish State be finally approved, the Zionists will at once apply for Dominion status in the Commonwealth.’73 Yet Keating was apparently unaware that the space for a civilising mission had been observed earlier on, had indeed been grasped and was significant well beyond the sphere of music. In 1934, a proposal for music programmes written by the Director of the Music Academy in Jerusalem, Emil Hauser, suggested that it arrange ‘first-rate concerts throughout the country’, thus systematising and streamlining a hitherto ‘formless’ situation and finding itself a ‘big cultural mission’.74 Although he was not

70

71

72 73

74

Poston’s frustration emerges in several sources. For instance, in a letter to Cyril Conner, then Overseas Liaison Manager at the BBC, he remarks that they broadcast so much ‘Arab propaganda’ that they cannot transmit ‘any “programmes” worthy of the name’. 24 June 1941. BBC WAC: E1/1141. In an interview in 1965 he recalled not having sufficient funds to broadcast the Palestine Symphony Orchestra. BBC WAC: E34/19/2. Interview dated 23 February 1965, conducted on the occasion that Kol Israel made a programme about the PBS. Letter from Keating to Cyril Conner, Director of Overseas Programme Services (BBC), 10 September 1947: 2 (my italics). BBC WAC: E1/1140. Keating 1999: 74. Letter from Keating to Cyril Conner, then Director of Overseas Programme Services (BBC), 10 September 1947: 2. BBC WAC: E1/1140. Emil Hauser, ‘Instrumental Music’: 1. Dated 5 August 1934. CZA: J1 4006.

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ultimately appointed as Director of Music, this ‘cultural mission’ did, of course, take root in Palestine, within Jewish education.75 Zionists had not only absorbed ‘Oriental’ into ‘Jewish’, but had led a successful territorialisation with Western classical music. And both strands had a nationalistic ethos built in, were indeed part of the much larger machine that was a proto-nation – for which Keating had limited imagination. The British had begun their rule of Palestine in managing a dichotomy from which they imagined themselves to be separate, namely Balfour’s ‘Jewish people’ and ‘non-Jewish communities in Palestine’. The early years of the PBS, as we have seen, nevertheless revealed some interaction and forced overlap: as a part of ‘Europe’, Western classical music was shared between English and Hebrew listening time, for instance. In other words, this music had seemed (to the British) to link the British and the ‘Jewish people’. But at the final moments in the history of the PBS, we observe a crucial shift. Keating imagines the British musical role to be a civilising one; meanwhile the ‘Jewish people’ is graduating into a nation state. And when the new radio station Kol Israel took over the buildings of the PBS in May 1948, the British were not needed to facilitate the broadcasting of Western classical music, and nor were they expected to share in the musical listening time. There was another exercise in (musical) separation, then, but the action was instigated by another point on the triangle. Power had shifted position, and Western classical music followed.

75

The recommendation was made in a letter whose author is not stated on the document, but was almost certainly A. Katznelson. Letter to G. C. Kennworthy, soon to be Programme Director of the PBS, 4 December 1935, CZA: J1 4006. Letter in response, Kennworthy to Katznelson dated 6 December 1936. CZA: J1/4617. A document stored in the same file as that holding Hauser’s proposal entitled ‘Vocal Music’ dated 7 August 1934 and written by Karl Salomon, who became Director of Music for the PBS, would suggest that both Hauser and Salomon were asked to put forward proposals. Why they were assigned separate areas (if indeed they did only each submit one document) is a question that the archive cannot resolve. Later correspondence (see below) shows that Salomon submitted proposals in 1935 as well, at the time when staff were specifically sought for posts, and that contact on this occasion was facilitated by the Chancellor of the Hebrew University, J. L. Magnes.

5 Provincialising mission

You who are seeking To sway me Do not attempt to humiliate me For I would never submit Should humiliation become a sweet fragrance In the vast gardens I would not take a single breath When the wind blows I am of a proud nature That forbids me from giving in to others.1

The poem above was written by the Kurdish Iraqi poet Ma‛rūf al-Rusāfī ̣ for a school song book published by the Institute for Teacher Training in Jerusalem where al-Rusāfī ̣ lived at the time. His title was ‘Humiliation and Magnanimity’, and his text was fitted to a popular song that had spread in the region during the Ottoman Empire, the Turkish title of which was Üsküdara gider iken (On the Way to Üsküdar), referring to a district on the Asian side of Istanbul. Adopting this melody for words appropriate to local situations was common at this time throughout the Mediterranean region.2 An interpretation of the song in this Jerusalem context could start with the date of publication – 1921 – and take the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire into account, along with the take-over of Palestine by British forces. It could also consider that the volume as a whole was a school song book. Perhaps the most obvious reading would see it as a critical appropriation of a Western model, for the genre of ‘school song’ was widespread in missionary establishments in Palestine.3 And whereas St George’s School used such songs to promote loyalty to various symbols of

1

2 3

The translation is by Nada Elzeer. The Arabic original has rhyming lines, but the purpose of this translation is simply to render its primary content, rather than its literary style. For a discussion of migrations of this song see Buchanan 2007. Such critical imitations of Western models are usefully addressed in Bonnett 2004 and Chen 2002.

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Englishness, royalty and ‘the Holy Land’, the compilers of this song book sought something closer to their own experiences. Taken from that perspective, it might be seen as an affirmation of pride in a broad Eastern identity, and even – through its hybrid contents – a rejection of new rulers from the West.4 As recent postcolonial scholarship has argued, however, one problem with such interpretations is that colonised subjects and their actions seem to exist only in order to react to their colonisers.5 In fact, the appropriation of the regionally popular tune, and the use of a poem by an Iraqi Kurd, could remind us of something else entirely about Jerusalem and Palestinian Arabs. Palestine, after all, was not brought into being by missionary interventions, and nor was its subsequent development only a reaction to those. Rather, it existed in a complex network of peoples and countries in the region, which Western forces intervened in and transformed, but did not wholly displace. In this chapter, then, I sketch out some contexts in which Palestinians emerge as actors with a broader range of experiences than missions wished to see. I offer it a response to the challenge set by Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe, in which he strives to push beyond narratives of colonial suppression, while exploring the ongoing difficulties of doing so. One fundamental problem is that the ‘aims of professional history’, which rely on secular modernist thought as ‘master code’, leave a great many experiences outside the frame.6 My own book cannot escape the dilemma, but I attempt here to expose qualities of life that lay beyond the gaze of the various Western commentators and their ‘progressive’ projects, and to consider some of those in a fresh light now. The difficulty of the task is compounded by a paucity of available sources, which is a particular problem with respect to Ottoman Palestine. And music triggers additional, apparently unanswerable, questions, because it was rarely notated or discussed in print. We do have three powerful witnesses, however, two from Greek Orthodox families (Khalil Sakakini and Wasif Jawhariyya) and one from a Quaker home (Khalil Totah). To be sure, these three figures cannot be taken as representative of Palestinians in general (any more than any other threesome could be): they

4

5

6

Here I use ‘hybrid’ in the political sense that Bhabha (2005) developed in ‘Signs Taken for Wonders’. See Young 2004: 186–98, for instance, and for specific reference to the problem in literature on Palestine, see Stein and Swedenburg 2005: 6. Chakrabarty 2008: 101.

Provincialising mission

were in fact rather exceptional. And on one level this chapter is a methodological experiment rather than a work of history. But the value of Jawhariyya, Sakakini, Totah and some others I draw on less intensively, is that they were profoundly involved in Western interventions. They offer us insight into what Mary Louise Pratt has termed ‘contact zones’, namely the physical and temporal spaces of copresence between coloniser and colonised.7 The perspectives of these witnesses (even if rather personal, and sometimes anecdotal) are engaged with the situation. Crucially, the spheres of vision and centres of gravity of these Arabs were quite distinct from those of the foreign officers and reporters. With their help, then, it may be possible to somewhat decentre – or even ‘provincialise’ – mission.

Moving out of the waiting room Some of Chakrabarty’s most valuable analyses expose how colonial rulers classified their subjects as ‘pre-modern’, while understanding themselves as at the cutting edge of a timeline of progressive modernity. As Chakrabarty explains, the apparent gap between native and coloniser – a period of catching-up, or existing in the ‘waiting room’ – could be filled by education provided by the colonial order.8 This pattern is already familiar from my discussions in Chapter 3, where it emerged that Western-style music making was considered by missionaries to be a symbol of, or even mechanism for, progress. But it can also be a way of considering Palestinians’ dynamic responses to mission. After all, Western music-making could be a contributory element within the package of qualities that might transform Palestinians, in the eyes of missionaries and colonial officers, into what Bhabha terms ‘reformed, recognizable Others’ – whether Muslims turned Christian, Arabs conforming to British gentlemanly ideals, or Arabs working for the British government.9 In other words, the acquisition of Western musical skills was one of various tickets that might seem to lift ‘natives’ out of the waiting room of ‘tradition’, and allow them to participate in the apparently universal march of history. Research to date indicates that a small number of Arabs were enticed by that to an advanced stage, actually entering professional employment as musicians, European classical style. Their primary musical backgrounds were in church organisations. Augustine Lama (originally 7

Pratt 1992.

8

Chakrabarty 2008: 8–9.

9

Bhabha 2005: 86.

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Al-Ama, 1902–88), for example, studied organ with a priest at the Franciscan school of St Saviour’s Church and by 1922 was himself employed as organist there. Salvador Arnita (1914–84) is another case: he worked as assistant organist at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and then studied in Egypt and Italy before returning to live as a composer, conductor and teacher in Jerusalem and Ramallah. Arnita and Lama were active in a range of ways, whether conducting, teaching, playing the organ and piano or indeed composing, and both left sizeable repertories of classical Western genres.10 Arnita performed internationally as an organist in the same period, featuring as a soloist or conductor in major venues in Europe, as well as in the USA, Egypt and Jordan.11 Given that these professionalised musicians – and a number of others – were educated in Catholic rather than Protestant organisations, the question might be posed as to whether their training was in any way distinct from that of Protestant missions discussed above. The existing sources are thin on the ground and tell us all too little, although as I noted in Chapter 3, some of the earliest records of music tuition refer to activities in a Catholic seminary. This may possibly indicate that later on, pupils in Catholic schools enjoyed greater continuity of teacher and thus better opportunities for sustained and in-depth study. But the school magazine of the Franciscan Terra Sancta College, published in the 1930s, indicates that actual school activities proceeded along lines very similar to Protestant ones. There are celebratory remarks in 1932 about the piano recital of Mme Renèe Florigny of the Philharmonic Musical Company in New York City, and also ‘Saturday Night Socials’ in which performances on the piano by Augustine Lama were a highlight.12 And in 1933 a theatrical performance by pupils of a play reworking the book of Genesis (‘Joseph and his Brothers’ by one W. H. T. Gairdner) is depicted in a photograph that 10

11

12

Lama’s compositions are now housed at the Magnificat School of Music, Jerusalem. My brief encounter with the archive suggested that they were written predominantly for the church (for organ and/or choir), and in a basic eighteenth-century idiom. Arnita wrote prolifically: ‘three symphonies, four concerts, two suites, three piano trios, a few string quartets, several Oriental dances and solo works for piano, organ, violin, violoncello, oboe and string orchestra’. See www.salvadorarnita.com/html/music.html accessed 30 June 2010. Some manuscripts of Arnita’s works are in the private collection of Rima Tarazi in Ramallah. Three others are worth mentioning: John Melkon Rose (1924–95), of Armenian and British parentage, studied music while a pupil at the British section of Jerusalem Girls College and St Georges School, participated in children’s programmes at the PBS and went on to become an organist. Yousef Khasho (1927–97) was schooled at the Franciscan orphanage and became active as a choral conductor and organist; François Nicodeme (1935–76) had won a PBS prize for his piano playing by the age of eight. See Zougbi 2007a, 2007b. The Review of the Terra Sancta College II/4 (Easter 1932): 94–5. NLA: PV4179.

Provincialising mission

shows their dressing up as biblical characters for the part.13 This echoes – now with the intensification of pupil engagement – the occasion of ‘Christ and his Soldiers’ discussed in Chapter 1. Finally, the Terra Santa College’s ‘Annual Musical’, assembled in 1935 by the Arab musician Youssef Batrouni (then music teacher at the school), included Haydn, Mozart, Verdi and the ‘Terra Sancta Hymn’, with a smattering of lighter band pieces apparently from France, Italy and Spain. It was attended by a number of local dignitaries (including the mayor of Jerusalem, Hussein Al-Khalidi).14 And when students graduated in 1936 the music programme seems to have reflected some of the dignitaries in the audience: between Puccini, Verdi and Wagner the band played ‘The American Patrol’ by T. H. Meacham, for instance (the Consul General of the United States was in attendance).15 Much in line with the ideals of the schools we encountered in Chapter 3, then, this leading Catholic school developed Western music training and performance as a vehicle of elevation and celebration. Beyond the professional sphere, Western music-making by Arabs can perhaps best be traced through the example provided by Khalil Sakakini (1878–1953). Sakakini was an essayist, poet, scholar and founder of three schools (1909, 1925 and 1938), who also served as Education Inspector under the Ottomans and the British. Educated initially at a Greek Orthodox School, and then at the Anglican College that existed alongside St George’s, he also spent six months in New York. His renowned interest in music emerges from his diaries and other family memoirs. He played the violin, for instance, and developed his skills as an adult by studying violin and voice at a music school in Jerusalem.16 He planned to introduce music to the curriculum of the Arab Teacher Training College in 1919 (indeed volunteered to teach himself, shortly before his resignation and had his children, who attended German schools and the Friends Schools, learn piano.17) His daughter Hala recalled in her autobiography that Sakakini sang a lot at home, including songs from England and Greece (having spent time in both countries), and that all his children heard recordings of Madame Butterfly, Caruso and Chaliapin 13 14 15 16

17

The Review of the Terra Sancta College III/7 (Easter 1933): 42 and 59–63. NLA: PV4179. The Review of the Terra Sancta College V/14 (Summer 1935): 117. NLA: PV4179. The Review of the Terra Sancta College VI/15 (Christmas 1935): 35–7. NLA: PV4179. It is not clear from his recollections which music school this was, whether the Music School or the Jerusalem Music School. His resignation was a protest to the British government, which had appointed Herbert Samuel, Jewish Zionist, as High Commissioner to Palestine. Davis 2003: 193.

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while visiting his colleague, George Khamis from the Arab College.18 When Sakakini’s son Sari mourned his mother’s death, he played Beethoven piano sonatas to console himself. Perhaps Sari had even internalised European notions of music and the ‘inner life’ from his German and/or Jewish music teachers.19 Yet the family had not simply exchanged European traditions for the ones that were more long-standing in the region. Sakakini sang Arab songs at home and hosted friends who played Arab instruments for evening parties: Wasif Jawhariyya, who accompanied him on ʿūd, wrote enthusiastically of his vivacity in music making.20 And as a child Hala imitated the ʿūd playing and singing of the young performer Kāz ̣im al-Sibāsi who often visited, while when the family went on holiday to Lebanon, the monologist Omar Zenni called by and performed for them.21 Additionally, Sakakini composed patriotic songs. By the late 1920s, the time of the first Arab uprising, song was a popular medium for expressing nationalism not only on the streets but also in schools, Islamic schools included.22 The al-Nahd ̣a College (founded by Sakakini in 1938) would have a song composed by Youssef Batrouni with the commanding title ‘inhad ̣ī! inhad ̣ī!’ (Arise! Arise!).23 It is worth remembering that for non-Jews, many public events involving Western classical music may have been alienating, for they were run by and for Jews. To be sure, the YMCA was a shared space and this provided one of the most important concert halls from the mid-1930s onwards. The Palestinian Arnita (mentioned above) was its Director of Music between 1936 and 1944. But other venues were more formal and exclusive. As students, Sakakini’s children also attended concerts by the Palestine Philharmonic Orchestra held at the Edison Cinema, and they seem to have felt somewhat out of place. They observed the audience members who, ‘all dressed up for the occasion, looked so stiff in their fineries they made us laugh’.24 They were also somewhat detached from the didacticism that inhered in the concert-going practice, which Sari used to parody by saying to his sisters: ‘Now let’s study the programme like thoroughly cultured

18 19

20 23

24

Sakakini 1990: 68, 87. One of Sakakini’s daughters mentions a Frau Rohrer and a Herr Jaretzki as teachers. Sakakini 1990: 68, 72–3. 21 22 Nassar and Tamari 2005: 376. Sakakini 1990: 7–8. Greenberg 2004: 12. Sakakini 1990: 102; Tamari 2009: 115. The relevant chapter in Tamari’s book can also be read as an article in Jerusalem Quarterly. See ‘A Miserable Year in Brooklyn Khalil Sakakini in America, 1907–1908’, Jerusalem Quarterly 17, February 2003. Sakakini 1990: 80.

Provincialising mission

folk!’ It is unlikely that this detachment came from a lack of appreciation for music or learning about it, because Hala’s memoirs reveal her pride in having studied music theory at school. Rather, it hints at the emergence of a professionalism and class consciousness that challenged the young Arabs’ sense of belonging. This was presumably heightened by hearing the Zionist anthem at the beginning of each concert, a loud marker of the political project that challenged their place in the region. The most intriguing source through which to reflect on this context for Western music is the song book mentioned above, dating from 1921, the very early years of the Mandate government. It was published in Jerusalem by Khalil Totah, who was then director of the organisation training teachers for schools throughout Palestine, the Arab Teacher Training Institute.25 As Figure 4 shows, its cover is a picture signed by the lithographer Avraham Leib-Monsohn, a Jewish resident of the walled Old City who had established a printing press there in 1892. His image brings together representations of violin, ‘ūd, nāy and musical scores, and the art nouveau-influenced style of decoration is complemented by olive branches, presumably representative of local vegetation. Additionally, we see a woman perched upon a column and playing a lyre. This reference to classical antiquity may well be the most telling element. As I outlined in earlier chapters, Europe’s self-construction in the nineteenth century had involved separating itself from ‘Arab’ and ‘Jew’. Part of this project can be traced in philhellenism among European artists and writers (their enthusiasm for Greek remains in Italy and the work of Homer, for instance), and the institutionalisation of ‘Classical Antiquity’ and ‘Classical Archaeology’ as fields of academic research. These were instrumental in creating a notion of European cultural ‘roots’ that by definition excluded ‘the Orient’ and Hebraic peoples completely.26 By digging its foundations in Greece, ‘Europe’ managed to annex ancient Greece from its hinterland, erasing the manifold Hellenic impact on other peoples in subsequent centuries: while ancient Greece was inextricably linked to Europe, ‘other’ cultures such as Hebraic and Islamic ones were apparently wildly different. But in the image here, provided by a Jew as a symbol of Arab education, the 25 26

FBS: Historical Documents 1900–1929. In the broader political sphere the movement led in 1830 to the support of a Greek uprising and ‘liberation’ from the Ottomans. Kirchhoff 2005: 39–66. Marchand’s work, which places less emphasis on colonialism and more on the structures sustaining German academic thought, also addresses scholars’ powerful divisions between ancient Greeks and Hebrew peoples of the Old Testament. See Marchand 2009: 106–13.

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Figure 4 School Song Book [literally: The Collection of School Songs], Jerusalem, 1921. Housed in the archive of the Friends Boys School, Ramallah. Reproduced by permission.

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Orient is integrated into a collage of classical antiquity and Europe. It has been integrated into the project of Enlightenment. The songs contained within the book are mainly well-known European ones, all furnished with texts written by al-Rus ̣āfī. According to one teacher’s recollections, Nicola Ziadeh, Totah and his wife had played the tunes on the piano while al-Rusāfī ̣ came up with texts for them.27 Al-Rusāfī’s ̣ texts refer specifically to the goals of the Arab Teacher Training Institute, and even while some tunes are associated in the West with religious themes, all are secular. Some address themes of nature, others relate to the homeland, but most of them relate to education and schooling. One example is shown in Figure 5: the German song ‘O Tannenbaum’, a well-established Christmas Carol in Europe, has been adapted to fit the following text. The Western stave notation is adapted here to be combinable with the Arabic text, which must be read from right to left. The Song of the Institute for Teacher Training28 O Institute for Teacher Training, you remain the home of glory For the ailment of ignorance is cured by those you graduate Chorus: We cherish our homeland and those who live in it as long as for knowledge we have the teachers’ school. The Institute for Teacher Training in the land of Palestine provides Knowledge to cure our inner ailment An institute where, if the thirsty stopped by, he would have his thirst quenched And then leave the source of knowledge, his strength recharged We are the soldiers of wisdom, who raise the flag of knowledge With books and a pen we walk on to kill the humiliating ignorance We would not relinquish knowledge, but rather we attain it By sacrificing for it all that is precious to us Go on, friends, walk on and strive so that you find success in knowledge For you will never do well except with the education of children. It is difficult to ascertain the degree to which this song book was integrated into Arab schools by the teachers graduating from the college, but Ziadeh, who went on to become a teacher and historian, used the songs at the school where he worked in Acre to teach ‘the students to stand in 27 28

Hilden 2007: 99–100. The translation is by Nada Elzeer. The Arabic original has rhyming lines, but the purpose of this translation is simply to render its primary content rather than its literary style.

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Figure 5 ‘The Song of the Institute for Teacher Training’ from the School Song Book [literally: The Collection of School Songs], Jerusalem, 1921. Housed in the archive of the Friends Boys School, Ramallah. Reproduced by permission.

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formation in the yard and sing before going to class’.29 Ziadeh also developed a loyal attachment to the song book (for which he paid one shilling) that may remind us of the deaconesses discussed in Chapter 3. Just as they were institutionally wedded to theirs, ‘he kept [the] book and took it with him everywhere he went’. Totah himself understood his song book as a contribution to Arab progress on the model of what he called ‘advanced countries’. His autobiography offers a broader framing of this idea. There he wrote, ‘having known America and the West, I was consumed with the passion of doing my bit towards the creation of a new Arab World … A new mutuality was needed, a fresh outlook and a modern approach.’ He hoped the book would make students wish ‘to seek knowledge’, second, ‘implant in them the love of the homeland’, and third, provide them with ‘a refreshing recreational activity to recharge their minds’.30 As a range of postcolonial scholarship has demonstrated, however, the imitation of modern practices by colonised people is always simultaneously an exercise in producing difference. On the one hand, there may be a desire from the side of the coloniser to retain difference – Bhabha’s ‘almost the same but not quite’ (or ‘white’) – the authority that retains hierarchies despite apparent inclusion.31 This is germane to the Arab case with respect to the differential relationships that the British government would develop with its divided subjects. Jews were given autonomy over their educational system and were thus at liberty to develop a proto-national structure, system and curriculum. They were, then, allowed to make their own way towards existence as a modern nation. Arab education, however, was kept under colonial direction, and – according to colonial reports published at the end of the Mandate – neglected.32 There was no comparable chance, then, for Arabs to establish themselves in the same way. Khalil Totah would go on to become Director of the Friends’ Schools, and complained at the end of his time that attempts to take control of the Arab curriculum and integrate subjects such as music into it had been constantly obstructed.33 On the other hand, difference from the side of the colonised may express a range of other matters: colonial critique, individualisation, nationalism, for instance. The nationalistic texts of Totah’s song book do seem to

29 32

33

30 31 Hilden 2007: 99–100. Totah [undated]. Bhabha 2005: 85–9. Documents written in 1946 by the Director of Education, W. A. Russell, reveal the extent to which the British had neglected the sphere of Arab education overall. Ricks 2009: 65.

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suggest these things: even while not articulating an explicit claim to ‘Palestine’ by name, they express loyalty to the land. And they embody Arab refusal to stay in the ‘waiting room’ and watch Jews enter national modernity alone. But there is another level in which the book is more intriguing, because it runs against the grain of political polity in an additional way. Namely, by commissioning such a potent illustration by a Jew for the front cover, it subverts the separation of ‘Jew’ from ‘Non-Jew’. The result is an Arab-led collaboration.

Another route forward Movement out of the musical waiting room wasn’t always straightforward, however, especially perhaps when it involved the transformation of Arab traditions through adaptation to Western models. When Nuwayhid took over the Arabic section of the PBS in 1940, he argued that it was ‘unacceptable that Arab musicians should continue to resist learning to read and write musical transcription’.34 He arranged for Youssef Batrouni to teach them, and offered financial reward to those who excelled. But several of the musicians were not educated beyond elementary level and so there was a high price to pay: the much-celebrated buzuq player Muh ̣mmad ʿAbd al-Karīm refused to learn and was fired. Nuwayhid later discovered that ʿAbd al-Karīm was completely illiterate, and greatly regretted the fact that he could not find him to offer employment again.35 The redundancy, a loss to the PBS and a woeful consequence of a blanket decision made by an Arab director seeking progress, can be read as a symbol of the fragility of a musical practice falling outside the dominant scheme for social advancement. The risks of joining modern institutions may have been behind the reluctance of the ‘ūd player Wasif Jawhariyya (1897–1972) to join either 34

35

Nuwayhid 1993: 280. The case of Ezra Aharon is also worth remembering in this context, as it was as a result of encouragement and training from his Jewish nationalist supporters that he learned musical notation and wrote down the shorter pieces and songs he composed for the PBS. Aharon’s works were at the time of my research stored in the private collection of Amnon Shiloah. I did not have access to them. At around the same time, and in what seems to be an informal and untutored way, Jawhariyya was experimenting with his own system for musical notation based on the strings of the ‘ūd. While he did not develop this very far, he did make a vast collection of song texts, which may well be a record of his repertoire. ‘Musical notebook’, unpublished, 576 pages. The song texts are divided into five genres. See 9–10 for the musical notation experiment. Copy housed at the Institute of Jerusalem Studies in Ramallah. Nuwayhid 1993: 267–8.

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the Palestine Conservatoire (as noted in Chapter 3) or the PBS. Chakrabarty has identified two basic types of transformation in colonised subjects seeking independence: one embraces the structures of the colony, accepting its position as ‘native’, and training itself to become a ‘citizen’ through an imitative education; the other claims and enacts citizenship without that.36 If we can recognise the contours of Totah and Sakakini in the first type, then those of Jawhariyya come into view through the other. It is not that he rejected all forms of education, but he resisted many of their institutional forms and expectations, and his responses to modernity disrupt the imitative model suggested by Sakakini and Totah. Jawhariyya was born into a distinguished Greek Orthodox family, and two of the schools he attended were European missionary establishments: first the German Schneller School and later, from 1912 to 1914 (when it closed because of the war), the Anglican St George’s.37 Of the German school, he remarked dispassionately that the ‘most important lesson was the one where we had to learn and memorise the verses of the Holy Bible … we also had to learn the well-known hymns of the Protestant Church. The teacher would play on a small organ, or sometimes a violin, while we sang’.38 But the rest of his life sets that influence into critical relief. His recollection of the day on which he encountered recording equipment, for example, shows that Christian songs had a place (they are referred to as ‘religious’ below), yet they were but colours within a mixed collage: The first Edison phonograph came to Jerusalem … all the neighbours gathered, adults and children alike, and my brothers and I were in the lead … Mitri then started recording: the neighbours’ girls sang some religious songs like ranna sawtun ̣ fī al-’aʿālī [a voice was heard in the heavens], and Nūr al-Muna, Zumurruda, and Hilana al-Muna did some ululations. Mitri then recorded some songs that were in vogue at the time, before my brother Tawfiq and I recorded what we could. I remember recording al-ghusnu’idhā ̣ ra’āka muqbilan sajada … [when a branch sees you coming, it prosternates], then the Druze song fī ḥukm al-sabʿ salātīn ̣ [during the rule of the seven sultans].39

36

37

38

Chakrabarty 2008: 10–11. Chakrabarty acknowledges a parallel with Bhabha’s dual notion of ‘pedagogic’ and ‘performative’ nationalisms. See ‘DissemiNation: Time, Narrative and Margins of the Modern Nation’ in Bhabha 2005. In between them he was a pupil at a school established by Sakakini, the Dusturiyyeh National School. His leaving this school and joining St George’s was a result of Hussein Effendi alHusseini’s recommendation that it would develop his English to a higher level and increase his career prospects. 39 Nassar and Tamari 2003: 20. Nassar and Tamari 2003: 50–1.

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We can trace the range of music in the region encountered by Jawhariyya and consider it as his musical ‘education’ – thus setting the new, formalised educational practices discussed in Chapter 3 into context. It was as a child visiting villages outside Jerusalem that he received his first instrument (a tanbūr, ̣ a long-necked, fretted string instrument) and instrumental instruction from a Moroccan man tending fields in Beit Souseen.40 He had an acquisitive attitude to songs, but also a grateful one: he learned from several different people in the villages and treasured what he had gained from each of them. The people to whom he refers included a shepherd in Deir Amr called al-Abd, a friend of the same, and someone called Deeb bin Ahmed Muslih from another village (either Kasla or Saris).41 He was taught how to dance the dabka by a man called S ̣ālih ̣ alShaʿrāwī, and this rapidly provided him with a community role: his teacher asked him to lead the dance at a wedding. These opportunities were in large part a consequence of remarkable privilege. His father, Jurjus, would eventually occupy a number of authoritative positions in the local Orthodox community and Jerusalem‘s municipal council, and he trained as a lawyer. But at the beginning of his professional life and while Wasif was a child, he worked for Hussein Effendi al-Husseini, feudal landlord and member of the Jerusalem elite (who would become Jerusalem’s mayor). This in itself was the reason for the beneficial visits to the villages, but Hussein Effendi also developed a personal interest in the young Wasif, which enabled him to expand his training rather further. For instance, when he encountered a peasant who played the rebec in Hussein Effendi’s fields around the village of Deir Amr, the latter’s mistress, Persifone, bought him an instrument and he took lessons for three months, for which Hussein Effendi rewarded the peasant with food, possibly more. Thus equipped, Wasif began to entertain guests at parties back in Jerusalem. He was still only eight or nine years old. Later on, he took up the instrument that his father played, the ʿūd, receiving two lessons per week at home from an outstanding amateur player.42 Once again Hussein Effendi helped: when Wasif subsequently encountered the singer ʿUmar al-Batsh from Aleppo, who was in Jerusalem to perform with the city’s military band, Hussein Effendi arranged for al-Batsh to give him some instruction. Wasif recalled that he took ‘lessons in Andalusian muwashshahāt four days a week from 11am to 1pm, under the trees of the Maskubiya building, which had filled 40 42

Nassar and Tamari 2003: 33–4. Nassar and Tamari 2003: 37, 96.

41

Nassar and Tamari 2003: 35–6.

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with Turkish soldiers’.43 He experienced this as a tremendous ear-opener, for he learned repertoire that was new to him, but already widespread in Egypt and Syria. One consequence of this was a sense of elevation above the musicians he knew in Jerusalem. Because at this time Jerusalem had no institution for music education, musicians he encountered who had formal training tended to come from elsewhere. Some were famous in the Arab world and their appearances caused a stir. As a boy, he heard Sheikh Salāma Ḥijāzī, for instance, whom Hussein Effendi brought from Cairo in 1908 to perform with musicians and the theatre director Jūrj Abyad ̣. Wasif noted that the musical performances of plays and stories reduced the audience to tears.44 Later he would hear Umm Kulthūm while on his honeymoon in Cairo and again in Jerusalem, and would also hear Abd al-Wahhāb there twice. Yet such events, with their pomp and exceptionality, do not compete with the main core of his musical education. The latter took place on the street and in homes, in environments where music was an embedded part of community life. And here there were two categories in Wasif ’s thinking, categories that bear no relation to those brought by the historicist vision of colonisers. These were ‘professional’ and ‘amateur’. Into the former category fell a band called the Sons of Abu al-Sibāʿ (made up of a qānūn, percussion instruments, an ʿūd, and voice), an ʿūd player called Abu Khalil, and singer and percussionist ʿAbd al-Salām alAqraʿ, who provided music for puppet shows. Wasif also included four female singers: Asmā al-Qarʿa, Amīna al-ʿAmawiyya, Thurayyā Qaddūra, Khayzarān ʿAbdū (who also played qānūn) and Frusu Zahran (who also played ‘ūd). Jewish musicians from Aleppo were ‘professionals’ too, and I will discuss their contribution below. But those who played without financial reward – like Wasif himself – gained his greater approbation. Commenting in detail on their musical capabilities and the ways they had themselves learned music, he also recorded what each one did for a living, whether working as bakers or officials in the judiciary, for instance. He even listed musicians who only spent part of the year in Jerusalem, for they too contributed to his development. When one Muhammad al-Soussi visited the city and stayed – ‘to my great fortune’ – near the Jawhariyya family house, Wasif and many others could go along and ask him to play specific songs on the qānūn, so that ‘I picked up a great deal of music’.45 43 45

Nassar and Tamari 2003: 193–4. Nassar and Tamari 2005: 372.

44

Nassar and Tamari 2003: 108–9.

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One obvious value of Wasif ’s memoirs is that they reveal that the colonial models were not the only ones through which Palestine’s residents sought advancement. Multiple influences carried Jerusalem into modernity, and the arrival of new technologies created a network with neighbouring cities of Beirut and Cairo. From 1910 onwards, gramophone records could be heard in cafes and on the street, and the music of Egypt had Wasif ’s rapt attention: The disc recordings of dowrs and muwashshahāt arrived, sung by late Sheikh Yūsuf al-Manyalāwī, Muh ̣ammad ʿUthmān, Sheikh Salāma Ḥijāzī, Muh ̣ammad Sālim al-ʿAjūz, ʿAbd al-Ḥayy Ḥilmī, Dāwūd Ḥusnī, Zakī Murād and others, and particularly by al-S ̣afatī.

The further significance of Jawhariyya’s stories lies in the way that they enable us to reconsider the very soundscape of the region. In particular, the Old City of Jerusalem can seem quite different from its image in missionary sources. The following narrative is set in the area transformed by Catholic buildings around the Via Dolorosa which, as I mentioned in Chapter 3, had been previously inhabited predominantly by Muslims: Singer and ʿūd player Muhammad al-‘Ashiq used to come to Jerusalem in the summer, and make arrangements with the owners of the Hospice Cafe, which is located opposite the Austrian Hospice. He would sit on a wooden platform at one of the corners of the main road crossing opposite the Hospice, and sing with his affectionate voice and play the ‘ūd, while people sat around him and on every street pavement in that quarter, silent and mesmerised, drinking beverages and coffee, smoking waterpipes and cheering him, particularly during the Ramadan nights on which he sang exceptionally well until the cannon was heard. It would not be an exaggeration to say that his voice, especially at that time of the night, when all was silent and no cars could be heard in Jerusalem, reached to our house, pure and natural, despite the considerable distance. I used to go with my brothers … and sit near the café … I still remember a favourite which he used to sing, a taqt ̣ ūqa ̣ of the maqām bayātī … I found it fascinating how, when he was repeating the word joz, he went back to the keynote in a gradual way. This taqt ̣ ūqa ̣ became a hit with the Jerusalemite amateurs/music lovers, both men and women. I listened to this singer with excessive passion, and begged my brothers to stay longer and longer, making my brother Khalil lose his temper. I wished and prayed I would meet this singer one day.46

Wasif ’s description pushes the new Christian mission buildings (and the Christian pilgrims retracing Jesus’ steps between them) right to the edge of 46

Nassar and Tamari 2003: 45.

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the stage. The central focus is the terrace of the cafe, and the relaxed community living space on and around it. We observe that these are some of the platforms on which music making takes place, yet also realise that the impact of the music (brought from Egypt to this setting) can spread widely beyond. Offering novelty and charm in a language and musical idiom that was familiar, yet new, it offered a path through musical experiences that were plainly progressive, but equally plainly not European.

Beyond religion In the earlier chapters of this book I have revealed ways in which European and American writers on ‘the Holy Land’ imagined and constructed it in a range of religious terms. Although a few commentators such as Dalman had acknowledged the hybridity of religious practices encountered on rural travels, there was a tendency to draw boundaries along religious lines.47 The sharpest distinctions were drawn within Jerusalem’s Old City, which was conceived in confessional ‘quarters’ by Western commentators from at least William McClure Thomson onwards. Yet as is already apparent from Wasif ’s texts quoted above, residents did not live in it as such. Thus recent historians have been keen to illuminate the distinction between colonial demarcations on the one hand, and the prevailing sociality of local people on the other. Tamari describes it as follows: There was no clear correspondence between neighborhood and religion … there was substantial intermixing of religious groups in each quarter … the boundaries of habitat, furthermore, were the mahallat, the neighborhood network of social demarcations within which a substantial amount of communal solidarity is exhibited. Such cohesiveness was clearly articulated in periodic visitations and sharing of ceremonials, including weddings and funerals but also active participation in religious festivities.48

A range of surviving documents suggests that such ‘ceremonials’ and ‘religious festivities’ overlapped between confessions, so that the Muslim pilgrimage of Nebi Musa emerges as a celebration merging with Christian Orthodox Easter, the Christian Orthodox ceremony of the Holy Fire is interconnected to Muslim folk festivities and the feast of Ramadan is an 47

48

Palestinian ethnographer Taufik Canaan (of whom more below) said that the differences between the observances of Christians and Muslims in rural areas were superficial. (Canaan 1927: vi. See also Kahle 1910, 1912 for similar perspectives.) Tamari 2000: 8.

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occasion for massive entertainments for all residents of the Old City.49 Jawhariyya recalls interchange with Jewish festivities as well: Easter and Pessach could trigger Christian–Jewish–Muslim celebration, and Muslims and Christians joined Jews at the shrine of Simon the Just twice a year.50 Jawhariyya’s writing also emphasises domestic interchange: his (Christian) family was in constant interaction with Muslim families in a range of social contexts. This existing communality was severely challenged by British administration, which tended (just as it did in India) to organise society along religious fault-lines with the assumption that these were also political fault-lines. This enabled it to maintain its long-standing perspective that held the region to be one of sectarian tribes at constant war. Meanwhile, and partly in consequence of the divisiveness, there was an intensification of Arab nationalist sentiment. One particular result was the discursive construction of affiliations that transcended confessional distinction and that revealed continuity with the pre-British times.51 Jawhariyya once again provides a valuable example: We Jerusalemites of the various denominations had always lived like a family during the Ottoman rule, and there was never any difference between a Muslim or a Christian, but when Britain occupied Jerusalem, it tried to sow trouble, particularly among Muslims and Christians. And as though it had not been vicious enough in issuing the sinister Balfour declaration right after the occupation, causing the loss of our homeland, it banned Muslims from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and Christians from Temple Mount.52

The limitations of the sectarian vision can be traced clearly in practices and musical sensibilities that were off the missionary radar. A case in point is the connection between secular music and Islamic culture. Sakakini (a ‘progressive’ Christian) regarded reading the Quran as a crucial part of Arab education and insisted on its place within curricula in his schools. Similarly, Jawhariyya was encouraged to study the Quran for musical reasons by a Christian civil servant, then based in Jericho, who taught him many songs: I was very pleased because he is one of Jerusalem’s most famous music connoisseurs and amateurs. I was lucky at that time to learn from him a valuable selection of the songs of Egypt’s old musicians like Abdu, Muh ̣ammad ʿUthmān and Sheikh 49 50 51

52

See Halabi 2007 for a historical account of the intercultural aspects of Nebi Musa celebrations. Tamari 2000: 23–4. For a clear account of the crystallisation of these ideals in the Istiqlal Party in 1932, see Matthews 2006: 137–41. Nassar and Tamari 2005: 286

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Yūsuf al-Manyalāwī. He was staying in a room at the Greek Orthodox Monastery, near the church, and I spent long hours with him … He encouraged me to continue to read the Quran all my life, for the accurate reading of the Quran could help me immeasurably in improving my singing.53

Such ideas and practices were primarily a result of developments in Egypt, where many of the most renowned singers in the early twentieth century were Quran chanters.54 Thus one of Wasif ’s most frequent points of reference for singers he heard in Jerusalem was their experience with the Quran, whether they were renowned professional chanters from Egypt such as Mah ̣mūd S ̣ubh ̣ and Ahmed Hassanein, or less well-known figures such as Sheikh Ah ̣mad al-Ṭarīfī. Other principles were the ‘purity’ of historical genres and traditions such as the muwashshahāt – for which Mah ̣mūd S ̣ubh ̣ was exemplary – and the quintessence of Arab music for Wasif, the striving for tarab: ̣ Sheikh Ahmed sang wonderfully, which made me play the ʿūd in a very vibrant way. I was the only one to play the poems he recited on the ʿūd, which amazed him and made him treat me rather affectionately. I would not be exaggerating if I said that the voice of Sheikh al-Ṭarīfī is one of the most voluptuous and most powerful voices. He mainly sang poems which, although not very inventive in terms of their music, were rather solid in that their meaning was powerfully conveyed, without any elaborate singing, as they say. This put the unsuspecting listener in a state of extreme tarab, ̣ thanks to a performance style which resembled Quran recitation, and his powerful tenor voice.55

In this same period two developments took place that shifted the religious and social significance of music in Jerusalem. First, musicians who had developed a place in professional society in larger urban centres (including Damascus but most prominently Cairo) leant music a respectability that was transmitted to the region both by the gramophone and their own visits. Second, Palestine itself developed a cafe culture that created a new space for socialising, reading newspapers, listening to recordings and, increasingly, entertainment such as cabaret. This was closely connected to the expansion of the Palestine press in 1908.56

53 54

55

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Nassar and Tamari 2003: 212–13. Danielson has identified the interrelation between Quran recitation and song in early twentieth-century Egypt. See Danielson 1997: 23–6. Nassar and Tamari 2003: 321–2. For references to Sobh and Hassanein, see Nassar and Tamari 2005: 565–7, vol. II: 530–1. Matthews 2006, 147–8; Tamari 2003.

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In the last years of Ottoman rule and in the early years of the British Mandate, these cafes were sites of potent intellectual and artistic activity. They indicate a public side to Jerusalem that was distinctly unholy and that complements the private one so much in evidence in Jawhariyya’s memoirs. Not only were the cafes secular spaces where the various Christian, Jewish, Muslim and Armenian populations met, but they could be highly hedonistic. One, founded in 1918 within the Old City and called the Mukhtar’s Café, was known by Sakakini and his circle as the ‘vagabond cafe’. It was a meeting point for his ‘vagabonds’, the manifesto of which he published in 1925. His ideas revolved around a philosophy of pleasure developed with reference to Nietzsche and a medieval Arabic text by Ibn Miskawayh, according to which ‘Sorrow is neither necessary or natural. We should immerse ourselves in life and cherish it by celebrating our nights … We should indulge in music and singing.’57 And although the increasing political problems in Jerusalem meant that the period of cafe culture was short-lived, hedonism was continuous in other spheres. Jawhariyya’s reminiscences are a veritable catalogue of parties in which music is always present, and guests and hosts are often incapacitated by excessive alcohol. This image may seem too sharply polarised from the ‘holy’ Jerusalem imagined by missionaries, and there are indeed spaces in between the two visions. For example, although secular music drawing from Quranic recitation cut across religious boundaries, music and its practitioners were not uniformly respected. Jawhariyya’s father, for one, who loved music and hosted musicians in his own home, had a strong sense of class and education accompanied by related notions of propriety. It led him to help his son acquire and learn the music by artists he himself valued, such as Sheikh Salāma Ḥijāzī and Sheikh al-Manyalāwī, and to forbid him to learn certain songs; it also led him to scold him severely for making rhyming errors in poetry (apparently picked up from the singing of Mitri Costandi al-Muna), and to say that Wasif ’s education should distinguish him from singing ‘vulgar’ music like a ‘handyman’.58 When Wasif spontaneously took part in a wedding parade on the street as a child, singing along and becoming the focus of attention, his father sent someone to retrieve him in case it gave the family a bad name.59 But this was a matter of propriety, not religion.

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58 Quoted in Tamari 2003. Nassar and Tamari 2003: 23. Nassar and Tamari 2003: 111.

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Contact zones Early on in the period covered by his memoirs, Wasif encountered Jewish players from Aleppo whom he lists among the ‘professional’ musicians active in Jerusalem. He identifies their loyalty to the great tradition of muwashshahāt performance, while observing (without criticism) that they altered the texts: Jerusalem had musical bands which were known as ‘the instrumentalists’, and were formed by Eastern Jews from Aleppo. These musicians were passionate about Arab music and made sure the muwashshaḥ were immaculately preserved, but they used to change the language and the content of the songs.60

His descriptions reveal that these musicians could be heard in a range of contexts, and that some of these were characterised by inter-confessional fluidity and exchange: We often went to see them and listen to them in the Aleppo commune, as well as in Habsah Street and the Jewish quarters of al-Basal and Montefiori. Arabs used to invite them to their wedding celebrations where they gave excellent performances. Amongst these musicians were: Haim, who played the violin, and then the ʿūd for which he was famous; Zakī al-Ḥalabī the percussionist and tireless singer … As for the Jewish janakis, there was Sulika, who was well-known amongst Jerusalemites. She was the leader of the band and was accompanied by dancer Fariha and others. There is not a single Arab Muslim or Christian house in Jerusalem whose celebrations had not been led by Sulika, who … converted to Islam.61

Similarly, the memoirs recall that when the famous singer and dancer Badīʿa Masābnī ̣ visited Jerusalem, she was accompanied by a musical band conducted by the Jewish player Shehada. Wasif admired the song and dance greatly, also observing that Shehada played the ʿūd ‘very well indeed’. And he was happy to have learned an Egyptian song from Shehada himself. He would later teach it to his English teacher at St George’s School, the Arab Dr ʿIzzat Ṭannūs.62 With respect to Jews from the West who later settled in the region, however, the picture seems a little more complex. It seems more heavily burdened with questions of authority and influence, and increasingly energised by the push and pull of Pratt’s ‘contact zones’.63 One anecdote, 60 61

62

Nassar and Tamari 2003: 148–9. Nassar and Tamari 2003: 149. Janakis were female singers, often also playing darbukah (goblet drums). 63 Nassar and Tamari 2005: 327–8, 313. Pratt 1992.

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for instance, reveals Wasif ’s pride in having powerful and gifted friends in the new community of Jewish musicians from Europe, but also his desire to match them with the traditions with which he himself identified. He was proud to be able to show off his friend Sami al-Shawwa, a violinist of great fame in the Arab world, to refugee violinist Emil Hauser: Once I took Sami to the Hebrew Music Institute in Jerusalem, at the time when my friend, Mr. Hauser, the violinist, was its president. It is a well-known fact that this institute was home to the finest musical geniuses and musicians, particularly violinists, most of whom came from Germany. They had all heard about the fame of Sami al-Shawwa and were interested in hearing him play, and I acted as the translator. Sami seized the violin and started playing pure Arabic maqāmāt containing quarter tones of the maqāmāt sīkāh and bastanikar. Hardly had he begun playing than they held their heads with their hands and started shaking with tarab. ̣ They were truly amazed and went wild, and I can confirm that they complimented him a lot.64

Wasif ’s concern with power is also suggested by the satisfaction he took from a friendship with the Mandate government’s Director of Education, W. A. Stewart. He records that they spent time together not only in Jerusalem but also in Tel Aviv, where they played the ʿūd in basement venues, assisting Jews learning Arab song and dabka, an Arab village dance. Such recollections and many more indicate the attraction that British authority held for him: it was a matter of some pride that he returned home only at dawn with a member of the British establishment, with whom he had been enjoying music and dance in the company of ‘Jewish beauties’.65 On one level, this is a sign that he managed to continue a lifestyle introduced to him early in his life by Hussein Effendi, who – in particular after Wasif ’s father died – had taken him under his wing, and regularly brought him into social contact with Turkish officials and visiting dignitaries from the Arab world. On another, it is a sign of a broader situation, in which a considerable number of Arabs considered it an honour to socialise with British officials. This tendency was seen as highly problematic by some nationalists, who argued that it undermined the coherence of the Arab striving for independence.66 The critique is indeed apt for Jawhariyya: while relishing Stewart’s company in Tel Aviv basements, he was also teaching Jewish pupils there the Arab traditions he knew and contributing thereby to a

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65 Nassar and Tamari 2005: 432–3. Nassar and Tamari 2005: 438–9. Sakakini recorded this in his diary in the early 1930s. See Matthews 2006: 173.

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peculiarly Zionist project. Dabka was one of several local genres that Zionists learned, reconstructed as ‘Jewish’, and used to affirm their claim to the land.67 The account of teaching Jews coexists in the memoirs with passages that reveal Wasif ’s irritation at a similar process occurring in other musical spheres. For instance, his apparent acceptance early on that the Aleppo Jews changed the texts they sang, and his celebration of their presence in Arab homes, contrast sharply with his remarks about the last period of the Mandate. Commenting about the radio, he refers to the use of Hebrew texts on Andalusian muwashshahāt as ‘malicious’. He draws a sharp distinction between the Iraqi Jewish protagonist in his tale, and the ‘musicians’: It is worth mentioning that famous Iraqi master musician Azzuzi al-Yahudi (the Jew) was one of the first musicians at the radio. But because of the political tension between Arabs and Jews, the government had to separate them, so Arabs were singing and playing alone, and so were the Jews. Mr. Azzuzi, who was of Iraqi origin and had represented Iraq at the 1931 [sic] Arabic music conference in Cairo, came up with an innovative idea which was, in fact, a malicious one, and replaced the lyrics of the classical Andalusian muwashshaḥ with Hebrew lyrics … But his work was doomed to failure and was soon mocked by musicians.68

This description complements what we know about the difficulties facing Arab Jews attempting to live in the Ashkenazi Jewish communities of Palestine.69 For, rather than an ‘innovative idea’ of his own, Azzuzi’s embrace of modern Hebrew was a consequence of his struggle to survive as a disparaged immigrant (among immigrants), and his willingness to grasp opportunities coming his way. Jewish musicians such as David Yellin and David Avisar had advised him that composing to Hebrew texts would improve his popularity, and they had actually provided him with appropriate texts.70 This gained him some work and an entry ticket into the project of developing Mizrahi Jewish culture that was part of the endeavour to

67

68 69 70

As Kaschl has put it, ‘[b]y adopting Arab dance practices and making them their own, Zionist dance leaders in historic Palestine … emphasized that Israeli-Jewish modernity was to be culturally distinct from European modernity’. Going on, she argues that ‘Jewish dance leaders … believed that they could recover their own, long-lost authentic traditions from the time of the Bible and ‘re-enchant’ Jewish practices.’ In essence, then, ‘the Arab villager came to serve as a stand-in for Jews searching for their authentic cultural roots’. Kaschl 2003: 58–9. Nassar and Tamari 2005: 541. For a discussion about historical prejudices against ‘Oriental’ Jews see Piterberg 1996. For a discussion of Azzuzi’s difficulties and successes, in the Jewish community of Palestine see Shiloah 2003 (in Hebrew).

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establish a Jewish music rooted in Palestine. But through this Jewish ‘rooting’ project and rather obvious signals such as setting the poetry of Hayim Nahman Bialik – a poet who did much for the cultivation of Hebrew and was understood as a ‘national’ poet – Azzuzi had become swept into the category of ‘Jew’. Wasif ’s memoirs reveal that it was not without loss.71 Azzuzi became ‘Ezra Aharon’, and the sympathy of Arab musicians evaporated. One further anecdote illuminates Wasif ’s taste for elite company very clearly, while simultaneously suggesting his powerless ‘Oriental’ position, not only as a colonised resident but also as a musician. It relates to a song he wrote (based on a published variant of a song by the Egyptian composer Sayed Darwish), complaining that the British had appointed Herbert Samuel, a man who was for Wasif ‘one of the world’s pioneering Zionists’, as Palestine’s first High Commissioner. The text for the song stated that the Arabs had been ‘sold’ and would be led by people called ‘Shabtai, Sholem and Haim’, who would oblige them to speak Hebrew. This expression of anger towards the British became popular, because Wasif sang it at many social gatherings. One might imagine, then, that it could potentially have fed into growing unrest, even action against the British decision. However, he allowed it to be neutralised in an apparently elegant contact zone when the military governor Ronald Storrs asked him to sing it at his own parties, including at an official reception at which Samuel, the High Commissioner himself, was present. Wasif ’s willingness to place himself in this position – presumably he was honoured to contribute to a reception with the High Commissioner – effectively contained his contribution within the sphere of British amusement. It caused enormous mirth among the officials present.72 That he performed the ‘exotic’ on such occasions, preparing himself in what he called ‘traditional Arab dress’, may have contributed further to his harmlessness. Certainly, discursive criticism in more formal spheres was treated without amusement or tolerance. The same High Commissioner banned a book entitled History of Palestine, coauthored in 1920 by Totah, then Director of the Arab Teaching Training College, because of its remarks about Zionism.73 But perhaps the most important musical contact zone can be found in Wasif ’s perspective on Robert Lachmann, for it brings music so firmly into the sphere of historicism. Lachmann, as we have already observed in Chapter 2, was appreciative of Wasif ’s capacity to play music that he 71 72

For a valuable discussion of the struggles of such Arabs see Tamari 2004. 73 Nassar and Tamari 2005: 352–3. Ricks 2009: 65.

Provincialising mission

understood as being of historic quality, even ‘pure’. Wasif ’s memoirs indicate his willingness to disseminate this music constructed as such, for he played and sang – as he put it – ‘in accordance with the theories that Dr. Lachmann was writing’, at venues including the Arab College, the Hebrew University and the Conservatoire. He learned a lot from me about the ʿūd playing, with regard to the modern Arabic music scale, and to rhythm, as they had been taught to me by the old masters who could not read music, and as I had picked up this art from them. I will never forget this conversation, for it was exactly what Lachmann wanted to hear.74

While this indicates Wasif performing the required role without concern, his memoirs also include an account of a public occasion when he protested publicly about the way that Lachmann was presenting him. He appreciated Lachmann’s view that Arab music could not be entirely reduced to Western notation, he said, and he also agreed with his general analytical and historical insights. Yet he went on to point out that he himself had been immensely privileged, whereas most people were not. Going on, he said that if Arabic remained such an exclusive medium then it would die out, whereas he knew from the rest of the Arab world that this need not happen. The selfaggrandizement in his comments need not mask their basic argument: But who is this person who can memorise all these complicated facts, and apply each quarter note … correctly, all their life? Don’t you agree with me that there cannot be more than one person in every twenty thousand who actually masters this art, which means that, if Arabs stick to this difficult way of doing things, it will not be long before there is hardly one remarkable musician around? Having said that, why do you oppose the principle of learning Arabic music using Western-style musical notation? I am sure that it would be possible to find, in every ten houses, a person who can play very well according to fixed rules that are not under threat to disappear. A symbol for the quarter tone you have mentioned has been added to the Western-style transcription at the conference on Arabic music which was held in Cairo in 1931 [sic], and in which you took part yourself. No? My experience in this fine art makes me certain that today’s musicians who learned music after that conference can play the long complex pieces which are full of quarter tones by following Western-style musical transcription, as is the case in Egypt and the various Arab countries … I am sure that Arab musicians have the courage to learn music, and in this way the number of Arab musicians would be in the hundreds, just as it is in the West

74

Nassar and Tamari 2005: 517–18.

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where there is a musical instrument in each and every house. Look at Muhammad ʿAbd al-Wahhāb’s musical orchestras today … There is also the orchestra of the queen of hearts, Umm Kulthūm. Listen and see for yourself how they are able to play with exquisite skill sophisticated musical pieces that are crammed with quarter-tones.75

According to the memoirs, Lachmann did not accept Wasif ’s point. He wished to distinguish between the musical tradition and its practitioners. Wasif then politicised his framework explicitly, but Lachmann stood his ground, and resisted the invitation to consider the material and political implications of his argument: So allow me to tell you, Dr. Lachmann, that if you still insist on your opinion, it is from a Zionist anti-Arab point of view which is somewhat sly, and aims at preventing Arabs from spreading their music, and from ever evolving beyond what they have already achieved, and that is all there is to it … Dr. Lachmann went mad and insisted on his opinion, saying: ‘No, this is wrong. I would much rather there was in every 20,000 just one Wasif Jawhariyya who masters music and singing the old fashioned way, as I said before. This has nothing to do with politics, for art – and particularly music – is art in everyone’s opinion.’

It is difficult to reconcile Lachmann’s reaction with comments he made with regard to the radio in November 1935, when (as mentioned in Chapter 4) he wished to see opportunities for Arabs to develop their musical activities. Here, as mediated by Wasif, he seems unconcerned that his view could deny Arab musicians choices and voices. Without any other sources for their public altercation, and without knowing at what point Wasif wrote his account of it, the whole event should perhaps be read rather broadly. On one level, there is after all no doubt that it was a timely outcry. The gap between the dissemination of Western and Arab musics was growing within the Arab community itself. As I will discuss in Chapter 5, a Christian middle class was emerging that had no taste for Arab music, and we encounter this elsewhere in Wasif ’s memoirs. Dr ʿIzzat Ṭannūs, one of his teachers at St George’s school, had himself loathed Arab music until Wasif led him to it.76 Ṭannūs was apparently a product of an effective Anglicisation and the paucity of formal training in Arab styles. Elsewhere in Wasif ’s memoirs the question arises in different contexts. One is another expression of his admiration for the visiting Armenian 75

Nassar and Tamari 2005: 518–19.

76

Nassar and Tamari 2005: 313.

Provincialising mission

musician he refers to as Sisaq, whose ‘ability to read music gave him a firm foundation for the mastering of the instrument’.77 Others are his notes on his own experience of learning the ‘ūd. One of these emphasises the hospitality and refreshments that his father provided in exchange for the care: My father would bring him wine and exquisite mezze dishes in person, which made Abdul-Hamid take extra care of my learning and acquisition. In the beginning, he taught me a dūlāb, then he taught me yā sāḥ ̣ al-S ̣abr, then a piece from the bashraf [by] Tanios, in which I took thirteen lessons.78

The individual labour-intensiveness of this method is yet clearer in another recollection, which also indicates a paucity of resources – one ʿūd is passed between teacher and student: As for the teaching method at the time, which was the method through which I learned to play, it consisted in the teacher showing the student where to place his fingers while playing short phrases from longer songs or musical pieces, and then handing him the ʿūd so that he would attempt in his turn to play the phrase in question as he had heard it from the teacher, and which he should be able to remember by heart. Such was the learning method before the shift to Western music notation happened, and that is the reason why few people excelled in music. For only the truly gifted and passionate were happy and willing to apply themselves and learn through the difficult old method.79

As Wasif ’s reference to the Cairo conference reminds us, moreover, he and Lachmann were in fact rehearsing a debate that played out in several fields at the time.80 On the one hand was a European modernist stance towards the irreconcilable qualities of Oriental and Western musics, and on the other, an Egyptian vision of Arab modernisation on Western models. In Cairo the debate had polarised European ethnomusicologists such as Béla Bartók and indeed Lachmann (who argued that the riches of the East should be preserved as they were) against Egyptians (who were keen to transform their work by connecting up with Western trends). Wasif ’s testimony places the debate in the Palestinian context, where Jewish settlers made it particularly fraught. After all, as we have observed in Chapter 4, Jews seemed to have it all ways. They were skilled in ‘European’ music, yet also claimed ‘Oriental’ repertories, religious music and even folk song and Arab regional dance as their own. 77 79 80

78 Nassar and Tamari 2005: 441. Nassar and Tamari 2003: 96–7. Nassar and Tamari 2003: 97–8. For a discussion of these debates in the context of the conference, see Racy 1991.

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And once Wasif ’s predicament is considered through Chakrabarty’s notion of colonial historicism, it is a poignant illustration of the potential cost when immigrants have an interest in ‘preserving’ the traditions they encounter in their new homes. The long-standing resident, once proud to be in a position to learn from all musicians encountered, is faced with categories brought from elsewhere. These set limits on his community’s musical activities. Arguably they do not even allow them into a ‘waiting room’. They are in a no-man’s land. It is a neat musical correlate of ‘the immovable East’.81

A gestural postlude I began this chapter by reflecting on Chakrabarty’s perspective on history, and I close it with some further thought on the same subject, now with more consideration of ‘the Palestinian peasant’. The way that this figure emerged in missionary accounts fits into classic colonial narratives of progress, whose insistence on a historical timeline and a relegation of spiritual practices to the ‘pre-modern’ ensure that peasants are permanently denied a presence in the present. As Fabian has argued about anthropology more broadly, the ‘ancient’ quality of the peasants is preserved precisely so that the natives can appear as ancestors of the missionaries themselves.82 And yet – in the Palestinian location – the historical method does something else as well, because of its biblical formulation. Namely, it reinforces the notion that Islamic practices are impositions – not only because they invoke the (pre-modern) gods, but because they have interrupted ‘history’, which is the progression from an early Christianity into its modern secularised forms with national frameworks. Historians writing from within the colony cannot escape the problem. Bhabha has referred to native histories as mimetic – dependent on the categories of European history, even while attempting to create a space of difference. ‘Indian history’ – for instance – is already constructed through the prism of ‘difference from’. For this, a neat Palestinian equivalent can be traced in what Tamari has termed a ‘nativist’ tendency in Arab scholarship. Writers involved drew inspiration from Gustaf Dalman and German scholars of Islam such as Paul Kahle. They practiced Bhabha’s mimesis, presenting their research within the ‘master code’ that involved the 81

This now notorious expression is that of Baldensperger 1913.

82

Fabian 1983.

Provincialising mission

movement of biblical text to land, and the regard for the peasant as a fossil of biblical testimony. They also packaged their work for consumption by the ‘world market’ (publishing in English and German research organs).83 One of Stephan H. Stephan’s articles, for example, which appeared in the British Journal of the Palestine Oriental Society, identifies resemblances between the Song of Songs and seventy-seven songs from Palestinian folklore (thus following up on Dalman’s enquiry of 1899 directly).84 Another presents local nursery rhymes and songs as historical materials whose artlessness was to be cherished. They contained ideas ‘whose origin may sometimes be traced to ancient antiquity’.85 The most prolific and important of the group was Protestant physician Taufik Canaan, for whom the life of the Palestinian peasant radiated an ‘uncontaminated patriarchal Palestinian atmosphere’, which was ‘fading away’ with Westernisation.86 His position involved a clear binary construction between himself as (scientific) writer on the one hand, and the (natural) peasants on the other. He distanced himself from his subject quite emphatically, stating that it was not easy ‘to gain the confidence of the fellah to such a degree that he will speak freely and with detail’.87 Essentially the function of the peasants was structurally the same as in colonial missionary accounts: it was to justify the presence of people on the land, through their relationship to ancient texts. But here his angle is significant, for he embraced not only traces of the Judaic and Christian bibles, but also the presence of the Quran and Islamic practices: he sought legitimation, then, for Muslims on the land. His main contribution was indeed a monograph with the title Mohammedan Saints and Sanctuaries in Palestine. The title radiates the separatist vocabulary of the ‘master code’ (‘Mohammedanism’ being a common misnomer for Islam) – and thus speaks in the language of colonial law – and yet also 83

84 86

87

Chakrabarty has noted that such histories are written only after their writers have been ‘transposed and inserted … into the global narratives of citizenship and socialism’, and ‘only after the social existence from their own labor has entered the process of being made abstract in the world market for ideational commodities’. Chakrabarty 2008: 98. 85 Stephan 1922: 199–278. Stephan 1932: 62. He opens one article by saying ‘the present inhabitants of Palestine (who are in many respects as primitive as their ancestors of two thousand years ago)’ (Canaan 1931a: 15). In another piece, he writes ‘Immutability is the most striking characteristic of eastern life, and the inhabitants of the Near East may not and dare not deviate from the traditional path of their ancestors’ (Canaan 1931b: 172). Canaan ran the hospital for lepers from 1919 to 1923, where Dalman lodged when he visited Jerusalem in 1921 and 1925. They corresponded with one another after 1925, and Dalman expressed gratitude to Canaan in his acknowledgements in Arbeit und Sitte (Männchen 1993: 213–14). Canaan 1927: v.

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makes maximally visible the majority population. The book contains detailed ethnographic discussion and a large range of song texts, along with descriptions of singing in ceremonies. This lends the Muslim population texture and audibility that it lacks in other sources. Alongside references to the Christian Bible, the book includes quotations from the Quran. That all these writers in the nativist circle used the prevailing religion/ peasant structure, wrote in English and presented their work in foreign journals may well indicate a concern to present the case to the colonial forces who were deciding the fortunes of the region.88 Their work could not, of course, substantially challenge either the historical or political perceptions of those in power in the region. But hindsight may allow us to use their work to think about mission differently. At the very least, we can use it to give voice to limits of missionary self-imaginings. For this task, songs can serve us well. Their texts, their functions and their very creators and singers were forced increasingly into categories, as we have seen. On a very basic level, ‘primitive’ musics (and their participants) were set against music which served the march of progress. But today the songs can illuminate the incongruity of the timeline on which such categorisations depend. I suggest this here by placing one of Canaan’s musical findings alongside a musical trace of mission: Canaan noted in 1927 that ‘rain St. George’s School ran a competition processions’ were practiced for a school song in 1925, for which a throughout Palestine by model was provided by staff member ‘Mohammedans, Christians and Jews, Dr Ibrahim George. Given that each in his own way’. Going on, he George V was on the English throne, stated ‘[o]nly those of Moslems the reference to ‘our queen’ is a little interest us here’, and provided some perplexing, but it renders the ethos examples, of which this is one. of devotion to an absent ideal all the more striking. The song was to be sung to the tune of ‘Tramp, Tramp, Tramp, the boys are marching’. (Send) the rain, O Lord, and water Thy Tune your voices boys and rally western grain! Hail St. George’s with a song (Send) the rain, O merciful One, and With a might roar and cheer water Thy thirsty grain! Greet our queen from far and near

88

Tamari describes the whole movement politically, understanding it as an attempt to ‘establish sources of legitimation for Palestinian cultural patrimony (and implicitly for a Palestinian national identity that began to distance itself from greater Syria and Arab frameworks)’. Tamari 2009: 95.

Provincialising mission

Till [sic] the silent mountains echo clear O Lord, wet the mantle, Thy servants are in song. poor and grain-measurers (obliged to measure their grain)! … O Lord, wet the rags (with which so many are dressed because of poverty), Queen of the Holy Land we love thee we are Thy servants wherever we go! Help us true and brave to be. O Lord, wet the head-cloak, put an end In our little stretch of life to the strutting of the merchants! Hours of peace and years of strife, O Lord, what is this (Thy) anger, we Be with us and guide us for we follow hunger and eat the woodsorrel! thee.89 O Lord, wet the veil, we are poor, where shall we go!90

On the one hand, we have an idealist text constructing loyalty and devotion to an absent (fictitious?) monarch, constructed in a style that suggests an embattled prayer for guidance that is to be sung to a melody associated with marching. On the other, we have a prayer to a deity for relief from drought and consequent hunger. If the first one is more advanced than the second, then the timeline of ‘progress’ must be towards musical militarism, and increased alienation from lived experience of the land that is the home. Making space for such a comparison is a primarily gestural response to the historical dilemma I invoked at the start of the chapter. And such gestural experiments cannot reverse the earlier marches of mission. But they may at least offer moments of conceptual disruption, cause perhaps some productive rupture. And if they can actually set in motion some new lines of thought, then they have more than served their purpose.

89

90

These are verses 1 and 3 of 4. The St George’s School Magazine, Easter Term 1925, 1/2: 4, 10. MECA, Jerusalem and The East Mission Archive, GB 165–0161, Box 51, file 4. Canaan 1927: 220–1.

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6 Culture

The Culture and Identity (CI) program focuses on strengthening Palestinian cultural awareness and Arabic literacy, establishing cultural centers in cities and villages, and supporting cultural and artistic activities, from children’s libraries to traditional music and rug weaving. Under this Program, Welfare Association has also disbursed funds for the rehabilitation and restoration of buildings of cultural and historic importance in other Palestinian cities such as Akka, Haifa, Jaffa and Lod-Ramleh which are part of the Palestinian living heritage.1

When Abdul Hamid Shoman founded the Arab Bank in Jerusalem in 1930, he probably envisaged a more settled existence for his business than the ensuing years were to allow. He can certainly have had little idea that not only the British, but also he himself and over 700,000 other Arabs would be gone from Palestine within two decades, and that the terms ‘Palestine’ and ‘Palestinian’ would be variously suppressed, reconstructed and contested thereafter. He could also not have foreseen that his eldest son would cofound an organisation in Geneva in 1983 seeking in certain ways to remedy this situation. Welfare Association, as it is called, draws on the Shoman network of Palestinians in international business to enhance the work of the Palestinians who stayed in the region. Its main work involves fundraising for infrastructure, staff training, core activities and equipment, in addition to supporting ‘heritage and identity … living culture and building civil society’.2 Welfare Association is one of several funding organisations that has emerged outside Palestine while cherishing a historical and personal claim inside. One other is the A. M. Qattan Foundation, which takes its name from Abdel Mohsin al-Qattan (also a co-founder of Welfare Association). Al-Qattan moved from Jordan to Kuwait in 1963 and founded the Al-Hani Construction and Trading Company, which would benefit from the 1

2

Welfare Association, ‘Major Tracks’. Text was available at http://welfare-association.org/en/ content/view/18/36/ in January 2011. ‘About Us – Mission Statement’. Text was available at http://welfare-association.org/en/content/ view/12/28/ on 8 July 2009.

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petroleum boom, and enable him to set up the Qattan Foundation in 1994.3 He himself presents the work of the foundation with reference to his beloved teacher Khalil Sakakini, whom we encountered in chapters 3 and 5, who celebrated education with the words ‘They planted and we harvested, we plant and they shall harvest’.4 Qattan’s reference to Sakakini indicates both a better future for the coming generations, and a link with an earlier period in which Palestinians were involved in self-development on Western models. I present these examples to introduce two themes. First, despite the gap of several decades since the period addressed in the last chapter (a gap that is a consequence of the waning and then waxing in the Western interests that are my main focus), there are continuities to be traced across the divide. Second, many of the new structures through which music has been supported in Gaza and on the West Bank since the last decades of the twentieth century are in part a consequence of the interests of an elite group of Palestinians who are distributed globally. These are Arabs from Palestine who, we could say, moved out of Chakrabarty’s ‘waiting room’ in certain ways. To be sure, that theoretical trajectory was not ‘complete’: they did not belong to a Palestinian nation; they could not have Palestinian passports. Yet some did have a connection to the world of global finance, and – importantly for the interests of this book – they had both the ability to interact with missions sent to Palestinians by foreign governments and organisations, and the capacity to send missions to Palestinians less fortunate than themselves. The fact that their work involved music at all was not only a product of interests in developing education or investing in Arab Palestinian identity, as Welfare Association’s text above might seem to suggest. Rather, it must be seen in the context of the changing function of the arts in the global political sphere, which I outlined in the Introduction with reference to Jameson and Yúdice. To recap with two examples: the Maastricht Treaty signed in 1992, which was primarily a monetary and security contract, was understood as marking ‘a new stage in the process of European integration undertaken with the establishment of the European Communities … creating an ever closer union among the people of Europe … using culture

3

4

See ‘Vision’, www.qattanfoundation.org/subpage/en/index.asp?sectionID=107 and ‘Chairman’s Introduction’ accessed 8 July 2009. www.qattanfoundation.org/subpage/en/index.asp? Section2ID=684&SectionID=107 accessed 8 July 2009. ‘Chairman’s Introduction’ www.qattanfoundation.org/subpage/en/index.asp? Section2ID=684&SectionID=107 accessed 8 July 2009.

Culture

as a vehicle’.5 Two years on, the European Union established a new framework for relations with countries on the Mediterranean, which sought to develop ‘peace’, ‘stability’ and ‘shared prosperity’ through political and economic measures, while ‘the social, cultural and human aspect [aimed] to develop human resources and promote understanding between cultures and exchanges between civil societies’.6 In short, the end of the twentieth century witnessed a substantially increased infiltration of culture into politics. There may be some irony to be sensed when analysing the impact of this situation on Palestine. The largest influx of foreign interest and aid, after all, was the consequence of a political institution (the Palestinian Authority), and a political plan (within a few years, a new state with Palestinian citizens). Yet almost all funding from outside the region was generated separately – and maintained strictly separately – from the political progress towards the nation. Whereas elsewhere, publicly sponsored cultural forms affirmed specific political goals, in Palestine – aside from amplifying rather nebulous terms such as ‘peace process’ or ‘democracy’ – they seemed to have to shun them. The irony becomes more pressing in the light of what happened next, namely that the building of Israeli settlements on the West Bank did not slow down, the Palestinian Authority was ruined by elitism and corruption and the political process ground to a halt. While the international community diverted monies towards emergency aid it maintained the same rhetoric of ‘supporting the peace process’ and ‘democracy’ even while these had apparently lost their relevance. The practical role of sponsors shifted substantially: they found themselves cooperating in various ways with the situation of occupation, rather than supporting the development of civil society within an emergent autonomous political unit.7 For example, they compensated for ongoing damage rather than either addressing the causes or actually developing the infrastructure invoked in their discursive rationales.8 Additionally, as we will see, some of the most substantial funding even bypassed and sought to compensate for (and thus indirectly prop up) failings in the Palestinian Authority itself.9 5 6

7 8 9

Quoted in European Commission 2001. ‘Barcelona Declaration and Euro-Mediterranean partnership’. http://europa.eu/ legislation_summaries/external_relations/relations_with_third_countries/ mediterranean_partner_countries/r15001_en.htm Le More 2005: 982, 991–3. See also Hanafi and Tabar 2003. Le More 2005: 993–4. For an account of Palestinian elite operations and the implosion of the PA see Rabe 2004.

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This situation, in which cultural forms are profoundly alienated from the situation on the ground, may seem to challenge our grasp of music’s interaction with politics. Writers often observe music’s power to affirm positions of power or, conversely, to mediate messages of resistance to subjugation. What I will be discussing below requires a different model from these. Many of the organisations sending (cultural) aid see themselves as helpers of the Palestinians; this position tends to entail – or at the very least imply – criticism of the Israeli government’s policies. Yet the musical programmes they develop or support can rarely be read as ‘opposition’ or ‘resistance’. They seem rather to be masked contributors to rather complex networks of institutional frameworks and interests.10 One of the key components of such networks is the cultivation of ‘heritage’, involving local actors and a wide range of sponsors from outside the region, and resulting in the historically informed refurbishment of physical objects such as buildings and neighbourhoods. As elsewhere, ‘heritage’ has a second dimension, namely that it is intended to vivify the environment both socially and economically. In the Palestinian context it has a particular political significance as well: it is understood by both Palestinian and foreign actors as a measure to counteract Israel’s confiscation, appropriation, and destruction of Arab and more broadly Muslim sites.11 As Mitchell has remarked in the context of Egypt, ‘one of the odd things about the arrival of the era of the modern nation-state was that for a state to prove that it was modern, it helped if it could also prove that it was ancient’.12 Of course, nobody doubts that Palestine is ancient, but it has become incumbent on Palestine to revitalise the artefacts that can characterise a future, a future that is distinct from the Israeli one that is in such energetic production. Music has overlapped with this heritage generation most obviously where sponsors have sought to preserve and cultivate local traditions. For example, Welfare Association’s ‘cultures and identities’ track focused on ‘tradition’ and ‘preservation’;13 Ford Foundation also provided very substantial grants for the development and performance of Arab music, as did the Swedish International Development 10

11 12 13

Rabinow’s ‘assemblages’ may be appropriate ways of conceiving them. See Gell 1998 for an experiment with assemblages in art, and Rabinow 2003. See also Born 2005, 2009, 2011 for broader discussions of the construction as it may relate to cultural practices. Yousof 1995 discusses all these dimensions in the context of the city of Nablus. Mitchell 2002: 179. ‘Major Tracks’. Text was available at http://welfare-association.org/en/content/view/18/36/ on 18 July 2009.

Culture

Association.14 Such endeavours have the same three components as do architectural projects, namely physical preservation through archival work, support for music education and performance and the maintenance of a sonorous Palestinian presence in areas occupied by Israel.15 Western classical music also has a place within the heritage movement, however. In response to the Judaisation of Jerusalem’s Old City, for instance, Welfare’s ‘Old City of Jerusalem Revitalization Program’ seeks not only to ‘rehabilitate historical buildings, preserve cultural heritage’, but also to ‘create a better quality of life for Jerusalem inhabitants’. This lies behind its recommendation that the National Conservatory for music make use of the spaces it has rehabilitated there, thus putting restored buildings to cultural use by Palestinians (with Western classical music as well as Arab music).16 Additionally, when the Conservatory moved its headquarters from Ramallah to the symbolically more significant Jerusalem in 2002, Welfare Association helped with the move. At the time of writing it is assisting with the restoration of a new historic building for the Conservatory in East Jerusalem by finding donors and arranging legal negotiations regarding ownership and leasing. Such actions carry a significance that extends into the international arena because they can generate a certain type of visibility. As such they crystallise a (heritage) propaganda war. Are Palestinians to be presented to the world as impoverished people living in apparently run-down buildings in very poor conditions? Or are they to be seen as actively engaged in cultural activities such as music-making, in aesthetically pleasing historic buildings? An Israeli military presence will be judged differently in the two contexts. My initial focus in this chapter is on Ramallah, a town about 10 km north of Jerusalem, partly because most investment has been made there; but I also reflect on the smaller, but significant, impact of post-Oslo missions within Israel. Initially I develop a link with chapters 1–5, constructing a history that combines earlier missionary interventions with the

14

15

16

The Ford Foundation, for instance, provided the National Conservatory with a total of $620,000 between 2000 and 2006, almost all of which was for the development of specifically Arab musical practices. See annual reports 1999–2006 available at www.fordfoundation.org/aboutus/annual-reports accessed 1 July 2008. A good local example is Yabous, established in 1995. This non-profit organisation is devoted to concert festivals and concerts in East Jerusalem and has been supported by SIDA since 1999. The motivation for this support, according to a SIDA report already discussed above, is ‘helping to maintain the Palestinian cultural presence in Jerusalem’. Pehrsson 2003: 4. Interview with Welfare Association staff. Ramallah, 15 July 2009.

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recent influx of aid disbursements. The history involves groups who have moved from Chakrabarty’s ‘waiting room’ into positions of some authority (albeit only on a local level) and who are at times able to interact with foreign organisations in transnational networks. Moving on, I explore in more detail some of the resultant relationships – Pratt’s ‘contact zones’ – between locals and foreign investors. By the end of the chapter I hope to have shed some light on the uncomfortable symbiosis between Israeli, Palestinian and foreign actors on the ground, and paved the way for some reflection on Jameson’s and Yúdice’s positions on the global politics of culture in Chapter 7.

Beyond the waiting room Individual stories In 1991, Welfare Association requested that Ramallah resident, pianist and composer, Rima Tarazi, should prepare a study on the situation of music in Palestine.17 This request led Tarazi to consult other musicians and music teachers in Ramallah who had what one of them referred to as ‘professional training’; these were Nadia Abboushi, Salwa Tabri, Amin Nasser and Suhail Khoury. In the words of Tarazi, ‘we wanted to make something happen, we knew what was needed, namely a music school that would offer serious music education and prepare music teachers in the various schools’. Indeed, discussions led in 1993 to the establishment of a music school, the ‘National Conservatory’ that functioned under the auspices of the university at Birzeit (10km north of Ramallah), with teaching based in Ramallah.18 Initially, the institution consisted of two piano teachers and a volunteer director (Abboushi, Tarazi and Nasser), and one teacher of Arab music (Khaled Jubran, a Palestinian citizen of Israel from the Galilee, who lived in Jerusalem). There were some forty pupils, most of them former private pupils of Abboushi and Tarazi.19 I gathered this information primarily from fieldwork, which in this case consisted of individual interviews and conversations with the Conservatory’s founders and people connected to the institution in other ways, followed up by email correspondence for precision. It was the testimonies 17 18

19

Rima Tarazi, interview with the author, Ramallah, 25 April 2007. The headquarters was in the building housing the university’s Board of Trustees. See Habash 2003a. Conversation with Khaled Jubran, 4 July 2008.

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of such people that led me to take the historical perspective of this section. When I first interviewed administrators and teachers I was immediately faced with the fact that many of their families had members who had worked in historical missions, missionary schools and/or the Anglican church. This was not to say that they necessarily understood the church as an important part of their own lives, and by no means did it signify a lack of interest in introducing Western classical music to Muslims. In fact, as we will see, the Conservatory’s nationalistic ethos would be opposed to such an attitude, and indeed (secular) nationalism and family pride were the strongest features of the self-constructions that I heard. But the genealogy was there. It emerged, moreover, without prompting: my questions had been rather basic and open, enquiring what music my interviewees had heard early in their lives, what opportunities there had been for learning instruments at the time and so on. When, rather later, I interviewed Nasser, who is related to Tarazi, he contextualised his own development without reference to the church at all. But at the end of our conversation, he stated what had become very clear to me by then. Having asked me to tell him once again exactly what my research interest was, and having heard my response (I was researching the development of Western classical music in Arab communities of Palestine), he said: ‘it came mainly through the churches, especially the Catholic and Evangelical ones. To the best of my knowledge, in the 1940s and 1950s you couldn’t find a single Arab Muslim getting into Western classical music.’ For the purposes of this chapter, then, it seems worth illuminating the genealogy of the National Conservatory in a way that illuminates its debt to the various missionary schools and British intervention in Palestine. Two founders of the Conservatory, Abboushi (b. 1944) and Tabri (b. 193?), can be placed within the history of the Friends School, where Tabri’s father was Arabic teacher and then Dean. Their recollections provide a link with the schools’ archival material I discussed in Chapter 3 above. Tabri remembered a number of music teachers who came to the Friends School from the USA during her time there, even Rolla Foley himself, who was ‘a good one’. Tabri’s parents had been educated at German missionary institutions in Jerusalem (the Schmidt School and the Schneller School). Her mother played the piano and her father the trumpet. She herself had begun taking private piano lessons at the age of six, with one Sister Antoinette Talamas, a Palestinian from Jaffa who otherwise taught at St Joseph’s School in Ramallah. Abboushi remembered a weekly class in singing at the Friends School, where she learned songs such as ‘She’ll Be Coming Round the Mountain

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When she Comes’; she also recalled the music teacher there, who taught Arab folk songs and ‘national anthems’.20 While a BA student (religion and philosophy) at the Beirut College for Women (now the Lebanese American University in Beirut), she studied harmony and piano with Arnita (whom we encountered in ‘Provincialising mission’ but who was by that time a Palestinian refugee in Lebanon) and continued music thereafter at the Lebanese Conservatoire in Beirut. The piano teacher she considers her ‘main teacher’, however, was the Palestinian Mary Salah, who was based in the Old City of Jerusalem but had studied at the École Normale in Paris. The other three founders of the Conservatory, namely Nasser (b. 1935), Tarazi (b. 1932) and Khoury (b. 1963), are relatives, members of a large, extended Christian family that involved itself in Palestine’s turn to the West in the nineteenth century. Tarazi’s great-grandfather was a member of the Greek Orthodox church, but her grandfather joined the Catholic church and then converted to Protestantism, going on to become one of the first Anglican ministers in Palestine.21 From the next generation, her aunt Nabiha Nasir (1891–1951) established a private school for girls in Birzeit in 1924. Tarazi attended this school (as did Nasser). When I asked whether it was connected to a church, Tarazi replied ‘it was not religious’; and she then said it was ‘the first national private school’, thus placing it firmly within a trajectory of modern Palestinian independence. The school organised music lessons for the pupils by bringing Arnita from Jerusalem to carry out his duties. We have already seen in the cases of Sakakini and Totah that some Palestinians found ways to experience life abroad, and this was also the case for some of those interested in professional music making, both during the British Mandate period and the early years of Jordanian rule. Nasser studied piano and composition in Austria and Germany while Tarazi, attending the American Junior College in Beirut, studied piano and theory alongside her ‘general studies in arts and sciences’. Both of them were supported by their families. Tarazi then went on to study piano privately near Paris, where she recalls that her teacher Mme Leduc (who had been a student of French composer Vincent d’Indy) not only pushed her hard at the piano but also took her to concerts. She had monthly masterclasses with Lucette Descaves, a teacher from the Conservatoire, and 20

21

She thought the teacher was called Graham Leonard. Interview with the author, Ramallah, 12 September 2007. For detail on rival conversion groups see Colbi 1988; Tibawi 1961.

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in the following year she lived in Paris for five months, taking composition classes at L’École Caesar Frank and piano at L’École Supérieure. Tabri studied piano, choral conducting, organ and a little violin at the Bayreuth Akademie in Germany. She recalls spending her spare time there with ‘Musikmachen’, and sums up the impact of her experiences with the statement that ‘Mozart is the love of my life’.22 Somewhat later, Tarazi’s nephew, Suhail Khoury, would attend the (Catholic) Collège De La Salle in Jerusalem and study clarinet with Nasser. He also read music at the University of Iowa.23 Under Jordanian rule following 1948, these musicians subsequently contributed, on an extremely small scale, to furthering the development of Western classical music in Ramallah. Tabri taught at the Friends School after her graduation in 1948, and from the mid-1950s a Quaker from Indiana led a choir there that she accompanied.24 The United Nations’ Women’s Training Centre was another venue for music tuition: Tabri taught there from 1962 until 1994 and Nasser also did so briefly. During this Jordanian period, however, it was probably the family school, by then called Birzeit College, that was the main venue for Western-style music education in the Ramallah area. When Tarazi returned from Paris and Beirut (graduating from university in the latter in Arabic and Psychology), she taught music and composed songs for its choir until she left for some years, to go to Canada in 1956. Nasser taught woodwind and brass instruments at elementary and intermediate levels when he returned from Germany in the early 1960s. He also ran a choir and a wind band of six players. When he moved to Amman – at the request of the Jordanian government that he found a music school there in collaboration with two other musicians – Birzeit’s music programme was interrupted. But it resumed in 1969 when Abboushi returned from her studies in the USA. She offered an elective of music appreciation, a further elective of classical music history, led a choir that sang Arab music and anthems and national songs by local composers and also put on performances of

22

23

Salwa Tabri, interview with the author, Ramallah, 25 April 2007. I visited Salwa in her home in order to conduct the interview, and was warmly received by her and her sister. She has for many years been suffering from multiple sclerosis, which has forced her to abandon the piano. Despite my protesting that I had barely touched the piano for seven years, she was insistent that I should play for her, so I stumbled through a movement of Beethoven, twice. She was attentive and highly critical. It was a familiar experience which took me straight back to years of living in Germany and Hungary. But I hadn’t expected to encounter the ‘existential’ importance of playing Beethoven well, while doing field work in Ramallah. 24 Habash 2003b. Interview with singer Tania Nasir, Ramallah, 21 April 2008.

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musicals and operettas. Abboushi moved to Dubai in 1977, where she gave private piano lessons for four years, mostly to young Palestinians in the Diaspora, and Nasser, who had returned from Jordan some time before, took over the programme again. In the preceding years he had also established what he called his own ‘small conservatory’ with the support of the YMCA.

Institutional frameworks There are two historical threads, then, that facilitated the consolidation of these loosely networked people into an institutional team driving the foundation of the Conservatory. First, thanks to their past involvement with missionary intervention, they had gained a particular set of musiccultural skills and values. Beyond an admiration for Mozart bordering on worship, these included a preference for Western over Arab music and a sense of aesthetic criticism and professionalism. Tabri, for instance, told me that she had not enjoyed teaching at the Ramallah Women’s Training Centre because she had to ‘do very elementary things’ such as teach children how to read music; and we will observe Nasser’s sense of professional quality in a different context below. Second, there was the family institution to which three of them belonged, namely Birzeit School. This had begun as an elementary school for girls, but by 1930 was a co-educational secondary school; from 1953 it was teaching a freshman year, from 1961 it had added a sophomore year to that, and by 1975, despite the new Israeli occupation, had all four years in place. In April 1976, it became a member of the Association of Arab Universities and one year later, a member of the International Association of Universities. Thus, although in the early 1990s, Palestinian institutions could still not be formed without permits from the Israeli military authorities, Birzeit University – the Nasir family powerhouse – provided institutional backing for the National Conservatory, circumventing Israeli requirements thereby. A third framework to note is this broader situation of detachment. Birzeit University itself had struggled to function under occupation, thus the non-government status of music education for Arabs can be understood as a part of the unresolved political situation.25 Nevertheless, the 25

The website of the university offers some examples of its own difficulties in functioning under occupation in the last decades. In 1973, just as Birzeit’s development into a full-fledged university was nearing completion, Israel closed the campus by military order for two weeks.

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detachment of music is also a continuation of history discussed in Part I. During the Ottoman period, missionary schools were the only ones providing music teaching; and during the Mandate period, the case was the same for the Arab population, despite a British government and a huge European influx. The trend continued during the period of Jordanian authority prior to the Six Day War in 1967, when there was no music education in state schools. The pattern might have shifted in the 1960s, for Tarazi served on the Committee for the Music Curriculum in the Ministry of Education, which had plans to implement a music programme in public schools. But the Israeli occupation following 1967 proved to be too much of a disruption for formal innovations of such substance, and Tarazi and her friends strove instead to work through a music society, promoting music and music education, to the extent that the difficult circumstances allowed.26 A new situation did develop in the early 1970s, however. Jordan remained responsible for schools for some time despite Israel’s presence, and several of my interviewees recalled that it took the step of establishing an Institute of Fine Arts in Ramallah that included music teaching. However, no cooperation emerged between this institute and the music teachers from the private sector schools who I have discussed above. Nasser was forthright in his dismissal, recalling that he was invited to join, and had some discussions, but that ‘I excused myself. I couldn’t work with them. I met with them, I talked with them and I found that the standard [was] very primitive.’27 Instead, in its early days the institute was run by a Palestinian musician called Jack Laham (who had studied in Italy but returned to Ramallah), in collaboration with two members of the Board of Education, Amin al-Dajani and Qasim ʿAbd al–Hadi. There was some teaching on ‘ūd and other Oriental instruments available, alongside

26

27

This was the first of many military-ordered closures. Between 1979 and 1992, the university was closed 60 per cent of the time. The fifteenth and last closure lasted for fifty-one months, from 8 January 1988 until 29 April 1992. During this prolonged period of closure, the university continued to operate underground with small study groups in makeshift arrangements outside the campus. Under such conditions, many students needed as long as ten years to complete their four-year degree courses. In 1980, the Israeli occupation authorities issued military order number 854, which granted them full military control over such university matters as hiring of faculty, admission of students and the curriculum. The order affected Birzeit as well as all other higher educational institutions in the occupied territories. Fortunately, it was rescinded shortly afterwards due to the local and international protest it generated. See www.birzeit.edu/about_bzu/p/2542 accessed 8 July 2009. Tarazi has the documentation in her private collection, and discussed it with me at our second meeting on 12 September 2007. Amin Nasser, interview with the author, telephone, 10 August 2009.

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Laham’s instruction in the Western classical tradition. Laham himself left the institute after a few years, while continuing to work in music education in projects for the ministry. Commissioned to produce a music text book that could be used in schools, for instance, he spent some years developing that. But there is no sign that this was published or taken up broadly.28 The tension between the world of these Jordanian government initiatives and that of private schooling emerges not only in Nasser’s concern about ‘the standard’, but also in the recollection of a student at the institute. Musician Issa Boulos, who attended a Catholic school, remembers the Friends School as ‘very expensive and [with] a selection process, it created a sense of “them and us”’. He learned piano at the institute in the early 1980s with a teacher called Mohammed al-Karzon, which was what he could afford to do, but discovered nothing about the fact that his left hand could play different music from his right until he joined a band some time later.29 But in fact it would be a mistake to conclude that it was finance or class alone that kept him apart from other opportunities in Ramallah. Rather, it seems more likely that it was a consequence of the negligible significance and minimal audibility of Western classical music at all. Boulos stated in interview that it was only some years later that he heard that Abboushi and Tarazi had been teaching piano during the same period, and that the information had astonished him. Boulos could not have even aspired to it, then, because it had no presence. Nasser’s remarks about the locality indicate his own perspective on precisely this situation: My whole career was all frustration. At that time when I started studying music, everyone was looking at music as something unimportant in our society. We had the feeling of being put down. One day I wanted to reach the point where we have respect for these things.30

The invisibility is also suggested by the history of an amateur choir, the Jerusalem Chorus, founded in 1955 by an Anglican Palestinian in Jerusalem, with rehearsals taking place at St George’s for many years.31 Abboushi, Tabri and former President of Birzeit University, Gabi Baramki, spoke to me about it during interviews with great affection and some pride. 28

29 30 31

A large number of his books are preserved in the library of the Edward Said National Conservatory of Music in Ramallah. Issa Boulos, interview with the author, Birzeit, 10 July 2008. Amin Nasser, interview with the author, telephone, 10 August 2009. Melkon Rose, who participated in the choir early on, discusses it briefly in his memoirs. See Melkon Rose 1993: 254.

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In the 1960s it had gathered Palestinians from Hebron, Bethlehem, Jerusalem, Ramallah and Birzeit for weekly rehearsals, and had put on Easter and Christmas concerts. The repertoire remained consistent over the years, with an emphasis on church music, and for Abboushi and Baramki it had become a crucial symbol of resistance to Israel’s occupation. Abboushi was very keen to document the choir, and regarded my research as something that ‘needed’ doing; she helped me locate a large number of concert programmes in the library of the National Conservatory. But when we scoured the lists of participants for names of people who might further assist me with my research, she was saddened to observe that the number of participant Palestinians was constant, but smaller than that of the foreigners.32 She observed ruefully that if I was to write ‘our history’ on the basis of these documents, it might well not appear in the way that she herself had experienced it. Set in contrast to the initiatives developed in the same place by Rolla Foley in the 1940s, the work of the Jerusalem Chorus may indeed come across as small-scale. However, and as Abboushi pointed out, enthusiastic Palestinian members provided a constant basis for fluctuating international guest singers and musicians of the group throughout the period. The strength of its commitment, moreover, meant that it could be a potential partner for a later phase of mission from the West, as was indeed recognised by English singer and concert manager John Harte. Starting in 2004, Harte began collaborating with the choir to put on concerts and festivals in the region that involved some local performers but also Europeans, including the Choir of London and instrumentalists from England. The Choir of London and the Jerusalem Chorus were well matched, essentially because they were parallel outgrowths of the Anglican choral tradition. And once the collaboration was underway, it brought a particular quality for the Palestinian participants. Most obviously it was not only of musical, but also of political significance, for which an event from 2009 can be an example. That year Harte arranged a performance of Brahms’ A German Requiem in the Lutheran Church of the Redeemer in Jerusalem, which involved musicians and singers from Palestine and the UK. Abboushi explained to me that the British Council had applied to the Israeli authorities for permits for the Ramallah residents (who are not otherwise allowed to enter Jerusalem) to enable them to take part. When permits were not forthcoming, she

32

We found programmes from 1969 onwards, but with many gaps.

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managed nevertheless to pass through a small checkpoint at which not all car passengers were checked. The Old City was part of her childhood, and the location of her early musical tuition, thus to take part in such an event was a profoundly uplifting experience; it overcame the political framework established by Israel, and momentarily suspended the unhappiness of the situation. In a sense, then, Harte’s concert was a vehicle for very smallscale, but very profoundly experienced, nationalistic and even restorative action. In broader terms, the conjunction between Harte and the Jerusalem Chorus members is suggestive of a shift in the shaping of elite groups in Palestine. As I have shown, those involved with music were in situations that had developed through family connections and networks along with opportunities brought by foreign organisations. They conformed, then, to the multi-layered model for elite formation put forward by Brynen that identifies ‘primordial perspectives’ (stressing traditional societies) and ‘social change perspectives’ (stressing transformation), in addition to later ‘organisational perspectives’ (stressing nationalism) and statist frameworks (stressing institutions of the proto-state).33 But the new financial situation after Oslo triggered the emergence of elite groups who drew their strength from international relations and development aid. Hanafi and Tabar call this a ‘globalised elite’, and its place in the network of new missions will be the subject of the later part of this chapter.34 Before moving on to that stage, however, there is one more area to consider.

The waiting room in Israel Palestinians within the borders of Israel live with the legacy of the British Mandate scheme that divided them legally from ‘Jews’, and within, therefore, a dualistic system that is not to their advantage. Although they have Israeli citizenship, this does not entitle them to the lives of Jewish citizens of the same state: we might say, then, that they are only allowed partially out of the ‘waiting room’. Traditionally Israeli society has been theorised through two main lenses, the ‘melting pot’ and the ‘pluralist’, but recent research has revealed a more problematic situation.35 Oren Yiftachel has characterised the civilian status of non-Jews in Israel as one of ‘ghettoized citizenship’, identifying a constrained existence whose difficulties are

33 35

34 Brynen 1995: 33ff. Hanafi and Tabar 2005. For a critical discussion of the first two of these models see Kimmerling 1997.

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intensified by a stratified system of ‘creeping apartheid’.36 He demonstrates that Arab populations have been prevented from building on their formal citizenship to achieve parity and full interaction with their Jewish cocitizens by Israeli state policies. Most profound of these, he argues, is Israel’s drive for Judaisation (and consequent de-Arabisation), which is in direct contradiction to its discourse about being a ‘democracy’. Israel, he argues, is in fact an ‘ethnocracy’.37 The social situation of music has been researched in the context of the mass media by Regev, whose findings are in line with Yiftachel’s model. Regev identifies an interface of some contest, but predominantly a culture of ‘exclusion and denial’ in Israeli media.38 Ben Ze’ev’s research in music education tells a similar story. He reveals that since the formation of the state, Jewish populations have been integrated into a ‘comprehensive system’ of music in the following ways: [Jewish populations received] music lessons and guided concerts from kindergarten to secondary school, participated in school choirs and music ensembles, and attended music conservatories after school. Through summer camps, scholarships, foundations, competitions for young musicians, concert platforms for budding artists, and university programs, government and private budgets have encouraged the children and youths in the majority population to strive for excellence in the field of music.39

In contrast, he finds that Arab children have rarely been considered by the government to be potential recipients of music education. The main exception was a moment in the 1960s, when the Chief Inspector of Music at the Ministry of Education, Emmanuel Amiran, a Russian Jew,

36 37

38

39

Yiftachel 2009: 1 (italics original). Yiftachel points out that state policies (all legally reinforced) facilitate land confiscations, prevent Arabs building settlements, exclude Arabs from elite business and political spheres, obstruct any but Jewish immigration to the country, prevent Arabs from serving in the armed forces (and gaining associated benefits), favour Jewish groups for development budgets, prevent civil (and thus potentially Arab–Jewish) marriage and structure all public culture around a Jewish calendar and the Hebrew language. Even though some liberalisation of policies in recent years has benefited groups such as homosexuals and women and has stoked claims about the nation’s ‘liberal democracy’, the Arab minority has not gained materially because of the unchanged policy of Judaisation. The ideal of the latter is fuelled by the unresolved situation in the Occupied Territories, and ongoing cycles of violent resistance. Regev 1995: 445. He notes that since concluding his research in 1994, political changes had led to ‘something of a “peace fad”, which included a seemingly more open attitude towards Arab music and Culture’, but diagnosed these as ‘scattered moments’ that did not change the prevailing situation. See also Regev 1993. Ben Ze’ev 2006: ‘Abstract’, 134.

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sketched a plan for teaching songs to the Arabs. This was based on a perception that the Arabs of Israel were polarised from the state (of which they were ostensibly citizens). He suggested that various types of music could help: We are making a real effort to improve the situation of music in the minorities’ school. We want to give these children, in addition to Arabic folk songs, also songs of work and nature of the new Israel: songs that have eastern musical style; and we are already taking care of an assembly of [such] songs that will be published and distributed to the teachers. The songs can and must be a bridge of understanding between all the people of this land and it also has to be an educational means to tighten the bond between the Arab youth and the state.40

While Amiran seems to have sought greater understanding, his anxieties were not only sociological. Rather, he also posited a distance that suggested biological categories of difference in types of ‘hearing’. It led him to some doubt about real potential for change, along with some concern about whether such change was even desirable. But the thrust of his proposal was indeed on changing it, on creating a team of people who were trained enough (‘special teaching methods’) to make the ‘adaptation’ come into effect. The implication of his text is correction, or de-Orientalisation, with a very long-term, institutionalised perspective: One of the problems is whether or not it is possible and desirable to teach in these schools where their hearing is eastern, the western musical tradition. If we do that, it will demand a lot of adaptation on the part of the pupils and require special teaching methods. If we find the right teachers for that, this problem will also be ameliorated in the next years. Furthermore, in the future we will do serious teaching work in the colleges and this will ensure the minimum music education in those schools.41

Ben Ze’ev finds no sign that Amiran’s reflections on correcting ‘eastern hearing’ were followed through in any serious way, any more than any experiments were carried out in connection with the ‘western music tradition’. Rather, the ministry commissioned a number of song books combining Arab and Jewish songs, and a number of Arab composers contributed to these, coordinated by Palestinian musician Suhail Radwan. Ben Ze’ev argues that the song books were not based on a sustained or well-researched project: they were ‘designed in accordance with Israeli-Jewish models’, and (on the basis of extensive interviews with

40

Ben Ze’ev 2006: 18.

41

Ben Ze’ev 2006: 18–19.

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Arab teachers of music), he reveals that they failed to achieve any popularity.42 He does not trace any subsequent attempts by Israeli authorities to introduce music into schools, and observes elsewhere that the dearth of investment is characteristic of the broader musical world. For instance, in 2002 the Ministry of Education published a report noting that not one of the seventeen music festivals receiving state support was an Arab festival, and that of twenty-two orchestras, twenty-eight choirs, six music centres and two opera houses, only one Arab orchestra – The Orchestra of Arabic Music – received state support.43 This is not the place for a full-blown examination of the place of music in Arab communities of Israel. Rather, I am interested in exploring the impact of the post-Oslo missions, and reflecting on the place of Western classical music in the constellation. In a sense this returns us to the structure discussed in Chapter 4. Even without the institution of the PBS, we can trace the shifting place of Western classical music in a triangular configuration of Jews, non-Jews and funding from outside the region. The first major initiative came from the USA, when the American Friends of Israel’s leading symphony orchestra, the Israel Philharmonic (IPO) responded enthusiastically to a concert involving Arab and Jewish children. Their request that more such ventures take place led after some years to ‘KeyNote’, an outreach activity that is the first significant Jewishled music project for Arabs after Oslo. A further initiative began in 2004 in the field of teacher-training (a field in which Arabs have long interacted with Jews), when the Chairman of the Department of Music Education at the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance, Veronika Cohen, led a team which arranged concerts in the Arab schools in which her Palestinian students were doing placements. Both projects strive for a mix of musical styles: KeyNote involves some Western classical music in Arab communities, but is celebrated as benefiting ‘all of Israel’s citizens’, and combines the IPO players and their repertories with an ‘Arab Jewish Ensemble’ called Shesh-Besh, which plays and runs workshops in a range of styles. Cohen’s team provides some Western classical music for Arab schools, but seeks primarily to cultivate Arab traditions (70 per cent), thus maintaining difference from Jewish schools (where Western music is 70 per cent of what is provided).44

42

43

Ben Ze’ev 2006: 29–35. Ben Ze’ev’s main source for his discussion is an interview with musician Elias Jubran. 44 Ben Ze’ev 2004b. Email to the author from Veronika Cohen, 21 July 2010.

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Both projects might be understood in terms of the global shift of the time, as much as of the post-Oslo climate. It was a private foundation that supported the concerts in Arab schools, namely the Jerusalem Music Centre; and further funding came from outside the country, namely the Municipality of Rome.45 The IPO case is clearer: in effect, American Friends had suggested to the IPO managers what its roles might entail in the new ‘age of expediency’, and the availability of finance led them to integrate the idea into their corporate structure. Contact with the Abraham Fund, an organisation founded in New York in 1989, was for the management a major turning point: as one player put it, the IPO ‘more or less adopted their guidelines, i.e. to be active with all Israel’s citizens’.46 The same player expressed some bafflement that it did not occur to the IPO to find a way in earlier on: ‘somehow it was always missed. I don’t know why. It’s obvious. They are 20% of the population.’47 And according to his succinct promotional overview of the KeyNote programme, ‘The biggest “winner” of all this activity is without a doubt the Israel Philharmonic itself.’ Jameson’s juggernaut of capitalism might be traced in the institutional need to keep the books turning over; and the relationship between the orchestra and its sponsors would indeed be maintained with this in mind. Collaborative concerts, after all, were effective: as representative of an image. As a vehicle. For fund-raising for the orchestra. They like it in the USA. So it’s outreach to the people who support the orchestra.

But the benefits were also to do with morale-boosting and affirmation of the power of Western classical music. In line with musicians whose work we will discuss in Chapter 8, at least one player found that the transmission of music to children renewed their sense of value: Performing in schools for children, seeing their eyes riveted on the instruments, hearing them participate with all their heart in performances at the Mann Auditorium has brought new life into the orchestra and for some of us, renewed faith in

45 46

47

Email to the author from Veronika Cohen, 21 July 2010. IPO member, interview with the author, Tel Aviv, 9 March 2010. The fund provides support to ‘education for coexistence, tolerance and equality and building leadership for a shared society’ and to ‘combat the root causes of alienation and inequality between Israel’s Jewish and Arab citizens’. ‘Our Strategy’, www.abrahamfund.org/main/siteNew/index.php?page=42 IPO player in interview with the author, Tel Aviv, 9 March 2010. And he was also startled by the level of interest, taken aback by his encounter with Arabs: ‘we have really good response … I mean response to orchestra members playing in Arab schools. They’re so disciplined, they’re so quiet. They’re really concentrating, they’re really interested.’

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the power of classical music. As one of my colleagues said to me after a morning spent in the classroom, ‘I don’t know how to say it, but I come out of these sessions with a feeling of “mission”’.48

Behind such thoughts were also some older Orientalist tropes. Another interviewee configured music education for Arabs in a polarity between ‘us’ and ‘them’. The ideal of ‘us’ was highly selective, comprising musicappreciators who go to concerts. Against this was ‘Arab society’, which was lacking, perhaps inherently. Arab students at the Jerusalem Academy were apparently on the right track, but they were increasingly at odds with ‘their own community’. The latter indeed ‘hurt’ them by failing to attend concerts of Arab music: There is a serious problem in the Arab society. I think they don’t value music education to the same extent that we do. The [Arab] students [of music] have their own uphill battle with their own community. When Taiseer [Elias, Palestinian ‘ūd player] gives a concert most of the audience is Jews. The families don’t pay money to go to a concert. It hurts the students to go to a concert of Arab music and all the audience is Jews. For some there is a religious problem.49

The account could be charged with simplicity, for it is only a tiny proportion of Jewish Israeli society that attends concerts, and the reasons for not paying to hear Taiseer Elias cannot be reduced to a lack of concert-going habits in Arab society. Moreover, the very basis of concert-going, namely a particular type of music appreciation, is managed by the state education scheme in Jewish communities alone, as we have learned from Ben Ze’ev. Yet more intriguingly, while the project was trying to counter that imbalance, the reasoning behind it was also a product of an assertion of a quite deep notion of difference. When I asked the interviewee to put into her own words how the benefits of music could be grasped, the response was that music ‘makes me more human’. In the light of the historical discourse that gave rise to such ideas (which I discussed in Chapter 3), we might infer that she felt herself to be ‘more human’, because she appreciated music. The informant also invoked ‘democracy’, the idea that music should be universally accessible, which would imply that everyone had the right to be made ‘more human’. Indeed, this led to a cultural Orientalist trope. Rather than accepting fully that a concert-going habit depended on a certain level of acculturation and even privilege (education and security), 48

49

Peter Marck, ‘A “Teenager” at the Philharmonic’, in (undated) brochure about KeyNote supplied to me by the IPO in March 2010. Interview source. Jerusalem, March 2010.

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there was an admission of harbouring occasional hopes that the reverse was the case, namely that music itself might actually bring a civilisation and peace: Everybody deserves it to the same extent. It is one of mankind’s gifts. Sometimes you get the idea that they have no culture. Or that it will stop them throwing rocks.50

That Western classical music might ‘elevate’ Arab culture can be traced strongly in another initiative as well, one founded in 2003 by a Palestinian, Duaibbis Abboud Ashkar. Abboud Ashkar had no musical training (he was an engineer) until as a mature student, he took a degree in humanities from the Open University, developing a long-standing passion.51 I met Abboud Ashkar twice to interview him about his work, which complemented the published sources discussed below. Abboud Ashkar began work voluntarily in local schools, teaching music appreciation; he also put on concerts – the first concerts of secular Western classical music in Nazareth – for his older son and Israel’s national orchestra for youth, the Young Israel Philharmonic Orchestra. From the start, he collaborated with the IPO’s KeyNote: players from the IPO travelled to Nazareth and prepared pupils for concerts, the pupils then travelled down for the concerts in bus loads (in 2006, two thousand children attended an IPO concert in this way).52 Orpheus’ mission statement is as critical as it is affirmative, inspired by Abboud Ashkar’s reading of Popper’s Open Society and Its Enemies (1945): Orpheus concerns itself with music as a medium towards developing a more open society in Israel in general and in the Palestinian Arab community in Israel in particular … Orpheus wishes to tap into the transformative power of music, witnessed the world-over, for promoting social change within Palestinian Arab society in Israel and Israeli society as a whole.53

Where Popper, in 1940s Europe, strove to articulate an individualist and liberal alternative to the totalitarianism and catastrophic social perfectionism that had developed around him, so too, Abboud Ashkar puts forward a

50 51

52 53

Interview with the author. Jerusalem, March 2010. Abboud Ashkar’s background was Anglican, and he grew up hearing music at church and from the large collection of records at home. That of his wife Maha was Protestant and Greek Orthodox, with early schooling in a French Catholic school (including piano lessons). Interviews, Nazareth 7 January 2007 and 15 September 2009. Abboud Ashkar, interview with the author, 7 January 2007. www.orpheus-music-edu.org/orpheus/aboutus.asp

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model of non-idealist, individual exploratory creativity setting out to counter the extreme idealism of religious and political movements in Israel. In interview with me, his stated goals were to integrate Western classical music into early childhood education, to promote its accessibility to the general public, and to establish professional Arab-Jewish ensembles playing Western classical music. Some might query the relationship between Abboud Ashkar’s embrace of Popper’s anti-idealism on the one hand, and his exclusive focus on Western classical music on the other. Indeed, Abboud Ashkar took a strikingly negative view of Arab music, which he saw as in need of Western stimulation to improve it: I am not ashamed to say I want to raise it. There are obstacles. Some are to do with structure. Also Arab nations are defensive about it. Arabs have adopted many things freely – theatre, novel, science and psychology. But they refuse to adopt music. I want to break that barrier.54

This perspective can be usefully compared with that of the team at the Jerusalem Academy, whose sense was that Palestinians preferred studying Western classical music above Arab music, because ‘it is a high culture … parents want that’. There the preference was to see Arabs cultivate Arab music, as we have seen. But Abboud Ashkar saw humanity as level, while music had a progressional hierarchy that humans could take or leave: We are built as Homo Sapiens. We have hard wiring to music as to mathematics. We need to learn. There is no difference. An Arab child reacts to music as does a Russian. Sometimes we take on a shell and defend ourselves. The Golden Age of Arab culture was open – it translated Greek and Roman texts. It made progress.55

He also explained that it was extremely difficult to support the drive for progress in the way that he felt it required, because of resource distribution. The few resources that were available – the Abraham Fund mentioned above, for instance – were based on the ideal of collaboration with Jews. He argued that collaboration in equal partnerships was not possible, because Jewish communities had so many decades of music education behind them. A documentary film about Orpheus made by an American NGO called ‘Alternate Focus’ offers two more perspectives on these questions of Palestinian ‘progress’. Founded by a Jew, a Christian and a Muslim, this strives to broadcast and place on its website material that ‘provides balance

54 55

Abboud Ashkar, interview with the author, 7 January 2007. Abboud Ashkar, interview with the author, Nazareth, 12 September 2007.

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to existing coverage of Middle East and related issues’.56 Many of its features show the difficulties of civilians’ life in the Middle East, others focus on influences from outside the region that influence it negatively, but the film about Orpheus takes an affirmative line, presenting the transformative role of music. Despite the anxieties and experiences which Abboud Ashkar communicated to me, Orpheus seems, in the film, to symbolise a way forward for the region, for it has led people from separate communities in Israel to interact with one another, find hope in personal and social change through music, and also come into contact with the Western world outside the region. For example, one of the film’s commentators on a school in Nazareth remarks that it was a ‘new concept’ to have Jewish teachers in the school, that they were all ‘really communicating … sailing in the boat together’.57 One of Orpheus’ co-founders explained the strength of classical music as mediation: ‘classical music in general can get us a kind of wider language, international language … a bridge that can connect the two societies together’.58 Some also regarded Western classical music as a ticket to the outside world. A co-founder, for instance, observed that it enabled Palestinians to connect with, and contribute to, Western cultural forms, rather than being limited to Arab traditions alone. Similarly, the Jewish Uri Ben David from the nearby Kibbutz Mizra said that a child from Nazareth should ‘be able to join any orchestra in the world playing western music and at the same time be able professionally and mentally to find his way playing Arabic music’.59 The film also functions to maintain the essential separation of music from politics, because it presents music as a medium of ideals that seem to help Palestinians past all their difficulties. It skates round critique of the region’s history and Israeli state policy to the extent that even the future Member of Parliament Haneen Zoubi (a Palestinian) reflects on the past only in order to be critical of the Arab community. Observing that in the last decades Palestinians have been so engaged with their ‘local struggle’ and a ‘political discourse’ that they had got cut off from their creativity, she states that Orpheus could reconnect Palestinians – to both local and international culture.60 Thus culture is made to seem beneficial, beneficent,

56 57 59 60

‘Who we Are’, www.alternatefocus.org/About.html 58 Narmin Haj, speaking on Sweed (DVD). Munther Haj, speaking on Sweed (DVD). Uri Ben David, Director of the Emek Yizre’el Cultural Centre. Sweed (DVD). Haneen Zoubi, founder of NGO I’lam, Media Center for Arab Palestinians in Israel. Zoubi represented the Balad party from 2009 onwards. Sweed (DVD).

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and also harmless, apparently not threatening the political status quo. In actual fact, it could pose a threat to – because it is out of line with – the dominant Israeli state policy. Indeed, it challenges the ethnocracy by attempting a self-empowerment in cultural terms that has an implicit political ambition. Specifically, its excusive focus on Western classical music could be understood as reflecting a desire for a change of identity that encroaches on certain types of Jewish identity.61 At a time of Israeli liberalisation, the Ministry of Education launched a three-year project that allowed Orpheus to establish a wind band, a string orchestra and a recorder ensemble. But the project was axed after one year, so the ensembles had to be disbanded and Orpheus was refused further funding by the ministry.62 It would have dissolved at that point, but support emerged from outside the region, namely from the Barenboim– Said Foundation, which has facilitated the establishment of a substantial music school in its place. This reinforces the role of foreign missions, and suggests that the bulk of ‘integration’ in Israel does have to be financed by Europe or the USA, especially if it is to involve the development of Western classical music. There is one more Western classical music initiative to discuss, and it is perhaps the most striking from the perspective of the ‘waiting room’. This is a music school called Beit Al Musica (House of Music) established in 1999 in the town of Shefr Amr, which lies to the north of the country near Nazareth and Haifa. Its Palestinian founder Amer Nakhleh graduated in guitar from the Academy of Music and Dance in Jerusalem, and went on to study and teach at the Conservatory in Ramallah from 1996 to 2000. He founded an association in 1996 in response to growing interest and enthusiasm among musicians and educators in the region. There was, however, no state funding available at this stage, and the school – akin to the case of the National Conservatory in Ramallah – came into being thanks to family capital. This time the capital was financial, a product of the Nakhleh coffee business, which also enabled the school to move from its basement rooms into a large refurbished premises in 2007, where by 2008, 250 Palestinian students were receiving lessons in both Western classical and Arab musical traditions.63

61 62 63

See Gilman 2008 for an overview of Jewish identity in the context of European music making. Abboud Ashkar, interview with the author, Nazareth, 12 September 2007. Interview with the author, Shefr Amr, 15 September 2007. The school’s history can be read in more detail at www.beit-almusica.org/eng/index.php?cat_id=124 accessed 9 July 2009.

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Sources about the school can be found on its website, which I have complemented here with two interviews with Nakhleh. The ideals of the institution are completely different from the first two examples, indeed the centre of gravity is elsewhere. Neatly in line with the ideals of European cultural initiatives presented above, the school strives to ‘promote cultural rights of the Palestinian minority in Israel, to enrich society through the development of musical frameworks, open prospects for artists, and interact musically with other cultures at the highest standards’.64 Nakhleh’s own comments about the project are similarly in line with contemporary discourses in cultural citizenship: ‘If you can’t express yourself culturally, you don’t exist’, he told Ben Ze’ev in interview.65 This argument was one thread within his strategy towards changing the situation in which Palestinians weren’t ‘equal citizens’, which he took towards its logical target in 2002, when he sought Israeli government recognition for his school. The three-year reactions from the Ministry of Education shifted from frank mirth to official inspections and then acknowledgement that all the criteria were fulfilled. It was nevertheless explained to Nakhleh that there were thirty-nine conservatories in Israel, and that for this one to come into being, a little money would have to be taken from each of those.66 Yet in 2004, Beit Al Musica became the first, and only, music school for the Palestinians in Israel to be recognised by the Ministry of Education as an Arab Music School of professional standing. Funding is granted on the basis of the number of pupils taken and does not exceed 13 per cent of the budget, so the school’s income thus comes primarily from a combination of student fees, the aforementioned family capital and support from multiple NGOs and Western governments.67 But the ministerial recognition is a sign that one Palestinian has pushed parts of his community into an official world of cultural citizenship as constructed by the State of Israel.

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‘Introduction’, www.beit-almusica.org/uploads/File/Beit-Almusica_AnnualReport_2008_Final.pdf accessed 9 July 2009. 66 Ben Ze’ev 2004b. Interview with the author, 15 September 2007. The 2008 newsletter lists the following, alongside ‘local donors and individuals’: Bernard van Leer Foundation, British Council, Children of Peace, Embassy of the United States of America, French Cultural Center, Goethe Institute, Italian Cultural Institute, Jerusalem Fund for Education & Community Development (USA), Kathryn Ames Foundation in memory of Max and Ida Freedland (USA). www.beit-almusica.org/uploads/File/Beit-Almusica_AnnualReport_2008_Final.pdf. See p. 17.

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Contact zones and occupation The national and the democratic At the time of writing this book, nearly two decades after Oslo, Palestine’s National Conservatory is a major institution with several hundred students, and branches in several towns on the West Bank. It offers music education for amateurs, plus broader training at elementary and ‘intermediate’ levels, the latter culminating in a diploma following which students are intended to be ready for university-level music education. (Within the Conservatory’s five-year plan at the time of writing is the launching of its own undergraduate degree programme.) This institutional growth has occurred despite the difficulties of development under Israeli occupation, and to a large extent as a product of cultural missions from Western organisations. My interest here is in placing the Conservatory in the context of two potentially contradictory forces. The first is a profound sense of national and regional identity; the other is the agendas of funded programmes from abroad. What we can observe, I suggest, is quite a complex form of Pratt’s ‘contact zone’. There are two schemes at play, while the dominant framework (Israeli control over Palestine) has a further – perhaps surprising – impact, as well. The national and regional identity is a good place to start, partly because the Conservatory comes in line with other conservatories in the Arab World, Iran and Turkey for a number of reasons. Most obviously, it has two separate faculties, namely Western and ‘Oriental’ music. In addition to activities within the curriculum are numerous music camps, festivals and concerts; and there is a large-scale music competition (called ‘Marcel Khalife’ after the prominent Lebanese ‘ūd player, singer and spokesman for Palestine) that takes place every second year (for both faculties). The director, Souhail Khoury, has established a network with conservatories in the Arab world. This regional identity is also indicated by its early financing, as the first facilitating donations actually came from ‘friends’ and, as we have seen, it was a request from a Palestinian NGO that triggered the institution’s foundation.68 Such affiliations enabled the National Conservatory to focus strongly on national and Arab identity in the initial stages. Certainly a number of my interviewees told me that they had had difficulty – as 68

Email communication from Rima Tarazi, 5 August 2009.

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non-Arabs – in contributing early on. For instance, when representatives of the Swedish International Development Association (SIDA) made a survey of performing arts institutions on the West Bank in 1993 and selected the National Conservatory as one of their potential collaborators, they were startled to have their first invitation rejected. Similarly, a musician from overseas who was resident in Ramallah for personal reasons offered her skills to the Conservatory in 1997, and was surprised to be told that only faculty teaching in Arabic could become employees.69 Another reason for one of these rebuffs, however, may lie in friction with the particular ambitions and language of foreign aid organisations. As mentioned above, these have sought rhetorically to construct a ‘civil society’ without direct engagement with the political process. Their stated aims tend to invoke ideas such as ‘democracy’, ‘gender equality’ or ‘peace’. The initial ideals of the National Conservatory’s founders, on the other hand, were a response to more exclusive types of ambition that have long constituted institutional music education, namely aesthetic excellence and national pride. They were also formulated in a context of deep resentment about Israeli occupation, which intensified national sentiment. The push and pull between the national and the democratic is instructive. On the one hand, the Conservatory adapted to expectations of some foreign funders, thus making a move in line with broader political realities. During its early years the Palestinian Authority lost credibility to such an extent that when the World Bank sought to boost the civil sector in Palestine it took the unprecedented step of electing a non-governmental body – Welfare Association – to manage a six-year development project worth 17 million US$ (of this, 10 million was provided by the World Bank itself).70 Leading a consortium involving the British Council and the Charities Aid Foundation, Welfare thus became the channel for some of the biggest grants entering the region, and by 2006 had completed a second phase of World Bank funding (PNGO II), channelling thereby a total of 42 million US$ over nine years.71 The attendant discourse was not about 69

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This was part of a broader shift. Prior to Oslo, Birzeit University employed a large number of foreigners on the faculty, who often taught in English, but the policy thereafter changed to favour, even insist upon, Arabic-language tuition. Victor Kashkoush, ‘World Bank supports Palestinian NGOs’, Alliance Magazine 1 June 1998. www.alliancemagazine.org/en/content/world-bank-supports-palestinian-ngos accessed 8 July 2009. For more discussion of Welfare Association in the context of other aid-providers prior to Oslo, see Nakhleh 2004: 42ff. The World Bank’s successor project (PNGO III 2007–9) created a sister organisation for Welfare called ‘NGO Development Center’, and donated a further 10 million US$ towards the fund.

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the ‘nation’, but about ‘democracy’ and ‘civil society’. In such a climate, the ‘National’ Conservatory of Music had to take its place in the civil ‘development’ movement. Yet on the other hand, there was accommodation and mutation on the side of the funders, too. The first major foreign sponsor, SIDA, for instance, had a strong commitment to ‘democracy’, one of the most prevalent explanations for music and musicians’ presence in aid budgets. In this context ‘democracy’ entails equal rights not only to economic and legal forces, but also to ‘culture’. In its simplest form, this means that music should be available widely, and that scholarships must be made available for music study. By 2000, SIDA had provided 2,500,000 SEK (c. US$ 350,000), and for the three-year period 2001–3 this increased to 6,000,000 SEK (c. US$ 840,000).72 Some of this money had been used to provide 271 scholarships at the Conservatory, and 71 per cent of the students had received support, ranging from 25 per cent to 100 per cent of their tuition fees. The result, in combination with other foreign sponsorship, was that by the time SIDA published a report in 2003, Suhail Khoury was director of an organisation operating not only in Ramallah but also in East Jerusalem and Bethlehem. By then bearing the name ‘Edward Said National Conservatory of Music’, it employed seventeen teachers (Palestinian and non-Palestinian) who were teaching 350 students in the three branches, in addition to others reached through outreach programmes. This, of course, is only one example of musical ‘democracy’, and others were harder to measure. According to a former SIDA employee, there was some tension between the desire to allow Palestinians to respond to their locality in the best way they saw fit, and the need to implement strategies understood by SIDA as appropriate. Ultimately they were in a foreign place, and relied on their foreign contacts to explain the possibilities to them.73 The SIDA report alluded to these difficulties in a different way. While affirming that people working in the cultural sector ‘all have a strong commitment to democratic ways of working’, it contains an admission that it was ‘very difficult to measure the outreach to poorer segments of the population’, because institutions benefiting from SIDA’s support did not provide much information about their outreach work other than mentioning venues as ‘village’ or ‘refugee camp’. The writer urged for much stricter monitoring of the implementation of ‘democracy’: it was ‘essential to know

72 73

Pehrsson 2003: 22. Telephone interview with former SIDA employee Stig-Magnus Thorsén, 13 August 2009.

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who is actually reached and invited to join dance, music and theatre or take part in a workshop to develop her/his own talent’. Some doubt emerges, as well, from recommendations that the Conservatory make its scholarships available more broadly (for instance to amateur musicians who already ‘play with traditional dance groups in the youth centres in town and refugee camps … [who] can usually not follow regular afternoon classes during weekdays, since they study or work and sometimes have a family to cater for’). And a broader sustainability is in question in observations that music has little or no place in government strategy, and is unlikely to in the future.74 The report evokes a tricky dilemma, then: on the one hand, SIDA is dealing directly with a small group of the population that is clearly quite separate from the poorer and less privileged majority. Only this small group has experience with institutional music education, and it gained it from studies abroad. Furthermore, it is an open question as to whether a Palestinian government – should it emerge in the future – would take the project on board, and thus lead institutionalised music education more deeply into Palestinian society. SIDA is dealing with a cultural elite and a particular cultural product. Additionally, the potential slippage between SIDA’s ideals and its actual programme has a very particular significance in the ‘pre-national’ context. Acknowledging the difficulty of monitoring the impact of the aid provided, the SIDA report states nevertheless that ‘the effects of the Israeli occupation are profoundly affecting Palestinian children, and in such a situation, any contribution to children’s intellectual and emotional development is relevant and important for the future of the Palestinian society’.75 In one sense, SIDA’s report seems to be justifying the fact that it is obliged to offer a fairly free rein. But the title of the report – ‘Arts Under Siege’ – indicates an institutional sympathy with Palestinians’ desire for self-determination, which may (especially in a context of anxiety about cultural imperialism) lead to a favouring of local decisions. We might extrapolate from this the often-made claim that while the Israeli occupation keeps Palestinians ‘under siege’ (and may present some difficulties for foreign aid workers), it simultaneously places certain Palestinians in a position of alternative leverage with foreign aid (and allows foreign aid workers a considerable degree of liberty too). As we will indeed see below, the Conservatory projects a vision strongly through cultural activities, albeit on a local level, and has a political and rhetorical presence

74

Pehrsson 2003: 4, 29, 36.

75

Pehrsson 2003: 11 (my italics).

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in the cultural sphere that – as we will see further in Chapter 7 – may compete with cultural projects that are led by foreign institutions working on the ground.

The Palestinians and Europe’s shame One such foreign institution is another significant supporter of music education in Ramallah, the Barenboim-Said Foundation. The foundation’s activities in the area began late in 2003 with a kindergarten project, a collaborative venture with Palestinian Medical Relief, one of the largest medically focused NGOs in the region, established in 1979.76 Simultaneously, the foundation offered some teaching of school-age children, initially in collaboration with, and on the premises of, Christian schools in Ramallah, and with particular support from the Friends Boys School (which we have already encountered in Chapter 3 above). The first teachers to work for the foundation came from an informal network of musicians connected in some way to internationally celebrated musician Daniel Barenboim. After some time, the foundation became more independent from local organisations and took on its own premises in 2007, an apartment in a block in Ramallah. At the time of writing (July 2009) it has 120 students and 9 teachers (2 of whom are full time), in comparison with the Conservatory’s 800 students and 48 teachers.77 While smaller than the Conservatory, it wields greater funds, and has rather broader ambitions. Founded in 2004 at the wish of Manuel Chaves, President of the Junta de Andalucía (Autonomous Regional Government of Andalusia), the foundation ostensibly aims to ‘serve as a reference for intercultural conciliation’. Its most prominent spokesman and indeed its ‘Titan’, to adopt DeMars’ term for the leading public figure, the persona of the institution, is Barenboim.78 (Said, in whose name the foundation also lives, passed away just as it was founded.) The medium of the foundation is therefore music, which is to be integrated ‘into the fabric of society, from which it distanced itself throughout the course of the 20th Century as a result of a general trend of specialisation’. One of the foundation’s objectives brings ‘conciliation’ and music together, explaining that it seeks to ‘promote the spirit of 76

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In 2007 there were two teachers on the staff, one responsible for the state education curriculum, and the other for music. Children attending were aged 3–5. Amra 2007. Conversations with Muna Khleify (Barenboim-Said Foundation (BSF) administrator, 16 June 2009), and reference to the website of the Conservatory. See http://ncm.birzeit.edu/new/page. php?page=background and follow link to ‘Faculty’. Accessed 24 June 2009. DeMars 2005: 9–12.

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peace, dialogue and reconciliation, primarily through music’, and that ‘the history of the peaceful coexistence of different cultures over the centuries in Andalusia is a central feature’. The foundation also aims to promote ‘an integral humanistic education’ within music education, and to collaborate regionally in ‘Andalusia, Palestine and other Middle Eastern countries’.79 The annual budget started in 2005 at €3,000,000, but this was effectively a basis above and beyond which funds from elsewhere could be gathered and fed into the same projects. Thus, for instance, the Junta de Andalucía put down €2,000,000 in 2007, and external sponsorship provided a further €1,009,473, bringing the total income to €3,009,473. A significant part of the budget is spent on the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, an ensemble bringing Arabs and Jews together along with Spaniards, under Barenboim’s baton, which met for the first time in 1999 (of this ensemble, more in Chapter 6). Nevertheless, the orchestra is also a means to raising further funds, because it can charge fees when it appears in major venues and gains royalties from recordings, and also because it attracts sponsors, too. The foundation’s other projects are directly related to musical education, namely an Academy for Orchestral Studies (Seville), an Early Childhood Education Project in Andalusia, a Scholarship Fund (for West-Eastern Divan musicians), and a Musical Education Project in Palestine and Israel. The budget for the last on this list, which concerns us here, rose from €376,299 in 2005 to €664,656 in 2008.80 The Barenboim-Said Foundation is descended from an organisation called the Three Cultures Foundation, established in Spain in 1999, which was designed to promote dialogue between Morocco, Spain, and other Mediterranean regions.81 Although the later foundation has a different emphasis, the key ideas of ‘peace, dialogue and reconciliation’ have been sustained, in addition to the aim of cooperating in the Mediterranean region. For Palestine, then, the project is not concerned directly with the current struggle for statehood. Rather, it involves entering a broader collaboration with existing nations, and indeed taking ‘the history of the peaceful coexistence of different cultures over the centuries in Andalusia’ as a model. The situation might be compared with times of earlier 79

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‘Foundation’ www.barenboim-said.org/en/fundacion/fines_fundacionales/ and ‘Objectives of the Foundation’. www.barenboim-said.org/index.php?id=166 I am grateful to Muriel Páez Rasmussen, Director General of the Barenboim-Said Foundation, for providing me with this information. This organisation hosted the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra workshops in Seville in 2002, 2003 and 2004. Again, thanks to Muriel Páez Rasmussen, Director General of the Barenboim-Said Foundation.

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missions. In chapters 1–3 I discussed the time during which a society based on ideas of Jesus was the ideal model to which Palestine was to aspire. Palestinians are now being invited to model themselves again, but to draw on a different historical moment (and place), namely Andalusia’s ‘different cultures over the centuries’. In daily practice, the Andalusian idea is quite remote from the musical intervention, because teachers simply offer children lessons in Western classical music, put on concerts, and run an orchestra (and as we will see in Chapter 8, the teachers have their own agendas). Yet it operates on another level. If pupils progress sufficiently well, they may be selected to travel to Spain to participate in the junior ensemble of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, and eventually even in the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra itself, the flagship of the foundation, the apparent embodiment of ‘three cultures’. Again, the structure of earlier interventions is apparent: enticing opportunities are available, but they involve a departure from local allegiance and the construction of new loyalties determined from outside. By joining the programme, for instance, the children start to contribute themselves to a celebration of Andalusia’s most-celebrated historical moment. That contribution to Andalucismo, or Andalusian nationalism, elaborates what historian Khalid Duran has called ‘Andalusia’s nostalgia for progress’.82 And it contributes to the foundation’s image as a sort of reparation for Spain’s anti-Semitism in the early fifteenth century, implying that all its collaborations are expressions of a better world. But this use of music to create – or at least ‘stage’ – a better world in the form of Andalusia, is just one part of a broader phenomenon, namely Yúdice’s ‘expedience of culture’. And a more widespread image in circulation is regret about, and transcendence of, Europe’s recent anti-Semitic policies and actions. The Barenboim-Said Foundation – with its mission of reconciliation – is closely bound up with that important ongoing project, but it is not one that can be imported to the West Bank very straightforwardly. An intimation of the complexities involved can be traced in a conflict that developed between the National Conservatory and the Barenboim-Said Foundation. My sources for the following account are six interviews with faculty and ex-faculty from the two institutions, each of whom brought up the subject in interview without my prompting. The occasion was an orchestral workshop in Jordan in the summer of 2005, which was run collaboratively by the two schools. It was intended for 82

Duran 1992. For more optimistic engagements with Andalusian multiculturalism, see Osseiran 2004.

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Palestinian children from the West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria, children who share a heritage in historical Palestine, but who normally would never meet one another. It was understood by participants as an opportunity for new inter-Palestinian collaboration, then, but was also intended as a contact-free zone in one sense: there would be no collaboration with Israelis (for that, Lebanese and Syrian participants would have needed special permits to take part).83 Faculty members from both the foundation and the Conservatory were involved, but one of them – working for the National Conservatory – had Israeli citizenship. When this fact emerged at the workshop in Jordan, some Lebanese and Syrian participants were angry and alarmed, not least because they were contravening their government policy. They thus demanded that she leave. Adding to the furore, a faculty member from the Conservatory refused to take her on the coach. The significance of the crisis here is that the teacher whose unannounced secondary citizenship caused the conflict was working, on a personal level, with precisely the sort of reconciliation that the Barenboim-Said Foundation promotes. I refer to her as SU here. SU had been a German non-Jewish citizen who had moved to Israel from Germany in 1991, having got a job there specifically in the interest of developing a link with the country. She understood this as a confrontation with Germany’s anti-Semitism. She converted to Judaism, first with a ‘reformed’ programme, and then with an Orthodox one. However, she found the latter ‘distasteful and anti-intellectual with a strong Arab hatred’, and gradually disengaged, becoming non-observant. A consequence of the experience was that she commenced learning Arabic, and joined Machsom Watch, a group monitoring Israeli military practices with Palestinians trying to cross checkpoints. She had begun teaching for the Conservatory in 2005. The impact was considerable. First, the problem was suspended for the period of the workshop (the young musicians became apologetic but the teacher withdrew from participation, did some sightseeing and then attended the final concert). But then, it played out between the Conservatory and the Foundation, who took different and separate paths forward. The Conservatory continued to develop the youth orchestra with Palestinians from Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria; the foundation broke away, establishing a connection with a Palestinian organisation in Israel, and 83

Political relations between the various Middle-Eastern states require players from Egypt, Syria and Lebanon to gain special government permission to play with Israelis.

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founding an orchestra bringing together its students with those from the Nazareth school. The upshot of an import of European ‘reconciliation’, then, was a structural mirroring of aspects of the geopolitical division of the Palestine region, rather than a transcendence or transformation of them.

The concert and the heritage In the early years of the new millennium, a Ramallah-based non-profit organisation working on ‘architectural heritage in Palestine’ called RIWAQ, approached Germany’s representative office in Ramallah for help in restoring an Ottoman castle. In a village 12 km west of Ramallah, the Ras Karkar castle is on a mountain overlooking lands that were once populated by villages dominated for a time by the semi-feudal family of Sheikh Ismail Ibn Samhan. The German office agreed in 2007 to provide €40,000 to support the restoration, in line with its policy of ‘preserving cultural heritage, through which Germany seeks to maintain the historical and cultural heritage of the Palestinian people’.84 A year later, the office of German Representation in Ramallah suggested that an Austrian festival called Sounding Jerusalem should use this space for a concert, which it did in 2008 and 2009, forming – for staff member Hermann Schüller – an ‘absolute highlight’ of the festival.85 Such a concert (even if a festival highlight) can only be of momentary impact on the broader context, yet it does provide a momentary crystallisation of processes at work more broadly. A brief word on Sounding Jerusalem is useful at this point. The festival developed from discussions between cellist Erik Oskar Hütter (who initially taught in Ramallah) and the rector of the Austrian Hospice in the Old City of Jerusalem (now a guest house, cafe, chapel and venue for public events), on whose facilities it depends. Benefiting in its first year, 2006, from the Austrian Presidency of the EU, it launched with a workshop for fifty children from Jerusalem, Nazareth and Ramallah, as well as thirteen concerts of primarily Western classical music in venues in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, and one in West Jerusalem. When I attended its events in 2009, it had become a concert festival and spread much further into 84

85

Press release, ‘Germany Supports RIWAQ through the Restoration of Al-Samhan Castle in Ras Karkar’ dated 14 May 2007. www.ramallah.diplo.de/Vertretung/ramallah/de/Aktuell/Presse/ pm__dd__03__2007,property=Daten.pdf Hermann Schüler in interview with the author. Ramallah, 15 July 2009.

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Israel and the West Bank, however, working with a modest budget raised annually (€150,000 for the 2007–8 year, for instance). Additional funding was provided by small grants (normally not more than €20,000) and infrastructural support from representative offices and embassies of certain European countries in the region, particularly those of France and Germany. One of the festival’s main organisers, Petra Klose, was giving her time free, so in a sense her company in Vienna was a sponsor too. I conducted in-depth interviews with Klose, Hütter and the Palestinian member of the organizing team, Nadia Arouri. Arouri had been a cello student of Hütter while a pupil at the Friends School. The description of the event by the German sponsoring body did not render the Israeli presence entirely invisible: as Schüler put it, RIWAQ had ‘rebuilt the inner courtyard in a beautiful manner. This is a very poor village completely surrounded by Israeli settlements.’ However, he emphasised that the project primarily involved a transformation of the local situation as grasped by the Palestinian population, because ‘the first thing was to show them the heritage in their centre. And to get the population to have a feeling for that.’ With his reference to the concert itself, this ambition became even clearer, because of the novelty of the event in the Palestinian context, the deservedly respectful treatment it received from local people, and also what he saw as the local people’s own desire for something different from their normal lives: the people in that village have never listened to classical European music. [They] organized chairs, lighting system, a buffet. They came in all these beautiful embroidered dresses. They came not only because once in a year something is happening. Because they wanted to have this feeling to meet something completely new.86

From this account, however, we can sense something else as well, namely that there were active Palestinian contributions – ‘beautiful embroidered dresses’ – contributions that Schüler had not apparently anticipated. The Palestinian impact on events put on by foreigners is not always acknowledged, precisely because of the need to depoliticise the intervention. The resulting ambiguity about Palestinian partnerships is what I address here. My main case study is another concert within the Sounding Jerusalem festival, this one held in the Roman amphitheatre at the village of Sebastia near Nablus. Rather akin to the political and institutional conflict described above, this case emerged during interviews most often without my prompting. 86

Interview with the author. Ramallah, 15 July 2009.

Culture

I greatly regret not having been present at the actual concert. My stay in Palestine in June 2009 coincided with two major festivals running parallel – along with Sounding Jerusalem there was the ‘Music Days’ of Al Kamandjâti (to be discussed in the next section below) – in addition to a visit from the Choir of London. Thus, although I attended a concert every night there were so many clashes that I inevitably had to miss some events. In consequence I am unable to offer a direct account of the concert at Sebastia, or indeed relay statements made by local people who were in the audience. But remarks made to me about it later were so interesting that I chose to include them here. To begin to discuss the event, we need to return briefly to the question of heritage. The starting point for Sounding Jerusalem’s choice of venue had been the desire for an evocative historical site for a concert. One of the organisers from Austria, Petra Klose, described the place in the following way: ‘it’s very hard to get [to Sebastia] because of all the checkpoints, it’s wild, there’s nothing renovated, you have to go down a little road past the donkeys’. She valued it above all in terms of its biblical history and potential value to global circulation: ‘it’s a historical place. Salome danced there. John the Baptist was killed there. It should be open for international tourism.’87 The festival founder and director sought out such places for as many concerts as possible. His words emphasise history, beauty and remoteness and give an impression of places blissfully spared from the realities of human life. As he put it, it is a ‘dream to do music and play music in these incredible surroundings. They are “innocent”. They aren’t like in Tuscany where it’s all merchandised. There are people everywhere there. Here it is historic treasure.’88 For Hütter the benefits, however, were different from those articulated by both Schüler and Klose. They were primarily his own. Each event gave him personally something new: You get full luxury here. To get the diversity of what human beings are all about. I’m grateful for this. I’m not a social worker. I’m doing it for myself. I have to see that. It’s so enriching. Enriching your life. It’s not about nice moments. It’s about what we are. And to discover this from all perspectives is my biggest motivation.89

87 88 89

Petra Klose, interview with the author. Jerusalem, 22 June 2009. Erik Oskar Hütter, interview with the author. Jerusalem, 26 June 2009. Erik Oskar Hütter, interview with the author. Jerusalem, 26 June 2009.

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And he set this quasi-anthropological exploration into sharp contrast with another type of music-making that he knew, namely the professional one based in Europe, where there was just: a little world of classical music. For me anyway. I played a tour in South America. It was just 5 star hotels and concert halls and flights. At the end I was so disgusted. We aren’t interested in humans. It’s very self-centred. You’re performing your music. And then applause.

His blunt account introduces a bridge between Europe and Palestine that all the post-Oslo investments can mask, namely a desire for something other than the life that a Western musical training has produced in a modern urban environment. Palestine – conceived as remote, historical and replete with possibilities of rich human encounter – is enticing; that it may seem to ‘need’ Europeans’ help is part of the enticement. This is a familiar pattern from colonial and Orientalist thinking, but it is a relative novelty to find music embedded within the structure in quite this way. Of this there will be more to be said in Chapter 8. For now, though, the notion of ‘innocence’ can be set into relief by a closer look at the concert in Sebastia. Five accounts reveal that it was by no means dominated by the European scheme for heritage or entertainment. Not only did the local people shape it in ways that challenged the latter considerably, but environmentally, they had the upper hand, for when the foreign musicians arrived they realised they had misjudged both the climate and the venue. The sun was far too intense for instruments to be played, and the acoustic of the gently-raked amphitheatre was not suited to music without amplification. While the musicians waited for the sun to go down, the villagers took advantage of the refreshments brought from Nablus, and entertained themselves. Klose described the result in the following way: With the amphitheatre they were coming and they were all over us talking and screaming from one side to the other. It was kind of a bizarre situation. It wasn’t the first time we had noise in the concert. But we didn’t have the chance to calm them down in the amphitheatre. They were all above us of course. To get them to hear us would have meant shouting. It was a very noisy concert. Guys were selling ice cream. It was a bit wild. A little village festival there. Hundreds of children came and looked at the instruments. The first on the programme was a very quiet piano piece by Debussy. It was all so loud. People were just there talking about the amphitheatre. They commented during the playing.90 90

Interview with Petra Klose, Jerusalem, 22 June 2009.

Culture

As the sponsor, the Director of the French Cultural Centres, pointed out, it was exceptional for the villagers to find anything happening at the theatre. They came with their families, creating a ‘warm animated atmosphere’ that was ‘like a village feast’. But the acoustic forces of the visitors were rather small, so ‘it was difficult to hear the musicians after the 2nd row’.91 This apparent clash of expectations was given a positive spin by the Palestinian member of the organising team. Structurally, the Sounding Jerusalem festival is supported by a non-profit organisation called A.MUS.E (Austrian Music Encounter), the mission of which is to use and promote music ‘as a possibility to create open meeting places for human encounter, for a vivid international cultural exchange and for fostering the intercultural dialogue’.92 It seeks to implement ‘high quality music projects for and with young people’, and provide ‘access to children, youth and adults living in conflict zones and/or an economically weak environment to having a share in the dynamic process of international dialogue and exchange of culture’. Arouri placed the concert in Sebastia in this perspective, arguing that: It was one of our most successful cultural encounters. I don’t think people didn’t listen. I think they listened in their own way. In Palestinian culture music is very much the accompaniment the whole time. It isn’t where you sit and listen and do nothing else. They were listening. A kid would be running around and suddenly hear something. He’d stop and look at them with huge eyes with so much interest and curiosity. And that’s the most important thing. To awake [sic] their curiosity. It’s not about teaching them how to behave. Just showing them there is something else. Some people were listening all through the concert. 93

With her personal perspective on ‘Palestinian culture’, she nevertheless constructed herself as one of the outsiders to the group in the amphitheatre. This was consistent with other parts of her interview with me, in which she described an early childhood of living in Paris, North America and Jordan, and an immediate affinity with foreign music teachers arriving in Ramallah after Oslo. She also expressed concern about class divides, saying, ‘what is sad is that the Palestinian society is split. We have the elites. They have absolutely no contact with the simple poor people in the old city.’ And she placed Sounding Jerusalem in this context, as if it was something that could contribute to ameliorating the situation by providing

91 92 93

Patrick Girard, telephone interview with the author. 10 July 2009. ‘A.MUS.E. – Austrian Music Encounter’, www.euromedalex.org/fr/node/4036 Nadia Arouri, interview with the author. Jerusalem, 22 June 2009.

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‘quality music for all people of the region for free’. The concert in Sebastia was a dynamic event, she suggested, because there was learning on both sides: We’re the ones coming from the outside. We should respect their habits. I believe there was a message from both sides. Most importantly we brought something new. They gave something too. They gave us a deeper acceptance of difference rather than talking about it all the time. With every concert you begin to accept a lot more. Through actions not words. It’s much easier to talk about it than to implement it.

Finally, she was happy that the musical intervention had not impinged too strongly on the participants’ experiences. Whereas Klose had told me that the ambient noise levels were lower once an announcement had been made before the Mendelssohn Octet in the second half, Arouri’s perception was different: What for me was really important was that we didn’t want to have microphones. Not to make the music louder than the people talking if they wanted to talk. Not to impose the music on them. He couldn’t come through with his voice. He asked them to be quiet. They didn’t notice it.

It is possible that Arouri was idealising the event in the interest of promoting Sounding Jerusalem to me, and that many members of the audience were less entertained than she suggested. Two Palestinians at least – who had travelled from Ramallah on a day trip – were disappointed and irritated, feeling that the venue was unsuitable and the event had been poorly planned.94 On one level, certainly, there had been some planning: most of the audience had been brought from Nablus and surrounding villages in coaches arranged by the French Cultural Centre, for instance. But on another, it was indeed a small experiment, a momentary constellation in which foreign musicians tested the compatibility of their dreams against the local environment. And it did become a pivotal moment in the festival’s planning, forcing the organisers into a serious rethinking of their offerings, because the climate, the material qualities of the space and most of all the people of the region, had each shaped the event more strongly than had the musicians themselves. Beyond this very localised meeting point, there is a further interactive boundary to consider, namely the broader international one, and in particular the presence of the Israeli occupation. At the time of writing, the 94

They preferred to remain anonymous.

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population of the village and the surrounding area is disempowered by contemporary politics. In part this is because of the Israeli presence: Nablus was sealed off for many years and was surrounded by a particularly high density of checkpoints.95 But it is also because leading foreign governments have categorised its elected regional government, Hamas, as a ‘terrorist organisation’ and thus placed it out of bounds for foreign government collaboration. One sponsor of the event, the French Cultural Centre (the cultural wing of the French consulate) has been particularly successful in arranging events in regions controlled by Hamas, despite the obstacles. The director outlined his work in this connection as follows: We try to be very prudent. Officially, we don’t speak with Hamas. But we run a Cultural Center in Gaza, where Hamas has power. In Gaza we are the only ones [foreign nation states] with a cultural centre. We work with the Al Aqsa University. We do projects with them. We also work with Islamic University on projects about heritage in Gaza.96

But the sensitivity of connections with Hamas was tangible during several of my interviews about the Sebastia concert. None of the representatives of foreign organisations involved seemed to have negotiated the venue, and each one stated that another group had done it. The Director of the French Cultural Centre, for example, described necessary negotiations in the following way: Nablus municipality is Hamas or affiliated as such. We work with the municipality but we try not to involve them too much. We work actually more with the civil society or NGOs than with the Municipality itself. We used the open air theatre. It was given by the Hamas municipality, but dealt by the festival organisation (Sounding Jerusalem) and not directly by us.97

One of my informants was more specific, but requested anonymity, stating that when the programme was printed, ‘Hamas had to be omitted’ from the list of supporters. The same informant also stated that the sensitivity had a further layer, namely that the presence of Hamas on publicity might be a problem for the Palestinian Authority. Were the PA to take umbrage, foreign organisations might be in danger of losing their official partners. No matter how comprehensible this network of relations may be from the perspective of foreign policy and diplomacy, the impact that this may have 95

96 97

For the struggles of Nablus and its influence on cultural heritage and practices, see, for instance, Abdelhadi 2004; Sub Laban 2004; Yousof 1995. Patrick Girard, telephone interview with the author. 10 July 2009. Patrick Girard, telephone interview with the author. 10 July 2009.

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on the Palestinian situation more broadly is worth considering. It would seem, in fact, that as a result of the fact that Hamas’ collaboration with a Western cultural organisation is unmentionable, the prevailing Western image of Hamas as non-cooperative and rigidly ‘Islamist’ can be maintained. Seen thus, public events may actually contribute to perpetuating the isolation of Hamas (and, by association, Palestinians more generally). A discursive erasure of local political participation was also a component of reportage on individual Palestinian perceptions. One of the foreigners working on the realisation of the project placed his description within the institutional framework of ‘cultural’ intervention: ‘The mayor was happy something was happening there. It was completely unpolitical [sic].’ His account of the audience response was similar: ‘something happened for the people for Sebastia. I think they appreciated that. Without any political message.’ This interpretation may well carry some weight. It should also be understood as the product of a context in which anything ‘political’ has become negatively loaded in the extreme. ‘Unpolitical’ is a discursive tool attempting to capture the positive aspects of something, while not in fact being unaware of the power struggles that are ongoing. That said, it is worth noting that the discursive technique does actively strip the mayor and the audience of their political voices and their capacities for political thought. Should an event organised by foreigners be conceived by people living under occupation as having no ‘political message’? It may well be that many present were intensely grateful that the French find ways of making contact, despite international laws obstructing their attempts to do so. Yet the positive spin on depoliticisation is thought-provoking for two reasons. First, it carries with it the notion that Palestinians in the amphitheatre should be free of politics. Second, it embodies the idea that they can be freed from politics by European entertainment. This disempowers them twice over. In the modernity that Palestinians and their supporters seek, everybody needs a political voice (it is perhaps the thing that Palestinians need most urgently). And to be effective, it probably needs to be rather sharply distinguished from European entertainment – and quite possibly from the European search for fulfilment in heritage.

The citizen in the Orient Discourses of the ‘unpolitical’ combine with Orientalist tropes in the profile of a significant music school in Ramallah not yet discussed. Smaller in scale than the National Conservatory and quite different in profile,

Culture

Al Kamandjâti (‘The Violinist’) was founded by Ramzi Abu Redwan as a low-budget music education and performance project running music workshops in villages and refugee camps in Gaza and the West Bank (2003, and then twice in the following years). It then expanded with annual music workshops in refugee camps in southern Lebanon (2005 onwards), an annual Baroque Music Festival at Christmas (beginning in 2005), a summer Music Festival (beginning in 2006), and a summer Music Camp (beginning in 2007). In 2005 the school itself opened in Ramallah. At the time of writing, it has 200 students from the town.98 The school building is exemplary of the move towards the trend in cultural heritage that renders its physical presence internationally visible. Located in Ramallah’s impoverished and partly derelict old town (which did not benefit from the building boom that Ramallah experienced in the wake of Oslo), its transformation is a cipher for the process of heritage revival imported to Palestine and is worth exposing here in some detail. The building belongs to one of Ramallah’s oldest families, members of which sought a community project to help raise funds for restoration. Three organisations collaborated to make this possible, namely Al Kamandjâti, SIDA and RIWAQ, which we encountered above. Welfare Association’s website presentation of Al Kamandjâti demonstrates how it nestles among the ideals of the dominant civil sphere, while also being a useful prop for the staunch rhetoric of Welfare’s Palestinian-led ethos. The school embodies refurbishment and vivifying of a heritage site, outreach and transformation of impoverished communities, a combination of Western and Arab music and resistance to the occupying Israeli authority.99 In a number of contexts, however, the nature of the transformations involved takes on another dimension. For example, the lead architect on the project, Khaldoun Bshwara, viewed the ‘value’ of the site not in terms of its architectural quality, but its ‘history’.100 He understood his task to be the ‘recuperation of the space’, and the provision of something for the local children. The solution he found, involving extensive metal sheeting, glass walls and roof terraces, was criticised by his colleagues as contrary to the

98

99

100

Extensive information, including reports on many of these events, can be found at www. alkamandjati.com/ accessed 9 July 2009. See also Hass 2005 for a summary of Abu Redwan’s achievements. ‘Al Kamandjâti – Music for All’ http://welfare-association.org/en/content/view/342/97/ accessed 18 July 2009. Interview with the author, Ramallah, 26 April 2007. I called Bshwara on the phone to request this interview, and visited him at the RIWAQ office that afternoon. For further comments from him about his ideas, see Hass 2005.

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spirit of the surrounding architecture. Yet his own perspective was that it had, along with the musical activities, done a powerful job in transforming the attitude of people from outside the old town. Whereas this had been an area that ‘they did not go’, he explained, the musical and architectural intervention had made it a valued destination. In his eyes, then, the old town had been ‘peopled’. This is a symptom of a discursive practice of both territorialisation and people-creation again (rather akin to what we encountered in Chapter 3), and comes in line with the prevailing discourse about the school. The man who founded it is the focus, and a powerful narrative has developed about him in the media since 2001. It provides a founding myth for the school that is essentially an exemplification of the hopes borne in the tides of responses to Oslo. The violent force of the Intifada dissolves; and the cultured civilian of a peaceful future state emerges in his place. In this case the ‘cultured civilian’ holds a viola, and runs a music school. The first appearance was in October 2001 in a French communist magazine called Regards, within an article entitled ‘Concerto for Stones and Violin’ brought to life by ‘before’ and ‘after’ photographs of Abu Redwan.101 The ‘before’ photograph showed a small boy running with a stone in his hand, an image that had been widely circulated in the Palestinian media during the first Intifada, had indeed become a local icon for resistance to the Israeli occupation. The other photographs, however, presented a poised young man with a viola, apparently a ‘citizen’ of highclass culture. At this point, Abu Redwan had recently finished music studies in Angers, France. The fulfilment of the narrative emerged in 2004 in the national newspaper Le Figaro, which presented the same ‘before’ picture of the boy with the stones, but showed five other, more recent pictures of Abu Redwan.102 Each one illustrates a scene from his newly running music workshops in Palestine, for which he took musicians from Europe. In the largest picture, he himself helps a child to hold a violin, apparently in a Muslim home with family members watching. The teleology of Abu Redwan’s official biography runs as follows. A Muslim born in 1979, his childhood was spent at the Al Amari refugee camp near Ramallah. Like all children at the camp, he was involved in violent (if powerless) attempts to withstand the military action of Israeli forces. His first contact with Western classical music came in 1996, when

101

Avran and Sablonnières 2001.

102

Brunet and Trevert 2004.

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he took part in a workshop there led by the Palestinian violinist Mohammed Fadl, who had been on the staff since 1994.103 Abu Redwan came to the Conservatory thanks to the actions of a journalist who was visiting Ramallah at that time, and who sought out the child in the well-known Intifada photograph. Following the workshop, Abu Redwan became a student at the Conservatory, and subsequently enrolled at the Angers Conservatoire, where he studied for three years. Following his studentship there, and with the support of Angers-based members of the Association France Palestine Solidarité, he put on fund-raising concerts under the banner of ‘Musicians for Palestine’, which enabled him to launch his own workshops and start further fund-raising for the establishment of a school. To this personal story one can add the enthusiastic finance of the West for the new cause. Abu Redwan’s entrance to the Conservatory, for instance, would not have been possible without SIDA’s scholarship scheme. Additionally, he benefited there from an American viola teacher, Peter Sulski, whose presence was a knock-on effect of US government’s new support for cultural activities in the region. Sulski had been one of several players touring within the framework of Apple Hill Chamber Music’s ‘Music for Peace’ Middle East tour in 1996. The performers stopped over in Ramallah, where they led a workshop for students of the Conservatory under the auspices of the US government.104 Sulski then gained a grant from the US consul to spend one month teaching in Ramallah in 1997, subsequently teaching at the Conservatory for eighteen months, from 1998 to 1999. Abu Redwan was able to study in Angers as a function of a new scheme run by the French consulate in Palestine. That both these stories – the biography of Abu Redwan and the rise of Western cultural mission – leave much untold is very clear. None of the complexities of Abu Redwan’s life emerge from it: there is merely a switch from elements feared in the West (Islam, violence) to elements admired (music, education). Nor do the complexities of strategic interests of the various institutions involved have a place in the public narrative: actions are apparently the function of special individuals (Fadl, Sulski). But two stories

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Fadl’s family had lived in Jaffa until 1948, but he grew up in Amman. He gained his BA in music in Cairo and taught violin thereafter in Amman, initially in schools and then in the new Conservatory, which he helped to found in 1986. Fadl’s special area is group teaching, the techniques of which he studied (with the sponsorship of Queen Noor of Jordan) with Sheila Johnson in Virginia, USA. Interview with the author, Ramallah, 24 April 2007. Interview with the author, Ramallah, 18 June 2009.

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serve one another in a strong narrative, Abu Redwan and his project providing the perfect symbol of an idealised (Western) Palestine. The matter that must be raised, however, is the relationship between the cultural narrative and the ongoing situation of Israeli occupation. This is striking for three reasons. First, the narrative (as a ‘conversion story’) implies that there was something wrong with the boy who threw stones in the Intifada, that this was corrected by contact with music and, furthermore, that Abu Redwan is now correcting his society more broadly through music. In this respect the narrative masks a basic reality, namely that there was something profoundly wrong with a situation that saw a small boy throwing stones at passing tanks. And at the heart of that was an unresolved legacy of settler colonialism and a military occupation. Second, the funders’ interests are neglected, indeed the funders themselves tend to be entirely peripheral to the public narratives of individual transformation. But of course the funders’ interests are products of global international relations playing out in the Middle East. And these are products in part of Israel’s occupation (funders do not send music ‘development’ schemes to equivalent institutions in established states such as neighbouring Jordan, Lebanon or Syria). So the paradox is clear: the occupation is erased by the cultural narrative, but the occupation is actually what provides the very conditions of possibility for the cultural investment (and narrative). Third, the cultural investment is dependent on the cultural narrative as well. To illustrate: in interview with me, one foreign diplomatic worker active in the region expressed an ambition to transform people in terms of their skills and (consequent) power. The institutional aim was ‘to help Palestinians to find ways to get in charge. To be able to do things. We pay for tuition – music professors and piano tuners – so they will be able to do things on their own.’105 However, he quite pointedly constructed his work as apolitical as well, by necessity. If it were ‘political’, he explained, it would be instantly stopped by either Israeli forces or the organisation for whom he worked, who are obliged to work within the constraints imposed by Israel. Essentially this means that his work – as a foreign cultural emissary in the Palestinian Territories – must develop in explicit denial that it has any political significance at all.

105

Anonymous by request. Ramallah, June 2009.

7 Dialogue

Intercultural dialogue is a process that comprises an open and respectful exchange between individuals, groups and organisations with different cultural backgrounds or world views. Among its aims are: to develop a deeper understanding of different perspectives and practices; to increase participation (or the freedom to make choices); to ensure equality; and to enhance creative processes. From the point of view of the cultural sector, intercultural dialogue within a country involves public and private cultural/artistic initiatives which bring together individuals/groups from minority/migrant communities together with the majority population in order to enter into a multi-directional communication process. Such dialogue ideally takes place in a shared space where attempts are made to address unequal power relations between those belonging to majority/minority groups. The aim of an intercultural exchange is transformative of all those participating and can result in, for example, the creation of new or hybrid cultural expressions/forms, new image constructions, changed behaviour patterns etc.1

The text above, a product of early twenty-first-century European thinking on cultural policy, introduces the climate of ideas supporting music projects discussed in this chapter. The key concepts are openness to difference, inclusiveness and creativity. They are translated into activities in which it is hoped that minority and majority populations will establish new means of communication, allowing power relations to be freshly negotiated and participants changed thereby. In fact the possibility for effecting change through cultural dialogues has been broadly challenged, and is now a matter of some concern among public funders. As such, it comes in line with broader disquiet about international peace-building operations, where failures are very much in

1

‘Intercultural Dialogue and Cultural Policies’. Council of Europe/ERICarts, Compendium of Cultural Policies and Trends in Europe, 11th ftn, 2010. www.culturalpolicies.net/web/ intercultural-dialogue.php accessed 1 June 2009.

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evidence.2 According to the Anna Lindh Foundation, a major promoter of intercultural understanding in Europe, ‘one of the paradoxes in the context of the Foundation’s work is the fact that despite the investment over the years in work for Mediterranean cooperation, the gap in mutual perceptions between people across the region remains, and in some cases has significantly deteriorated, a reality which continues to be at risk of regional challenges, from conflict and war to economic crisis’.3 Historian David Steigerwald has written yet more pessimistically, arguing not only that culture’s failure followed very sharply on the heels of politicians’ failure, but also that politicians’ recourse to ‘culture’ has been only to the detriment of political action.4 The new initiatives within Israel that I discussed briefly in the last chapter might well have been considered under the heading of ‘Dialogue’. What I will be discussing here, however, is a somewhat different configuration. It involves a broader theoretical perspective in which musical performances can be considered within recent debates about culture and power. One starting point will be the division between music and politics that I identified in the previous chapter. This is, of course, far from new. Western classical music’s function has often been to facilitate an escape from material existence. Said described the arts in general as existing ‘intensely in a state of unreconciled opposition to the depredations of daily life, the uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor’.5 Elsewhere, he expressed a similar perspective on musical performance specifically, which he understood not only as ‘a uniquely endowed site’ but also as a ‘separate status and place’.6 Such ‘unreconciled opposition’ and ‘separateness’ is striking in today’s context of cultural conciliation efforts, for it seems to establish a challenging distance between the world of art and a world needing to change through art. Yet the distance supports one of the key ways in which music has entered cultural conciliation programmes, namely through its projection of utopia in performance. I suggest in what follows that such performances of utopia are forms of simulacra, and, as such, strive to be part of an economy that promotes what Baudrillard calls hyperreality.7 My account does not follow Baudrillard into the nihilistic endpoint of some of his claims, in which cultural

2

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4

For a recent discussion of international peace-building strategies and theories about their failures, see Autesserre 2010: 14–23. ‘The Anna Lindh Foundation: An Actor dialogue in the Euro-Mediterranean space’, www.euromedalex.org/sites/default/files/ALF.pdf 5 6 7 Steigerwald 2004. Said 2004: 63. Said 1991: xvi. Baudrillard 1983a.

Dialogue

meaning has all but evaporated.8 Rather, I point to ways in which performances retain a capacity to manipulate and remain, indeed, connected to plays of power: we simply need to look for changing relationships between power, representation and materiality. I argue that utopian performances are ‘sold’ as representations of a better reality, but tend merely to evoke elements of reality that are decontextualised and are incorporated into reproducible (and marketable) models. The discourses surrounding them afford particular frames of understanding, including those of cultural conciliation. In consequence, they seem on the surface to have value and utility. On closer inspection, however, such performances seem to bypass the forms of value that can be measured on the ground – and this undermines their utility rather fundamentally. One intriguing point about the export of such performances to Palestine is the jarring effect that they may have there. In 2005 a commentator complained that Barenboim had confused whether Palestinians wanted a symphony or a homeland, for instance.9 The remark articulates a rebuttal of the decontextualised model of a symphony (as a European fantasy of harmony), and a determination not to be taken in by the mediatic circulation of marketable images. As we will see, however, the ways in which Palestinians appropriate the potential of image circulation are also striking. On one level, these reinforce Jameson’s thesis that the global spread of simulacra is both part and parcel of contemporary imperialism. But on another, they make us look beyond it – the simulacra of Western classical music are not only signs of foreign imposition, but resources for Palestinian self-definition. The strength of Jameson’s analysis lies in its attention to economic forces, and the latter’s tendency to subsume culture. But his analysis neglects the social dimensions within which cultural economic negotiations take place.10 The varied social contexts of musical performances diversify their already manifold interpretational possibilities, because transmission both creates and interrupts the production of meaning. Thus for the performance of musical utopia – simulations of ‘happiness’ as understood by certain groups in certain places – the question may be whether the performance is compatible with the (imaginary ‘happiness’

8 9

10

See Baudrillard 1983b. This comparison was made by As’ad AbuKhalil in response to Barenboim’s expression of respect for Israel in the San Francisco Chronicle. See his blog at http://angryarab.net/2005/09/09/ Featherstone 2000: 199.

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in) sites where it is observed.11 Or, in the practical terms addressed here, the question is whether the ideals of foreign concert promoters are in tune with – or even in ‘dialogue’ with – the ideals of residents. ‘Dialogue’, in this context, frequently refers to the controlling of images and their relationships to actuality, rather than work towards changing the ‘unequal power relationships’ that are of putative concern. So in this chapter I address ways in which concerts become sites of definition and masking, and consider the resources that Palestinians have for contributing to the contest. I hope, by the end of the chapter, to have suggested a way of grasping the essential incompatibility of the Western simulacra with the lived world on the West Bank.

Concerts as simulacra To introduce the idea of concert ‘simulation’, I turn first to a project run by the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra and described in its own website history. It consisted of a series of concerts involving a range of traditions, developing in consequence of ‘unprecedented optimism’ in the nation’s history directly following the Oslo Accords. It was a remarkable moment of collaboration between professional musicians, and groups of children who never usually met one another: One concert, for children of the Dheisheh Refugee Camp, was a multi-cultural, bilingual encounter full of good will and fun, featuring the IPO percussion section and an ensemble of Arab musicians from Nazareth. The finale of the concert was a joint performance of Tico-Tico; Arab and Jewish musicians jamming with the children.12

Another concert in the same series focused on Western classical music but still drew children together who were otherwise divided: Zubin Mehta was asked to lead the IPO in a historic concert bringing Palestinian and Jewish children together in the concert hall. Orchestra members shuttled between Bethlehem in the Palestinian Authority and Beit Shemesh, a typical Israeli development town, to prepare 500 youngsters for an orchestra concert. Finding ‘neutral territory’ for children from Dehesche [sic], a refugee camp, and Beit Shemesh was not an easy task, but when Mehta finally brought the baton down 11 12

I discuss this in the context of musical utopias in Beckles Willson 2009b. Peter Marck, ‘A Teenager at the Philharmonic’, 1 December 2009. www.ipo.co.il/eng/Series/ Backstage/Articles,123.aspx

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in Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony at the Jerusalem YMCA, 500 children had an unforgettable experience.13

Despite the warm description, the estranged, simulated dimension of these concerts is pronounced. According to the IPO text about the second concert, the organisers chose the ‘YMCA’ in West Jerusalem because it represented ‘neutral territory’. Presumably this means a place in Israel not directly expressive of Jewish or Israeli identity, but ‘neutral’ erases a complex history. The YMCA began as a British establishment, and a report on the Buildings’ ‘Service of Dedication’ in 1933 reveals ways in which this could be expressed musically at that time. To be sure, there is an embrace of religious diversity (perhaps a form of ‘neutrality’?), but this embrace is controlled by one religious persuasion assumed to be superior: By 2.30 p.m. on April 18th, a large number of people of various nationalities had assembled outside the main entrance of the new Y.M.C.A. buildings … While the presence of representatives of other religions reminded us that the Y.M.C.A. is the servant of Jerusalem with its three creeds, the Service of Dedication which now followed in the Auditorium was a Christian act of prayer and thanksgiving. In the Bishop’s prayer at the beginning, as in Dr. John R. Mott’s address towards the end, the note of ‘C major’ was struck, and we were left in no doubt as to the central position of the third letter in the title of the Association. The prayer beginning ‘And now, O god’ welded into one the Y.M.C.A. ‘triangle’ with the greater ‘triangle’ of the Christian Faith.14

If we follow the building’s history further, we learn that it became an important sporting, social and concert venue in the later years of the British Mandate (we observed that Sakakini’s children attended concerts there, and that the musical director was the Palestinian musician Salvador Arnita). Even later, in the very early days of Israel’s foundation, it could be understood by one Christian at least as a place where Western classical music could be heard in distinction from the political furore outside its walls. As Melkon Rose put it in his memoirs, the YMCA ‘was the centre of a musical world [in the early 1950s], its auditorium put to full use with weekly orchestral concerts and piano recitals. Many of the musicians stayed in the hostel, where I had the privilege of meeting them … It was a relief that shared interest in music and the arts could override political divisions.’15 13 14

15

‘7th Decade’. www.ipo.co.il/eng/About/History/.aspx ‘New Y.M.C.A. Buildings Service of Dedication’. [No author.] Lines of Communication, May 1933: 17. NLA: PV 4181. Melkon Rose 1993: 226.

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Yet despite Melkon Rose’s claim, it is unlikely the music truly overrode the multiple divisions. He spoke from a position of relative privilege, as an indigenous, Arab-speaking Armenian–English Christian who had training and thus opportunities to move in these professional circles. And more problematically, the warm comments in his memoirs refer to a time of ongoing Arab expulsion. Whereas before 1948 the YMCA’s members were 90 per cent Arab, by 1950 90 per cent were Jews; indeed Melkon Rose himself would soon choose to leave, moving to Amman because he saw no future for himself in Jerusalem.16 The expansion of music was in part a function and sign of that population transfer. Thus the YMCA cannot be the ‘neutral territory’ imagined by the IPO, as it is loaded with the history of the region that the IPO concert ostensibly sought to transcend. Promotion of the IPO concert in the YMCA separated out the building from its history, then, bringing it in line with the broad tendency already discussed in Chapter 6, in which there is a gulf between artistic (and conciliatory) performance and political and economic action. The function of the concert was essentially to articulate an alternative to the ‘depredations of daily life’ – to recall Said once again. Yet a further point about the decontextualising of the image-making is perhaps more pressing. The IPO had brought together children from locations that were only apparently detached. The two places are actually very problematically linked. The Israeli town Beit Shemesh was built in the 1950s in the neighbourhood of an Arab town called Beit Natif that had been destroyed and evacuated by elite forces of the Haganah, Jewish paramilitary organisation during the Mandate, in 1948.17 As for the refugee camp Dheisheh, located outside Israel beside Bethlehem on the occupied West Bank, this is one of sixty-one camps made necessary by precisely this process. It was set up in 1949 to contain Arabs from Beit Natif and about forty-five villages in the region. An extra twist in this tale comes from the fact that Beit Shemesh is one of the first ‘development towns’, established to spread urban development in Israel and house Jewish immigrants from Arab countries. In the early 1990s, moreover, it expanded to incorporate new immigrants from the former Soviet Union, indeed the 16 17

Melkon Rose 1993: 227. For quick access to detail on Beit Natif, including population statistics, size, map, and the Jewish settlements built on its land in 1958, see www.palestineremembered.com/Hebron/ Bayt-Nattif/index.html accessed 8 July 2009. The classic book on lost Palestinian villages is Khalidi 1992, which presents a detailed account of the history and contemporary site of Beit Natif (see 211ff.). The same information can be read here: www.palestine-family.net/index.php? nav=4–218&hits=20&did=2361 accessed 8 July 2009.

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resultant Ramat Beit Shemesh (Beit Shemesh Heights) was built upon the ruins of Beit Natif. Thus, whereas (non-Jewish) Arabs had been banished and remained so, Jewish Arabs and Jewish Russians were welcomed. The IPO’s bringing together of children from these two sites, then, simulated something that was radically estranged from the ethnocratic policies that otherwise characterised the region. We can turn to another utopian concert projection to reflect on a different relationship between past and present. This one is a case of European intervention, namely a concert presented in 2009 as the apotheosis of Sounding Jerusalem (an Austrian festival that we encountered in Chapter 6). Set on the open rooftops of several historic buildings in Jerusalem’s Old City, it was advertised as follows: A vision over the roofs, created by 40 young wind instrument players from Europe and the Middle East: performing a piece especially composed for this night. The young artists send a sounding message in the evening sky of Jerusalem, binding the quarters of the Old City. Music might achieve what is not yet possible on the ground: the equal participation of an ethnic, religious and cultural diversity in a peaceful and stimulating dialogue.18

Music’s transcendence is explicit in this text, but it was also implicit by association in the way the event unfolded in the city. Ticket-holders took part as if undertaking a pilgrimage, mimicking groups of singing pilgrims, parades of monks, nuns and tourist groups who regularly traverse Jerusalem’s Old City. But rather than seeking a numinous entity, their (somewhat elusive) goal was the hearing of music. They gathered initially at the German Church of the Redeemer (in the former German Evangelical colony to which Gustaf Dalman belonged), were organised into six groups, and were then led as a group by one of six volunteers, passing through the narrow streets to their allotted rooftop where the musicians, and rows of chairs, awaited them.19 The volunteers sent signals with mobile phones, and the six groups of brass players performed in sequence, partially audible to one another depending on the wind, and coordinated by organisers (and volunteers) with communication on mobile phones.

18 19

Sounding Jerusalem Festival brochure 2009. The first group climbed the tower of the Church of the Redeemer, the last group walked to the Ecce Homo convent on the Via Dolorosa and climbed to the roof (I was the guide in this case); other groups were distributed between rooftops on the Citadel Hostel at the Jaffa Gate, the Swedish Centre nearby, the Padico Building near the Damascus Gate and the Austrian Hospice.

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The music began with a fanfare-style extract from Handel’s Music for the Royal Fireworks, then moving on to more Handel, Purcell and Farnaby. Once each group had played a piece, all the groups played (simultaneously, but with staggered entries) a new work by Sidney Corbett written especially for the occasion and called Jerusalem Refrains. Described by Corbett as ‘composed echoes’, and inspired by the Muslim call to prayer that resounds from the minarets of various mosques over the Old City five times a day, it involved alternating tutti sections of slow and rapid fanfares, with some solo calls and riff-like passages. The audience members moved about trying to catch strains of ‘other’ groups in the wind. My understanding of this concert is a product of my participation within it: having had regular contact with organisers of Sounding Jerusalem in the ten days prior to the event, and becoming aware that they were shortstaffed, I offered to be an usher. In consequence, I attended one planning meeting for guides and organisers, and subsequently led one group of audience members to the roof of the Ecce Homo convent on the Via Dolorosa, and then back to the Church of the Redeemer afterwards. On the basis of this, I observed that audiences had little chance to sense ‘equal participation of an ethnic, religious and cultural diversity’, because there was no printed information about the performers or the music and they had no idea what music they were listening to. From our rooftop, moreover, there was very little to be heard from the others. Through the planning meeting, and in conversation with players after the event, I also established that the performers had not experienced the diversity or the ‘peaceful and stimulating dialogue’ either. One of the groups was to have been a student ensemble from Ramallah, for whom permits were requested from the Israeli Ministry; in fact only one received a permit and travelled to play along with his German Ramallah-based trombone teacher. Another of the groups involved musicians who played for the Israeli Defence Forces who had been recommended to the festival by a brass teacher in Tel Aviv. The other players were from Europe. But there was no full rehearsal, and the full identities of the players were not spelled out to all the participants. In essence, then, the event was a spectacular display of European ideas (and in previous years was indeed celebrated in the international media). The image-making character was yet more important when the audience groups reconvened at the Church of the Redeemer (and the two participants who had travelled from Ramallah went home). In the courtyard of this church they were greeted by the German Probst Uwe Gräwe, who expressed his gratitude to the festival and said ‘all the time we try to bring

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people together but it is much easier to separate them. You have managed to connect them in music.’ The brass players then united to play Bach, Handel and Canadian Brass’ arrangement of the traditional song Just a Closer Walk with thee, after which Hütter, the festival director, gave a speech. He explained the festival’s principles of openness, encounter and communication, its desire to reach all people of the region, challenge stereotypes and break down barriers. He went on to say that one of the musicians had talked about the freedom of birds to fly from place to place, connecting things not connected on the ground, and that the rooftop concert was the same, connecting something that was ‘not connected so far’. During the recorded soundscape that ensued (composed primarily of birdsong), musicians improvised individually on melodica, horn, cello and trumpet, and a slideshow of photographs of the Old City was projected onto four large strips of fabric suspended in the centre of the courtyard, which rippled gently in the breeze. The photos began with images of rooftops, then showed Orthodox Jewish children, adults, the Wailing Wall, moving on to Arabs selling fruits, street scenes, tourists, nuns and much more. At the end, a set of violins emerged at the bottom of the projection, and moved up to reveal strings that tied them together, all held by the director, who was the final image before he faded away. This closing scene provides a particularly stark example of the way that European religious sentiment can merge with European musical simulacra at the turn of the twenty-first century. For many tourists it may have been a moving occasion, and was at the very least an entertaining piece of musical theatre, a living installation in the Holy City. Perhaps some of them used it as a moment of private prayer for reconciliation in the region. But the event itself was firmly detached from that process, was essentially an externally arranged display of European dreams. The European concert organiser booked musicians, the European photographer framed the local people with his powerful long-distance lens and then designed a sequence to portray the European director as a magical puppeteer; the European provost hosted the musicians and the photographic display in the European Church; the European musicians played European and American music of their choice and then improvised freely. Jerusalem, then, was a beautiful site of European fantasy, and residents were present as a backdrop and photographic display. These two examples can be complemented by a third, with which they are each in tremendous friction. This is the image-making of the National Conservatory, as rendered legible in its concert promotion and reportage. The following extracts are taken from newsletters published in 2001 and

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2002. It is worth noting that the Ford Foundation, which sponsored some of the concerts mentioned, provided $20,000 for what its annual report described as ‘a series of concerts by Palestinian musicians in communities affected by the recent violent clashes in the West Bank’.20 Whereas Ford refrained from mentioning the nature of the clashes or their causes (thus maintaining a division between politics and music), the National Conservatory used a more explicit vocabulary in one of their reports: In the present painful circumstances of violence and anxiety in our Palestinian society due to the continuing occupation, the NCM has taken it upon itself to plan several activities as a form of artistic expression and in solidarity with the victims of the ongoing Aqsa Intifada … The first [concert] series, entitled ‘Singing Wounds’ took place in Ramallah … and the second entitled ‘May Music Stop the Bombs’ was dedicated especially to the victims of the bombardment and was organized in areas which have been attacked in Ramallah, Bethlehem and Beit Jala … As a response of an NCM appeal made on 01 October 2000, Ford Foundation has responded positively by allocating a fund in order to enable the NCM to organize its concert series dedicated to the victims of the Intifada.21

Another report stated: The National Conservatory of Music started the Spring Intifada Series in March 2001 under the slogan ‘Let the Music Break the Siege’ and continued until mid-July in Jerusalem, Ramallah and Bethlehem, with the participation of Palestinian and international musicians, as well as recently established local Palestinian groups such as ‘The Zaradeesh Choir’ and ‘Nawa’, an Oriental music ensemble. In cooperation with the French Consulate General, the NCM also hosted the famous French pianist Miguel Astrela … Karloma, an ensemble of four professional musicians working at the NCM, performed in Jerusalem at the French Cultural Center, and as per the request of the Consul General of Belgium, Mr. Leo Daes, the students of the Oriental music department performed at the Belgian Consulate in Jerusalem on Belgium’s National Day.22

These reports construct the role of the National Conservatory as part of a profoundly traumatised and indeed victimised society. The concerts appear to encourage solidarity and hope among Palestinians and their locations – a range of Palestinian locations subjected to non-Palestinian attack 20 21

22

Ford Foundation Annual Report 2001: 168. ‘Concerts’ and ‘Emergency Support to Music’, in Newsletter No. 1, The National Conservatory of Music, June 2001: 2. ‘The Spring Concert Series’, in Newsletter No. 2, The National Conservatory of Music, June 2002: 2.

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including Jerusalem – affirm Palestinian agency in those contested places. The reports also affirm international networks, linking Palestinian musicians on the one hand, and the Ford Foundation, the French consulate, a French performer and the Belgian consulate on the other. Indeed the reports themselves construct the musicians as sought-after and welcomed by Western foreign nationals. Most importantly, the reports are inclusive – they incorporate the ‘depredations of daily life’ into the space of the concert itself – and are thus at odds with the prevailing notion that music’s function is the projection of something firmly separate from that, and indeed from the political situation more broadly. This distinction, between the desire to keep them separate and the wish to expose their relationship, is perhaps the most crucial element at the interface between foreign and Palestinian-led operations. When German music teacher AC came to the region in 2003, she brought what she considered desirable, and what she characterised in a 2007 interview as ‘vague ideas about peace projects’. This, she observed with hindsight, had been a mistake, a product of having ‘had no idea how strong the anti-Israeli sentiment was’. Moreover, having attempted – unsuccessfully – to draw Palestinians into working for musical ‘peace’, which she wished to understand symbolically rather than politically, she found herself participating in a symbolic projection that she herself could not stomach. The occasion was a children’s concert in which she was conductor, and the programmes printed by the National Conservatory expressed hope that the orchestra would play in ‘the liberated city of Jerusalem’ in the future.23 The implications of this for AC – namely the expulsion of Israelis – were extremely problematic. A further concert in which she was involved was dedicated to Arab prisoners in Israel. This, again, was for her ‘too political’. From one perspective, the discord between AC and the National Conservatory seems to be about symbolic projections. The symbols of each implied political goals: AC would have been happy with a ‘peace’ project, whereas the National Conservatory sought a re-Arabisation of Jerusalem, or a protest about (and ultimately the release of) Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails. However, the matter is not only symbolic. Rather, it should be understood in terms of material and social history. By the time AC arrived in the region, after the second Intifada had commenced, few believed in ‘peace’ initiatives for very specific reasons. One decade after Oslo, Palestinians had been in receipt of cultural ‘peace’

23

Interview, Nazareth, 3 January 2007.

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initiatives for some years, but these had not been accompanied by political change, military withdrawal or material improvements. This matter emerged in an article by Ben Ze’ev published in Israel’s daily newspaper Haaretz in 2004, in which the Palestinian National Conservatory’s flute teacher and academic director is quoted at some length: When the occupation is over and people can relate to one another as equals and talk as equals it will be possible to do things together, and that will be wonderful. We are all hoping for this. As individuals, and not officially, of course there is no problem with making contact, and in any case the intentions of those who want to initiate such contacts are very important. Putting a concert under the heading ‘Concert for Peace’, for example, is impossible: How can there be ‘peace’ inside an occupation?24

It is worth recalling Steigerwald’s thesis that political investments in ‘culture’ have led to a decline in political action. And we might also invoke Baudrillard’s argument that the rise of disconnected simulacra has been coupled with the expansion of a consumer culture characterised by passivity.25 The simulated utopias of Palestine had become hollow for many, because cultural projects had been recognised as mechanisms for select individuals and institutions to raise money.26 By simulating a harmonious situation, potential participants felt at risk of perpetuating the growing confusion between reality and simulation and – worst of all – feeding the political stasis thereby.

Reading simulacra Said’s reading of Verdi’s Aïda attempted a ‘contrapuntal’ strategy, reflecting beyond plot, character and genre to consider the cultural setting of the work’s commission and premiere. The novelty of Said’s argument is that the opera emerges ‘not so much about but of imperial domination’, because it was written for Egypt, was imported to Cairo and was based on the European discipline of Egyptology.27 It was a projection of Egypt for Egypt, then, and even the opera house built to present the Italian

24 25 26

27

Heather Bursheh, quoted in Ben Ze’ev 2004a. Baudrillard 1990: 35ff.; Steigerwald 2004. Had players from Ramallah known that they were playing with members of the Israel Defense Forces on the roofs of Jerusalem’s Old City, it is likely that fewer would have been prepared to perform. Said 1994: 138.

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novelty was part of an extravagant, but superficial, European-style modernisation of Cairo.28 A comparable reading might be made of an event in 2009, when the Barenboim-Said Foundation funded the performance of an opera for children in Ramallah.29 The libretto was written by Paula Fünfeck (a German) on the basis of an Arab folk tale that a long-standing employee of the Barenboim-Said Foundation, Anna-Sophie Brüning (a German), had located in a German compilation. Brüning, with the support of the Fundación Vizcaina Aguirre in Spain, assembled the music from manuscript fragments by Spanish composer Juan Crisóstomo Arriaga (1806–26). The libretto was then translated into colloquial local Arabic and put to the music. The title was The Sultana of Cadiz. A piece of music for ‘ūd was inserted at some stage, prior to the performance in Ramallah’s Cultural Palace, where performing forces included a Palestinian children’s chorus and orchestra (reinforced by certain local teachers and Spanish musicians flown in for the occasion), and Palestinian singers (also flown in from homes abroad), actors, producers and designers. The opera’s ‘performance’ was not limited to Ramallah, however. Rather, it also featured in a short documentary on German television channel Arte, and a promotional DVD produced by the publishers Boosey & Hawkes. The rationale for the opera as presented in these spaces was an elaboration of the foundation’s ideals outlined in Chapter 6 above, namely European ideas about coexistence, and a celebration of Andalusia’s Golden Age. As such, the project comes in line with Aïda in Egypt (and its provision of employment for a German playwright and a German musician reinforces that point): it was a projection of a better situation for the region (drawn from the ancient past). As Brüning explained in her ‘Repertoire Note’ for the publisher: ‘Arriaga lends our piece the so very important Spanish element. Even though the music comes from a later epoch, it symbolizes the land in which until the end of the fifteenth century the three

28

29

A number of scholars have attempted to ‘rescue’ the opera from Said’s contrapuntal weave, returning the debate to the composer’s own supposed intention, and to plot, character and genre. Locke 2005; Robinson 1993. Some of their insights may be more subtle than those offered hitherto, but by returning to the inner stage, they defuse the radical potential of Said’s broader perspective. More recently, indeed, Guarracino 2010 demonstrates how Said’s exploration of the Egyptian context for Aida can be expanded. The initial sum in the budget was €100,000. Thanks to Muriel Páez Rasmussen, Director General of the Barenboim-Said Foundation, for providing me with this information.

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monotheistic civilizations coexisted peacefully and in dialogue with one another. A dialogue that is largely missing today more than ever before.’30 The similarity with Aïda notwithstanding, what is so striking about this summary is how extraordinarily difficult it is to reconcile it with Arriaga, or his music. Even setting aside the idealised presentation of Muslim Spain, Arriaga’s distance from that time – several centuries – is jarring. Stylistically, moreover, his music is in line with late eighteenth-century Central European repertoires and (in the selection for this opera at least) is free from ‘Oriental’ exoticisms that flavoured some classical musics in that period, which might just have made the opera’s promotion more persuasive. In fact, the interpolation on the solo ‘ūd created a musical moment for Ramallah that was otherwise completely absent (the published score makes no reference to ‘ūd playing). I read the gap between the opera’s promotion and its content as another sign of our age of simulacra to add to the concerts discussed above. In Baudrillard’s and Jameson’s visions of postmodernity, we recall, there has been a profound breakdown between the imaginary and the real: the only meaning of signs is their connection with the order of signs. The opera is brought into existence through discourses of cultural conciliation and intercultural dialogue, which radically mystify its real (financial, political) relationship with the material world, and even fail – in this case – to refer to the musical style itself. Nevertheless, the matter is more complicated than it may first seem, because actors are by no means unaware of the mystification in which they participate; nor indeed do they adhere to one particular type of mystification in order to make their contributions. For example, even having promoted the Spanish inspiration and its relevance to the contemporary situation, Brüning told an Israeli journalist in interview that for her personally, the really important thing was getting the children on the stage to act and sing, and that it really had nothing to do with politics.31 She revealed, then, a participation in two parallel cultural discourses – one to do with cultural conciliation, and the other to do with providing nonpolitical projects for children. What I hope to show in the following two subsections is that a range of actors treated the opera with distinct, but interrelated, strategies of

30

31

‘de Arriaga – Brüning. Die Sultana von Cádiz (arr.2008)’, www.boosey.com/pages/opera/ moredetails.asp?musicid=55430 Conversation with author and Noam Ben Ze’ev. Ramallah, June 2009. Thanks to Ben Ze’ev and Brüning for allowing me to listen in.

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mystification. I suggest that they too evince the space that Baudrillard evokes with his theories of simulation and hyperreality. From all perspectives, the opera is like a vacuous space around which claims can float.

A view from Ramallah The first sign of Ramallah’s mystification of the opera is provision of a new title, namely The Story within the Tale.32 This title provides an accurate indication of the structure of the libretto, but it effectively masks the Orientalist framework of the published version (Boosey & Hawkes’ promotion of which was framed by images of decorative Islamic archways, symbols of Andalucia).33 Notwithstanding that adaptation, there were multiple objections to the use of Ramallah for a staging of a European rewrite of an Arabic tale that would benefit employees of the BarenboimSaid Foundation, promote the foundation elsewhere and engage a foreign publishing house. A further element of provocation for local people was the involvement of Barenboim, about whom opinion had sunk very low at the time. A particular irritant had been an article he had published in the online edition of the UK’s Guardian newspaper six months earlier, which was understood by Palestinians as a justification of Israel’s attack on Gaza in 2009 in the name of ‘self-defence’.34 In consequence, in the months leading up to the opera’s scheduled performance, the Ramallah City Council came under pressure from the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) to obstruct the event by refusing to rent the Cultural Palace to the Barenboim-Said Foundation. The charge made, and reported to Haaretz, was that the Barenboim-Said Foundation took no position on the occupation, and preferred to promote coexistence through music, thus giving ‘a 32

33

34

Adham Nu‘man, volunteer stage hand, stated that he himself had proposed the new title. Interview with the author, Ramallah, 18 July 2009. E-flier, ‘Die Sultana von Cadiz’. I am grateful to Jens Luckwaldt, of Boosey & Hawkes in Berlin, for providing me with this. Hass 2009. Barenboim had placed himself outside the conflict in the article, and constructed Israel and the Palestinians as two squabbling sides requiring ‘King Solomon’s wisdom’ to sort them out. The biblical perspective emerges immediately in his opening paragraph, which not only constructs the region as battleground (Israel and Hamas must renounce violence), but also requests that ‘the world … acknowledge that this conflict is unlike any other in history’. He suggests that the difference was so immense between this territorial conflict and any other, that ‘neither diplomacy nor military action can resolve’ it. The implication is that Israelis and Palestinians are not people with normal human political and military ambitions, then, because they lie beyond these fields. www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jan/01/israel-gazabombings-hamas

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normal image to a very abnormal, colonial situation’.35 We will return to PACBI in more detail below, but three performances of the opera did take place. This was effectively because it was redefined in more ways than the new title reveals. Just as Said demonstrated the close involvement of Egyptians in the production of Aïda in Cairo, the performances in Ramallah were demonstrably dependent on local participation. This was not just a matter of local expertise; rather, it concerned forces that worked against the moves towards obstruction. Two very distinct types of local force can be grasped from an article published in Israel.36 The first is structural, and perhaps rather obvious, falling in line with local elite involvement with imperial intervention (and indeed Aïda once again). Although the City Council did take PACBI’s line and vote against the rental agreement, it was subsequently pressurised by several other groups, including the office of the Palestinian President, Mahmoud Abbas. This is one reason that the Cultural Palace was made available and the performances went ahead. Plainly the opera had become a player in the local political field and certain parties had it in their interest to push it forward. Rather than an Orientalist fantasy benefiting only foreigners, then, it had been accepted as useful to certain Palestinians. There seems to be another factor to consider, however. The final decision about the Cultural Palace was reached only after rehearsals had been underway for a long time, and children had been involved in the project for several months. By that time, local involvement and investment was such that families of children who were performing had come to support it. Preventing the opera from happening had come to represent a destructive move: it would deny children the opportunities available to them and put all their work to waste.37 Alongside party political agendas, then, and alongside one of the most powerful political offices in Palestine, we find that the group that is generally considered the least powerful in society – children – had an impact on the way the project was managed and indeed understood. Rather than merely a foreign intervention, it was seen as an opportunity for Palestinian children. The centrality of the children came through equally strongly from one of my informants in Ramallah, albeit from a different perspective. Adham Nu‘man, volunteer stage hand, expressed his frustration that the presence

35

Hass 2009.

36

Hass 2009.

37

Hass 2009.

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of children was one of the things that prevented people from thinking or speaking about the political implications of what they were actually doing. From his perspective, the children had two effects, one stemming from their work onstage, and another that was visible in the lack of firm action by the adults around them: They [the kids] broke the stick and it became a jelly. The kids have a major role in the opera. They’ve spent a lot of time and effort on this. … They are there and they want to do this in a way, some of them. I don’t want them to be shocked by their first experience of theatre. It’s hard, hard and they really make it. They study it. But establishments, they have policies to allow them to have an element which is duplicated. There is the kids, the one who have the role. Then there is a duplicate role. It’s the jelly.38

This dimension of the children’s involvement throws a particularly ironic light on Brüning’s statement, according to which the point was getting the children on the stage to act and sing, rather than do anything political. That might have seemed a deliberate strategy to reassure the Israeli press that her work was not supposed to be antagonistic to Israel. But the dichotomy between children and politics seems here to be false. Even while the presence of children can be experienced as beneficial and remote from politics, that presence is highly political. By apparently smothering the political, they facilitated (political) action. Nu‘man went on to state explicitly that nobody had any sympathy for the production itself, but they went along with it for the children: ‘people support the thing because it’s the kids. Everyone thought the opera was s**t.’39 He articulated thereby the opera’s transformation and its strategic masking, moves apparently made in the interest of Palestinians.

A view from Tel Aviv A review of the opera by Benny Ziffer, published in Israel’s Haaretz, is similarly dismissive of the opera itself, but creates instead a particular image of Ramallah. This too belongs in the world of the simulacrum, and to a yet more striking extent. In his closing paragraph, Ziffer writes that the event had afforded him the opportunity to look outside his own world: he had ‘a nice trip’, without which he would not have ‘left his bubble’ and remembered what one could do in Ramallah, namely normal things such as walk on 38 39

Adham Nu‘man, volunteer stage hand. Interview with the author, Ramallah, 18 July 2009. Adham Nu‘man, volunteer stage hand. Interview with the author, Ramallah, 18 July 2009.

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the streets, stand in the square, or sit in a cafe and talk about the situation. Yet in the end he conjures all this as something purely ephemeral: One day the army came and wrecked all the offices, smashing all the computers, down to the very last one. A bubble that vanishes in a single puff.40

The shocking ephemerality evoked here is connected to ‘army’ action that can only refer to Israel. Yet the ‘bubble’ seems in itself so momentary that we are left in limbo, suddenly bereft of what was a simulated image world, not the world of politics and military action. Inevitably, representations of the West Bank in the Israeli press are profoundly affected by the ongoing occupation. Scholars have theorised the consequences with a range of means, including Gitlin’s ‘media frame’ theory and state power, social psychological approaches to fear, and through the analysis of a range of editorial practices.41 Such research has been in general highly critical, going so far as to argue that the press fosters hatred and enmity, and has routinised the situation vis-à-vis the Palestinians and dampened public morale, dissuading readers from taking seriously the potential for positive change.42 Daniel Dor discerns that even while negotiations were underway between state leaders, the media presented the situation as an ‘intractable conflict’. The narrative that consolidated during 2000, according to which everything had been attempted by Israel but Palestinians were simply ‘unripe for peace’, actually ‘contribute[d] to the intractability of the conflict’.43 Aside from the free newspaper Yisrael Hayom, the three major daily newspapers (all privately owned) are Yediot Ahronot, Maariv and Haaretz, the first of which is the most widely read in Israel, estimated in 2010 as reaching 34.9 per cent of Israeli newspaper readers.44 Both Yediot Ahronot and Maariv are generally placed in the category of ‘populist’, whereas Haaretz is understood in Israel as an elite paper, enjoyed by only a portion

40 41

42

43 44

Ziffer 2009. For examples of this work, see Bar-Tal 2000; Bar-Tal and Teichman 2005; Cohen and Wolfsfeld 1993; Dor 2004, 2005; Wolfsfeld 2004. Roeh and Nir 1993; Wolfsfeld, Frosch and Awabdy 2008. See also Evans 2011 for an analysis of how the Israeli media enlarges sectarian divisions. Dor 2004: 157, vii. See ‘Israel – English- and Hebrew-language Media Guide’, Open Source Centre, at www.fas.org/ irp/dni/osc/israelmedia.pdf. Caspi and Limor provide very detailed and valuable discussion about the readerships of the three papers mentioned here, even while their actual data is somewhat out of date. They also state that newspapers do not allow external auditing, often relying instead on newspapers’ own claims, so that all figures have an element of approximation. Caspi and Limor 1998: 84.

Dialogue

of the most highly educated population groups (even while having an influence beyond its circulation by dint of its prestige).45 Its weekday readership was estimated as 6.6 per cent of Israeli newspaper readers in 2010, and it is the only newspaper that publishes articles offering certain Palestinian perspectives on the situation.46 It also has an English-language edition which is read worldwide, but this has a different editorial team and a very different agenda from the Hebrew edition; Dor argues it is in effect a different newspaper.47 That the Hebrew edition relegates Palestinian perspectives to the back pages may be seen as a combined reflection of readers’ interests (minimal with respect to Palestinians), and the conformist style of journalism that recent writers have criticised.48 Although research into media strategies has focused on the reportage of conflict, the climate it reveals may be one explanation for the humorous style of Ziffer’s article on the opera. It appeared in his weekly column ‘Zifferland’, a name that not only intimates the personal style he has developed for it, but also the parodist style of the article, one that is unmistakably designed to entertain. At the outset, an imaginary scenario polarises one world (Tel Aviv) from another (Ramallah). Tel Aviv is characterised by a notable touring opera production from Europe, whereas Ramallah seems to be aspiring to be the place of opera: The man under his vine in the Ramallah bubble phoned the man under his fig tree in the Tel Aviv bubble and invited him to come to the opera that evening. ‘What? Opera in Ramallah?’ asked the man in the Tel Aviv bubble. And as the crème-dela-creme of Tel Aviv society thronged to the Center for the Performing Arts box office to get tickets for the premiere of La Scala Milano’s production of ‘Aida’, he mounted his chariot and – yallah – dashed off to Ramallah.49

Moving on, Ziffer draws a new polarity, this one between Europe and Ramallah: What distinguishes opera in Ramallah from opera in, say, Vienna, is that in Vienna one does not have to pass the infernal baptism of the Qalandiyah checkpoint. A symphony

45 46

47

48

Caspi and Limor 1999: 79–80; Dor 2005: 108–9; Roeh and Nir 1993: 178. See ‘Israel – English- and Hebrew-language Media Guide’, Open Source Centre, at www.fas.org/ irp/dni/osc/israelmedia.pdf Dor 2005: 111–12, endnote 5. Amira Hass and Gideon Levy are the most charismatic and prominent writers on the Palestinians, publishing regularly in Haaretz. Their articles have been collected in volumes published in English. See, for instance, Hass 1999, 2003; Levy 2010. Since the Oslo Accords, music critic Noam Ben Ze’ev has published regularly on music among Palestinians. 49 Dor 2004: 168; Dor 2005: 111, endnote 5. Ziffer 2009.

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for tin, car horns and perspiration mixed with dust and a chorus of human groans of a people returning home from a day’s work and forced to squeeze through a single narrow gate; trucks, buses, mini-buses and vans, as well as fancy jeeps.50

This is in fact a literary device. The only way that ‘opera in Ramallah’ involves this Israeli checkpoint (which is after all some miles away) is if one travels from Israel (and this article did not appear in Ha’aretz’ English edition). The checkpoint is in the text, then, to characterise Ziffer’s journey for the fearful Israeli reader, and ultimately to portray it as one of unpleasantness and even danger. He notes, indeed, that the border sports a warning sign to him that ‘traveling in Area A is tantamount to a criminal offense’, going on to say that ‘for art’s sake I am prepared to do something criminal’. This, too, is a device for the imagination of the Israeli reader, for as a journalist he is entitled to apply to the army for a pass that enables him to pass the checkpoint legally. Moving on, the characterisation of Ramallah continues to be comparative, now through reference to the Palestinian middle class, which emerges unfavourably in the light of the population of Israel. The ‘level’ of the opera was poor, and the sense of an ‘end-of-year school play’ dominant. In Israel, Ziffer claims: they would already have demanded and created a commission of inquiry to determine where the huge amounts of European money invested in such a childish venture had disappeared. Oh, that corrupt Palestinian elite. That smug bourgeoisie, which instead of caring for its anguished brethren throws resources at a thing like this!

On one level, Ziffer’s notion of a ‘corrupt Palestinian elite’ may seem connected to the world of politics and finance. It echoes widespread observations that the NGO sector in the Occupied Territories came increasingly, following Oslo, to provide privileged employment to a small cadre of the population, and that this operated increasingly remotely from (and at cost to) the bulk of the population.51 But of course this has little to do with the opera that is the basis for Ziffer’s text. Although some Palestinian artists did benefit, the leading singers were Palestinians brought in from outside the region, and were not members of the local elite cadres.52 We have already noted the benefits to two German citizens and the involvement of a European publishing house. And we know that the Andalusian government

50 51 52

Ziffer 2009. For discussion of this matter see Hammami 2000; Hanafi & Tabar 2005. The two lead singers were Enas Massalha, a Palestinian born in Israel but living in Berlin, and Marwan Shamiyeh, a Palestinian born in Kuwait who grew up there and in England, and who was living in Erfurt in 2009.

Dialogue

had underwritten the opera in consequence of its collaboration with Daniel Barenboim (an Israeli), within a rolling programme without great financial benefits to Palestinians on the ground. Ziffer’s account masks European fiscal arrangements over Palestine by invoking a different matter altogether. One way of reading Ziffer’s text is to see it as the account of a journey to a potential place of opera, and indeed, by extension, to a potential nation state. The music critic for Haaretz constructed it on such terms, but much more affirmatively: for Ben Ze’ev it was the ‘first’ opera for Palestine.53 But Ziffer’s point of arrival – opera in Ramallah – is allowed to appear only in order that it can also disappear. Even the Palestinians’ show of strength emerges towards the end as children at play – without reflection on the hierarchies of authority in a city under occupation. And an apparent gesture of hospitality is observed in passing without any reflection on its possible meaning: the security man at the gate [of the Cultural Palace], who walked around with his weapon drawn as though it were a toy gun, invited … the photographer who accompanied me to coffee on the house.

This final gesture of a parodist tone to invoke the security man’s wielding of apparent toys may well intimate that Palestinians are not yet really grown up. And if they aren’t grown up enough to hold guns properly and put on an opera successfully, then perhaps they can’t be grown up enough for anything else. Not opera and not politics – or as Dor has argued, not ‘peace’. Hence their disappearance in a puff of smoke? Ziffer’s text is doubtless legible in a range of ways, but its relationship to Orientalist strategies, indeed the types of comparative, engaged strategies that I discussed in ‘Revelation’ and ‘Distinction’ above, is unmistakable. So too is the distorted representation of the relationships of power that underpin the opera, and Ziffer’s journey to it. The opera was an empty sign. But it could trigger not only the articulation of a dichotomy between Israel and Palestine, but a situation in which Palestine itself – not just the opera – could be rendered a mere simulation.

On the borders of performance The discussion of Ziffer’s journey to Ramallah introduces the question of movement in the region. Movement – and its lack – is decided by a military regime from Israel, is controlled by fixed and flying checkpoints, 53

Ben Ze’ev 2009a.

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road blocks and borders and is of immense concern to both foreigners and locals. Not only is the control of borders a key factor in shaping ‘dialogue’, moreover, but border crossings – successful and unsuccessful – have themselves become themes within musical conciliation projects. One of the most widely circulated images of border crossing is the 2005 performance, by the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, in Ramallah. I address this mediatised performance below, before proceeding to some examples in which border crossings (and indeed non-crossings) take different strategies. These, I suggest, articulate another border that may well not be traversable.

Transnational border crossing Founded in 1999, by Daniel Barenboim with the support of Edward W. Said, the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra brings together young Arabs, Jews and Spaniards for a workshop and concert tour every year. Its profile in the sphere of the elite international concert circuit is at the time of writing very strong, and its concerts have been broadcast internationally; but it has only been present in the Palestine region on one occasion, in 2005. As much discussed, the orchestra contains a tension between repertoire (exclusively the Western classical tradition) and marketing (as an expression of inter-cultural dialogue).54 It is partially at odds, then, with the notion of ‘dialogue’ at the head of this chapter, in which the aim is to be ‘transformative of all those participating’ and ‘the creation of new or hybrid cultural expressions/forms, new image constructions, changed behaviour patterns etc’. But the visit to Ramallah might seem to offer new possibilities. The main source for considering this event is the orchestra’s promotional double DVD, which makes the Ramallah appearance in 2005 a centrepiece, and uses as its title: ‘The Ramallah Concert’. Footage indicates that the orchestra members first heard the idea about playing in Ramallah at their workshop in 2004. This is the first real ‘dialogue’, in which we learn that going to Ramallah was a frightening prospect for Israelis, who associated the West Bank with danger; some of the Spanish players thought similarly. The second dialogue was a diplomatic one: Barenboim enlisted the support of the Spanish government for the project, and attained thereby diplomatic passports for all players. This circumvented the 54

For detailed discussion of this orchestra, see Barenboim and Cheah 2009; Beckles Willson 2009a, 2009b; Etherington 2007; Riiser 2010.

Dialogue

problem that players travelling as citizens of Israel, Syria or Lebanon would have been present on the West Bank illegally. Although the film provides this information, it is the symbolic role of music, and its place at the heart of the project, that dominate the tale, fleshed out by selected narratives of participants. Every one of these is highly emotional, whether excited by adventure, moved by the possibility of reaching a forbidden territory, overwhelmed by the musical experience, or stirred in another meaningful way. The concert itself is part of the DVD, and appears from the presentation to be both warmly welcomed by the audience and hugely enjoyed by participants. Missing from the DVD, however, is any information that would allow the viewer to sense dialogues on the ground in Ramallah, except for some brief footage of Arab members of the orchestra enjoying a little shopping and meeting locals. Rather, the landscape is present as an unhappy backdrop (and the use of plaintive Arab music as an uncredited soundscape reinforces the Orientalised ambience). Moreover, beyond comments from the officials involved – a short logistical tale from the coordinator of the Barenboim-Said Foundation in Ramallah; and official celebratory greetings from the Deputy Prime Minister Nabil Shaath and politician Mustafa Barghouti introducing the concert – there is no footage of Palestinian residents’ impressions. The film does reveal in passing that a number of the orchestral players from neighbouring Arab nations were from Palestinian families exiled from the region in 1949, and also that there was at least one Palestinian participant from Israel. Yet at no point is the question even posed as to whether there was any participation by Palestinians from the Occupied Territories. To gain a sense of the local impact and participation, then, one has to look beyond the DVD. A local press review allows us one way in, namely Maureen Clare Murphy’s article for the Lebanon-based organ The Daily Star. Murphy observed that the concert ‘was unadvertised, and only at the last minute were local photographers allowed to document the event for Palestinian papers. The concert was invitation-only.’55 She went on to observe that ‘[f]oreigners were disproportionately represented in the auditorium’. Several of my interviewees cited the recent rift between the Conservatory and the foundation as a reason for low Palestinian attendance; there was also growing sympathy for a group promoting cultural boycotts (of this more below). A substantial number of invited guests had simply chosen not to attend.

55

Murphy 2005.

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Two Palestinian testimonies can add to the picture. One is a speech by a musician from Israel given at a conference in Japan. Nizar Rohana’s summing up recalls the tension between musical utopia and reality that we encountered above. He understood the prevailing image of the orchestra in the following way: What is the meaning of the Divan Orchestra for Palestinians? Is it significant for various Palestinian institutions, and for Palestinian society? It may be a very beautiful world, but it is far from the reality in Palestine, something like a ‘show’. Palestinian people see this project like this. Palestine is still under the Israeli occupation, and the situation in Palestine, especially these days in the Gaza strip, is so hard and terrible, that we cannot accept the Divan project, because it serves more the interests of Israel. It announces Israel’s look of peace to the people in the world, while the occupation still continues. Palestinian society is dependent on foreign donations, especially European, American, and even Japanese. But these foreign donors prefer to donate their money to projects like the Divan Orchestra that shows co-operation between Israel and Palestine.56

Going on, he also discussed the appropriateness of Western classical music education in Palestine. From his text we can trace his resistance to types of utopia mediated through Western classical music and appreciate that the arrival of a symphony orchestra of Jews, Arabs and Spaniards playing Chaikovsky might well not be many West Bank residents’ dream scenario. Palestinian people feel now that they should have a chance to build their own identity, before doing this kind of project. I think it is very important for Palestinian people to study and practice their own musical heritage.57

Another testimony comes from the single player from the Occupied Territories who participated in the Divan in 2005, violist Mohammed Amr. He wrote his comments below at my request that he expand on a passing remark he made on email in 2010, which was in effect an insult about the orchestra (this had been the response to my question as to whether or not he was attending the Divan workshop that year). Our original contact harked back to 2006, when we conversed as part of my fieldwork on the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra; and I had seen him again while doing fieldwork at a workshop on the West Bank in 2008. But we had not had contact aside from this. I told him in my email message that I had spotted him on the DVD about the Ramallah concert, and had wondered why he had not been interviewed on that occasion. He responded as follows:

56

Rohana et al 2006: 124–5.

57

Rohana et al 2006: 125.

Dialogue [V]ery carefully chosen people are interviewed every time by different media … Barenboim is literally playing a chess game. During the closed debates, he decides who speaks and when, he knows the position of each and everyone during rehearsal, he decides where everyone should sit depending on the colour skin and the image and the impression that a certain combination gives the western collective subconscious, everything is studied (the teacher once asked me to move more …) to give the best impression, he decides who should appear on the camera or the DVD. This whole image looks more like a theatre piece than reality. I was banned from all interviews because I didn’t have any of the accepted profiles, because I was not ready to make such a concession.58

Amr then considered his own experiences of crossing borders in comparison with the Divan’s freedom to move. He had already told me about his journey to Spain when we first met in 2006, but he contextualised nearly four years later, in the email: The absurdity of participating at this orchestra became very obvious to me one day while leaving Ramallah to go to Jordan to take a plane to Spain to play with the Divan [in 2006]. That day I waited about 3 hours at the Qalandia checkpoint to be able to quit Ramallah, I spent those 3 hours observing the misery and the humiliation that me and my Westbankers go through. I saw the paradox, I tried to find a reason to justify myself, and I couldn’t! Later, I understood that this orchestra is a big machine to generate money through manipulation, and it’s insensitive to the complaints of one of its rare Palestinians who represents somehow the real Palestinian youth who lived through occupation. This was the end.

Amr constructed the orchestra’s appearance in Ramallah as a triumph of foreign intervention and local government action: This orchestra is like a creature that can only live in a laboratory, the goal of the Ramallah concert was to show how a coalition of powers (Israeli Palestinian and Spanish governments) can get united and transform Ramallah into a laboratory where this creature can survive, no exchange was made with Palestinian public …, what mattered was the challenge, the risk, the symbol, a purely mediatic concert; at this level it was a big success, but nothing else.

One might counter Amr’s notion of a ‘purely mediatic concert’ with a layer of the orchestra’s identity that is rarely discussed. To be sure, the event was plainly skewed away from Palestinians’ own experiences. Not only was it largely closed to the general public, but all official speeches introducing the concert were presented in English rather than Arabic (they were intended for the film cameras, not the audience). Yet it is worth placing this in the 58

Email to author, 6 August 2010.

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evolving role of the orchestra in Europe. Whereas during Said’s life it was configured as a workshop and place of dialogue between estranged players as much as a concertising venture, Barenboim has subsequently turned it into a vehicle of international media display and diplomacy. In effect, the Ramallah concert was part of a strategy to establish ‘dialogue’ elsewhere. In 2004, the year in which he first raised the idea of going to Ramallah with the orchestra, and ostensibly in an attempt to compensate for the intellectual vacuum created by the recent death of Said, Barenboim invited a panel of intellectuals to the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra’s workshop. He then had them co-author a Declaration, which called upon the German and Spanish governments to intervene in the ‘political deadlock’ between Israelis and Palestinians and to rescue them from their ‘inferno of mutual and self-destruction’.59 Subsequently, drawing on a briefing paper he had requested from one of the Symposium participants, Barenboim met with German Chancellor Schroeder and Javier Solana (High Representative for the Common and Foreign Security Policy of the European Union) to put forward some policy proposals, and two Symposium participants published related articles in the Spanish daily El Pais.60 This level of negotiation is visible on the ground in Ramallah to only a few, and cannot therefore nuance the general sense of hostility. Furthermore, the concert itself created another negative imprint, one that is probably impossible to redeem. The whole idea of the ‘Ramallah concert’, after all, is inseparable from a notion of ‘Ramallah’ as a place of danger, and simultaneously as somewhere that is difficult (or risky) to reach. We can already see the irony of this, given that Palestinians have such difficulty leaving it. The apparent difficulty and danger is developed in the DVD

59

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Those selected were Mustafa Barghouti, leader of the newly founded Palestinian National Initiative, which had just set itself up as a democratic political force in the region; Yaron Ezrahi, Professor of Political Science at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem; Felipe González Márquez, the Spanish ex-Prime Minister and socialist politician; Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies at Columbia University; Wadie Said, son of Edward Said; Raja Shehadeh, Palestinian writer; and Avi Shlaim, Professor of International Relations at the University of Oxford. Avi Shlaim’s private archive has enabled me to reconstruct the political ambitions of the Symposium members, and some of Barenboim’s subsequent attempts to shift EU policy in the Middle East. For the Declaration text, see www.danielbarenboim.com/journal_symposium2004 accessed 6 August 2006. See González 2004, and Avi Shlaim 2004. An article by Mustafa Barghouti, ‘In Search of a New Vision’, seems not to have been published in El Pais, but is preserved in English in Avi Shlaim’s personal archive. Shlaim also wrote Barenboim a briefing paper for the meeting with Schroeder. On the death of Arafat in November of the same year, Barenboim wrote an article about the political landscape and promoted Barghouti within it. See Barenboim 2004.

Dialogue

presentation well beyond the passports already discussed. Viewers observe not only that Arab players arrived in Ramallah (from Jordan) while Israeli and Spanish players were brought from Israel. They also see that Arabs were there in time to look around the town and meet local people, whereas the others were rushed in to rehearse, perform the concert and depart instantly. The impact of this is worth considering, for neither the Israelis nor the Spanish had any experience of Ramallah other than the Cultural Centre, and what they observed through the windows of their minibuses (in a military-surrounded convoy). The Cultural Centre is a recent building on a hill outside the town that was on the occasion, according to Murphy, surrounded by ‘uniformed, armed guards’. The Israeli and Spanish players had no opportunity, then, to form an impression of the place that might go beyond the one that they had prior to making the trip, and there was no hope of the ‘multi-directional’ communication process that is ostensibly characteristic of intercultural dialogue. Ramallah resident, Swedish writer Peter Lagerquist, observed that the timing had a formative impact of the event as an image. From his perspective, ‘the way the orchestra was whisked out of Ramallah immediately afterwards was comical, and also dismaying’.61 Lagerquist countered the prevailing foreign face of Ramallah by taking the opposite position, saying that there is no ‘security situation’ in Ramallah that threatens outsiders. ‘No foreign visitor has ever come to harm or been accosted here … The place fairly crawls with expats particularly in the summer and people are so used to seeing them around that no one notices.’ Lagerquist identified the event as following a historical trope: ‘what was interesting about the exit in that sense was that it fairly approximated a sort of colonial nervousness. Fear of the Kasbah/Jungle/Ghetto.’ In his reading, then, the way that the border crossing was arranged constructed Palestine as a place of such violence that the non-Arab (even the Spaniard) required military protection. In fact, the event’s celebration in the Western media is to a large extent dependent on a fearful image of ‘Ramallah’ that is particular to people who have not visited it. But this is not an image shared by the people who live there (or those who live elsewhere in the Occupied Territories, even probably those in most of the Arab world). So the crossing into Ramallah, the very underpinning of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra’s documentary film, is incongruous to local residents (especially those who are in

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Peter Lagerquist. Email to author, December 2005.

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regular receipt of foreign aid workers and their projects, who constantly cross the border that they themselves cannot cross). For them, the imagemaking is bound to fail.

Turning the mirror round That is not to say, however, that ‘Kasbah’ representations are entirely useless to Palestinians; but the latter use them in (musical) representations of borders with Israel in a different way. The confluence can illustrate how the insider-outsider dichotomy – while a dominant feature in so many ways – is an inadequate model for considering what is going on culturally, simply because the actors occupy so many of the same spaces and employ so many of the same strategies. Locals strive very hard to involve themselves in both local and international arenas of agenda setting. The opening scene of Al Kamandjâti’s promotional DVD provides an example. It is set at Qalandia, the main Israeli border crossing leading to the West Bank to the North of Jerusalem, at which a group of European musicians has arrived and started making music right beside the checkpoint. Israeli guards wielding machine guns respond officiously and try to move them on, but Abu Redwan intervenes. Playing with the trope of the civilised man among barbarians (already emerging in his biography discussed in Chapter 6), he states that the clarinet is ‘not a gun’. This line, moreover, was to become the title of his DVD. A similar narrative can be traced in reportage of Abu Redwan’s inclusion of a concert in Gaza within his Baroque Festival 2007. The European guests invited had permits to enter, but Abu Redwan himself did not, a fact that emerged only at the border. The Europeans opted not to enter Gaza without Abu Redwan, and French diplomacy eventually enabled them all to travel back to Ramallah. One of the UK-based musicians wrote an account of the events on his personal blog, and Freemuse, the World Forum on Music and Censorship, reported the happening on its website, revealing that it had been followed up not only by a press conference in Ramallah, but also in Berlin, where Barenboim, ‘one of the backers of the festival, expressed his deep dismay at a press conference’.62 Whether Abu Redwan ever had a real chance of getting into Gaza is moot. The real performance, however, was not a concert in Gaza. It was European musicians and European musical funding being blocked from giving a concert 62

Simon Hewitt Jones. www.simonhewittjones.com/blog and www.freemuse.org/sw23638.asp

Dialogue

with Abu Redwan in Gaza. The premise that makes the story powerful is not far from the ethos of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, namely that music should transcend politics and break down barriers. But here it is used as a platform on which to reveal that the barriers are cruelly resistant: rather than a staged scene of utopia, we get a certain picture of material realities. In a different, but related type of Palestinian action in connection with borders, there is a strategy to counter ineffectual simulations of inter-ethnic union by using them as bargaining tools for real change. In the years following Oslo, the National Conservatory received various offers of finance from Israeli sources, one of which was an extravagant grant to stage a concert in the hall of the Notre Dame of Jerusalem Center (in West Jerusalem). The grant was wildly in excess of the annual budget of the Conservatory, but its terms dictated a performed collaboration between Israelis and Palestinians. A response constructed by faculty-member Khaled Jubran was that the Conservatory would be pleased to take part in the concert, so long as all its students were able to attend. That would entail, he explained, opening all the checkpoints just for that one day (in and around the West Bank and Gaza). No more was heard from the sponsors.63 Perhaps Jubran’s response – a negotiating position that took the real physical situation of Palestinian students into account – provoked embarrassment or irritation among the potential sponsors. As we have already grasped, the realities of Palestinians’ lives, and the checkpoint apparatus surrounding their homes, are kept entirely separate from discourses and performances of conciliation. Moreover, professional concerns may be at stake, including the maintenance of fiscal prosperity. A musician from the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra complained to me in an interview in 2009 that attempts to work with Palestinians on the West Bank had proved difficult because the latter had so many demands. They didn’t want to be photographed, for instance, which was for this player intensely irritating. As he put it, ‘they have to realise we are a professional organisation and if our sponsors want photographs they have to get photographs’. He then went on to say how pleased he was that in fact they had managed to take photographs anyway, without being seen. (He requested that his statements be anonymous in my work.) Jubran’s position, on the other hand, was essentially a non-acceptance of the boundaries over which Palestinians have no control (the Israeli check-

63

Interview with the author, Jerusalem, 18 July 2009.

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points and blockades of which Amr complained), and the drawing of new boundaries over which Palestinians strive to have some control (essentially the public display of Palestinians). The underlying question at stake lay on the line dividing ‘peace’ in the aesthetic realm and ‘justice’ in the legal and economic realms. Through Baudrillard, we could say that the question lay at the crux of the relationship between the simulacrum and the real. For Jubran, if the two were not closely linked (if the boundary was not to be broken down even for the day of the concert), then there was likely nothing to be gained – and perhaps much to be lost – in the aesthetic performance of peace.

Shaping simulacra One further type of Palestinian action is similar, but involves actors from outside the region, and an attempt by Palestinian groups to communicate to the world their sense of the regional situation. This diverges substantially from the prevailing international construction. The latter involves Israel and Palestine as a pair of (implicitly equal) competing entities, and as Khalidi has argued, the idea of ‘Palestine’ is barely allowed to exist except in relationship to ‘Israel’.64 The tendency to see Israel and Palestine as a competing couple is mirrored in the patterns of some performing ensembles that try to put on concerts or other events ‘on both sides’ in the interests of balance. In 2004, however, when a group of academics and intellectuals in Palestine founded PACBI (already encountered above), they did so to argue for an international boycott. Collaboration was to be refused with ‘all Israeli academic and cultural institutions until Israel withdraws from all the lands occupied in 1967, including East Jerusalem; removes all its colonies in those lands; agrees to United Nations resolutions relevant to the restitution of Palestinian refugees rights; and dismantles its system of apartheid’.65 Performers offering themselves to Palestinians when also performing in Israel, found themselves asked by PACBI to withdraw from their agreement with Israel if they wished to perform in Palestine. The differing responses of two English choirs faced with the choice can be traced in an article published in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.66 John Harte’s Choir of London had performed in both Israel and in Palestine and 64 65 66

Khalidi 1997: 147. ‘About the Campaign’, www.pacbi.org/etemplate.php?id=868 accessed 31 July 2010. Ben Ze’ev 2009b.

Dialogue

collaborated with Israelis and Palestinians, but came round to the idea of working with the Palestinians alone. The Choir of Clare College (Cambridge), on the other hand, while being urged by the Choir of London to take the same strategy, responded differently. It chose to play in Israel and forego its performance in Occupied Bethlehem. The apparent failure of ‘Dialogue’ in this case was constructed in the article in a very specific way. Tim Brown, director of the Cambridge choir, complained that he had been denied an educational trip. It would have been valuable, he said, for choir members to ‘go through the roadblocks in the West Bank, and come up against the separation wall and become aware of the Palestinians’ difficulties – and sing with them’. Yet he refrained from an examination of Palestinians’ real difficulties by saying that as a musician, his job was essentially to trade in beauty and it was not for him to ‘judge’. He also iterated a view of music’s transcendence, which would justify his choir’s presence: I believe in music’s ability to make the world more beautiful, and that with its help we can love one another. This is what makes people human. And if we were to have boycotted – would anything have changed? Would the walls really have tumbled down?67

The spokesman for PACBI made no objection to Brown’s choir members travelling to Bethlehem and experiencing the checkpoints. He also welcomed the choir’s ‘participating in the Bethlehem mass within the congregation’. But he voiced the position that there was a difference between an educational ‘fact-finding mission’ on both sides, and performers that came to perform a string of events in Israel and then give a single concert to those he termed ‘the hapless “natives”’ over the border. Additionally, he presented the widespread view that musical performance is an implicit affirmation. The Choir of Clare College, he argued, was affirming Israel’s policies by performing there. PACBI argued that in the light of Israel’s ‘fresh war crimes in Gaza, its ongoing occupation and colonization of Palestinians and Arab land, and its system of racial discriminations against its ‘non-Jewish’ citizens, [such a performance in Israel] in fact contributes to whitewashing Israel’s grave violations of international law, particularly in the light of the Goldstone report’.

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Ben Zeev 2009b. The speaker for PACBI was Professor Gabi Baramki, formerly acting President of Birzeit University and member of PACBI steering committee. www.haaretz.com/culture/ arts-leisure/bringing-baroque-to-bethlehem-1.1695 accessed 31 July 2010.

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Tim Brown’s vision of the region, on the other hand, was less involved with the local situation, and more influenced by the Bible and Western classical music’s recourse to that. During his interview he elaborated on the musical beauty of Bach’s Christmas Oratorio, describing a passage setting of the text ‘Let us go to Bethlehem’. This was an elision of the Bible, the musical work and his original plans for the tour: there are a number of voices separated from the choir as though the people are chattering and egging one another on – but at the same time the flute and violins are playing a single melodic line, as though two angels were hovering above the chatter. This is very picturesque.68

We need only recall Tobler’s irritation in Bethlehem (witnessed at the opening of Chapter 2), when he felt that local people in the congregation were disturbing his musical-cum-spiritual experience of a visiting French choir, to realise the historical significance of Brown’s sentiment. He is reaffirming the biblical construction of Bethlehem as a framework for his visit, drawing on aesthetics and religion to justify his desire. The Haaretz article segues directly from this musical picturesque into the difficulty of performing in Bethlehem on tour. The obstacle to the picturesque and the angels seems to lie with PACBI. The fact that PACBI did not wish to prevent individual choir members either from visiting Bethlehem or from participating in a Palestinian event should be fully grasped. (The principle is important, even while the physical reality is that the checkpoint into Bethlehem is controlled by Israelis and that neither PACBI’s spokesman nor any other Palestinians actually had any control.) We should also observe that PACBI did not deny the biblical and aesthetic construction of the region. In fact, then, the organisation’s openness on these terms could be read as a hospitable invitation to choir members, and – in its interactive possibilities – an opportunity for dialogue. But this does not emerge from the reportage in Haaretz, because the emphasis there is on the potential beauty of Western classical music brought by English singers. The distinction between the two positions, then, echoes the one we have already encountered in other guises, in the National Conservatory’s publicity and Jubran’s bargaining strategy: without the involvement of the real, the simulation becomes objectionable. This may contribute to furnishing a theoretical observation.

68

Ben Ze’ev 2009b.

Dialogue

The sort of ‘culture’ that was potentially to be performed in Bethlehem was a product of the idea of a metaphysically conceived cultural sphere that could symbolise a better reality, or, as Featherstone has eloquently put it, that has ‘pretensions to producing universal cultural guidelines for social practices’.69 But not only is this type of performance very contingent, a product, in fact, of a privileged class that emerged in eighteenth-century Europe. It is also – in the contemporary practice of using culture to ‘make the world more beautiful’ – a participant in Jameson’s world of late capitalism, in which the economy (experienced in this case by a privileged layer of English population) is saturated by cultural representation (and vice versa). The result is that simulations become indistinct from realities. It seems to me that Palestinian society does not, indeed cannot, occupy such a world. The real is all too pressing.

69

Featherstone 2000: 191.

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8 Musical missionaries

One scene in Hélèna Cotiner and Pierre-Nicolas Durand’s documentary film about Al Kamandjâti, It’s Not a Gun, shows three French volunteer musicians discussing their experiences on the West Bank and in Gaza.1 One of them, Fred, is concerned about a disjunction between the situation on the ground and the skills that he has to offer. He indicates a sense of helplessness: orphaned children who regularly witness murder and bloodshed will not wish to learn music, he says. A double-bass player (unnamed) disagrees, pointing out that local people are asking for music lessons. He argues that music gives people a way to respond to violence that does not involve blowing themselves up in retaliation. Fred answers by saying that he does not believe (‘je ne crois pas’) that everyone can be diverted from such actions by music. Sabine’s contribution brings the scene to an affirmative close. Opposing the apparently fatalist, or despairing Fred, she makes a gesture of faith: ‘je crois’, she says, expressing her belief that it is worth using music to try to change a person’s life. Two issues are at stake here, the first of which is whether musicians are useful (or redundant) in sites of ongoing violence. But the second is more fundamental and more striking. The musicians reference an abstraction, namely ‘music’. They argue about whether ‘music’ has a helpful sort of agency in occupied Palestine – and they argue in terms of ‘belief’. The implicit leap of faith involved has an obvious parallel with religious conviction, which is one reason why I take the position I do in this chapter, and argue for the renewed perspective of ‘mission’. But that alone would not be sufficient grounds. It seems more significant, in fact, that many of the NGOs, charities and foundations that fund the aid packages grew out of ‘single-issue movements’ that were led by dissenting British Protestants in the late eighteenth century, whose missionaries (along with Presbyterians, Baptists, Methodists and many others) disseminated their moral and social ideals worldwide.2 I suggest that many musicians have essentially joined in these developing ventures, and as such, may be considered as a 1

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2

Cotiner and Durand 2006: track 4. DeMars 2005. See also Berman 2004; Keck and Sikkink 1998.

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new type of ‘missionary’. Hütter’s testimony discussed in Chapter 6 indicates a further reason to draw that parallel, for it reveals dissatisfaction with the world of music in Europe which echoes nineteenth-century anxieties over Christianity. What I offer here is a very different perspective from the ones discussed in chapters 6 and 7. My aim is to offer some insights into work on the ground, and the ways in which it interacts with the broader ideological frames I have examined so far. My sources for the discussion below are the testimonies of twenty-five musicians from Europe and the USA who have spent time on Palestine’s West Bank in order to teach music. Unless otherwise stated, all the musicians cited chose to move to Ramallah for a more prolonged period (the minimum is one academic year) to teach Western classical music there (as paid employees), and their presence was on one level a consequence of the establishment of three music schools in Ramallah (the National Conservatory, Al Kamandjâti and the Barenboim-Said Foundation). I have discussed my relationships with the teachers in more detail in the Introduction, but to recap in brief: almost all interviews were conducted in cafes and schoolrooms in Ramallah, and I generally asked basic questions about motivation and experience. At times I did probe my interviewees’ answers for detail and clarification, and I present these instances as part of the discussion below. I have provided all interviewees with false initials.

Europe’s demise and Palestine’s potential While the contemporary NGO discourse of ‘democracy’ through ‘culture’ sits within a liberal development discourse that intimates the end of poverty and conflict, it seems less obviously ambitious than the nineteenth-century millenarianism we encountered in Chapter 1. The way that its musical workers in Palestine recalled their move to Palestine, however, suggests a distinct structural parallel: most invoked concerns about their own homelands. Having witnessed what they saw as a musical world in sharp decline or without opportunities for them, they moved to Palestine for newly available musical employment and musical institutions under construction. It was a perceived threat to them in the ‘developed’ and ‘democratic’ West, rather than Palestine’s own need for ‘development’ or help, that actually took them to the region. One aspect of the perceived threat was actually economic. CE had found himself trapped in the UK after graduating between the need to get a job

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and the requirement by employers that employees have experience. A piano accompaniment job at Palestine’s National Conservatory advertised on an international website was ‘just a job’ through which to clock up experience. FH left Sweden for Ramallah to teach flute because she needed employment, and although a sister living in Jerusalem was an added attraction, she made the move ‘primarily because it was a job’. Brass teacher PQ was equally straightforward, saying, ‘I was completely thinking about my own career development … I was not coming here as a volunteer. I have a son to support in Germany.’ TW spoke directly to the economy of the music business in the USA with a rhetoric that suggested complete collapse: ‘there’s no income for music making available these days. The star system has fallen apart. Classical music has fallen apart. There are no more recording contracts.’ This economic problem had in most cases been intensified by other symptoms of malaise. At the mildest end of the spectrum were musicians who wanted to ‘do something different’, or something that ‘wasn’t in England’ (BD 2007, MN, RP, EG). These teachers were largely recent graduates facing a daunting market and abruptly uncertain about whether a music career was right for them after all. Then, some slightly older musicians had mild complaints that they sought to resolve. Violinist HJ was looking for a job with a stable income that allowed her to spend more time with her family than was possible in Germany. Another had ‘struggled to find a good balance’ between playing and teaching and in his orchestral playing job felt that ‘something was missing’. KJ was thwarted by the sense that Italy had ‘no music life’, and was ‘closed to foreign people’. Having played and experimented with a lot of music traditions he wanted ‘to get out of the situation in Italy’. Trombonist MN was frustrated with his professional situation in Germany. He had had contracts in the opera orchestra in Stuttgart and in the Berlin Academy (attached to the Staatsoper Berlin), and found that he ‘wasn’t interested in the orchestral thing anymore’ (2009). There were also more intense feelings of dissatisfaction with Europe, along with dashed hopes relating to the place of music in society. Conductor DX, who worked for three weeks on a musical in a collaboration in Ramallah in 2004, used the word ‘hypocritical’ for the Western musical world. He placed ‘the public, the high society with season tickets, and the classical amateurs who know everything better than everyone else’, in stark contrast with ideal listeners who had ‘an emotional response’. Observing that ‘today people don’t go to concerts to hear classical music’, he also asked himself: ‘Why should I go to hear the Eroica [Beethoven’s Symphony

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no. 3] for the 250th time? I don’t know.’ And ‘being confronted at the beginning of a career with the mentality of the orchestras … it felt repetitive and meaningless’. Similarly, GI (UK) had been disillusioned by the life of opera, abruptly appalled that her life ambition was to sing on a stage where the audience was actually full of corporate sponsors (2009). Despite retaining a sense that it was an honourable ambition to perform in worldclass institutions, the reality of their circumstances provoked the question ‘what am I doing?’. MN was disappointed by the values of the profession: ‘success is about winning an orchestral audition’, he said (2009). GI spoke (in reference to England) about the difficulties of music in a country where there’s so much wealth that people don’t appreciate anything: ‘they don’t really care’, she said. One of the most prominent spokespeople for music in Palestine, Daniel Barenboim, articulated a related position in 2004, and he managed to echo the rhetoric of earlier missions very strikingly. Just as Europeans and Americans investing in Palestine in the nineteenth century strove primarily to rescue Christianity, when Barenboim first announced a new ‘music Kindergarten’ in Ramallah, his ambition was weighted primarily towards developing, and indeed rescuing, Western classical music. He stated that ‘[y]ou can’t expect someone born into a family with no music … to understand when I’m conducting the Schönberg Variations. Therefore you have to go to the process from the beginning.’3 As he put it, ‘there is a great problem with music education in the world. There is no music education to speak of in England, in the United States and even in countries that are more attuned like Germany, which is diminishing very rapidly. If we go on like this we will have no musical life in thirty years.’ Barenboim’s further statements constructed a major scheme. The children from the kindergarten in Ramallah were supposed to use the interest in music they would be given through music education ‘later in the rest of the world to make people, and governments, aware of the necessity to have a music education’. And Ramallah itself was involved because of its openness: ‘it’s easier to start something like this in a society like Ramallah, rather than in Berlin, or London or New York’. So, children of Ramallah, and Ramallah itself, emerge within Barenboim’s plan as means through which to expand classical music appreciators worldwide. Not all teachers, but several employees of the Barenboim-Said Foundation who arrived late in 2003 or in 2004, recalled in interview that they had

3

Barenboim and Harding: 2004.

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regarded Palestine as an opportunity to create something better than what they had at home. They reconstructed their initial ideas as an idealised image of how education in Western traditions should develop, having hoped that a region with less formalised structures would allow them to work in less constrained ways. CD thought at the beginning that ‘everything was open; there was the feeling to found something there … To teach, to play to inspire people. I was never interested in being a teacher and getting a position [but there] I saw the possibility to put what you believe in education or being an artist.’ MN said that whereas in the Netherlands a standard weekly music lesson lasted twenty minutes, he realised that with the freedom offered by the conditions in Ramallah he would be able to provide children with several hours of lessons every week, and run ensembles as well (2009).4 Such comments were combined with a sense that Palestine was very lacking. This lack was what created the openness, allowed the possibility of founding something in the vision developed at home. The same lack meant that the teachers’ skills would be needed more in Palestine than in richer societies back home. For instance, MN said, ‘in the beginning I didn’t want to work with the advantaged kids; I immediately wanted to go to refugee camps and work with disadvantaged kids’, and later related this specifically to his own ‘working class’ origin. LN drew a connection with the work he had already done in poor communities of Los Angeles, which was a part of his university’s outreach programme, and TW has been similarly engaged with outreach in universities in the USA since 2001. HJ thought she was ‘coming to a country where children didn’t have a lot of money’, and another teacher said reaching the poor was ‘an important part of our mission’. PQ connected this with an implicitly moral position, saying that the job had seemed to offer ‘to help children who are in a really critical 4

In a few cases it was Barenboim’s name that had enticed a musician to Ramallah to work. Among others, CD and HJ mentioned the appeal of this. Additionally, CE actually left his job at Ramallah’s National Conservatory to take up a job at the Barenboim-Said Foundation school, in order to secure Barenboim’s name on his CV. He even turned down a teaching position in England at that point, because ‘Barenboim’ was apparently the better investment for his eventual career. The shift also made quite good financial sense: he received a salary that was higher than most recent graduates in Europe could dream of, and this came with an additional accommodation allowance, several flights home annually and a free mobile phone. CE’s tax-free salary in the 2008–9 year was 2,000 Euros p./m., plus 350 Euros accommodation allowance. (Most teachers at the Conservatory received 1,300US$ and no accommodation allowance at this time.) The accommodation allowance is generally sufficient to cover the 500US$ he pays for an apartment he shares with one other teacher (obviously subject to some exchange-rate fluctuations). He informed me that the salary is not subject to tax in Spain, Palestine or the UK. It is paid into an offshore bank account, and he draws it from an HSBC cashpoint in Ramallah.

Musical missionaries

situation and who have probably not many means to get educated especially in such luxury issues as music; I thought that children here may deserve it even more than in Germany where they are well settled’. The class-consciousness of these comments may seem sharply contrasted with the way that Barenboim set his targets. Nevertheless, many teachers’ ambitions had entailed a correction to the European/North American world of music, and indeed to the sense of being unappreciated. Moreover, all such comments indicated an unquestioning adherence to the notion that Western classical music was a good thing wherever it landed, and indicated barely any awareness of Palestine apart from its poverty. Most glaringly, they revealed little imagination of Palestinian voices that could contribute to discussing what kind of musical practices should be cultivated. And indeed, all the teachers’ ideas were challenged by realities once they had arrived in Palestine. First, developing a new and experimental music world that dramatically challenged the standard European model was unsustainable. MN quickly realised that children didn’t want five hours of trombone lessons a week and he found little or no support from his employer, the Barenboim-Said Foundation, for experimenting with different approaches. As he put it, the organisation was ‘turning into a German music school’. CD felt similarly that the foundation was not open to experimental projects and was becoming a conventional school. But he also said that this ‘was anyway what the Palestinians themselves were asking for’. Second, on arrival, although teachers working for Al Kamandjâti went to refugee camps, most others (those working for the Barenboim-Foundation in particular) discovered that their students in Palestine were extremely wealthy. They found themselves teaching children who belonged to the upper classes of Ramallah, and whose parents were political emissaries, the owners of banks and the directors of private schools. These children were accustomed to foreign vacations and large birthday presents (iBooks, for instance), and were generally ‘spoiled … used to being given everything’, as HJ put it. One child had his own private driver and recourse to other drivers when necessary. Third, teachers generally came with considerable naivety, on trust and without any contract; they then became rapidly exercised about what they understood as exploitation (FH, MN, PQ). Contracts in all three schools were reviewed in the summer for the following autumn, leaving teachers with no idea until June whether they would be employed in September. Schools were not legally empowered to secure their residency (so they might be blocked by the occupying Israeli regime from re-entering if they

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travelled out), and discouraged teachers from maintaining their performing careers elsewhere. Teachers at Al Kamandjâti were also critical of fund allocation and abhorred a prevailing expectation that they work every day of the week in order to compensate for the lack of infrastructure and management at the school. These teachers observed that they might be legally more secure (in the face of Israeli border controls) if they had ‘volunteer visas’, and that they would have nothing to lose financially from this arrangement. Their salaries were approximately in line with the per diem allowance that holders of such visas were allowed (RP, NM, KJ, HG).5 The upshot of these surprises and difficulties was some disgruntlement. Several were highly critical of both the management of the Barenboim-Said Foundation (in Spain), and its Palestinian organisers on the ground (‘out of their element’ when it came to the poor population, as one teacher put it). But others found a way of reasoning about their situation: one teacher regretted somewhat that her teaching reached mainly wealthy families in Ramallah, but said that she was pleased to have a few pupils from poorer villages near Bethlehem because ‘you feel you’re really giving them something’. The majority of musicians reverted to the system of values from which they had sought to depart back home, and adopted the institutional line. PQ relinquished his initial hopes of reaching underprivileged communities by reasoning that, ‘if you want to establish Western classical music in a society that’s not used to it, you need to start somewhere. You need not only players but an audience and it’s much easier to do it in a community that is already Westernised’. HJ stated that working with the refugee camps ‘isn’t part of the politics of the Barenboim-Said Foundation at the moment’, and that the task she had come to set herself in consequence was to ‘find very talented violinists and try to help them as quickly as I can while I am here’. MN, who expressed regret in 2007 that Al Kamandjâti’s student base was becoming increasingly middle class, said, two years later, that he could ‘see the benefits of teaching the rich kids’. One singer, JL (Germany), who had extensive experience from working in Germany, arguably challenged this acclimatisation pattern by developing her own projects in villages and refugee camps, initiating choirs with minimal institutional support and substantial personal investment. However, she had encountered resistance to her work, and defended the foundation’s limited outreach policy in the light of that. She agreed that it might seem problematic that outreach activities and recruitment 5

The salaries at Al Kamandjâti were substantially lower than at the Barenboim-Said Foundation – cf. footnote 4, above.

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schemes only took place in private schools, but she argued that reaching children in the schools run by the ministry (and thus reaching poorer children) was extremely difficult. There was, she said, a complex and lengthy bureaucracy involved. This structural phenomenon – in which musicians find obstacles in their way among their ideal targets and in which they spread their work only outside the state organisations – indicates another parallel with nineteenth-century missions. The initial targets for nineteenth-century proselytism were Jews and Muslims (the latter following the state religion), but missionaries were constantly thwarted in their efforts with these groups. They only had the impact they sought when they intervened in Orthodox Christian and Catholic communities. Similarly, teachers have encountered resistance to spreading music outside the wealthier, urban populations and have concentrated on applying themselves where they are made welcome. This has created another problem, however, and indeed further continuity with the nineteenth-century situation. At that time, missionaries’ acquisitive work created tremendous hostility and competition (for congregations) among the varied Christian groups. Analogously, and perhaps predictably, rivalry between two of the music schools in Ramallah has developed very intensely since 2004, and resulted in a situation of noncommunication. One teacher constructed it as a ‘cold war’ (TV). Several regarded it as rivalry between Barenboim on the one side and the Director of the National Conservatory, Suhail Khoury, on the other. Another said that it originated in the conflict with the Jewish teacher in Jordan in 2005 (discussed in Chapter 6 above). Others said it was a product of Barenboim’s use of Ramallah for his own international self-promotion. FH reflected what a poor example it offered, given that musical activities were supposed to improve social relations. To this ideal, we can now turn.

Cultural heritage and the construction of civilians When teachers such as Fred, Sabine and others went into refugee camps for Al Kamandjâti, they learned some Arab songs themselves and sought to participate in established projects. This would conform to the idea of supporting ‘heritage’ as understood today and discussed in Chapter 6. But very few teachers moving to the region from the USA or Europe wanted, or were able, to do this (I encountered only two: RT had studied nāy at a North American university and taught that instrument as well as flute

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when she arrived in Palestine; GI had studied Arab singing in the UK.) Additionally, almost none of the teachers taking up residency had any awareness of the region’s cultural politics or practices before they arrived. This is an important context in which to consider the difficulties that several teachers described in working with beginner pupils. They themselves bring a lack of knowledge, but when they notice the paucity of common ground with local children, they speak vehemently of the lack in Palestine (which, as we know, several had already imagined before arriving). It is not only a matter of language (most teachers have no Arabic and rely on pupils’ English or interpreters), but also a question of music. For example, JL, GI, MN and theory-teacher NP stated that many children couldn’t sing at all, or had barely any range. Some children seemed to them to have no sense of pitch, and MN remarked that ‘you can’t learn the trombone if you can’t sing’. FH had problems with what to her had been the very most basic elements. She said ‘it is becoming more normal now [in Ramallah] for children to play music. But the reference points still aren’t there. In Sweden everyone knows the major scale, and they don’t have that in their traditional music.’ NP attempted to teach Solfège and made headway with melody, but realised the difficulties of explaining harmonic progressions to students who haven’t been trained at all to perceive harmony (especially in ‘functional’ terms). She discovered that many of the students sensed music completely differently from her: while they could hear the complex polyphony of Vittoria motets, they could not make out the left-hand accompaniment of a Chopin Nocturne. Teachers discussed the disjunction between their skills and the children in varying ways. Most expressed respect for regional musical traditions (especially when they had realised that they could themselves not grasp them at all), and anxiety about the implicit cultural imperialism of making their contributions. An extremely articulate position emerged from MN, for instance, who referred to postcolonial theory. Observing that the trombone was a complex signifier, he sought even when teaching children to ‘draw attention to the colonial aspect of the instrument’. Understanding music as a ‘pick-up’ for education, he provided something that was new to children so that they could become curious about it and could discuss it. He performed pieces from the post-war European avant-garde (Berio and Kagel, for instance) for his students, happy that after their initial astonishment and amusement they realised that what he was doing was something ‘serious’ for him and sometimes political too. A different position was taken by GI, who invoked the term ‘cultural imperialism’ herself in order to reject it. She saw the music that she offered

Musical missionaries

as a means to counteract the hegemonic influence of ‘Western subculture’, which she said had ‘already been imposed on Arab culture without being invited’. As she put it, ‘they get the junk. The movies, the tacky clothes. If they have the junk why shouldn’t they have the good stuff too? They are flooded with the subculture without the high culture to balance it. The real stuff. We have that to balance … If you have a culture that’s losing its own identity that’s being swamped by the rubbishy end of western civilisation than it needs balancing out’ (2009). In a later interview she took a related position, describing the use of amplified music by schools that was swamping children. This was often local music – styles for dancing traditional dabka for instance – but was always extremely loud. As she put it: ‘they’re just bombarded … they lose the ability to listen’ (2010). GI was one of a small number of teachers who had learned some Arab music, and said she did ‘very little in the way of Western music in the [refugee] camps; they don’t like it because they can’t understand it; they can relate to Arabic music’ (2009). She was almost alone in understanding her role partly in terms of helping Palestinians foster their own ‘culture’, or indeed ‘heritage’. She said ‘there just has to be music in the culture. It has to be kept alive. A nation is its culture. Without culture it’s nothing. Culture is a social element as well. It’s also the face the country shows to the rest of the world.’ Others had learned Arab songs simply in an attempt to build a connection with their pupils. NP began with rhythms of Arabic words. JL found that children from villages and refugee camps were likely to know some songs by the Lebanese singer Fairouz, so she learned those and also introduced them to Arab songs she collected from the Evangelical School in Ramallah (which had a choir) and the Magnificat Institute in Jerusalem (2007). These had been collected and notated (and were even published later) as ‘local’. A very extreme contrast to these endeavours was evident in another teacher’s testimony (2009). He stated that Western classical music was superior to Arab music as a vessel of learning, and that although his students ‘wanted to play their culture’s music’, as he put it, he ‘insisted that they also learned Western classical music’. On being asked the reason for this, he connected it to a notion of ‘honesty’ which resided in being ‘precise’ before being ‘free’, and being true to what was on the page in terms of dynamics and phrasing. He had attempted to play some Arab music while in Ramallah, but found it difficult. He found ‘the traditional [Arabic] music to be imprecise, very open to interpretation’, and did not sense he could ‘teach [Palestinians] how to play their music’. Instead, he saw his job as a rare and rather particular privilege: ‘in many ways I had a

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dream job’, he said. ‘I was this musical pioneer being able to explain Mozart, introduce pieces by Mozart and Brahms … To explain to people who don’t have classical music training, to explain to people how it develops, how themes develop in different movements. In organic movement. How to listen to that. Showing people how to actively listen. I find that intoxicating.’ Extreme as this position may sound, it is essentially in line with the predominant structure that still prevails in the situation, in which superiority lies in things ‘Western’. Once teachers had explained that they had respect for local traditions, and that (in most cases) they regarded them as ‘different’ rather than lesser, on being asked by me to articulate their view of the value of their work, they invoked ideas about social enhancement. In other words, they adopted contemporary NGO discourses in order to justify themselves to me. This reasoning was of course very different from the ideas that had led them to the region, but the latter having proved fallible, the teachers absorbed themselves into the dominant structure of intervention. Indeed the implications of their accounts were quite radical, depending as they did on a rather particular construction of good sociality. First, several said that one of the values of music was that it was something that the children could have as ‘individuals’. EG wanted the children to ‘have it for themselves’, and said that through it, they could learn what you gained ‘if you concentrate on something yourself and work on your own’. She saw this as ‘a really positive thing’, because ‘kids here don’t have control over any part of their lives’. LN also emphasised an ‘individual creativity’. He polarised this with a passing critique of Arab music, which had a ‘serving the camera’ approach, he claimed. Yet this notion of developing a creative ‘individual’ was only a first step, said several teachers, towards coming together with others. Many such remarks were in line with current educational theory regarding music’s potential role in exemplifying and thus instilling, ideal practices of social behaviour.6 JL, for instance, said that the main aim of her elementary music workshops was ‘to open the senses and perception of the children, to make them socially aware of one another’. Two years later, she expanded on this to say that music ‘helps with social perception. The demands of music are to do with perception. Noticing others. It’s to do with finding a place within the whole. Noticing others, noticing the self. Being part of a collective.’ Another hoped that pupils ‘got a sense of personal

6

Green 2008.

Musical missionaries

responsibility’ by noticing that when playing chamber music their mistakes ‘could make the whole piece fall apart’. The idea was that they would experience the ‘sensitivity of support … trust, rapport, collegiality’. FH also said that there were transferable skills that could be developed in an orchestra. It was about ‘social interaction’, she said. LN suggested that the ‘interaction’ between boys and girls was also a positively egalitarian aspect of music. Music isn’t ‘sexist’, he said, explaining that he understood that gender roles were strictly policed in Palestine. Even while some teachers presented these ideals to me, they – and others – stated clearly that the reality was rather complex. Most identified difficulties with the process of their work, discussing a disjunction between the skills and habits being introduced and the foreignness of these to the social context. FH said that the point of an orchestral rehearsal was that ‘one could learn to play together’, but that for this to happen the children needed to have learned their own parts, and ideally studied a score and listened to a record. In fact, most children did not have support at home for such preparation and tended to try to learn their parts when they arrived. Summing up the inapplicability of some of her own skills in the context, she added, ‘they never hear a professional orchestra, so they don’t really know what it means’. Such awareness and doubt must additionally be set alongside the admiration that a number of teachers expressed for Palestinian society as it was without their interpolations. GI was enthusiastic about the way Palestinians got along with each other in the cramped conditions of the refugee camps. ‘They know how to relate, it’s magic’, she said. TW said that social interaction was much better in Palestine than in the USA: he referred to the ‘big houses’ and ‘suburbs’ of the latter, and the trepidation that prevented parents from allowing children on the streets. MN’s insights were particularly developed because he (one of the few music teachers to do so) formed friendships with Palestinians. As he put it, the families live so close to one another that their environment is permanently socialised. In this context, one-to-one lessons of Western classical music and the need for solitary practising, were ineffectual interpolations. ‘It’s never going to work’, he said. For MN, in fact, the very strength and nature of the social bonds threw the sociological claims and frameworks of the project into question fundamentally. Having been embraced as a ‘friend’, for instance, he experienced the friendships and familial ties in Palestine as much deeper and more tenacious than those in Europe. ‘They drop anything for their friends,’ he said. ‘That’s often why kids don’t turn up for lessons or come late, and why

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so many businesses are closed half the time – someone’s friend or family needs something. They also spend time just sitting. Being there. With each other.’ This meant that the imposed discipline was inappropriate for a music education project. ‘They will never come on time, they will never practise. It’s another culture.’ Despite the apparently dualistic presentation of his remarks – one ‘culture’ against ‘another’ – MN’s time and admiration for Palestinian society is more in line with recent critiques of dualistic thinking. Too often, it is now suggested, foreign organisations attempt to impose a very narrow idea of ‘civil society’, without any grasp of the various forms of civil society already in existence there, and with the assumption that there is no ‘democracy’ at all other than that brought by Western forces.7 Additionally, new practices tend to be imported in a top-down managerial fashion, and promote the delivery of specific types of institution. They are frequently unsuccessful and trigger fall-back rhetoric about ‘Islamic resistance’ or ‘the Arab mind’. MN argued, similarly, that the Barenboim-Said Foundation denied some children opportunities simply because their behaviour was nonconformist. The institutional ideal was that ‘kids come to the lessons at the time that we do, cancel lessons for the reasons that we do, and play the scales in the same way that we do’. If they missed lessons too often, they were excluded. ‘But how can you be sure that they aren’t interested?’ MN asked. He was concerned that the institutional interest was not actually whether or not the children learned to play music, but whether or not they could adapt to the social expectations of the institution.

Music against violence One of the most common Orientalist stereotypes about the Arab world relates to its putative violence. Said connected this to a centuries-long, entrenched recollection of Islamic armies after the death of the prophet Mohammed, and observed that nineteenth-century representations of Arabs in general (and Muslims in particular) depicted them as barbaric and inherently warring.8 The discourse lives on, especially in the wake of 9/11, in new forms of idealism. As outlined above, supporters of the school Al Kamandjâti have promoted it in terms of a de-Orientalisation of its founder Abu Redwan. And Barenboim has taken a similarly 7

Challand 2006: 20–1.

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Said 1978.

Musical missionaries

dichotomised perspective himself, constructing Palestine as a place of violence and fundamentalism, from which music lessons may provide a foreign but enriching (and implicitly taming) alternative.9 The connection between violence and music was rarely so explicit in the discussions I had with teachers. Several referred to their belief prior to taking the job that Palestine was ‘dangerous’, and some said they had been ‘ready for adventure’. Just a few admitted to having come with vague ideas about ‘peace’, including the ambition of uniting Israelis with Palestinians through music. Yet all teachers were shocked as they came to perceive life on the West Bank. They said that their grasp of the situation had been radically altered by living there, and that the Western media (or their religious instruction at school) had given them a completely false impression of the problems. Having understood it as an ‘eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth conflict’, as one teacher put it in a tellingly biblical turn of phrase (2009), they all came to understand it is a situation of occupation in which Palestinians were denied territory and simultaneously held hostage, subjected by Israeli military forces and settlers to unspeakable humiliation and cruelty. This provided one more issue to which teachers had to adjust, one that we have already sensed from Fred’s despondency, discussed at the beginning of this chapter. In a sense, many had come with vague ideas about ‘helping’ a violent region by providing music; but on arrival, they diagnosed the reason for the violence as lying outside Palestine, namely in the Israeli government. One suggested that the sort of music that might ‘help’ Palestinian children suffering from violence might be something therapeutic. Yet he also said ‘I’m not equipped. The kids are distressed. They may be aggressive or not, they’re basically traumatised. The music could be therapeutic. But that’s not my skill.’ Another teacher negotiated the problem by arguing that a space should exist for music that allowed children to escape from their surroundings. AC, for instance, on observing what she referred to as ‘the strength of anti-Israeli sentiment’, abandoned her

9

‘Imagine a four-year-old child spending two years in a kindergarten playing piano and singing and then going to school and asking why there is no music. That’s what we started there. We have seven kids, most from refugee camps. It’s going extremely well. We have a Palestinian lady who runs it. We have teachers who come there and teach piano and sing. An hour of violin lessons in Berlin is an hour where you get the child interested in music. An hour in a violin lesson in Palestine is an hour away from violence, is an hour away from fundamentalism. It suddenly has another dimension. Classical music is not something that one associates with the Palestinians, with the Arabs in general. You give it to them with the understanding it can enrich their lives and get creativity out of it.’ Barenboim and Harding 2004.

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projections of musical ‘peace’ and indeed retreated from the conflict (2007). She wished to avoid the politics, she said, because ‘it’s enough if the children enjoy the music’ (2009). These examples might suggest that – unlike George, Sabine and Fred – most teachers gave no further thought to music’s capacity to prevent violence. In fact, however, some had not abandoned their ideals. This became very clear in the ways that several of them talked about two particular teachers, who had developed slightly different profiles from the others because they worked regularly (rather than just on a more spasmodic workshop basis) in refugee camps and villages, often alone. These two, moreover, did discuss music in the context of violence. I focus on their testimonies in the rest of this chapter, as they represent powerful threads in the primary current of utopian thought (even if not widespread action, as we have seen) supporting the post-Oslo introduction of music to Palestinians on the West Bank. JL, from Germany, who began work in Palestine shortly after the second uprising, has herself been in extremely violent situations, and she described some of those early on in our second conversation. For instance, in 2003 there were regular Israeli incursions into Ramallah, a house was blown up opposite the one where she was staying, there was fighting at night and it was impossible to even enter some places on the West Bank because of Israeli blockades. While in a taxi-van she was misidentified as Israeli and was thus shot at by Palestinians in the camp at Jenin, and she was present at a workshop in a refugee camp in Hebron that was broken up by the arrival of men from the local mosque shouting and waving sticks. This indicates experiences that she herself found traumatic, and later in the same conversation she introduced violence as the dominant feature of life on the West Bank for Palestinian civilians. I had asked her to explain to me what children gained from her music workshops, and within her reflections she made a connection with Israeli brutality towards Palestinians. The point of introducing music, she said, was ‘to get inside of this really, to penetrate the life of nightly raids. It’s a hard life. To offer something else, just a bit. Other activities are available at Youth Centres. But there aren’t very many of them … It adds a colour to their lives that wasn’t there before’ (2009). Her position, as articulated on that day, was that music was simply something nice, a relief, and another dimension to the intensely difficult lives of the children. The English singer GI had arrived only in 2008, and had not had the violent experiences of JL. In a conversation in which I asked her to tell me how she understood the function of her work, she said she was helping to

Musical missionaries

resist Israel’s activities, which she understood as ‘trying to stamp out the [Palestinian] culture and the people’. When I asked her whether music – as opposed to other forms of cultural activity – had a specific contribution to make, she introduced the fact that children listen to political songs. She also said, however, that while she discussed politics with older children, she avoided it with the younger ones, because ‘part of the point of the music is to take them away from all that. They have to be able to have a childhood’ (2009). In connection with this idea, she also developed a rather different line of response, which she opened by saying that ‘music education is lifechanging’. The exemplification she offered concerned one of her pupils from Hebron, who had been ‘very glum’ when she started working with him in the autumn. He had, indeed, wanted to be a sniper, to harm others in response to having regularly seen dead bodies since the age of 11. But by the time he took part in the Baroque Festival at Christmas, he was ‘very sociable’, ‘a joker’. When I asked GI whether the introduction of music had been the reason for this change, she said that he had in fact been learning music for two years previously, but that during his time with her he had made a huge vocal development. She described this development, which involved integrating the upper and lower registers of the voice subsequent to the breaking of his voice. This sort of vocal development, she said, ‘can be combined with personal development’. When I asked whether she was confident about the cause and effect mechanism between vocal and broader personal development, she said that she didn’t know. However, she then said that her own vocal development had been ‘a huge journey of personal development’, because ‘you are the instrument’ (as a singer), ‘you can’t separate it out’. JL’s position was closely related when she spoke about introductory workshops in which children encountered musical instruments for the first time. ‘Music is a medium for inner perception’, she said. She wanted children to experience ‘what an instrument is on the strictly musical side, reduced to that’. Just the fact of ‘holding the instrument, noticing the instrument, feeling it next to the body, the resonance … The resonance is a sensual thing. It is an experience in itself.’ In her comments JL had in fact invoked a sensitive and controversial question among some Muslims but as we learned from Wasif ’s memoirs, discussed in Chapter 5, the question may ultimately concern propriety, not religion.10

10

Marcus 2007: 89–91.

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Moreover, the connection between musical activity and behaviour deemed improper – the strong bodily corporeal connection with an impact of music – is for many religious people (outside Islam) a matter of concern. But she saw the connection between something ‘strictly musical’ and a ‘sensual’ resonance only from one perspective, namely as something positive. She elaborated this with a construction that echoed missionary perceptions of local people in terms of ‘wildness’. She hoped, she said, that the introduction of music to children would enable them to incorporate aspects of sensuality that could replace qualities she identified as ‘rough’. Through this, she said, ‘the view on life can be changed’. She said that she found the people in the region ‘rough with each other. They don’t notice each other’s vulnerability. They have very little care and attention for one another.’ Music, she said, could ‘bring that about’ and could be used ‘to transform conflict’. Even while music couldn’t ‘treat a specific conflict’, it could ‘create a basis whereby conflicts are treated differently’. JL also qualified her statements by adding that ‘the question is always there, of the impact … it can’t be measured’. She was fully aware of the fragility of her claim, and argued only with some provisionality about whether or not music could effect profound change. But the essentially experimental process of introducing Western music education was not in doubt. The same certainty was exemplified by one teacher who was dismayed that his concerts in Palestine had to be cancelled following mortalities, for reasons of ‘respect’. He understood music as a ‘coping mechanism’, and regarded such cancellations as mistakes, products of a misunderstanding about music’s helpfulness. But there is in fact a very long – and documented – tradition of mourning songs in Palestine, and ongoing practices are vivid as well.11 So there can be little doubt that local people have recourse to music in ways that they themselves find helpful in times of suffering. This teacher was either unaware of it, or understood his own contribution – a public concert of Western music – as a useful addition or enhancement thereof. At base, all the teachers chose to believe that the changes that music brought were good ones and would improve local people’s understanding both of music and of their very existence. The sense that there was substantial Palestinian opposition to the teachers’ work was not unusual: JL also referred to the matter. But strikingly, she also presented her strongest convictions in this context.

11

Dalman 1901; Rogers 1862; Sinnamon 2008.

Musical missionaries

Moreover, her explanation denied both the subtlety and complexity of the local situation on the one hand, and the question of a justifiable wish to be able to control (music-social) interpolation itself on the other. For example, local clerics’ disruption of singing and music workshops were products of a power conflict between two political groups (communists and Hamas), and ‘a general fear of the imposition of a Western way of life’. A prevailing anxiety about propriety led people to disapprove of music, she said; such people had made an anxious association between music and sexuality. I asked her whether she saw any connection between this association, and her interest in having children experience the sensuality of a musical instrument next to their bodies. Her answer was that ‘there was no connection’, because the people (from Hamas) had ‘no experience of the sensuality of a resonant instrument’. Their resistance, she said, was to do with their conservatism, and a fear of losing control over people (2009). As I have already stated, the teachers were united in their sense that the biggest problem for Palestine was the Israeli occupation. However, this did not prevent them from developing strongly critical positions with respect to Palestinian lives. And JL’s observation of conflict between Hamas and other groups, and her certainty that her own contribution to the situation was beneficial to children, reproduces a historical trope. It recalls Orientalist constructions of the region as primitive, conflict-driven, religiously fanatical and childish. It proposes that Palestinian children need rescuing from local warfare and the false consciousness being imposed on them by primitive groups (whether violent mobs, religious organisations or Hamas). As I have already exposed, in the nineteenth century, European missionaries often wrote about residents of the region in precisely these terms. Their recommendation was that local people should be reintroduced to the Bible, civilised thereby, and organised in national frameworks. Teachers such as JL and GI are interested in something different: they wish to see a protected sphere for the child, cultural activism rather than violence, musical sensuality instead of a perceived roughness and individualistic self-development on which to build groups. But the pattern of dissatisfaction at home, perception of problems (and thus opportunities) elsewhere, desire combined with interpolation, and then an experience of opposition are very similar.

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9 Conclusion

When we lose certain people, or when we are dispossessed from a place, or a community, we may simply feel that we are undergoing something temporary, that mourning will be over and some restoration of prior order will be achieved. But maybe when we undergo what we do, something about who we are is revealed, something that delineates the ties we have to others, that shows us that these ties constitute what we are, ties or bonds that compose us.1

At the beginning of the last chapter, I introduced a discussion between musicians who felt helpless in the face of violence and death. During the same chapter I presented a range of similar voices, exposing music teachers who felt that their skills were inappropriate to the task in hand. And I place this matter in some broader reflections to conclude the book, now with reference to an attempt to embrace the helplessness brought by loss, namely Butler’s eloquent essay ‘Violence, Mourning, Politics’, written in the wake of 9/11. The grief following loss, Butler writes, can strike us with manifold experience of dispossession and, in its intense forms, obliges us to confront something larger than ourselves. Moreover, it often foils our strategies of recovery and resolution: in the processing of grief, one may do better to allow oneself to be transformed by it, to submit to the vulnerability of being human, submit, indeed, to the irreducible sociality of the human. Such observations lead her to suggest that the insights brought by mourning might bring a lens through which ‘to begin to apprehend the contemporary global situation’.2 I will use her thoughts to bring to the foreground a question that has been lurking behind much of what I have discussed in earlier chapters. Before doing that, however, I reflect briefly on what I have presented so far. On one level, my book may be read as an alternative history of musical Orientalism, given that musical Orientalism has hitherto been almost exclusively narrated through interpretations of representation within 310

1

Butler 2004: 22.

2

Butler 2004: 28.

Conclusion

music. Such narrations have not gone uncriticised: the difficulties of bringing together musical representations of alterity and/or utopia on the one hand, and imperialist practices on the other, have been evident to scholars for some time.3 I hope that my own focus, which has sought to examine the question from another angle entirely, may offer a new way forward.4 My book also functions as an archaeology of Western classical music in (trans) mission. I have plotted, essentially, an increasingly institutionalised place for music within Western schemes for the sending forth of ideas and practices out into the wider world. Starting with religious themes, I moved gradually into the creation of cultural displays, a narrative arc that echoes Bernard McGrane’s scheme for the self-styled West’s shifting conceptions of ‘Others’. McGrane offers an ‘archaeology of difference’ structured by varying horizons for perception over time, namely religion, which gives way to knowledge, followed by time and finally culture.5 In the first instance, ‘Others’ are simply not Christian; in the second, they are ignorant of (our) Enlightenment; in the third, they are retarded components in our historically constituted time (even fossils); and in the fourth, they lack (our) culture. The missionary can convert the other (initially to Christianity), can learn about and educate the other (by doing research and delivering a schooling system), can bring the other up to date (by introducing political modernity), and can imbue the other with our culture (music, among other products). The role of music, we have seen, is centripetal: initially just a peripheral component of religious institutions and broad educational packages, at the end of the story it has its own dedicated institutions as ‘culture’. Yúdice, we recall, was interested in the swell of ‘culture’ in the post-cold war period, but McGrane’s history flags it up as an important category of alterity as early as the late nineteenth century.6 He offers, then, a further

3 4

5 6

Head 2003: 226–67 in particular; McKenzie 1995,. A little entanglement of the two strategies might be another way forward. We could look at events that are contemporary but rarely considered together. For example, in the period shortly after the PEF was established, James Finn was writing up his experiences as consul in Jerusalem while Camille Saint-Saens composed his biblical opera Samson and Delilah (1863–76). Another example: in the year before Idelsohn moved to Jerusalem, Richard Strauss completed his opera Salome (1903–5). Finally, in the year of the Madrid conference in which Palestinian and Israeli leaders were brought face to face, John Adams’ The Death of Klinghoffer received its world premiere in Brussels. Each of the operas could be considered in the broader political constellation in this way. McGrane 1989. McGrane argues – rather contentiously – that in the twentieth century the idea of culture challenged evolutionism and historicism so substantially as to displace them entirely. I would

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prompt about the sorts of continuity that I have been tracing in this book, which should indeed stimulate thought in the future about how a deeper history of cultural mission could be explored. In late nineteenth-century Britain a range of literary, musical, theatrical and educational initiatives were led by socialist groups, who argued that the arts had the capacity to reform society from the individual outwards.7 There were pedagogical projects, but also displays and performances. Such spaces for aesthetic absorption were to function not only by offering a ‘utopian vision’, but even ‘as a means of bringing the new life into being’.8 And a deeper historical exploration of cultural missions would necessarily keep track of the oppositional positions as well, for – as the cold war polarity illustrates very sharply – there is usually dialectic at play. British socialist idealism developed in dialogue with the aestheticism that it countered, which sought individualism and autonomy for the arts, rather than community or fusion with politics. Perhaps most intriguing for the historical approach, however, would be setting the starting point for the new movement. Could it be, in fact, that music – among the expressive cultures – led the way? Was music’s place in the church – however disputed – essentially the way in? Was its close affiliation with religion an association that preconditioned it to serve in moral improvement packages? Were Pestalozzi’s innovations – attempting to strip it of its religious affiliation yet maintain its moral one – bridges through which other arts could elbow their way into cultural missions? Such causal questions are not easily answered, yet they become pressing in the light of what I have presented here. By offering this history of musical (trans)mission, I have also engaged with music’s place in transnational movements fostered by neo-liberal development discourse. Here, as in my study of Orientalism, I have joined a range of other music scholars, but taken a different path. Whereas those working on musics created in the last decades have been able to draw attention to transformations brought by interculturalism, my own account has been focused on the maintenance of a repertoire. Had I taken another strategy – and sought out cross-cultural practices in the region – then I would of course have written a very different book. But I had identified a phenomenon and chose to contextualise it historically, rather than seeking its hybrid forms in the particular locality of my study.

7

rather suggest that culture joined the group of frameworks and became dominant in certain spheres, particularly intensely during the cold war. 8 Britain 1982; Steedman 1990; Waters 1990. Livesey 2007: 9.

Conclusion

As a result of this, I have traced Western classical music as if it is an example of one of Appadurai’s ‘hard cultural forms’. Using the example of the game of cricket, Appadurai has defined a hard cultural form as one that is resistant to change, because its associated ‘value, meaning, and embodied practice’ is ‘difficult to break’.9 The cause of the ‘hardness’, he explains, lies in the fact that ‘the values that it represents are, at their heart, puritanical ones, in which rigid adherence to external codes is part of the discipline of internal moral development’. I have, however, been following a case in which the tendency towards resistance to change lies not only in ‘puritanical’ values (although the question of professionalism and discipline might come under such an umbrella), but also in the constructed desirability of the value system. After all, the discourses used to justify the promotion of Western classical music have been moral ones, and it has become politically and economically advantageous to be seen to have absorbed them (music being a tool in a performance of value). Cases in this book have revealed the point of doing this, not least of which is the need to create an image of ‘the Palestinian’ that is structured according to values ostensibly embodied by Western classical music. It is extremely difficult – if not impossible – to separate the appeal of an art form in personal aesthetic and emotional realms from its appeal in terms of its perceived values. Edward Said used the language of aesthetics brilliantly to describe his apparently private musical experiences, but he also came to transplant these into the wider public and political sphere, and revealed thereby some of his own deeply held notions of value. Barenboim’s conducting of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra was according to Said ‘a gesture of the highest form of human solidarity to Palestinians and other Arabs’, a comment that could be heard – outside the sphere of Western classical music appreciation – as unwittingly patronising.10 And he expressed delight that Western classical music specifically had an appeal to Arabs: ‘What is so heartening is how many young people have responded, and how even in this most difficult time young Palestinians have chosen to study music, learn an instrument, practise their art.’ His final remark – ‘who knows how far we will go, and whose minds we might change’ – indicates his desire that Western classical music should bring about a widespread transformation. The ambition, after all, was ultimately not for a Middle East populated by orchestras. It was for a Middle East of 9 10

Appadurai 2006: 90. Said’s speech on receiving the Prince of Asturias Award for Concord in Spain in 2002. See Smaczny 2005: track 5.

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social political relations that were less unhappy than those he observed during his lifetime. But Western classical music was for him a model for those, as he argued at earlier points in his life in quite concrete terms.11 My histories of Western classical music – written through the frames of Orientalism, Mission, and Neo-liberalism – have not led to an affirmative position. Rather, I have exposed a process that leaves a profoundly ambivalent resonance. In its most negative forms the resonance may constitute its own opposite, namely a deadening through unwarranted discipline (the use of the Western musical stave in chapters 2 and 3 for instance). Equally troublingly, it may be an unintended amplification of an ongoing political impasse (the case of the opera discussed in Chapter 7). Or it may, alas, seem to come in line with other repackagings of modern liberal practices for arbitrary (or market-driven) export, what Spivak has summarised as ‘white men, seeking to save brown women from brown men’ (the desire to create civilians and civil society from children, seen in chapters 6 and 8).12 The history is negative, then, despite the good intentions of so many of the actors involved. So we need to ask why this is the case (even while being aware that the answers may be multiple and not straightforward). One answer might relate directly to the situation of Palestinians, which remains, at the time of writing, desperate. Whereas other research may lead through a historical trajectory from imperial to post-imperial and globalised societies, and thus chart increased agency of subjects, Palestinians face a type of globalisation without their society being postcolonial. Yet it is not appropriate to use this particular political impasse to explain what I believe is in fact a broader development in Western classical music, so we need to look further. My cautious suggestion is that we first think back to the moment at the beginning of my narrative, the moment at which it became increasingly desirable, in Europe, to foster interest in the Bible. The desire was part of a religious revival that must be seen in the context of Enlightenment, the development that placed religious frameworks under threat. It was a response to modernity, it was a time for renegotiation. Strikingly, it involved activities not only within the contexts of rising modernity, but also those which reached outwards into other places. Marchand has argued that even while public institutions underwent a secularisation in the nineteenth century, this should not mask the fact that personal religious 11

12

Said 1991: xiv. For critiques of his drawing aesthetics into utopian social practices, see Beckles Willson 2009a, 2009b: 334, in particular; Etherington 2007. Spivak 1999: 303.

Conclusion

convictions remained strong.13 Mission – as we have seen – could be a space for developing and maintaining a personally cherished belief. Thus considered, we can perceive missions as products of multiple losses. There were losses of religious certainty, losses of material securities, and there were losses of established types of sociality. Missions were created to compensate for the losses, were indeed in certain cases intended very explicitly to recover society, to recall it from its false path. From this perspective, we can see missions in the context of Boym’s restorative nostalgia, as components of modernity that strive to recover spiritual roots, projects to overcome the melancholia of loss through alternative spheres of production.14 (The intended products of missions, of course, were souls.) Would it be too much to suggest that a related situation might lie behind the later stages of my narrative, namely that the sending forth of Western classical music specifically may be a function of loss? On one level, it would seem fully justified: as teachers’ testimonies revealed, many were in Palestine because the field in which they were trained was not only a saturated market at home, but had also lost its point. Palestine seemed to offer a place in which a new musical world might be constructed. It also seems justified in the broader absorption of the arts into ‘social’ projects within industrialised societies as theorised by Yúdice. Artists have recuperated their inherited sense of meaningfulness by undertaking work that is (apparently) not in the service of the market, and audiences can be wooed to the arts by their new ‘relevance’. The shift can be traced in the opening line of an article about the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra in The Guardian newspaper: ‘Suddenly, classical music has become sexy’.15 One way to probe the question further would be to test ourselves by posing another question. What would it mean to those who love and work with Western classical music, to insist that it be thoroughly divested of its discourses of elevation? This may seem naive on several fronts, for it needs some kind of system within which to operate. But we could also think of a more radical intervention as well. Is it time to stop sending it forth all together, to stop imagining that it is appropriate to send it forth? This may be a difficult thought for some. It may indeed be a painful thought, and trigger a fear of loss. At the beginning of this Conclusion I invoked what was apparently a different type of loss, but Butler was not only referring to bereavement. She was also referring to loss occurring ‘when we are dispossessed from a place,

13

Marchand 2009: xiv, xxviii-xxix, also 15–52.

14

Boym 2001.

15

Observer 2006.

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or a community’. I would suggest that the institutionalisation of Western classical music training, in tandem with the industries of popular culture and multiculturalism, has created a tension and perpetual sense of threat (and loss). The self-elevation of Western classical music is precarious and unsustainable outside the specialist academy. Those trained to ‘believe’ thus often do experience loss and disorientation once they are outside that protected sphere. One does not need to empathise with their feelings, fully or at all. Rather, simply recognising their existence may help us understand the actions of people who have developed a set of skills and beliefs about those skills, and who find themselves in an environment that is not welcoming. So I do suggest, in fact, that missions of Western classical music can be seen – just as can missions of religion – as products of restorative nostalgia. While writing shortly after 9/11, the crux of the business of loss for Butler lay in the need to build non-violent relationships to ‘others’. There is, then, a tremendous irony in turning to her writing at this point. I have been discussing projects that set themselves up as mechanisms for encountering ‘others’ in peaceful, productive ways, after all. And I have listened to actors explaining their hopes for creating positive transformations. I have been studying a field that could itself be examined under today’s academic field of ‘conflict transformation’. Yet I have identified failure. Not physical violence in the area of music, to be sure, but very distinct failure nonetheless, in musical engagement with ‘others’. In another essay from the same post-9/11 period Butler draws on Levinas to argue for attention to the human face. The face offers a site of particular vulnerability. In order to engage successfully with another, the key is to respond to the face, ‘to be awake to what is precarious in another life or, rather, the precariousness of life itself’.16 And in ‘Violence, Mourning, Politics’, Butler is clear about the ideas that prevent such a state of wakefulness. They may be well-intentioned, but may simultaneously include ‘the nature of “man”, or the a priori conditions of language, or the timeless conditions of communication’.17 As she puts it most baldly, ‘It is not possible to impose a language of politics developed within First World contexts on women who are facing the threat of imperialist economic exploitation and cultural obliteration.’ If we are in search of less unsuccessful musical activities, then, I suggest we consider the case of Western classical music through this lens. We

16

See ‘Precarious Life’ in Butler 2004: 134.

17

Butler 2004: 49.

Conclusion

might rephrase Butler’s statement slightly to ask: ‘is it useful to impose a musical practice developed within First World contexts on adult and child civilians who are facing colonisation, economic exploitation and cultural obliteration?’ We might also ask whether the delivery of Western classical music is compatible with close attention to the face of an ‘other’, in Butler’s terms. To enhance her conceptualisation, we might consider the face as something that we not only see, but to which we must ‘listen’. Are the types of listening that are expected by practitioners of Western classical music compatible with listening to the face of the ‘other’? Such questions leave us with a choice. And if arguments for listening to the face develop, the export of Western classical music may well seem increasingly problematic, even while the loss remains tangible. Perhaps the moment will come, then, when the ‘missionary’ strategy for managing the loss will be revoked. And a different resolution will be accepted.

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Glossary of main Arabic musical terms mentioned in text

ʿatāba, (pl. ʿatāba): a folk song genre popular in rural Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine and Syria bashraf (from the Persian peshrev): a composed instrumental genre in four sections with an interleaving refrain, often the opening piece in a series bayātī: one of the maqāmāt buzuq: a long-necked, fretted lute dabka: an Arab folk dance popular in Palestine and the surrounding region dhikr: an Islamic devotional practice involving the invocation and repetition of the names of God, conducted individually and in groups (sometimes involving music) h ̣ijāz: one of the maqāmāt maqām (pl. maqāmāt): often translated as ‘melodic mode’ and represented as a scale, in practice it is a collection of notes associated in Arab and Turkish musics with particular melodic phrases and types of development mawwāl: an improvisation for voice, drawing on colloquial poetry muwashshah ̣, (pl. muwashshahāt): a genre of composition for voice, often setting classical Arabic poetry nāy: a type of reed flute blown obliquely ‘ūd: a short-necked, unfretted lute qānūn: a trapezoid, plucked zither samāʿī, (pl. samāʿiyyāt): a genre of Ottoman instrumental music in four sections with an interleaving refrain, characterised by a distinctive 10/8 rhythmic pattern in all but one section santur: hammered dulcimer of Persian origin, trapezoid in shape takht (from the Persian word for ‘platform’ or ‘stage’): a small Arab music ensemble (usually instrumental but often accompanying singer or chorus), popular in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. tarab: ̣ a feeling of ecstasy to be striven for in the experience of music

318

Interview database

Musicians and music teachers in Israel and Palestine Palestinian Duaibis Abboud Ashkar, see ‘Administrators’ Nadia Abboushi, Ramallah, 12 September 2007 and 17 July 2009 Ibrahim Attari, Ramallah, 21 April 2008 Issa Boulos, Ramallah, 10 July 2008 Amal Duaibis, Ramallah, 26 April 2007 Taiseer Elias, Haifa, 14 September 2007 Mohammed Fadl, Ramallah, 24 April 2007 Issa al-Jildeh, Ramallah, 23 April 2007 Khaled Jubran, Jerusalem, 4 July 2008, 20 June 2009 and 18 July 2009 Yusuf Khill, Nazareth, 17 July 2008 Souhail Khoury, see ‘Administrators’ Amer Nakhleh, see ‘Administrators’ Amin Nasser, telephone, 10 August 2009 Tania Nasir, Ramallah, 21 April 2008 Ramzi Abu Redwan, see ‘Administrators’ Hania Soudah-Sabbara, Jerusalem, 22 April 2008 Salwa Tabri, Ramallah, 25 April 2007 Samer Totah, Ramallah, 18 April 2008

Non-Palestinian AC (Germany), Nazareth, 4 January 2007 and informal conversation 14 July 2009 BD (Scotland/England), Jerusalem, 27 April 2007 and Ramallah, 24 June 2009 CD (Austria/Germany), Jerusalem, 26 June 2009 CE (England), Ramallah, 18 June 2009 DF (Belgium), Nazareth, 3 January 2007 DX (Germany), Berlin, 15 February 2010 EG (England/France), Ramallah, 19 June 2009

319

320

Interview database

FH (Sweden), Ramallah, 14 June 2009 GI (England), Ramallah, 24 June 2009 and 3 March 2010 HJ (Germany), Ramallah, 19 June 2009 IK (Germany), Ramallah, 20 June 2009 JL (Germany), conversation, Nazareth, 3 January 2007 and interview, Ramallah, 15 June 2009 KM (Greece/USA/Israel), Nazareth, 4 January 2007 LN (USA), Ramallah, 15 July 2009 MN (Germany), conversation, Nazareth, 3 January 2007, and interview Berlin, 6 August 2009 NP (Venezuela/USA/West Bank), Ramallah, 16 July 2009 PQ (Germany), Ramallah, 17 July 2009 RT (Germany), telephone interview, 6 August 2010 SU (Germany/Israel), Nazareth, 1 January 2007 TV (USA), Ramallah, 18 June 2009 TW (USA), Ramallah, 18 June 2009 Group conversation with RP (England), NM (France/Israel), KJ (Italy), HG (Italy), 15 July 2009.

Administrators of festivals and teaching projects Palestinian Duaibis Abboud Ashkar, Nazareth, 4 January 2007 and 16 September 2007 Ramzi Abu Redwan, Nablus, 20 April 2007 and Ramallah, 14 July 2009 Bahia Amra, Ramallah, 25 April 2007 Nadia Arouri, Jerusalem, 22 June 2009 Gabi Baramki, Ramallah, 5 July 2008 Salwa Duaibis, Nazareth, 1 January 2007 and Jerusalem, 21 June 2009 Sami Hammad, Nazareth, 3 January 2007 and Nablus, 22 April 2007 and 17 June 2009 Muna Khleify, Nazareth, 3 January 2007, Ramallah, 16 June 2009 and 14 July 2009 Souhail Khoury, Birzeit, 11 July 2008 Amer Nakhleh, Shef-Amr, 15 September 2007 and Jerusalem, 5 July 2008 Muriel Paez, Director of the BSF, Ramallah, 16 July 2009 Michael Stevens, Ramallah, 16 June 2009 Rima Tarazi, Ramallah, 25 April 2007 and 12 September 2007 Saleem Zougbi, Bethlehem, 23 April 2008

Interview database

Non-Palestinian Faculty members and students at the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance, Jerusalem, 8 March 2010 Stefan Heckel, Jerusalem, 23 June 2009 Erich Oskar Hütter, Jerusalem, 26 June 2009 Petra Klose, Jerusalem, 22 June 2009 Musicians of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, Tel Aviv, 9 March 2010 Muriel Paez, Director of the Barenboim-Said Foundation, Ramallah, 16 July 2009 Michael Stevens, Ramallah, 16 June 2009

Representatives of funding bodies Patrick Girard, Director of the French Cultural Centres in the Palestinian Territories, telephone interview, 10 July 2009 Mahmoud Abu Hashhash, Culture and Arts – Al Qattan, Ramallah, July 15 2009 Ziad Khalaf, Al Qattan Foundation for the Child, Ramallah, 15 July 2009 Hermann Schüler, Deutschlandsvertretung, Ramallah, 15 July 2009 Staff at Welfare Association, Ramallah, 15 July 2009

321

Archival sources

BBC Written Archives Centre, Caversham (BBC WAC) Palestine Broadcasting Service files: E1/1140 and 1141 E2/261 5 E12/273 E17/133/1 and 2 E34/19/1 and 2

Bibliothek des Diakonischen Werkes der Evangelischen Kirche in Deutschland (EKD) (Library of the Diaconate of the Evangelical Church in Germany) Reports of the Syrian Orphanage in Jerusalem (Jahresbericht des Syrischen Waisenhauses in Jerusalem), especially: Fünfter Jahresbericht des Syrischen Waisenhauses in Jerusalem Vom Jahre 1865

Reports of the diaconate in the Middle East (Berichte über die DiakonissenStationen im Morgenlande), especially: Dritte Bericht über die Diakonissen-Stationen im Morgenlande, von den Jahren 1856 und 1857 Elfter Bericht über die Diakonissen-Stationen im Morgenlande von 1. Juli 1872 bis 30 June 1874 Sechster Bericht über die Diakonissen-Stationen im Morgenlande von Mitte 1862 bis Mitte 1864 Achter Bericht über die Diakonissen-Stationen im Morgenlande, von Mitte 1866 bis Mitte 1888

British Library (BL) P.P.959.d Bible Lands British National Archive (BNA) 322

CO 323/1588/2 Palestine Broadcasting Service in Arabic (1938)

Archival sources

CO 733/266/7 Broadcasting in Palestine CO 733/308/12 E420 Palestine Broadcasting Service: staff and vacancies (1936) CO 733/470/14 Reorganisation of Palestine Broadcasting Department FO 371/45422 Plan of propaganda for Palestine 1945 FO 395/557 E133 Arabic broadcasts (1938)

Central Zionist Archive, Jerusalem (CZA) Files pertaining directly to the Palestine Broadcasting Service: J1/ J1/ J1/ J1/

3426 4006 4007 4617

General file on newspapers, radio broadcasting and propaganda: S25/ 22760

Friends Boys School, Ramallah (FBS) Four folders labelled as follows: Historical Historical Historical Historical

Documents 1900–1929 Photographs 1920–1930 Documents – 1930–1939 Documents 1940–1949

Israel State Archive (ISA) 129/22 Two reports by W. A. Stewart, the outgoing Director of Education: ‘Arab Technical Education in Palestine 1930–1946’ (typescript of 14 pages dated July 1946) and ‘The Fine Arts’ (typescript of 3 pages dated [?] 10 / 46) 1050/27 Music Conservatory (vol. 2) 128/14 ‘The British Council, Progress Report for 1943–44’; ‘The British Council. Report for the First Quarter, 1945’ Second Series, no. 10. October 1944; ‘British Council Work in Palestine and Trans-Jordan. Monthly Report, January 1945’ 1879/1 Department of Broadcasting: Music Section: copies of ‘Between Ourselves’, 1945–7

323

324

Archival sources

Middle East Centre Archive (MECA), St Antony’s College Oxford Jerusalem and The East Mission Archive GB 165–0161 Boxes 50–4. St George’s School, 1900–1975 Box 75A. Annual Reports: vol. 1 (1889–97), vol. 2 (1898–1902) and vol. 3 (1903–10)

Bowman Collection GB165–0034 Boxes 1B and 2

Rex Keating Collection National Library of Israel (NLI) Mus 54 A6 Activity reports Mus 54 A7 Public relations PV 4179 The Review of the Terra Sancta College PV 4181 Lines of communication

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A. M. Qattan Foundation 215–16 Abbas, President Mahmoud 274 Abboushi, Nadia 220–8 Abraham Fund 232, 235 Abyad, Jūrj 195 Adorno, Theodor W. 10 agriculture 54–5, 71 Aharon, Ezra 130, 203–4 Aïda (Verdi) 270–2, 274 Al Kamandjâti 249, 254–5, 304 promotional film 286, 292 Alexander, Saloman 121–2 Alexander von Humboldt Foundation 23, 32 al-Husseini, Hussein Effendi 194, 202 Al-Manyalāwī, Sheikh 200 Al-Nashashibi, Azmi 177 Al-Qattan, Abdel Mohsin 215–16 Al-Rusāfī, ̣ Ma‛rūf 181–2, 189 Al-Shawwa, Sami 202 Al-Ta ̣rīf ī, Sheikh Ah ̣m ̣ad 199 Al-Wahhāb, Abd 195 Amiran, Emmanuel 229–30 Amr, Mohammed 282–4, 287–8 Anderson, Benedict 7 Anidjar, Gil 105, 161 Anna Lindh Foundation 260 Appadurai, Arjun 313 Arab League 21 Arab Teacher Training Institute 131–2, 185, 187, 189, 204–5 song of 189–91 Arab uprising 177–8, 186 Intifada 21–2, 269 Arabic Folk Songs for the 1945 Lebanon–Syria Folk Music Festival (Foley) 155 Arafat, Yasser 21–2 Arbeit und Sitte in Palästina (Dalman) 101–2 Arnita, Salvador 183–4, 186, 222, 263 Arouri, Nadia 247–52 Arriaga, Juan Crisóstomo 271–2 Ashkar, Duaibbis Abboud 234–6 Avisar, David 203 Azzuzi see Aharon, Ezra

Baker, James 22 Baldensperger, Philip W. 93–5 Balfour, Arthur James/Balfour Declaration 18, 160, 161, 169, 180 Barenboim, Daniel 27, 243–4, 261 Abu Redwan’s concert in Gaza 286–7 aims in music education 295 concert in Ramallah with West-Eastern Divan Orchestra 280 criticised 273 and Edward Said 1–2 efforts to resolve Israeli/Palestine deadlock 284–5 justifying Israel’s attack on Gaza 273 Palestine seen as a place of violence 304–5 and Suhail Khoury 299 West-Eastern Divan Orchestra see West-Eastern Divan Orchestra workshops involving Jews and Arabs 1–2 Barenboim-Said Foundation 28, 237, 243–7 budget 244 criticised 273–4 foundation and objectives 243–5 opera for children in Ramallah 271–4 rift with Edward Said National Conservatory 28–9, 245–7 Bartók, Béla 207 Batrouni, Youssef 186, 197–200 Baudrillard, Jean 13, 260–1, 270, 272–3, 287–8 Baumann, E. 58–9 Beit Al Musica 238 Ben-Arieh, Yehoshua 74 Bennett, Tony 14–15 Ben Ze’ev, Noam 229–31, 233, 238, 270, 279 Berman, Nina 3 Bhabha, Homi K. 5–6, 9, 191, 208–9 theorisation of ‘ambivalence’ 6–7 Bialik, Hayim Nahman 204 Bible 40, 134–6, 209–10 ‘biblical Orientalism’ 66–70 contemporary Islam irrelevant to Christian Bible study 40

Index

discussions of music emphasising customs with biblical parallels 102 English attitudes to 7–8 Israel 8 biblical references to Jews fighting enemies 67–9 Palestine 6–7 claims to Palestine based on Bible study 37–8 entirety of Palestine transcended by Jesus 48–9 paradigm shift in conceptions of the Bible and Holy Land 16–17 Song of Songs, debate about identity of 46–7 studying local people to understand the Bible better 47–8 supremacy of the Bible 48–9 Bible Lands 144 Birzeit School/University 32, 222, 224 Blake, William 73 Blyth, Bishop Popham 144, 146 fund-raising 144, 148–50 Bohlman, Philip V. 19, 105, 110, 154 borders and movement/crossing 279–80, 287–8. See also under dialogue Boulos, Issa 28–9, 226 Bourdieu, Pierre 67 Boym, Svetlana 315 British Council 127–9, 131, 227, 240 Brown, Tim 289–90 Brüning, Anna-Sophie 271–2, 275 Brynen, Rex 228 Bshwara, Khaldoun 255–6 Butler, Judith 310, 315–17 Camera Crusade through the Holy Land, A (Elmendorf) 66 Canaan, Taufik 209–11 Chakrabarty, Dipesh 9–10, 182, 193 native/coloniser gap/existing in ‘waitingroom’ 183, 208, 216, 218–19, 157. See also beyond the waiting room under culture Chaves, Manuel 243 Choir of London 227–8, 249 choosing whether to perform in Palestine 288–9 Christianity African missions 3 Anglicans education see St George’s School healing rifts 150

JEM see Jerusalem and the East Mission (JEM) Jerusalem 146 view of Middle East 62 Bible see Bible Catholicism education 184–5 Franciscan order of Catholics 38, 124–5, 184–5 Christian mapping of Palestine 38 humanist research embedded in Christianity 40 Jerusalem/region 55, 146 Christians in Jerusalem 100 Lutherans 39, 57, 60 New Lutheran movement 48 Moravian Church 56 nations deriving authority from 8 Protestants 7 British Protestants 3, 7–8, 292–3 mission 23 Protestant writings on Palestine see under Palestine Quakers 131–7 St Bartholomew’s Day commemoration 144–6 Clare College Choir 289–90 Clermont-Ganneau, Charles 90–2, 94 Cohen, Veronika 231–2 conclusion 310–17 Conder, Lieutenant 63, 122, 124–5 contact zones 183, 201–8 difficulties facing Arab Jews in Ashkenazi Jewish communities 203–4 and occupation see under culture Wasif Jawhariyya concern with power 202–4 Lachmann/debate on modernising/ reconciling different music 204–8 pride in powerful friends 202 Corbett, Sidney 266 Costandi al-Muna, Mitri 200 Cotiner, Hélèna 292 crusades 8, 86 Protestant ‘crusade’ against Islam/‘peaceful crusade’ 8–9, 37–8, 88, 137–8 cultural heritage the concert and the heritage 247–54 and the construction of civilians 299–304 heritage and institutional frameworks/ interests 218–19 Western classical music within heritage movement 219

353

354

Index

culture 11–13, 215–58 A. M. Qattan Foundation 215–16 beyond the waiting room 220–38 individual stories 220–4 institutional frameworks 224–8 contact zones and occupation 239–58 the citizen in the Orient 254–8 the concert and the heritage 247–54 the national and the democratic 239–43 Palestinians and Europe’s shame 243–7 foreign interest and aid 217–19 heritage and institutional frameworks/ interests 218–19 Western classical music within heritage movement 219 impact of elite group of Palestinians on music structures 216 instrumentalisation of culture 10–15 nature of 10–12 waiting room in Israel 238 Palestinians living in Israel 228–31 social situation of music 229–31 Western classical music 231–8 Welfare Association 215–16, 218–20 Western classical music 231–8 Beit Al Musica 238 benefits 232–4 IPO KeyNote project/concerts in Arab schools 231–2, 234 Orpheus 234–7 Dalman, Gustaf 39, 86, 124, 208–9, 265 emotional exposure in writings 70–1 Hebrew, use of 162 at Institute for Archaeology of the Holy Land 53–4 land and agriculture, respect for 54–5, 57, 99–100 account of rural life 101–2 music 61 children in missionary schools knowing local folk songs, importance of 99 and land/agriculture 54–5, 57, 60, 70–1 local music and religious sympathy 60–1 musical encounter with Bedouin 99 notion of past Israelite music absent from Dalman’s work 65 Palästinischer Diwan see Palästinischer Diwan (Dalman) preserving the shepherds’ pipes 98–102 Yiddish poetry and song compilations from Jewish communities 51–3 Oriental linguistics 41

Palestine, leaving 101 problems caused by modernisation and settlement, discussions of 99 adopting an increasingly preservationist stance 99–100 religion/religious beliefs 52–3, 56–7 background and mission 50–2, 98, 100–1 desire to convert Jews separate from vision for Palestine 100–1 hybridity of religious practices acknowledged 197 Jews/Judaism, views on 50–3, 99–101 local music and religious sympathy 60–1 Moravian Church 50, 56, 60–1 Muslims/Islam, views on 55–7, 59–60 practical competition with Islam 59–60 settlement/immigration of Jews 101 research and travels 49 Palestine as location of sacred history 54 sources 57–9. See also revelation Darwish, Sayed 204 deaconesses of Kaiserswerth 122, 124, 137–43 choir of school 125 music as a sign of unity 140–1 promotion of singing and music 138–43 children singing 139–43 pupils’ fear of the deaconesses 141 song book 138 Delitzsch, Franz 50 DeMars, William E. 3, 243 Derrida, Jacques 9 Deutscher Palästina Verein 41, 78–9 dhikr 64–5, 92 dialogue 11–13, 259–91 on the borders of performance 279–91 shaping simulacra 288–91 transnational border crossing 280–6 turning the mirror round 286–8 concerts as simulacra 262–70 European concert 265–7 IPO concerts involving range of traditions 262–5 division between music and politics 260–1 intercultural dialogue and effecting change 259 concept challenged 259–60 reading simulacra 270–9 view from Ramallah 273–5 view from Tel Aviv 275–9 utopian performances 260–7 jarring effect of export of performances to Palestine 261 d’Indy, Vincent 222

Index

Disselhoff, Julius 140 distinction 7–8, 76–115 stage 1: informal encounter, Mary Eliza Rogers and Titus Tobler 78–86. See also Rogers, Eliza Mary, Tobler, Titus stage 2: British strategy: Palestine Exploration Fund (1865–1918) 87–98. See also Palestine Exploration Fund (PEF) stage 3: negotiation with Jews 98–115 absorbing an armature (Abraham Zvi Idelsohn) 102–11 comparing and bridging (Robert Lachmann) 111–15 Diwan aus Centralarabien (Socin) 41–3 Domestic Life in Palestine (Rogers) 78 Dor, Daniel 276–7 Doumani, Beshara 25, 172 Duran, Khalid 245 Durand, Pierre-Nicolas 292 education 8–9, 80–1, 116–58 Arab education under colonial direction 191 Barenboim’s aims for children in Ramallah 295, 297 development of music education 117 Edward Said National Conservatory see National Conservatory Israel/Jewish Jewish autonomy over educational system 191 Jewish populations integrated into comprehensive music system 229 Jewish schools in Mandate Palestine 129–31, 191 lack of music education for Arab children in Israel 229–31 Mandate Palestine 126–37 British Council 127–9, 131 Friends School in Ramallah 131–7, 152–3 Jewish schools 129–31, 191 missionary schools only providing music teaching 225 music’s broad educational value 116 peopling the land 137–58 invitation to musical reason 152–8 musical production I: singing women of the diaconate 137–43. See also deaconesses of Kaiserswerth musical production II: singing soldiers of the JEM 143–52. See also Jerusalem and the East Mission (JEM)

reading the Quran as crucial part of Arab education 198 singing, children 120, 132–4, 139–43 spread of 3 territories for music 117–37 Europe 118–20 Mandate Palestine 126–37 Ottoman Palestine 120–6 Tonic Sol-Fa movement 3, 121–2, 147–8 Edward Said National Conservatory of Music see National Conservatory Egypt 8–9, 18, 37, 72, 218 Arab refugees 20 colonisation and penetration 5, 37–8 education 117, 150 control mechanisms and producing modern individual 117, 141 image of Old City 196–7 increased American/European travel to 3, 16 notion that Egypt could be stripped back to ancient glory 6–7 music 196 Quran chanters 199 Verdi’s Aïda 270–2, 274 Napoleon’s scholars in Egypt 38 occupation of Syria 16 Six Day War, effects of 21 surveillance and control 5 Egyptology 270–1 Ehrlich, Cyril 144 El-Kholy, Muhammad 105–6 Elmendorf, Dwight Lathrop 65–70 El-Shawan, Salwa A. 18 Engels, Joel 130 England/Britain colonies as ‘offshoots’ 146 consulate in Jerusalem 16 establishing a national home for Jewish people in Palestine 18 government policy increasingly interventionist 170 helping drive Egypt out of Syria 16 identification with ancient Israelites 8 missionary societies 17, 72 music education 118 nation akin to ancient Israel, perception of England as 72–3, 87 Palestine see under Palestine Palestine Exploration Fund see Palestine Exploration Fund (PEF) Protestantism and modern national consciousness 7–8 Etherington, Ben 10

355

356

Index

Europe European Enlightenment 3 Europe’s demise and Palestine’s potential 293–9 music education 118–20 self-construction 187 European Union 216–17 Fabian, Johannes 208 Farmer, John 144, 146 Feldman, Walter 17–18 Finn, Elizabeth 63, 71–5 article on ‘manners and customs’/local belligerence 91–2 categorisation of inhabitants 94 factional accounts about her life 74 religion and mission 72–5 Finn, James 37, 64–5, 71–5 religion and mission 72–5 Fliedner, Reverend Theodor 137–42 aims and ideals 139 daily scheme for school activities 141–2 educational institutes in Germany 137 promotion of singing and music 138–43 trained deaconesses sent overseas 137–8 Foley, Rolla 116, 227 Friends School in Ramallah 132–7, 152–3 music canon of Arab songs 154–5 compilation of European and American melodies 155–6 Eastern music/practice of Arab singing 157 expansion of programme at Friends School 133–4 mixed vision of the region 136–7 music teachers’ network/Music Teachers’ Club 133, 152–3, 155 music teachers’ standard 156 musical approach 153–6 notation 157–8 programme of concerts/festivals 132–4 Folk Songs of the Near East (Foley) 155 Ford Foundation 218–19, 268–9 Foucault, Michel 11, 117, 119 Frederick William IV of Prussia 17 Friendly Tunes for the Near East (Foley) 155–6 Friends School in Ramallah 26, 132–7, 152–3, 191, 221–2, 226, 223 missionaries less restrictive in definitions of religious expression 153. See also Foley, Rolla Fry, Stephen 159, 171

Fünfeck, Paula 271 Gaza 24 Abu Redwan’s concert 286–7 Israel’s attack on 273 music 216 Palestine National Authority 22 Palestinian migration from 21 Gellner, Ernest 7 German Requiem, A (Brahms) 227–8 Germany 99 Fliedner’s educational institutes 137 German Orientalism, recovering see under revelation German philanthropy in Africa 3 German philosophers linking aesthetics with theology 13 German sources 7, 25, 38–9. See also Dalman, Gustaf missionary societies 17 music education 118–20 Gillingham, John 7 Gobat, Samuel 121 Goodrich-Freer, Ada 125 Goren, Haim 39 Graf, Reverend Raimund 57–8 Gramcsi, Antonio 11 Gramit, David 117, 119–20 Granqvist, Hilma 112 Gräwe, Uwe 266–7 Grove, George 87–8 Guardian 273, 315 Guja, Ranajit 8–9 Gustavs, Reverend Arnold 98–9 Haaretz 270, 273–4, 277 music critic 279 performances in Palestine 288–90 Ziffer’s review of opera in Ramallah 275–9 Hamas 253–4 Hart, William D. 12 Harte, John 227–8 choosing whether to perform in Israel 288–9 Harun, Azuri 113 Hassanein, Ahmed 199 Hastings, Adrian 7–8 Hauser, E, 129–30, 179–80, 202 Herbart, Johann Friedrich 119–20 Ḥijāzī, Sheikh Salāma 195, 200 Hirshberg, Jehoash 19, 123, 125, 130 History of Palestine (Totah) 204

Index

Hobsbawm, Eric 7 Hoffmann, E. T. A. 125 Holy Land 1840–1948 see distinction; education; provincialising mission; revelation separation Hornbostel, Erich von 111 Homer 40, 187 ‘Humiliation and Magnanimity’ (al-Rusāfī) ̣ 181–2 Husserl, Edmund 153–4, 156, 158 Hütter, Erik Oskar 247–52, 267, 293 Idelsohn, Abraham Zvi 102–11 background 103 history of Jewish music 108–9 synagogue music as part of Oriental music/ music historiography 103–8 maqāmāt 105–8, 110–11 teaching 125–6 India 3, 8–9 British identity creation in 9 instrumentalisation of culture 10–15 nature of 10–12 international aid 3, 217–19, 292–3 transnational networks 3 Intifada 21–2, 269 Islam/Muslims 8–9, 55 contemporary Islam irrelevant to Christian Bible study 40 conversion of Muslim citizens illegal 143 Islamic practices as impositions 208 in Jerusalem 100 Muslims depicted as warring 304 Palestinian Arabs 18, 40 prophet Mohammed 3–4, 304 Quran see Quran secular music and Islamic culture 198–200 Sufism 64–5 Supreme Muslim Council 160 Israel 3 criticism of government policies 22, 218 declassification of Israeli papers, ‘New Historians’ writing after 21 development of modern state 8 Gaza, attacking 273 nationalist mythology, the ‘Philistine’ literary construct sustaining 67 occupying lands after the Six Day War 21, 33, 288 criticism of 22, 218 and cultural narrative 258

Palestine 18 balance in approach to Israel/Palestine situation 24–5, 33 Palestine as site for Jewish settlement 18–19 Palestinians within Israel 20, 228–31 press in Israel 276–7 the state of Israel 19–21 US support for 21 Israel Philharmonic Orchestra (IPO) 231–2, 234 concerts involving range of traditions as utopian concert project 262–5 It’s Not a Gun 286, 292 James, William 12 Jameson, Fredric 13–15, 216, 220, 232, 272 global spread of simulacra as part of contemporary imperialism 261–2 Jawhariyya, Wasif 25–6, 113, 130, 182–3, 186, 192–7 background 193 father’s propriety 200 cafe culture 199–200 Lachmann, perspective on 204–8 music education 194–5 Egyptian music 196 professional and amateur musicians 195, 201–2 teaching Jewish pupils Arab traditions 202–3 power, concern with 202–4 religion affiliations transcending confessional distinctions 198 interchange between religious festivities/ domestic interchange 197–8 studying the Quran for musical reasons 198–9 Jerusalem 40, 62, 84 British consulate 16, 37 cafe culture 199–200 Christianity/Protestantism 124 bishopric 17 Christians competing with Muslims, under threat from Jews 100 diocese founded 143 Jerusalem as ‘Mother-City of Christianity’ 146 Protestant church in 74, 124 colonisation 87 educational establishments 124 Hebrew University 112

357

358

Index

Jerusalem (cont.) music school 123–4. See also St George’s School new technology 196 St Bartholomew’s Day commemoration 144–6 Water Relief Fund/water supply 87 Jerusalem (Blake) 73 Jerusalem and the East Mission (JEM) 143–52 fund-raising 144, 148–50 goals/mission 151–2 music 144 choir 150 contributing to reinforcement of the mission 144–6 male role in music-people-production 148–50 Mrs Blyth’s ‘people-creating’ role 147–8 organ 148–50 outgrowth of British ecumenical interventions 143–4 representing Church of England as a whole 144 St Bartholomew’s commemoration/Christ and his Soldiers 144–6 disjunct as a conversion strategy 146 Jerusalem Chorus 226–8 collaboration with John Harte 227–8 Jerusalem Refrains (Corbett) 266 Jewish Music in its Historical Development (Idelsohn) 108–9 Jewish National Council 136 Jews/Judaism Bible see under Bible Dalman’s views see under Dalman, Gustaf education see education Jewish National Council providing separate education 136 expansion of mission to 17 Jewish conversion 8–9, 17, 53, 72–5 Holy Land as hostile region/Jews’ strong relationship to music 69 in Jerusalem 100 music maqāmāt 105–8, 110–11 at core of Sephardic liturgical tradition 105 music historiography 103–9 music scholars’ focus on the Jews in Palestine 19 synagogue music as part of Oriental music/music historiography 103–8 negotiation with Jews 98–115

absorbing an armature (Abraham Zvi Idelsohn) 102–11 comparing and bridging (Robert Lachmann) 111–15 Palestine see under Palestine Zionism see Zionism Jordan 225–6, 258 Arab refugees 20 Six Day War, effects of 21 Journal of the Palestine Oriental Society 101, 209 Jubran, Khaled 287–8 Just a Closer Walk with Thee 267 Kahle, Paul 55, 208–9 Katz, Ruth 110, 112, 114 Katznelson, Dr Abraham 162, 166, 168 Kay, J. P. 118 Keating, Rex 176–7, 179–80 Keith-Roach, Edward 134 Kennworthy, G. C. 162 KeyNote project 231–2, 234 Khalidi, Walid 20, 287–8 Khoury, Souhail 28–9, 220–8, 239, 241 and Daniel Barenboim 299 Kiesewetter, Raphael Georg 40, 43 Kirchoff, Markus 39–40, 87, 108 Klein, Rev. F. A. 94–5 Klose, Petra 247–52 Kulthūm, Umm 195 Lachmann, Robert 111–15 background 111 context of work 111 lecturing 130 music 167–8 Arab music broadcasting 175–6 perspectives incompatible with growth of professional institutions 112 reports to university/funding applications 112–14 Wasif Jawhariyya’s perspective on 204–8 Lagerquist, Peter 285 Laham, Jack 225–6 Lama, Augustine 183–4 Lane, Edward 43, 84–5, 88 League of Nations 19 Lebanon 20, 134–6, 258 Leib-Monsohn, Avraham 187 London Jewish Society 17, 72, 121 London Society for Promoting Christianity among the Jews 17, 72 Löw, Mark 51

Index

Luther, Martin 138–9 Lynch, William Francis 63–4 Macalister, R. A. Stewart 96–7, 154 McDonagh, John 8, 67 MacDonald, Malcolm 177 McGrane, Bernard 311 McGuire, Charles Edward 3, 147–8 Macintyre, Alistair 117 McNair, Crawford 177 Magnes, Judah L. 112 Mamdani, Mahmood 159 Männchen, Julia 56, 100–1 Manning, Rev. Dr S. 89–90 Mantell, Lieutenant 64–5, 92 maqāmāt 105–8, 110–11 ‘The maqāmāt of Arabic Music’ (Idelsohn) 105–6 ‘The maqāmāt of the Hebrew Poetry of the Oriental Jews’ (Idelsohn) 106 Marchand, Suzanne L. 39, 314–15 Marx, A. B. 120 Marx, Karl 2–3 Badīʿa 201 Masābnī, ̣ Mashriq (Racy) 17–18 Masterman, E. W. G. 98 Melman, Billie 62, 74, 78 Merling, Julius 119–20 methods 23–33 ethnographic research 27–33 politics and history 23–5 sources 25–7 Michaelis, Johann David 16, 47 Miller, Daniel 61 Miskawayh, Ibn 200 mission children, missionary approaches to 143 Dalman see under Dalman, Gustaf expansion of missions to Jews 17 historical trajectories linking nineteenth century with present 2–3 and the instrumentalisation of culture 10–15 missionary schools only providing music teaching 225 musical missionaries see musical missionaries Palästinischer Diwan in the context of mission 50–2 Protestant mission 17, 23, 37–8 Western-style music-making as dynamic response to mission 183–5 Mitchell, Timothy 5, 8–9, 218 control mechanisms and discipline 117–18

modern school organisation 117, 140, 150 ‘staging’ concept 65–6, 72 Mohammedan Saints and Sanctuaries in Palestine (Canaan) 209–10 Moscrop, James 87 mourning ceremonies 82–4 Murphy, Clare 281, 285 music missionaries see musical missionaries music education see education opera see opera violence, music against 304–9 Western classical music 231–8 Beit Al Musica 238 benefits 232–4 IPO KeyNote project/concerts in Arab schools 231–2, 234 Orpheus 234–7 Western-style music-making as dynamic response to mission 183–5 within heritage movement 219 music of Palestinians/Palestine culture see culture developments shifting religious and social significance of music 199–200 discussions of music emphasising customs with biblical parallels 102 literature Palestinian binary interaction with Jewish Israelis 23 Palestinian protest and self-determination 22 music education see education music scholars’ focus on the Jews 19–20 music as a sign of unity 140–1 Palestinian conflict, attempts to address using music 2 secular authority supporting 71–5 travellers’ distaste for Palestinian music 62–6 ancient Israelite music, compared 65–6 criticisms of sounds/sound of Islamic practice 63–5 perceptions/idealisation of silence 62–3 rivalry with non-Western Christian groups 63 music schools in Ramallah; see Al Kamandjâti; Barenboim-Said Foundation; National Conservatory musical missionaries 13, 292–309 insights into work on the ground from interviews 293 cultural heritage and the construction of civilians 299–304

359

360

Index

musical missionaries (cont.) Europe’s demise and Palestine’s potential 293–9 music against violence 304–9 music contributing to reinforcement of the mission 144–6 music dispatched worldwide by missionaries and colonisers 3 Tonic Sol-Fa 147–8 Musik der Araber (Kiesewetter) 40, 43 Mussolini, Benito 170 Nägeli, Hans Georg 119 Nakba 20–1 Nakleh, Amer 237–8 Nassar, Issam 62 Nasser, Amin 220–8 National Conservatory 28–9, 219–24, 227, 239–43, 256–7 agendas of funded programmes from abroad 240–3 image-making 267–70 national and regional identity 239–40 refusing to stage concert unless all students able to attend 287–8 rift with Barenboim-Said Foundation 28–9, 245–7 national sentiment 7 Nebi Musa festival 55, 94, 197–8 ‘New Historians’ writing after 21 Niebuhr, Carsten 16–17 Nietzsche, Friedrich 200 Nu‘man, Adham 274–5 Nuwayhid, Ajaj 177–8, 192 Open Society and its Enemies (Popper) 234–5 opera opera for children in Ramallah 271–5 review by Benny Ziffer 275–9 Verdi’s Aïda 270–2 Orientalism 4–10 colonisation 5–6 as integral part of Western culture 5 nature of the modern thought introduced to Palestine 7–8 texts embedding the author within the Orient 6 Orientalism (Said) 4–9 critical responses to 4–5 focus on representation 8 Orient as an invention of colonial powers 5, 9 Orientalist vision ‘textual’ 7

Orientalist writers ‘excising’ themselves from their texts 5 writers both glorifying and reviling ‘the Orient’ 6–7 Orpheus 234–7 documentary 235–7 support from Barenboim-Said Foundation 237 Oslo Accords 22–3, 231, 256, 262 Ottomans/Ottoman Empire 16–18, 33, 151 dissolution of Ottoman Empire 181 Greece 39–40 Palestine see under Palestine Palästinischer Diwan (Dalman) 39 Diwan of revelation 46–9 missionary Diwan 50–3 conversions 53 Yiddish poetry/song compilations as precursors to the Diwan 51–2 Orientalist Diwan 41–6 comparison with Socin’s Diwan aus Centralarabien 42–3 Introduction 42 music 43–6 significance of work/ethnographic approach 40–1 sources 57–9 Palestine Bible see Bible British Mandate/secular authority 18–19, 21, 71–5, 77, 111 dichotomy between ‘Jew’/‘non-Jew’ 18–19, 77, 159–60, 161, 180 education 126–37 society organised on religious fault-lines/ Arab nationalist sentiment 198 support for Hebrew project 162 cafe culture 199–200 cartography 84 Christian mapping and routes of pilgrimage 38 foreign interest and aid 217–19, 292–3 Gaza Strip see Gaza Strip impositions of English/French literary ideas 7 and Israel see under Israel Jewish settlement British officials supporting Jews’ settlement 71–5 difficulties facing Arab Jews in western Jewish communities of Palestine 203–4 education system 129–31

Index

Jewish immigration 77, 99–100, 102, 111, 122, 159–60, 264–5 missions to Jews 17, 72–5 ‘return’ of Jewish people 6–7, 17 music see music of Palestinians/Palestine Ottoman Palestine 18, 25, 37, 182 education 120–6 ethnic mix of Ottoman communities 159–60 population, composition of 18–20 as a proto-state 21–3 first Intifada (1987) 21–2 national movement/Palestine National Authority 22 scholarship related to Palestine declassification of Israeli papers, shift following 21 emergence of PLO and Six Day War, effects of 21 Protestant writings on Palestine 7 shifting perspectives on Palestine 15–23 Palestine as a proto-state 21–3 sacred province of a declining empire 16–18 site for Jewish settlement 18–19 the state of Israel 19–21 site of sacred/biblical history 6, 8, 54 understood as part of the West 8 transformations to Palestine 99–100, 102 travellers to Palestine Elmendorf ’s ‘biblical Orientalism’ reinforcing Palestine’s spirituality 66–70 failing to find biblical history everywhere 6–7 increased American/European travel 3 travellers’ personal connections with the land 6 violent/dangerous image 284–6, 304–5 war (1948–9) 19–20 effects of the Nakba/‘catastrophe’ 20 refugee problem 20–1, 33, 264 West Bank see West Bank Palestine Conservatoire 129–31, 205 Palestine Exploration Fund (PEF) 25, 77–8, 87–98 ambitions to control of the population/ categorisation and mechanisation 93–6 categorisation of population groups 94–5 framework categories 95–6 use of agents 93–4, 174 fund-raising by stirring popular fear of Islam 87–8

local Muslims/Judeo-Christians polarisation of local ignorance against researchers’ wisdom 90–1 studied as ‘manners and customs’ 88–92 view that local people should conform more closely to the Bible 89–90 music distinguishing peaceful writers and bellicose population 89 reporting of music 96–7 publication of occasional papers 94 purposes 87 product of strategic interests 87 Quarterly Statement 88–9, 94 Palestine National Authority (PA) 22, 217 failings 217, 240 Palestine Oriental Society 101 Palestine Post 134 Palestinian Broadcasting Service (PBS) 9, 26, 127, 131, 134 another mission, another separation 178–80 civilisational mission 179–80 Arabs, British 169–78 Arabs listening to programmes not intended for them 174–5 Arabs participating in cultural/political modernity 177–8 Arab music broadcasting 175–6 British seeking Arab listeners 170 Controllers of the Arabic Section 177 orchestra 170 rural and village listeners 172–3, 175–6 Europe, Jews (and Arabs) 166–9 European music 166, 168–9 vocal/live music 167–9 function 160, 161 as a cultural institution 162–3 launch 160 music 164, 166, 170–2, 175–6, 178–9 orchestra 170, 177–8 programming 164–5 Europe, Jews (and Arabs) 166–9 Music Committee 169 tripartition of air 162–5 Hebrew, use of 162 politics allowed a public presence only in news bulletins 163–4 Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) 273–4 founded 288 international boycott until Israeli withdrawal, seeking 288–90

361

362

Index

Palestinian Liberation Organisation 21–2 Palmer, E. H. 89 Pestalozzi, Johann Heinrich 119 Piterberg, Gabriel 23 politics Arabs participating in cultural/political modernity 177–8 division between music and politics 260–1 PBS news bulletins, politics allowed a public presence only in 163–4 politics and history 23–5 Popper, Karl 234–5 Post, Reverend George E. 96–7, 154 Poston, Ralph 173, 178–9 Pratt, Mary Louise 183, 201, 220, 239 Protestants see under Christianity Provincializing Europe (Chakrabarty) 182 provincialising mission 10, 181–211 another route forward 192–7 Wasif Jawhariyya 192–7 beyond religion 197–200 developments shifting religious and social significance of music 199–200 different ceremonials and religious festivities overlapping 197–8 distinction between colonial demarcations/sociality of local people 197 secular music and Islamic culture 198–200 society organised on religious fault-lines/ Arab nationalist sentiment 198 contact zones see contact zones gestural postlude 208–11 ‘Palestinian peasant’ 208–10 ‘primitive’ musics/songs illuminating incongruity of categorisations 210–11 moving out of the waiting room 183–92 Khalil Sakakini 182–3, 185–7 song book 181–2, 187–92 Western-style music-making as dynamic response to mission 183–5 Qattan Foundation 215–16 Quran 40, 85, 209–10 chanters 199 reading the Quran as crucial part of Arab education 198 recitations/readings 114, 170, 173 secular music drawing from 200 Racy, Ali Jihad 17–18 Radwan, Suhail 230 Rainbow, Bernarr 118

Ramallah Barenboim’s aims for children in Ramallah 295, 297 Cultural Centre 285 Friends School see Friends School in Ramallah image local residents’ views 285–6 as place of danger 284–6 in review by Benny Ziffer 275–9 music schools; see Al Kamandjâti; Barenboim-Said Foundation; National Conservatory opera 271–5 permits for residents to enter Jerusalem 227 West-Eastern Divan Orchestra concert 280–1 Ranger, Terence 7 Ranke, J. F. 139, 142 Raz-Krakotzkin, Amnon 104 Redwan, Ramzi Abu 254–8, 304 background 256 Gaza concert 286–7 Regev, Motti 229 religion/religious groups beyond religion see under provincialising mission Christianity see Christianity Islam see Islam/Muslims Jews see Jews/Judaism religious debate informing German academic research of Orient 39 revelation 7, 37–75 Anglican and American imposition 62–75 fulfilling prophecy 70–5 on (not) hearing revelation 62–6 on paths of righteousness 66–70 Diwan of revelation 46–9 debate about identity of Song of Songs 46–7 imposition of Christian belief on nonChristians/supremacy of the Bible 48–9 studying the people to understand the Bible better 47–8 missionary Diwan 50–3 conversions 53 Yiddish poetry/song compilations as precursors to the Diwan 51–2 Orientalist Diwan 41–6 comparision with Socin’s Diwan aus Centralarabien 42–3 introduction 42 music 43–6

Index

recovering German Orientalism 39–61 framework for hearing music 53–7 musical exchanges 57–61 in search of revelation 39–53 RIWAQ 247–8, 255 Robinson, Edward 38, 84 Rogers, Mary Eliza 76–86, 141 background 78 music 79–81, 86 use of Bible in writing 84 women, approach to 82–4, 86 Rohana, Nizar 282 Rose, Melkon 263–4 Rosovsky, Salomon 130 Roy, Sara 24–5 Sachs, Kurt 111 Said, Edward W. 1–2, 11 arts, describing 260 and Daniel Barenboim 1–2 Hart’s response to commentaries on religion and music 12 legacy in theorising European/US relationships with ‘the Orient’ 2 music 10, 12–13 concerts, function of 264 Verdi’s Aïda, reading of 270–1, 274 Napoleon’s scholars in Egypt 38 Orientalism see Orientalism (Said) perception of Muslims as warring 304 religion 12–13 West-Eastern Divan Orchestra see WestEastern Divan Orchestra St George’s School 26, 124, 151, 193, 201, 206 songs, use of 181–2 surpliced choir 126, 150–2 Sakakini, Khalil 182–3, 193, 215–16, 263 background 185 cafe culture 199–200 music 185–7 musical experiences, describing 313–14 Quran reading as part of education 198 Salah, Mary 222 Salomon, Karl 167–9 Samson, Jim 108 Samuel, Edwin 160, 169 Samuel, Herbert 204 Schleiermacher, Friedrich 12 Schneller, Johann Ludwig 122 Schor, David 130 Schroeder, Chancellor 284 Schüler, Hermann 247–52 separation 8–9, 159–80

British distinction between ‘Jew’ and ‘nonJew’, effect of 159–60 PBS see Palestinian Broadcasting Service (PBS) Shafir, Gershon 23 Shaftesbury, Earl of 73 Shehada, Raja 201 shepherds 66–70, 98–102 Shoman, Abdul Hamid 215 simulacra see under dialogue Simulacra et Simulation (Baudrillard) 13 Six Day War 21, 33, 225 Smith, Barbara J. 160 Socin, Albert 41–3 Solana, Havea 284 Sounding Jerusalem 247–52, 265–6 Spivak, Chakravorti Gayati 9, 147–8 Stanton, Andrea L. 162 Steigerwald, David 260, 270 Steinschneider, Moritz 104 Stephan, Stephan H. 209 Stewart, W. A. 129–30, 202–3 Stokes, Martin 117 Storrs, Ronald 204 Strickland, C. F. 173 Stumme, Hans 42 S ̣ubh ̣, Sheikh Mah ̣mūd 199 Sulski, Peter 257 Sultana of Cadiz (Arriaga) 271–2 in Ramallah 273–5 review by Benny Ziffer 275–9 Swedenburg, Theodore 173 Swedish International Development Association (SIDA) 218–19, 240–2, 255, 257 Switzerland missionary societies 17 Syria Arab refugees 20 music 134–6, 258 occupation by Egypt 16 Six Day War, effects of 21 Tabri, Salwa 220–8 Tamari, Salim 197, 208–9 Ṭannūs, Dr ʿIzzat 201, 206 Tarazi, Rima 220–8 Thesaurus of Hebrew Oriental Melodies (Idelsohn) 107–8 Thompson, William McClure 64–5, 197 Tibawi, A. L. 151 Tobler, Titus 25, 76, 78–86, 290 background 78–9 choirs 120

363

364

Index

Tobler, Titus (cont.) History of Palestine 204 music 79, 81, 86 local music 84–5 Palestine, long-term view of 85–6 use of Bible in writing 84–5 women, attitudes towards 81–2 Totah, Khalil 131–2, 136, 182–3, 193 song book 181–2, 187–92 nationalistic texts 191–2 travel/travellers distaste for Palestinian music see under music of Palestinians/Palestine growth of European and American travel 3 and hearing music 3 to Palestine see under Palestine travellers in the position of unseen observers 5 Trouillot, Michel-Rolph 76–7 Ṭūqān, Ibrāhīm 177 United Nations 33, 288 Urban II, Pope 86 USA 11 new ‘radical’ scholarly agenda and US support for Israel 21 Palestinian negotiations 22 Valerga, Joseph 122 Victoria, Queen 17, 71, 77 ‘Violence, Mourning, Politics’ (Butler) 310, 315–17 violence, music against 304–9 von der Lühe, Barbara 19, 130 Wackenroder, Wilhelm Heinrich 119 Welfare Association 215–16, 218–20, 240–1 West Bank 3 first Intifada (1987) 21–2 foreign investment 22 Israeli settlements 217 music 216 Palestine National Authority 22 Palestinian migration from 21 refugees 264 representations in Israeli press 276–7 West-Eastern Divan Orchestra 3–4, 10, 27, 244–5, 280–6, 315 Barenboim conducting 313 origins/purposes 1–2, 280

promotional DVD 280–1, 285–6 transnational border crossing 279–86 Wetzstein, Johann Gottfried 47 Whitehead, Alfred North 12 Williams, Raymond 11 Wolf, Friedrich 104 Wolffsohn, David 103 women attitudes towards 86 Baldensperger 94 Clermont-Ganneau 91–2, 94 local attitudes/Palestinian 80–1 Rogers 82–4, 86 Tobler 81–2 bourgeois female of nineteenth-century Europe 147–8 mourning ceremonies 82–4 World Bank 240–1 Yellin, David 203 Yiftachel, Oren 228–9 YMCA 132–3, 186, 224, 262–4 as ‘neutral territory’ 263–4 origins 263 York, Archbishop of 73, 87–8 Young, Robert C. 4–6 Yúdice, George 10–12, 14–15, 216, 220, 245, 311, 315 Zennie, Omar 186 Ziadeh, Nicola 189–91 Ziffer, Benny 275–9 Zionism 23, 74, 204 antagonism towards 100 British support 123, 204 clashes with non-Jewish groups 160 colonisation 172 Dabka. learning 202–3 education 123, 130–1 Hebrew University 112 music 180 nationalism 108, 123, 134–6 opposition to 136 settler colonialism 23 Žižek, Slavoj 14 Zoubi, Haneen 236 Zunz, Leopold 104