In My Voice Is My Weapon, David A. McDonald rethinks the conventional history of the Palestinian crisis through an ethnographic analysis of music and musicians, protest songs, and popular culture. Charting a historical narrative that stretches from the late-Ottoman period through the end of the second Palestinian intifada, McDonald examines the shifting politics of music in its capacity to both reflect and shape fundamental aspects of national identity. Drawing case studies from Palestinian communities in Israel, in exile, and under occupation, McDonald grapples with the theoretical and methodological challenges of tracing "resistance" in the popular imagination, attempting to reveal the nuanced ways in which Palestinians have confronted and opposed the traumas of foreign occupation. The first of its kind, this book offers an in-depth ethnomusicological analysis of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, contributing a performative perspective to the larger scholarly conversation about one of the world's most contested humanitarian issues.

“[A] monumental contribution to Palestinian studies . . . an indispensable resource for those interested in Middle Eastern folklore, music, history, and politics.” —Journal of Folklore Research Drawing from a long history of indigenous traditions and incorporating diverse influences of surrounding cultures, music in Palestine and among the millions of Palestinians in diaspora offers a unique window on cultural and political events of the past century. From the perspective of scholars, performers, composers, and activists, Palestinian Music and Song examines the many ways in which music has been a force of representation, nation building, and social action. From the turn of the twentieth century, when Palestine became an exotic object of fascination for missionaries and scholars, to twenty-first-century transnational collaborations in hip hop and new media, this volume traces the conflicting dynamics of history and tradition, innovation and change, power and resistance.

Music in Conflict studies the complex relationship of musical culture to political life in Palestine-Israel, where conflict has both shaped and claimed the lives of Palestinians and Jews. In the context of the geography of violence that characterizes the conflict, borders and boundaries are material and social manifestations of the ways in which the production of knowledge is conditioned by political and structural violence. Ethical and aesthetic positions that shape artistic production in this context are informed by profound imbalances of power and contingent exposure to violence. Viewing expressive culture as a potent site for understanding these dynamics, the book examines the politics of sound to show how music-making reflects and forms identities, and in the process, shapes communities. The ethnography is based on fieldwork conducted in Israel and the West Bank in 2011–2012 and other excursions since then. Author has "followed the conflict" by "following the music," from concert halls to demonstrations, mixed-city community centers to Palestinian refugee camp children’s clubs, alternative urban scenes and even a checkpoint. In all the different contexts presented, the monograph is thematically and theoretically underpinned by the ways in which music is used to culturally assert or reterritorialize both spatial and social boundaries in a situation of conflict.

A probing reading of leftist Jewish poets who, during the interwar period, drew on the trauma of pogroms to depict the suffering of other marginalized peoples. Between the world wars, a generation of Jewish leftist poets reached out to other embattled peoples of the earth—Palestinian Arabs, African Americans, Spanish Republicans—in Yiddish verse. Songs in Dark Times examines the richly layered meanings of this project, grounded in Jewish collective trauma but embracing a global community of the oppressed. The long 1930s, Amelia M. Glaser proposes, gave rise to a genre of internationalist modernism in which tropes of national collective memory were rewritten as the shared experiences of many national groups. The utopian Jews of Songs in Dark Times effectively globalized the pogroms in a bold and sometimes fraught literary move that asserted continuity with anti-Arab violence and black lynching. As communists and fellow travelers, the writers also sought to integrate particular experiences of suffering into a borderless narrative of class struggle. Glaser resurrects their poems from the pages of forgotten Yiddish communist periodicals, particularly the New York–based Morgn Frayhayt (Morning Freedom) and the Soviet literary journal Royte Velt (Red World). Alongside compelling analysis, Glaser includes her own translations of ten poems previously unavailable in English, including Malka Lee’s “God’s Black Lamb,” Moyshe Nadir’s “Closer,” and Esther Shumiatsher’s “At the Border of China.” These poets dreamed of a moment when “we” could mean “we workers” rather than “we Jews.” Songs in Dark Times takes on the beauty and difficulty of that dream, in the minds of Yiddish writers who sought to heal the world by translating pain.

The Oxford Handbook of Music and World Christianities investigates music's role in everyday practice and social history across the diversity of Christian religions and practices around the globe. The volume explores Christian communities in the Americas, Europe, Africa, Asia, and Australia as sites of transmission, transformation, and creation of deeply diverse musical traditions. The book's contributors, while mostly rooted in ethnomusicology, examine Christianities and their musics in methodologically diverse ways, engaging with musical sound and structure, musical and social history, and ethnography of music and musical performance. These broad materials explore five themes: music and missions, music and religious utopias (and other oppositional religious communities), music and conflict, music and transnational flows, and music and everyday life. The volume as a whole, then, approaches Christian groups and their musics as diverse and powerful windows into the way in which music, religious ideas, capital, and power circulate (and change) between places, now and historically. It also tries to take account of the religious self-understandings of these groups, presenting Christian musical practice and exchange as encompassing and negotiating deeply felt and deeply rooted moral and cultural values. Given that the centerpiece of the volume is Christian religious musical practice, the volume reveals the active role music plays in maintaining and changing religious, moral, and cultural values in a long history of intercultural and transnational encounters.

Modern Jerusalem, a city central to Jewish, Muslim, and Christian religious imaginaries and the political epicenter of the Israeli-Palestinian crisis, is to put it mildly a highly contested space. More surprising, perhaps, is that its musical landscape not only reflects these rifts but also helped to define them as the ancient city transitioned to modernity during the twentieth century. In City of Song: Music and the Making of Modern Jerusalem, author Michael A. Figueroa argues that musical renderings of Jerusalem have been critical to the formation of Israeli political consciousness. The book demonstrates how Israeli songwriters helped to shape their public's territorial imagination-- creating images of a city at once heavenly and earthly, that dwells in longing, that must not be forgotten, that compels one to bereave the dead, that represents the fulfilment of prophecy, and that is the site of immense cultural diversity. The dynamic history of its representation in lyrics and music helps dispel any notion that the Israeli-Palestinian crisis is timeless, intractable, and based on static, essential identities; while there are continuities across historical divides, radical change constantly transpires. City of Song combines analyses of musical meaning, political discourse, and public performance over the long twentieth century (1880s-2010) to reveal how the Israeli-Palestinian crisis' territorial fixation on Jerusalem has been constructed, historically contingent, and subject to artistic intervention in modernity. Through a musical history of Jerusalem, Figueroa introduces a novel, humanities-centered approach to one of the world's most contested cities, and one of the defining cultural and political questions of our era.

Sound disc consists of digitally remastered musical selections originally recorded by the authors.

What makes hundreds of listeners cheer ecstatically at the same instant during a live concert by Egyptian diva Umm Kulthum? What is the unspoken language behind a taqsim (traditional instrumental improvisation) that performers and listeners implicitly know? How can Arabic music be so rich and diverse without resorting to harmony? Why is it so challenging to transcribe Arabic music from a recording? Inside Arabic Music answers these and many other questions from the perspective of two "insiders" to the practice of Arabic music, by documenting a performance culture and a know-how that is largely passed on orally. Arabic music has spread across the globe, influencing music from Greece all the way to India in the mid-20th century through radio and musical cinema, and global popular culture through Raqs Sharqi, known as "Bellydance" in the West. Yet despite its popularity and influence, Arabic music, and the maqam scale system at its heart, remain widely misunderstood. Inside Arabic Music de-mystifies maqam with an approach that draws theory directly from practice, and presents theoretical insights that will be useful to practitioners, from the beginner to the expert - as well as those interested in the related Persian, Central Asian, and Turkish makam traditions. Inside Arabic Music's discussion of maqam and improvisation widens general understanding of music as well, by bringing in ideas from Saussurean linguistics, network theory, and Lakoff and Johnson's theory of cognition as metaphor, with an approach parallel to Gjerdingen's analysis of Galant-period music - offering a lens into the deeper relationships among music, culture, and human community.

A historical and contemporary study of Palestinian musicianship in exile in the Middle East, spanning half a century in disparate locations Palestinian Music in Exile is a historical and contemporary study of Palestinian musicianship in exile in the Middle East, spanning half a century in disparate and undocumented locations. The stories taking center stage show creatively divergent and revolutionary performance springing from conditions of colonialism, repression, and underdevelopment. What role does music play in the social spaces of Palestinian exile? How are the routes and roadblocks to musical success impacted by regional and international power structures? And how are questions of style, genre, or national tradition navigated by Palestinian musicians? Based on seven years of research in Europe and the Middle East, this timely and inspiring collection of musical ethnographies is the first oral history of contemporary Palestinian musicianship to appear in book form, and the only study to encompass such a broad range of experiences of the ghurba, or place of exile.

(Instructional). The purpose of this book and its accompanying audio is to give the student not only a method from which to learn the oud, but also an overview of the history, folklore and origins of this beloved ancient stringed instrument. This book teaches the fundamentals of standard Western music notation in the context of oud playing, and serves as an introduction for absolute beginners as well as those experienced on other instruments. The book covers: types of ouds, tuning the oud, playing position, how to string the oud, music notation, scales, chords, arpeggios, tremolo technique, studies and exercises, songs and rhythms from Armenia and the Middle East, and 25 audio tracks for demonstration and play along. The audio is accessed online using the unique code inside each book and can be streamed or downloaded. The audio files include PLAYBACK+, a multi-functional audio player that allows you to slow down audio without changing pitch, set loop points, change keys, and pan left or right.