1st Edition
Music and Encounter at the Mediterranean Crossroads A Sea of Voices
Music and Encounter at the Mediterranean Crossroads: A Sea of Voices explores the musical practices that circulate the Mediterranean Sea. Collectively, the authors relate this musical flow to broader transnational flows of people and power that generate complex encounters, bringing the diverse cultures of Europe, Africa, and the Middle East into new and challenging forms of contact. Individually, the chapters offer detailed ethnographic and historiographic studies of music’s multifaceted roles in such interactions. From collaborations between Moroccan migrant and Spanish Muslim convert musicians in Granada, to the incorporation of West African sonorities and Hasidic melodies in the musical liturgy of Abu Ghosh Abbey, Jerusalem, these communities sing, play, dance, listen, and record their diverse experiences of encounter at the Mediterranean crossroads.
Introduction. A Sea of Voices (Ruth F. Davis and Brian Oberlander) / Chapter 1. Voicing New Belongings: Composing Multilingual Songs in Italy’s Refugee Reception Centers (Fulvia Caruso) / Chapter 2. Morisco Prayer: Musical Hybridity and Historical Memory among Muslim Converts in Granada (Brian Oberlander) / Chapter 3. Tan Cerca, Tan Lejos ("So Close, So Far Away"): Competence and Collaboration in Jalal Chekara’s Flamenco Andalusí (Ian Goldstein) / Chapter 4. Brazilian Encounters: Beirut’s "Golden Age," Ziad Rahbani, and Lebanese Bossa Nova (Gabrielle Messeder) / Chapter 5. Bollywood Trajectories and Audibilities of Race in Greek Popular Song (Dafni Tragaki) / Chapter 6. Beyond the Borrowing Paradigm: Lessons from the Muslim-Jewish Maghrib (Jonathan Glasser) / Chapter 7. Teaching Andalousian Music at Rabat’s Conservatoire de musique marocaine: Franco-Moroccan Collaborations under Colonialism (Jann Pasler) / Chapter 8. Southern Subjectivities: Contemporary Art Music from the South of the Mediterranean (Anis Fariji) / Chapter 9. Dynamics of Musical Diversity: Morocco and the Southern Shore of the Mediterranean (Miriam Rovsing Olsen) / Chapter 10. Ensounding Exile: Yehuda Halevi and Israeli Musical Mediterraneanism (Michael A. Figueroa) / Chapter 11. Between Europe, the Middle East, and Africa: The Musical Repertoire of the French Benedictine Community of Abu Ghosh, Jerusalem (Olivier Tourny) / Chapter 12. Cycles of Encountering: Revisiting Robert Lachmann's Oriental Music Project in Mandatory Palestine (Ruth F. Davis)
Biography
Ruth F. Davis is a Life Fellow and former Director of Studies in Music at Corpus Christi College, University of Cambridge, where she is Emeritus Reader in Ethnomusicology. She also chairs the International Council for Traditional Music Study Group on Mediterranean Music Studies.
Brian Oberlander holds a PhD in Musicology from Northwestern University.
"This brilliant collection of essays gives voice to the Mediterranean and the histories of encounter that converge across its past, present, and future. The voices gathered here sound the lives of individuals no less than the complex narratives of religion and nation, of the struggle to sound the historical longue durée in the lived-in worlds of today’s Mediterranean."
—Philip V. Bohlman, Ludwig Rosenberger Distinguished Service Professor in Jewish History, University of Chicago, and author of Focus: Music, Nationalism, and the Making of the New Europe (Routledge)
"This far-ranging and timely collection of essays explores the musical cultures of the Mediterranean as a "sea of voices" resounding with the many contradictions of this contested geopolitical and cultural space. Richly illustrated with analyses of historical and contemporary case studies, this volume invites the reader to think not so much in as with the Mediterranean as a space for reconceptualizing not only Mediterranean musical encounters, but the study of music itself."
—Jonathan H. Shannon, Associate Dean for Academic Operations and External Relations and Visiting Professor of Anthropology, New York University Abu Dhabi
