Middle East - Anthony Ham [73]
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Popular Culture in the Arab world, by Andrew Hammond, offers a timely look at thriving popular Arab culture from Al-Jazeera to pop superstars, with detours into the world of tele-imams (think Muslim televangelists) and the mass media.
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Relatively new to Turkey and with its roots in the Turkish Diaspora of Germany, rap music has found a growing following within Turkey with a younger audience drawn to its counter-culture voice of protest. Many of the groups are based in Germany, among them Cartel (the first group to make it big), KMR and Aziza-A.
Israeli
Israeli music will sound familiar to many travellers, not least because many of its roots lie in European soil. But the country’s thriving music scene has become more nuanced in recent years, both in recognising the multinational origins of Israel’s population and in excavating distinctive Jewish rhythms from broader European traditions.
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Daniel Barenboim
No figure in the Middle Eastern arts has done as much to promote peace and understanding between Israelis and Palestinians as Daniel Barenboim (b 1942), the Israeli pianist and conductor. Barenboim is best known for having cofounded the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, a collection of young, talented Israeli, Palestinian, Lebanese, Syrian, Jordanian and Egyptian classical musicians, with his friend, the late Palestinian intellectual Edward Said, in 1999. From its base in Seville in Spain, the symphony orchestra (conducted by Barenboim) tours the world, including Israel and the Palestinian Territories. Back in Seville, the Barenboim-Said Foundation, which was set up to promote coexistence and dialogue and is funded by the local Andalusian government, holds summer workshops for young musicians from the Middle East, while it also supports a range of projects, including musical education programs in the Palestinian Territories. In 2002, Barenboim and Said were jointly awarded Spain’s prestigious Príncipe de Asturias Prize for ‘improving understanding between nations’.
But Barenboim has never been content to let his music alone do the talking. An outspoken critic of Israel’s policies and an advocate of Palestinian rights, Barenboim has performed in the West Bank, including a piano recital he performed after secretly entering the Palestinian Territories under the cover of darkness when the Israeli government refused permission for the concert to go ahead. After a concert in Ramallah in January 2008, he accepted honorary Palestinian citizenship, a month after he and an international orchestra were refused permission by Israeli border guards to enter Gaza, where they were scheduled to perform a baroque-music concert. In 2005, he also refused to be interviewed by uniformed reporters for Israeli Army Radio as a mark of respect for the Palestinians who were present.
Perhaps not surprisingly, Barenboim has become a hate figure for many on the Israeli right, and was described by the former Israeli Minister of Education, Limor Livnat, in 2005 as ‘a real Jew hater’ and ‘a real antisemite’. Undeterred, Barenboim pointedly refused to participate in the celebrations surrounding Israel’s 60th anniversary in March 2008 as a gesture of solidarity with the Palestinians.
To learn more about Barenboim and the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, track down Paul Smaczny’s documentary, Knowledge is the Beginning, which won an Emmy Award in 2006.
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Sterns World Music (www.sternsmusic.com) is a reputable and independent London-based seller of world music CDs that allows you to search by country, artist or even region.
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Perhaps the most successful example of this latter phenomenon is klezmer,