How to present fifteen centuries of Arabic music to the French public while avoiding the pitfall of orientalism? The first exhibition in Europe devoted to the question, Al Musiqa seeks to deconstruct clichés by offering a new journey to the Orient – this time, illuminated from the inside.
Non-Western music is often approached from the angle of exoticism – as evidenced by the existence of a “genre” called “world music” which brings together works whose only common point is that they come from “elsewhere”. While giving itself broad chronological boundaries (from the pre-Islamic era to the present day), the Al Musiqa exhibition, which runs until August 19 at the Philarmonie de Paris, is constructed in reverse of such an approach. Combining different media and objects (videos, installations, instruments, posters) with a view to immersing the viewer, the exhibition is conceived as a journey in which each stage plunges us into a specific spatio-temporal zone. Each room constitutes a listening terminal situated: from the desert where the sung poetry of the Bedouins and camel drivers resonates in the pre-Islamic era, to the dematerialized space of the internet at the end of the exhibition. We hear, among other things, court music from the time of the Umayyads, Sufi chants in the Maghreb from XVe century or even the popular song of Egypt from the XXe century. Works by contemporary visual artists from the Arab world complete this journey which goes beyond the boundaries of pure music.
By rejecting a formal approach to music in favour of historical contextualisation, the exhibition allows us to understand the different functions – religious, political, social – that this art occupies; it offers a broader exploration of Arab cultures through the prism of music. In doing so, it challenges certain preconceived ideas: the room devoted to the Arabian Peninsula in VIIe century highlights the musicality of Islam (chanting of the Koran, prayers accompanying religious festivals); the important place of women in song is highlighted through the figures of the divas of the 1940s (Oum Kalthoum, and many others). But it is also the idea of an irreducible elsewhere that is deconstructed: the stopover in Andalusia shows to what extent Spanish and Arab music intertwine their history, while the replica of a café in Barbès, which allows us to hear the “music of exile”, recalls that some Arab music is today created in France.
In this interview, Véronique Rieffel, curator of the exhibition, explains the challenges facing the Al Musiqa project, while explaining the choices made to present such a vast cultural heritage.
Photography: Ariel Suhamy. Interview and transcription: Catherine Guesde. Documentation and editing: Siavash Esfandiari.
Veronique Rieffel is an independent curator, art critic and cultural programmer specializing in Middle Eastern and African arts. She was director of the Institute of Cultures of Islam (HERE) in Paris, and the French Institute of Egypt in Alexandria. She is the author of the essay Islamania, from the Alhambra to the burqa, the story of an artistic fascinationpublished by Beaux Arts éditions in 2011. Photo credits: Manuel Braun
The Life of Ideas : What benchmarks did you use to present such a vast period and area?
Veronique Rieffel: The idea of the Al Musiqa exhibition is to offer a great musical journey both in time – from the pre-Islamic period to today – and in space. The exhibition takes the visitor to all the Arab countries and even beyond: to Andalusia and even to France where Arab music appeared after the Second World War, and throughout the world, since the music is now broadcast worldwide.
To talk about this very vast ensemble, we propose listening keys, based on the model of the journey. When we go on a journey, we rarely visit an entire country; we choose specific stages. In the same way, we propose here to the visitor to make stops at these different stages. The aim of this approach is to give the desire to delve deeper, to continue the journey through a concert, a film or a record. We deliberately refused to select a specific axis, so as not to reduce the understanding of Arab music to a particular genre. On the contrary, it was a question of opening the field as much as possible to pay homage to these cultures. This exhibition is also political: against the ambient discourse of discrediting the Arab world, it is a question of showing the extreme richness of Arab music.
The Life of Ideas : What does music teach us about Arab cultures?
Véronique Rieffel: Al Musiqa is, surprisingly, the first exhibition in Europe devoted to Arab music. Now I think that music is a good key to understanding and introducing people to Arab cultures since it is at the heart of cultural and social practices. It has always been a kind of thermometer of the political life of different Arab countries, whether music has accompanied power – this is the case with a character like Oum Kalthoum, who was the spokesperson for the Nasserist revolution and this idea of a triumphant pan-Arabism – or conversely, music is on the side of the opposition. This scenario is the most widespread today: musicians and singers say a lot about the geopolitical situation in Arab countries through a song that is often protesting, inherited from a long tradition. I think that music is really a key to listening to the Arab world.
The Life of Ideas : Do these musics carry the dream of a new pan-Arabism?
Véronique Rieffel: What is interesting is that music is already a universal language in itself, and even when it is based on words, on poems, this language is common to the entire Arab world: from Saudi Arabia to Morocco and even in the Diasporas, we have a common culture, a common understanding, and exchanges that can be extremely interesting. We see this in very popular cultural phenomena like “Arab Idol”, this show that also exists in France and the United States: since the common language is Arabic, it is listened to in all the countries of the Arab world and in all the Diasporas. The candidates come from Algeria as well as Lebanon or Palestine… We thus find a form of Pan-Arabism there; this project that had been very popular on a political level in the last century, but which had failed, is found on a musical level, helped by contemporary tools such as satellite and social networks. There is a circulation of content, songs, ideas.
As a result, there are several polarities in the Arab world today. In the last century, Egypt polarized the Arab world, but today there are many such centers: Beirut, Casablanca, the Emirates… Many structures encourage artists in the Arab world as a whole. At the entrance to the exhibition, we see a video by a YouTuber, Alaa Wardi, who, in six minutes, tells the history of Arab music. We see that he masters the registers of the Mashreq as well as the Maghreb. We see that thanks to this common language, we have access in the Arab world to a considerable range of content. We can therefore speak of a cultural Pan-Arabism.
The Life of Ideas : How to avoid the pitfall of orientalism?
Véronique Rieffel: Al Musiqa is an exhibition that has decided to move away from Orientalism; it is a very important decision. Our view of the Arab world has been shaped by Orientalism, both politically and aesthetically. The way we look at, the way we listen to the Arab world are linked to writers or artists who have been to the Arab world and presented it through their filter – or who have not been there and have fantasized about it. Music scenes are very present in pictorial Orientalism; we could very well have chosen Orientalist works to deal with this subject. But the works we have chosen to show are essentially works by artists of Arab culture, most of whom live in the Arab world. We wanted to show these cultures from the inside, to listen to the Arab world and see what the artists have to show us.
Moving away from orientalism also meant presenting the music of the Arab world not as foreign music, as it was imagined at certain times, or as some people imagine it today. We wanted to show that we all listen to Arab music, perhaps without knowing it. This fact is not linked to the recent history of globalization, nor to that of the great wave of immigration in the last century, but that it is a history that has linked us to the Arab world for a long time, since the Middle Ages. In the exhibition, there is a room dedicated to the music of the Umayyads and the Abbasids. The Umayyads, when they lost to the Abbasids, took refuge in Spain, and thus began to build a common culture, which had effects later on. It is this common history that we are telling, and not that of music from distant lands, of exotic music. We wanted to give people the chance to hear music that speaks to us and touches us.