In the Homegrown Plus series, we present concert recordings from the Homegrown Concert Series that also have accompanying oral history interviews, placing both together in an easy-to-find blog post (find the whole series here). This post, which highlights a recent Homegrown concert and oral history interview with Istiwanāt Live! from June 5, 2024, continues the series.
This is a guest post by Hanna Salmon, an intern at the American Folklife Center and PhD Candidate in ethnomusicology at the University of Texas at Austin. Salmon’s research focuses on how Palestinian storytellers foster affective atmospheres through their performances.
Istiwanāt Live! is an Arabic musical ensemble, or takht, formed by four ethnomusicologists with expertise in Middle Eastern music:
- Dr. Anne Rasmussen, Professor of Music/Ethnomusicology and Director of the Middle Eastern Music Ensemble at William & Mary
- Dr. Jared Holton, Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology and Musicology at the University of Georgia
- Dr. Anne Elise Thomas, Assistant Professor of Music at Sweet Briar College and Founder/Director of the Itraab ensemble at Virginia Tech; and
- Dr. Albert Agha, Assistant Professor at the American University of Sharjah
For their Homegrown concert in June 2024, the group was inspired by the American Folklife Center’s (AFC) Archive Challenge—a program created by staff at the AFC to bring archival, musical collections alive through contemporary performances. Istiwanāt Live!’s members looked for records in the AFC’s archival collections, and Harvard’s Loeb Library Arab 78 Collection, that they could learn, reinterpret, and perform live.
Istiwanāt Live!’s name comes from the materials with which they chose to work: cylinder recordings (istiwanāt in Arabic) and 78 records. The ensemble spent a year transcribing and rehearsing music from Arab and Arab American records, made in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Through their research into these records, they found that some recordings preserved stylistic features and performance practices that are different from Arab American music-making today. They fondly called these distinctions “musical treasures.” For instance, you’ll hear the ensemble perform vocal and instrumental improvisations (mawwal and taqasim) at the end of their selections. Nowadays, it’s more common to hear musicians improvise at the beginning of their performances, to introduce the melodic mode (maqam) and ease their listeners into the music. So why did the musicians on these records improvise at the end of their pieces? Rasmussen suggests that they were responding to the constraints of early recording technology: they wanted to record the composed music in full, and they filled extra time on the record with improvisations at the end (1991).
Watch the video below to find 3 other “musical treasures” the ensemble found! (Hint: listen for what Rasmussen calls “heterophonic mayhem”!)
Istiwanāt Live! chose a wide-ranging set of records for the performance above, many of which represent significant moments in the history of Arabic and Arab American music. They worked with a ‘vanity record’ of the song “Juz (Gos) al-Hamam” (The Pair of Doves) by Zakiyya Akub, who historian Richard Breaux argues was one of the first Arab American women to make a 78 record in the US (Rasmussen 2024: 5). They then performed a Tunisian piece recorded by famous vocalist Habiba Msika. They also found early recordings of two famous songs, “El Helwa Di” (That Sweet Girl) and “al-Bulbul Nagha” (the Nightingale Coos), with different melodies and lyrics than the versions we know today.
Other songs in Istiwanāt Live!’s performance came from important collections at the American Folklife Center. The group began and ended the program with a recording taken from AFC’s Benjamin Ives Gilman 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition collection. Of the 102 sound cylinders in the collection, 9 cylinders feature Turkish and Syrian/Lebanese vocal and instrumental music recorded at the Exposition’s Turkish tent. The ensemble performed “Egyptian March” (also referred to as “Gilman 77”) from the archival recording by qanun player and vocalist Malaka Surur.
The rest of the ensemble’s pieces came from the Loeb Music Library’s (Harvard University) Arab 78 collection of commercial records. The Library of Congress holds materials related to the Arab 78 collection in the Recorded Sound and Performing Arts Divisions. For example, recordings of “El Hilwa Di” (That Sweet Girl; also titled “ad-Dik ysayyah ku ku ku ku” [The Rooster Crows kookookookoo]) and “Ya Nanah Hilwa” (Oh Nanah, Her Beauty) both come from the Maloof Phonograph record label. The label was founded in New York at the beginning of the 20th century by Arab American musician and composer Alexander Maloof. The library holds several books of music arranged or composed by Maloof along with two albums featuring the Maloof Oriental Orchestra. One of these albums was a project of Anne Rasmussen’s titled The Music of Arab Americans: A Retrospective Collection. The album was released by Rounder Records in 1997 and features music Rasmussen encountered during her dissertation research. Istiwanāt Live! performed Constantine Souse’s version of “il-Bulbul Nagha” (the Nightingale Cooed), a record which is included on the album.
After the performance, members of Istiwanāt Live! gathered with AFC’s Head of Research and Programs, John Fenn, to discuss their process of working with the archives and their motivations for learning to perform this music, which you can see in the video above. Since all four performers are directors of Middle Eastern music ensembles at their universities, they spoke about the potential of these recordings as pedagogical tools. They discussed the difficulties of transcribing the recordings because musicians well-versed in playing Arabic music assign such high value to improvisation and a loose, heterophonic sound. Reflecting on their rehearsal experiences, Istiwanāt Live! members described the process of “cultivating” the ear and the technical skills they needed to adopt the style of the musicians on the records. They end the interview by speculating on how to make the music that Istiwanāt Live! performed more widely available and how to inspire people to do their own research in the archives. Since their performance, the ensemble has authored an article about their experience, to be published in the Canadian journal MusiCultures — keep your eyes out for more!
Collection Connections:
For more resources related to the recordings in Istiwanāt Live!’s concert, see:
- Gilman 77: “Egyptian March,” performed by Malaka Surur
- The Music of Arab Americans: a Retrospective Collection – includes “Il-Bulbul Nagha,” sung by Constantine al-Sous
- Habiba Msika: la diva des annees 20 / [est accompagnee a l’harmonium et au piano par M’hamed Khadhri]
- Other recordings from Maloof phonograph
- Other resources from Alexander Maloof
- Other resources from Anne Rasmussen
Other Homegrown concerts featuring music from the Middle East
AFC’s Archive Challenge
- Research Guide – Archive Challenge: Toolkit from the American Folklife Center
- Archive Challenge Sampler Concert 2017
- Archive Challenge Sampler Concert 2018
- Archive Challenge Sampler Concert 2019
- Archive Challenge at Home 2020 podcast
References:
Rasmussen, Anne. 1991. “Individuality and social change in the music of Arab Americans.” PhD diss. University of California, Los Angeles.
Rasmussen, Anne. 2024. “Taking our SEM Ottawa Show to the Library of Congress, June 5, 2024” in SEM Newsletter 58(3): 5 and 18.