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Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School
2019
Come, Ask My Heart: Voice, Meaning, and Affect among Algerian Sha'Bi Musicians in PCharisrtoipsher C. (Christopher Crandall) Orr
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FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY
COLLEGE OF MUSIC
“COME, ASK MY HEART”: VOICE, MEANING, AND AFFECT AMONG ALGERIAN
SHA‘BI MUSICIANS IN PARIS
By
CHRISTOPHER C. ORR
A Dissertation submitted to the College of Music in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
2019
Christopher C. Orr defended this dissertation on March 29, 2019. The members of the supervisory committee were:
Margaret Jackson Professor Directing Dissertation
Adam Gaiser University Representative
Frank Gunderson Committee Member
Michael B. Bakan Committee Member
The Graduate School has verified and approved the above-named committee members and certifies that the dissertation has been approved in accordance with university requirements.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This project would not have been possible without the support of many different people in my life who have encouraged me, mentored me, or contributed to this study. I am deeply grateful to the members of this committee for their mentorship and guidance throughout my doctoral program. Thank you to Frank Gunderson and Michael Bakan for helping me to develop as a scholar, for challenging me and for inspiring me to pursue my goals and research interests. I am appreciative of Adam Gaiser for the opportunity to participate in his courses in the Department of Religion. His teaching enriched my graduate studies at FSU, and his valuable insights have helped shape the present project these past several years. I am deeply grateful to my advisor, Margaret Jackson, for her encouragement and dedication to my graduate education. Her perspicacity and guidance have pushed me to new and creative ways of thinking, and her example as a scholar has inspired me to pursue meaningful, humanistic research. My time at Florida State has certainly been one of intellectual rigor and personal growth thanks to each of you. I owe a sincere debt of gratitude to the musicians, fans, and friends who have contributed to this study. Without their gracious collaboration this dissertation would not have been possible, and I dedicate this work to them with the humble anticipation that it will be received as a valuable, scholarly contribution to a musical practice they hold deeply meaningful to their lives, and which has become an important part of my own. A warm and heartfelt thank you to Yacine, Lyes, Samira, Mohammed, Mhenni, Oussama, Krimo, Aziz, Mohamed, Issa, Reda, Sallahadine, and Mahfoude. I am privileged to have not only worked with all of you on a professional level, but to have gained valued lifelong friends. I am grateful to Saad Eddine Elandaloussi and the Andalusi association, El Andaloussia de Paris, for the opportunity to participate in making music during my time in Paris. Thank you as well to the Association Les Beaux Arts d’Alger for graciously welcoming me into their family during my time in Algiers, and to their director, Hadi Boukoura, for his valuable insights at the final stages of this project. This study was funded by the Chateaubriand HHS Fellowship from the Embassy of France in the United States. I am grateful for their financial support, which provided me with the opportunity to live and conduct research in Paris. In addition, the fellowship offered me the chance to network and collaborate with French scholars. I am appreciative of the Centre de
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recherche en ethnomusicologie (CNRS-CREM) for their valuable feedback and suggestions during my research in Paris. A special thank you to Dr. Jean Lambert, Dr. Nicholas Prévôt, and Dr. Victor A. Stoichita for their insights and guidance. Lastly, I would like to express my gratitude to my family and friends who have supported me throughout this journey. I am deeply appreciative of my friends Kyle, Peter, and my community of support at Four Oaks Community Church. Thank to my high school music teacher, Lynn Stover, for sparking an interest in North African music and for inspiring me to pursue a career in ethnomusicology. Thank you most of all to my family for your love and support through thick and thin. Finally, thank you to my wonderful wife, Ashley, for your unceasing love and encouragement and for sharing in this adventure with me.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
List of Figures ...... vii Note on Transliteration ...... viii Abstract ...... ix
1. INTRODUCTION ...... 1
Focus and Thematic Overview of the Study ...... 3 The Sha‘bī Shaykh as Embodied Moral Authority ...... 4 Vocality and Collective Emotional Experience ...... 8 Sha‘bī as (Trans)national Heritage ...... 12 Review of the Literature...... 12 North African Musical Practices ...... 13 Francophone Postcolonial Scholarship ...... 15 Performance and Community in Diaspora ...... 17 Embodied Emotional Experience ...... 19 Vocality ...... 20 Discourse as Performance ...... 22 Nostalgia, Memory, and Place ...... 22 Overview of Chapters ...... 23
2. THE ‘PLACES’ OF SHA‘BĪ: LEGACIES OF THE MIGRANT CAFÉS ...... 26
Finding Sha‘bī: Intimacy and the Importance of Venue ...... 27 Finding Sha‘bī: Le Shwa des artistes I ...... 28 Algerians on Display: Colonial Bodies and Public Space in the Metropole...... 30 Creation of a Settler Colony and the Rise of Labor Migration ...... 33 Finding Sha‘bī: Le Shwa des artistes II ...... 35 Sha‘bī Music in Exile: the Algerian Café Scene in Paris ...... 36 Paris’s Oriental Cabarets ...... 38 The War of Independence and Postcolonial Transformations ...... 39 The Beur Cultural Movement ...... 42 Finding Sha‘bī: Le Shwa des artistes III ...... 47 “Deserting the Cafés” and the Rise in Institutional Support ...... 48
3. THE GRAIN OF THE VOICE AND THE SINGER’S MORAL AUTHORITY IN SHA‘BĪ PERFORMANCE ...... 52
Moho’s Studio ...... 52 Dahmane El Harrachi and the Timbre of Immigration ...... 56 Sufism, Text, and Moral Authority of the Voice ...... 62
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4. POPULAR POETIC TRADITIONS AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF SHA‘BĪ MUSIC ...... 76
Abdelkader Chaou at the CCA ...... 76 The Andalusi Poetic Heritage ...... 80 Malḥūn and Genres of Colloquial Sung Poetry ...... 82 The Andalusi Associative Movement and the Invention of Sha‘bī ...... 85 M’hamed El Hadj El Anka ...... 87 Women in Sha‘bī Music...... 92 “The Magic of Sha‘bī”: Poetry and Contemporary Performance Practice ...... 94
5. TRANSFORMATIVE ENVIRONMENTS, ECSTATIC EXPERIENCE: SHA‘BĪ AS AFFECTIVE PERFORMANCE ...... 103
Place-Making and Emotional Entrainment in Sha‘bī Performance ...... 104 Manipulation of Public Space and Creation of Intimacy ...... 111 ‘Alger al-Bahdja’: Nostalgia and Emplacement Outside the Performance Space ...... 117 Shared Symbols and Floating Signifiers: The Mechanics of Emotional Experience ...... 123
6. PEDAGOGY, TRANSMISSION, AND THE SHAYKH’S AUTHORITY ...... 130
Mohamed’s Mandole Class in Sarcelles ...... 131 Hadi’s Group Rehearsal of “Ya Waḥdani” ...... 135 Legacies of Maghribi Stigmatization in France ...... 136 The Visible Other: Artistic Promotion and the Place of Sha‘bī in Postcolonial France ...... 140 “Paris Is a ‘World’”: Mohamed’s Response to Stigmatization ...... 142 Negotiating Multiple Authenticities ...... 145 The Penetrating Gaze: Hadi’s Response to Stigmatization ...... 148 “Today, There Are No Poets”: The Shaykh and Responsibilities of Transmission...... 153 Authoritative Transmission: Embodied Knowledge and Proximity to the Shaykh ...... 156
7. CONCLUSION: CONTINUITIES, EVOLUTION, AND RETURN ...... 163
APPENDIX A: HUMAN SUBJECTS APPROVAL ...... 172
REFERENCES ...... 187
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ...... 195
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LIST OF FIGURES
1.1 Amar Ezzahi, ca. 1980s (1941-2016) ...... 5
2.1 Mohamed and his accompanying percussionist and keyboard player begin the evening with a set of traditional sha‘bī standards as the audience enjoys their dinner (Photograph by author, April 2017) ...... 29
2.2 Poster detailing the Eiffel Tower and main gallery spaces constructed for the 1889 Exposition Universelle ...... 31
3.1 Portrait of Amar Ezzahi by Moho Sahraoui ...... 54
3.2 Dahmane El Harrachi (1926-1980) ...... 60
3.3 Entrance to the Garden Marengo in Bab El Oued, Algiers, with multiple photos of Ezzahi taped to the wall in memory of the shaykh (Photograph by author, December 2018) ...... 64
3.4 Three modes used in Hadi’s interpretation of the text “Ya Waḥdani.” Accidentals in parenthesis show permitted variations in performance (Aous 1996: 19-20) ...... 70
4.1 Dancers gather down front during Chaou’s concert, March 3rd, 2017 (Photograph by author) ...... 78
4.2 Political Map of Algeria ...... 81
6.1 Mohamed leads his class in rehearsing their tūshiyya (Photograph by author, April 2017) .132
7.1 Chetouane’s accompanying musicians under the tinda (Photograph by author, October 2018) ...... 163
7.2 Wedding celebration in Algiers - the dancing begins (Photograph by author, October 2018) ...... 165
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NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION
The transliteration of Arabic terminology I use throughout this dissertation reflects a mixture between standard written Arabic and dialectical variations as they pertain to song texts, spoken dialogue, and terminology used by my interlocutors. This approach accommodates the rich and complex linguistic overlay in Algerian society, a reality manifested in my own research as a negotiation between Classical and Modern Standard Arabic, the more flexible, local rules of spoken Arabic in the Maghrib, and the idiosyncratic linguistic practices of musicians. In general, I follow the translation and transliteration guidelines of the International Journal of Middle East Studies. Terminology with common English usage follow their English spelling, without diacritic marks. Plural forms of nouns follow their Arabic forms, as opposed to the affixation of English plural markers (shuyūkh not shaykh-s); however, the spelling of broken plurals is sometimes altered to reflect Algerian dialectical pronunciation (qṣāyid not qsā’id). In certain instances, I use Francophone spelling of proper names to follow their common usage among Algerians (such as Cheikh El Hasnaoui). Transliterations of song titles have at times been left in their Francophone phonetic approximations, without diacritics, to reflect their common usage among my interlocutors. Diacritical marks are also abandoned in favor of phonetic approximations in examples of sung texts where the intent is to show their affective manipulation by individual singers.
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ABSTRACT
In this dissertation I explore performances of Algerian sha‘bī music in Paris as affectively powerful experiences for the Algerian migrant community. Literally meaning “popular,” sha‘bī developed as a modernized form of colloquial sung poetry among the working class of mid- twentieth century Algiers and has remained a significant mode of cultural expression in the twenty-first century. By comparing a range of formal and informal contexts of performance, I consider the interdependency of place and intimacy in the expression of authority, morality, ecstasy, tradition, and communal belonging in sha‘bī praxis. I eschew dyadic constructions of home and exile and instead explore the idea of place in multiple guises, both real and imagined, as it either constrains or enables shared ecstatic experience among listeners. During successful sha‘bī performances, participants transform physical spaces into places of intimacy by entraining with one another’s emotional states. This state of shared heightened emotion is vested in the role of the shaykh, who moves the audience through skillful execution of sha‘bī’s musical conventions and his demonstration of textual knowledge through a convincing interpretation of the musical poetry. Central to this experience is the voice of the shaykh, which imbues the text with affective power and establishes the singer as the embodiment of tradition. As evoked metaphorically in the sung refrain of a well-known song, “Come, ask my heart to share with you its news and you’ll see that you own it and you know what you’ve done to it,” the singer invites the audience into a shared ritual of ecstatic, musical interaction in which bodily co-presence and emotional entrainment bring listeners together in collective effervescence. Perhaps most importantly, singers are imbued with moral virtues by adoring devotees, which allows them to shape the emotional experiences of individual performances. Informed by interviews and participant observations, I examine how the sha‘bī singer comes to embody the weight of tradition and joins with musicians and audiences to facilitate intimacy across a range of Parisian environments. In the process, I seek to illuminate why sha‘bī continues to be such a dynamic, meaningful mode of cultural expression for France’s Algerian diasporic community.
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CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION
This story begins with an ending. A casket, draped in the white and green of the Algerian flag, drifts downstream through a river of people in a narrow street and toward the historic El Kettar Cemetery near the working- class Algiers neighborhood of Bab El Oued. As the crowd presses in to catch a glimpse, the pallbearers’ assistants are forced to clear a path while holding the masses at bay. Lifted cell phones dot the air, ready to record the moment the coffin passes by, while curious, somber onlookers lean perilously over the porch railing of a nearby restaurant. Others hang out of tall apartment building windows or climb atop the stone walls that flank the procession to gain a better view, keen to hear the steady chant of “Allah akhbār” from mourners as they near the cemetery. A camera pans over the sea of onlookers further upstream, allowing the viewer to see all who have gathered to mourn the passing of their beloved sha‘bī singer, Amar Ezzahi. Nearly two thousand miles away in the studio of the London-based network Al Magharibia, a headline news program host sat watching the cellphone video of Ezzahi’s funeral with another sha‘bī singer, Yahia Bouchala.1 Invited onto a special edition of the show to pay homage to the singer whose death just days earlier had sent shockwaves through Algerian society, Bouchala was visibly distraught as he reflected on the death of his friend and fellow musician. He stared at the large studio screen with tears in his eyes, still engrossed in the scene when the host interrupted him, “And what you do feel right now?” (Qu’est-ce tu as senti?) “Ah, well, what could one say…” he stammered. (eeh...que voulez-vous que je peux dire…) “We see so many common people [in this video]. Amar Ezzahi was close to the poor, no?” (On voit des gens très simples. Est-ce Amar Ezzahi, il était proche aux [pauvres], on peut dire ?)
1 Décès d'Amar Ezzahi, icône de la chanson populaire algéroise, YouTube video, 59 :24, posted by “Al Magharibia Channel,” December 10, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nu4Ronja8-Q 1
“Yes, yes, very close to the poor... and he was very humble. He was a man who—Well, I’m sixty-three years old. I’ve played with almost every singer. He’s the only one who really transported me along with him. And that’s not to say anything against the others—far from it! It’s just to say that he was someone rather special, such that I’m not able to describe…” (ah, il était très proche des pauvres…il était très humble. C’est un homme—moi, je suis soixante-trois ans. J’ai roulé avec, j’ai joué avec tous les chanteurs. Il est le seul chanteur qui m’a vraiment ramené avec lui. Je dis pas que j’aime pas des autres—non, loin de là ! Mais lui, il a eu quelque chose spéciale. Et j’arrive pas à vous décrire.) “Did Ezzahi leave a legacy for sha‘bī?” (Est-ce qu’il a laissé un patrimoine [pour] sha‘bī ?) asks the host. “—Oh, certainly. All music which is played [now] comes from him, whether directly or indirectly. […] When we listen to Ezzahi, we’re relaxed. He’s really very much in our skin. Voila. Every day he changed, varied his music, so we were carried along by his music. He’s really the foundation for Algerians. [His music] represents Algeria…When I listen to Amar Ezzahi, for instance, I’m reminded of when the French left our country, of independence, post- independence and everything after. So, he gives us good memories.” (Oh, beh, oui ! Oui ! Toutes ces musiques qui se jouent maintenant elles sont de lui, directe ou indirectement. […] Quand on écoute d’Amar Ezzahi, on est relax. On y vraiment dans notre peau. Voilà, et tous les jours il change, il fait des variations des musiques, donc, on est importé par cette musique-là… et, c’est le font des algériens, quoi…c’est l’Algérie. […] Moi, quand j’écoute d’Amar Ezzahi, par exemple, je me rappelle, les français quand ils sont partis chez nous, et l’indépendance, et l’après l’indépendance, et, tous qui venaient après, quoi. Donc, on a des beaux souvenirs, quoi…) Yahia Bouchala’s comments capture the love and devotion enjoyed by the most respected sha‘bī musicians. Literally meaning “popular,” sha‘bī developed as a modernized form of colloquial sung poetry among the working class of mid-twentieth century Algiers. For its community of enthusiasts, the power of sha‘bī lies in the ability of the singer to transport, captivate, and enthrall the listener in the unfolding drama of sung poetic verse. The sha‘bī singer is not merely a singer, but a storyteller. And for Bouchala, Ezzahi’s performances enacted the drama of Algerian history, told through texts and through the voice that delivers them. In a successful sha‘bī performance, the universal themes of morality, love, and religious devotion 2
found in the country’s poetic heritage are brought to life and contemporized in the affective immediacy of musical interpretation. That success rests on the voice of the singer—the emotive affect, the harsh, timbral icon of pain, the sweeping phrases of ecstasy. Sha‘bī singers enrapture audiences through the emotion of vocal delivery and subtleties of interpretation, creating a community of listeners with shared heritage, experiences, and expectations. Although sha‘bī music germinated in the Casbah of Algiers, the network of musicians and fans personally connected to Amar Ezzahi extends beyond Algeria to include the sizeable diaspora of migrants2 in France. Over the course of the twentieth century, more than one million people emigrated from Algeria to the colonial metropole, drawn by labor shortages and industrialization in cities like Paris, Marseilles, and Strasbourg. Musicians living in Paris performed in Maghribi cafés, while many in Algeria regularly traveled across the Mediterranean to record and give concerts. Although the city of Algiers remained central to the genre’s mythology, emigrant artists in France from the 1950s onward like Dahmane El Harrachi, Slimane Azem, and Cheikh El Hasnaoui composed songs in accessible language depicting the conditions of life as a young migrant laborer in a foreign land.
Focus and Thematic Overview of the Study
In this dissertation, I explore performances of sha‘bī music in Paris as affectively3 powerful experiences for the Algerian migrant community. By comparing a range of formal and
2 Throughout this document, I give preference to the term “migrant” over “immigrant” when referring to Algerian subjects of migration in France. This decision follows the work of Abdelmalek Sayad, who argues that a study of “immigration” implies a unidirectional analysis of a two-dimensional phenomenon, a move that results in viewing the migrant as deviant and ignoring the ‘push’ factors that compelled the migrant subject to leave his or her homeland in the first place (Sayad 2004: 30). In the case of Algeria, Sayad argues, it is the economic exploitation and disenfranchisement of the autochthonous Algerian population under French colonial rule which first created the conditions for immigration. The study of sha‘bī music in France necessitates an understanding of how the music’s development was shaped by the linked phenomena of colonial occupation and largescale, labor migration to the metropole. 3 Affect is the non-conscious, pre-reflective experience of external stimuli and the movement from one experiential state to another in response to that stimuli. Following Silvan Tomkins, affect is interpreted as intensity, drawing attention to an organism’s biological state by infolding the body’s continuous flow of incoming sensations and adding urgency to the experience (Tomkins 1995). In Chapter 6, I consider affect as the first step in the process of emotional cognition in order to understand live performances of
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informal contexts of performance, I consider the entwined roles of place and intimacy in the expression of authority, morality, ecstasy, tradition, and communal belonging in sha‘bī praxis. I eschew dyadic constructions of home and exile and instead explore the idea of place in multiple guises, both real and imagined, as it either constrains or enables shared ecstatic experience among listeners. During successful sha‘bī performances, participants transform physical spaces into places of intimacy by entraining with one another’s emotional states. This state of shared heightened emotion is vested in the role of the shaykh, or master musician, who moves the audience through skillful execution of sha‘bī’s musical conventions and his4 demonstration of textual knowledge through a convincing interpretation of the musical poetry. Perhaps most importantly, singers are imbued with moral virtues by adoring devotees, which allows them to shape the emotional experiences of individual performances. Informed by interviews and participant observations, I consider how the sha‘bī singer comes to embody the weight of tradition and joins with musicians and audiences to facilitate intimacy across a range of Parisian environments. In the process, I seek to illuminate why sha‘bī continues to be such a dynamic, meaningful mode of cultural expression for France’s Algerian diasporic community.
The Sha‘bī Shaykh as Embodied Moral Authority
I arrived in Paris to begin my dissertation fieldwork just a few weeks before news broke of Amar Ezzahi’s death in late November. Although vaguely acquainted with him at the time, I did not immediately realize the impact this musician would have on my own research or his profound importance to my interlocutors. With his passing at the forefront of everyone’s mind, Ezzahi would dominate nearly every conversation in which I engaged. Over the subsequent months I would gain an appreciation for his honored place among sha‘bī connoisseurs, both as a beloved friend of other musicians whom I met and as a representation of something more— something, as I would come to realize, that lies at the heart of my inquiry. What about this man
sha‘bī music as emotionally heightened, ritual experiences. As I will argue, the successful prediction of performance conventions produces feelings of gratification and moral uprightness among participants. 4 Throughout the document, I employ masculine pronouns when referring to the role of the sha‘bī singer in place of inclusive language. This is not meant to preclude the possibility of female performers of this music, but instead reflects the gendered expectations and norms of the genre as I encountered them in my research. 4
garnered such respect as a moral authority among his community of listeners? What about his singing and playing so captivated audiences, and why did his musicianship inspire near- hagiographic reverence for the person behind the voice?
Figure 1.1: Amar Ezzahi, ca. 1980s (1941-2016)5 A month after Ezzahi’s passing, I walked into an apartment building in the south of Paris to meet with several musicians from the Andalusi choir El Andaloussia de Paris. I had met Samir at the ensemble’s rehearsal just several days before. An electrical engineer in his forties, he spent much of his adult life living in Paris with his wife and children after leaving his native city of Algiers during the difficult years of civil war. Above all, he loved playing music. Upon learning of my project, he enthusiastically offered to talk with me. After guiding me to the address from the metro station, Samir led me up the narrow staircase, chatting away about New York City when we arrived at the landing of the fourth-floor apartment. Momentarily disoriented, I only realized after entering that this was not his home but that of his friend, Nacer, who had agreed to host us this evening. Mohammed, a percussionist and fellow musician in El Andaloussia, arose from the couch to greet me as we removed our winter coats and stepped inside.
5Amar Ezzahi dans les années 80s, in Wikipedia https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Search&title=Special:Search&redirs=0&searc h=amar+ezzahi&fulltext=Search&fulltext=Advanced+search&ns0=1&ns6=1&ns14=1&advanced=1#/me dia/File:Amar_Ezzahi_80s.jpg 5
Samir and Nacer returned to the living room, eager to shift the discussion to Algerian music. With the tape rolling, Nacer placed a tray of sweets and tea on the table as Samir introduced his own musical upbringing: Samir: My father bought me a guitar when I was eleven or twelve years old. And at that time, I enrolled in almost two years of sha‘bī music classes from 1986 to 1987. And the instructor was one of the students of M’hamed El Hadj El Anka named Kamel Ferjallah, who’s still a professor in Algiers. […] So, I learned some of the rudiments of music there until the crisis6 in Algeria began in 1987-1988 and there were no more salaries for instructors, civil servants, etc., and the course was canceled […]. And so, with the crisis, musical activity stopped for me in 1988. But, with my guitar at home, I discretely continued playing songs and listening to songs that I enjoyed by Amar Ezzahi…And it was he who really gave me a love for this music— as for me, I’m the generation of Amar Ezzahi. It was Ezzahi who really attracted me to sha‘bī music. (Moi, quand j’étais petit, j’avais onze ans, douze ans, mon père m’a acheté une guitare. Et j’ai vécu un an-demi, presque deux ans des cours, dans une classe chaâbi. C’était en 1986-1987. Dans cette classe chaâbi, le maître qui j’avais était l’un des élèves de Hadj M’Hamed El Anka qui s’appelle Kamel Ferjallah, qui est toujours professeur à Alger. […] Nous avons appris quelques rudiments de la musique chaâbi, et ensuite la crise en Algérie a commencé, justement en 1987-1988. On n’a versé plus les salaires des travailleurs des fonctionnaires…commencé une sérieuse crise, donc les course se sont arrêtés. Donc, il n’y avait plus des cours […]. Donc, pour moi, tout était arrêté en 1988. Mais j’avais une guitare à la maison, du temps en temps, je prenais cette guitare, discrètement à la maison, j’ai écouté aux morceaux qui me plait d’Amar Ezzahi, personne qui a décédée pas longtemps, et c’est lui qui m’a donné l’amour la plus—moi, je suis la génération d’Amar Ezzahi, c’est vraiment lui qui m’a accroché à la musique chaâbi.)
Among the songs that I tried to reproduce by Ezzahi, the one that touched me the most was “‘Alik bil-hana wa daman.” It’s a text written by another Algerian writer, also deceased, named Mohamed El Badji, who wrote many texts made famous by Boudjemaâ El Ankis and Amar Ezzahi. (Donc, parmi ceux qui j’ai essayé de reproduire d’Ezzahi, c’est « Alik bil-hana wa daman » qui m’a le plus touché au début. C’est un texte qui était écrit par un autre auteur algérien qui est décédé aussi, qui s’appelle Mohamed El Badji, qui lui a écrit beaucoup des textes connus, qui étaient chanté par Boudjemaâ El Ankis et par Amar Ezzahi aussi.)
When I responded with my impression that people seemed to adore Ezzahi despite the fact that he had not produced many recordings, Nacer explained,
6 Samir referred here to the violent years of civil conflict in Algeria during the 1990s and into the early 2000s, during which time the Algerian government fought a guerilla war against Islamist terrorists following the cancelation of the 1992 parliamentary elections. In his comments, Samir backdates the conflict to 1988, the year of the so-called October Riots which initially prompted democratic reform. 6
Nacer: Because he’s an artiste populaire and people loved him, because […] he’s someone who represented simplicity and authenticity. (Parce qu’il est un artiste populaire. Les gens l’aiment. Parce que […] il est quelqu’un qui a représenté la simplicité et l’authenticité.)
Samir: His popularity was due to his generosity. […] He played many parties, and often he gave the maximum to his musicians and took just a little for himself. And he gave money to the poor people in Bab El Oued (a suburb of Algiers) and was known by everyone. During les années noires (“the black years”), […] he was the only one who dared to continue playing at marriages—because we still had marriages at that time, despite the fact that many people were being assassinated. […] He did this in order to bring happiness to people in the neighborhood during a sad and difficult time. (Sa popularité chez lui était sa générosité. […] Il faisait beaucoup des fêtes, souvent il a donné le maximum à ses musiciens que lui prenait juste un petit peu. Et, souvent, des pauvres, les gens du quartier de Bab El Oued et tout, bah, il a donné son argent. Et cette générosité qui était remarquée par tout le monde, était pendant le terrorisme. Pendant ce temps, […] c’était le seul qui osé à chanter dans les fêtes des mariages, parce que on a des mariages pendant cette période, même si on avait beaucoup des assassinats…donc c’est lui qui a accepté. […] C’était juste de donner du bonheur aux gens, parce que tout le monde était triste à ce temps-là.)
As I would come to discover, admirers of Ezzahi described a self-reinforcing relationship between music and morality: he was musically powerful because of his upright moral standing, while his musical giftedness heightened his moral character. In other words, Ezzahi was admired not just for his musical abilities, but for his upright character as evidenced through musical skill. The humble life he led and his generosity with those around him contributed to the aura surrounding his performances, which came to represent something deeper and more long-lasting than himself. In successful sha‘bī performances, the ecstatic nature of listeners’ shared emotional experiences reverberate back to the singer in the form of reverence and, ultimately, ascriptions of authority based on righteous thought and noble action. When skilled listeners attribute moral sentiments to the quality of a musician’s performance, that musician is seen to embody ideals of the community through his or her personal life. The ability of a performer to captivate an audience becomes conflated with a moral respectability in the life of the singer, imbuing the musical experience with ethical imperatives. Ascriptions of morality are reinforced by the content of the text itself: a body of poetry replete with appeals to God, praises of the Prophet, and moral dictums on right living. Connoisseurs even describe a Sufi attitude of the best singers who plunge into a text with an erudite comprehension of its multifarious meaning and power. 7
The sha‘bī shaykh also personifies cultural heritage7 by virtue of his personal connections to other figures in the canon of sha‘bī’s history. Through the transmission of knowledge and expertise to younger pupils, the sha‘bī singer acts as a conduit between past and future, forming a lattice of personal relationships that weaves together multiple generations of mentors and mentees. In this sense, Ezzahi’s story follows a pattern of earlier revered singers in the genre’s history since its development in the cafés of mid-twentieth century Algiers. For onlookers at his internment, Ezzahi’s final resting place in the same cemetery as sha‘bī pioneers, M’hamed El Hadj El Anka and Hadj M’rizek, serves as a tangible representation of the singer’s affinity to these earlier pillars of the genre. Ezzahi continued this tradition through his own relationships with younger musicians who now value that proximity as esteemed cultural capital.
Vocality and Collective Emotional Experience
Several days after Bouchala’s interview and hundreds of miles north in Paris, several sha‘bī artists held a joint memorial concert in the large auditorium of the Institute of the Arab World to honor the life of Amar Ezzahi. The featured vocalist Kamel Aziz, who is one of Algeria’s most highly regarded young sha‘bī artists, walked across to his seat at center stage, mandole8 in-hand, and peered at the packed house through aviator sunglasses. Flanking Aziz were two master sha‘bī musicians accompanying him on banjo: Ptit Moh, an innovative sha‘bī artist and devotee of Ezzahi whose recent collaborative projects ventured into realms of flamenco guitar, and Yahia Bouchala, who flew in from Algiers for the event.
7 Recent ethnomusicological literature has problematized the use of cultural heritage in the context of living musical traditions, arguing it implies a preservationist stance toward a fixed tradition (Grant 2014: 11; Titon 2015). UNESCO’s 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage reflects this model, privileging representative genres or masterpieces to be preserved in the same manner as tangible cultural heritage. As a corrective, scholars like Jeff Todd Titon and Brian Diettrich have proposed an ecological model of sustainability that focuses on the creation of favorable “habitats” for local community participation (Diettrich 2015: 667). I find the term cultural heritage appropriate in this instance, however, as it refers to the ways in which the shaykh embodies the historical narrative of sha‘bī through personal connections to past shuyūkh in the historical canon as established by connoisseurs of the genre. Embodied knowledge, in this case, is something that cultural stakeholders regard as oral history to be preserved and displayed in the ritual act of performance. 8 Invented in Algiers in the mid-twentieth century, this fretted box lute is the signature instrument of Algerian sha‘bī and the choice of most sha‘bī singers. 8
Behind them, the remaining six musicians were arranged in a shallow semi-circle. Florid arpeggios erupted from the keyboard as Aziz settled into his chair and adjusted his microphone. Typically, audiences expected only a brief hello from a featured artist. This was, however, no ordinary performance. “As-salāmu ʿalaykum,” Aziz somberly greeted the audience. “This is a rather sad evening. To lose such a great maître, Amar Ezzahi—a loss and a tragedy…” (C’est un peu triste. De perdre un grand maître. C’est une perte, c’est un drame…) He then asked the crowd for a moment of silence and gestured for them to stand. Stoic, the musicians onstage waited onstage as the audience shuffled to their feet. The pianist halted his background accompaniment and bowed his head, his hands collected in reverence. Kamel Aziz stood in front, motionless, holding his mandole by the neck with head lowered. After a moment of silence, Aziz nodded with a “merci” and returned to his seat through rigorous applause. He settled in and began to freely improvise around the Andalusi mode of raml maya before turning toward the pianist, motioning for him to begin his own improvisation. The ensuing melody whirled around a highly ornamented line, supplemented by plaintive left-hand octaves that reinforced the minor modality. As the pianist’s solo came to a close, Kamel unfurled his voice in a plaintive istikhbār, or introductory improvisation. He meandered through a highly melismatic, arrhythmic verse, pausing periodically to allow for responsive, heterophonic flurries of notes from the two banjoists. Through several more verses, Kamel took the audience on a journey that traversed the mode’s terrain, punctuated by responsive gestures passed between his own voice, his mandole, and the other instrumental musicians. After several minutes, his voice descended into the cadential phrase and dissipated to a pregnant pause. Is it over? Then, out of the silence, Kamel declared the opening bayt, or verse couplet, of the song “Sali Trache Qelbi,” (Come, Ask My Heart) written by Mahboub Bati and recorded by Ezzahi in 1974. In a statement of pain and heartbreak, the poet spoke through Aziz’s opening catenation:
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Come, ask my heart for its news and Sālī trāsh qalbi ya‘ṭīk khibārū, anti llī you’ll see that you own it and you milkātū tadrī mā bīh know what you’ve done to it Let it complain to you and recount its Khalīh yashtkī yaḥkīlik ḥiwārū discourse
The two percussionists introduced the rhythm on darbūka (a goblet drum, also known as ṭabla) and riqq (frame drum similar to the tambourine), signaling that the song was now underway. One could almost hear Ezzahi’s voice from the vinyl singing the familiar tune. Aziz continued to the end of the refrain, and in concert with his percussionists, smoothly elided into a triplet meter. Come, ask my heart for its news and Sālī trāsh qalbi ya‘ṭīk khibārū, you’ll see Ask it, ask it, ask it! Sālī! Sālī! Sālī! It’s up to you whether you punish it or Tima antī ta‘dhbīh wila antī tashfīh heal it
“Eeh! Aywa!” The audience responded with clapping and cheers. Audience members began to sing along as he repeated the final line, now fully shifted into the new, energetic rhythm. Aziz carried the growing momentum into the opening line of the next song, “Awah Awah ya lala,” also written by Mahboub Bati and known by Amar Ezzahi’s recording: “Awāh awāh yāl-biyya māni syād! Lā lā awāh yā lālā […].” The joyous, phonetically repetitive lyrics and exuberant rhythm created an infectious energy as more and more audience members cheered, arose from their seats to dance, and filled the performance space with the shrill sounds of ululations. The somber intensity that characterized the mood in the auditorium just minutes prior had now completely transformed into a shared ebullience as everyone joined in the dancing and singing. The preceding performance shows the collective entrainment9—through synchronized bodies and emotional expressions—between audience members and musicians that typifies the ambiance of a successful sha‘bī performance. Aziz pulled the audience into the minutest
9 At its most basic sense, entrainment refers to the synchronization of two bodies in motion. The term was first proposed by Christian Huygens to refer to the phenomenon of two swinging pendulums coming into synchrony with one another (Leman 2016: 100-1). In the context of musical interaction, entrainment denotes an alignment of individual participants’ bodily rhythms and emotional states. Just as two pendulums exert a force upon one another that brings their disparate motions into phase, so too do human bodies become mutually attuned to one another’s rhythms and emotional states in a collective effervescence of shared musical experience (Collins 2004: xvi, xix). 10
inflections of his voice, closing in the cavernous space of the auditorium in riveting intensity that matched the gravity of the occasion. Through both his musical proficiency and through his authority as a contemporary sha‘bī shaykh, Aziz led the audience in a powerful rite of remembrance. At the same time, this collective catharsis depended on the investment of audience members, who brought their own knowledge of Ezzahi to bear on their individual experience of the performance. Aziz’s concert reinforced the notion that the sha‘bī singer is the lynchpin of ecstatic musical experience, but one whose success requires an audience of informed listeners. The singer offers an expert interpretation of texts, demonstrates a deep understanding of their semantic connotations and spiritual significance, and simultaneously heightens the texts’ emotional dimensions through vocal inflection. Skilled listeners bring these expectations to the performance, evaluating the performer on adherence to tradition and artistic individuality. An audience’s favorable assessment is a necessary component of the expressive interaction that opens up the possibility of meaningful emotional experiences. When performances are successful, the emotional entrainment of all participants yields collective empowerment, community solidarity, and a shared interest in supporting the continuation of sha‘bī practice. For Aziz’s audience of primarily Algerian migrants in France, their experience of Ezzahi is marked by a history of migration and displacement. Events such as this constitute significant points of connection and intimacy in a postcolonial society where social—and even economic— positions of Algerians can be tenuous. Enraptured by the tones of Aziz, audience members are carried back to Ezzahi’s working-class neighborhood of Bab El Oued and to the summer weddings on rooftop terraces where he gave his most mesmerizing performances. Many are transported to a time before leaving for exile ten, twenty, or thirty years ago when they last saw Ezzahi in person. This diasporic reality of distant places coexists with the immediate present, the heightened emotional co-experience that adepts call khelwa, in which listeners lose themselves in the ecstasy of performance. My research led me to understand that sha‘bī is more than a nostalgic rendering of a distant homeland. Instead, it is a music that encompasses overlapping frames of memory, referencing multiple pasts while remaining temporally relevant to Algerians in modern-day Paris. As constructed spaces of shared emotional intimacy, these performances support the social fabric of the Algerian community in the present just as much as they evoke nostalgia for the past. 11
Sha‘bī as (Trans)national Heritage
My personal interest in this music began not in a performance hall, but with the documentary El Gusto (2011). A chronicle of the reunion between Jewish and Muslim sha‘bī musicians who were torn apart by the Algerian War of Independence from France fifty years before, the film culminates in a concert of the twenty-member orchestra. I was moved by the musicians’ shared conviction that they played important roles in shaping cultural heritage, particularly as they helped Algerians process collective memories of both the war and post-war periods. As the film ended, I resolved to learn more about this music that held such deep meaning for its participants and to uncover more of the remarkable stories of sha‘bī musicians. When I began my fieldwork, the enduring power of oral narratives passed from generation to generation felt quite familiar to me. Raised in a home with older parents and grandparents, I gained a sensitivity to heritage as it contributed to the development of personal and collective identities. The creative lives of the musicians and painters on my mother’s side of the family shaped my local community, a cultural inheritance that then shaped my own sense of self and belonging. I encountered similar processes among my collaborators in Paris. Indeed, beyond the beauty and declamatory power of the music itself, sha‘bī is compelling to me precisely because it renders the past immediately present—even tangible—in sites of communal experience. In diasporic contexts, sha‘bī’s own connotations as a popular derivation of the classical Andalusi tradition are seemingly contradicted by notions of sha‘bī as an esteemed heritage of Algerian migration. As one listener told me, the homesickness expressed in songs of migration has now become a nostalgia for a past epoch, even if that epoch was tainted with hardship. The seeming contradictions between modernity and heritage, past and present, led me to interrogate the multiple pasts that sha‘bī contains and the devotion it continues to inspire among Algerians in present-day France.
Review of the Literature
The literature that informs this project draws upon area studies of North African musical practice, diasporic and postcolonial studies, musical aesthetics, music cognition, and new quantitative research on emotion in an effort to understand the multidimensional nature of sha‘bī music’s performative power. My research finds its place most directly within the conversation of
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a small but growing scholarship devoted to North Africa’s Andalusi musical traditions. These works deal with similar themes of heritage, transmission, and memory, and reflect cultural codes of meaning that pervade Algerian musical practice. I situate the historiography of sha‘bī and the aesthetic attitudes shaping contemporary performance practice within these scholars’ shared insights, building on their findings through my own research on an interrelated and parallel musical tradition.
North African Musical Practices
In his book The Lost Paradise (2016), Jonathan Glasser examines how the anxieties of loss in Algeria’s Andalusi tradition are central to the music’s practice, forming “the very texture of musical subjectivity and experience” (234). This multivalent, discursive tool is rooted in the loss of al-Andalus itself. Despite the music’s continued vibrancy among Algeria’s amateur associations, aficionados and practitioners continuously lament the attenuation of repertoire as a function of hoarding and failed transmission by shuyūkh.10 This discourse of lost repertoire rests upon the idea of the shaykh as the container of musical knowledge and embodiment of authority, an idea Glasser refers to as the “genealogical ethos.” In my own research, I note the same ethos of embodied musical knowledge as it pertains to the moral authority of the singer in sha‘bī performance. As with Andalusi musical practice, the authority of the sha‘bī singer depends on a personal relationship to past figures in the genre’s historical canon. I extend this idea to consider its implications for the success of heightened emotional experience in immediate performance contexts. Expert listeners of sha‘bī music believe the capacity of shuyūkh to create meaningful performances is predicated on their musical pedigree. Authenticated lineage informs effective interpretations of texts, while successful performances confirm the singer’s connection to that lineage in a self-reinforcing loop of authenticity.
10 Arabic plural for shaykh. In the context of amateur Andalusi associations, practitioners often set the traditional figure of the shaykh against the “modern” pedagogical model of the music director and thus consider the shaykh as a threat to the endangered patrimony. Conversely, Glasser observes, musicians who are respected as shuyūkh tend to regard newer pedagogical models as inauthentic modes of transmission (Glasser 2016: 174-175).
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Furthermore, Glasser notes the parallels between authoritative transmission among the Andalusi musical milieu and that of the Sufi shaykh. My interlocutors reinforced and deepened these observations, exploring how authoritative, affective interpretations of sung texts are evaluated according to Islamic aesthetics of sound and ethical listening. Lastly, Glasser’s research informs my understanding of contemporary attitudes toward sha‘bī as a popular genre. Glasser identifies a taxonomy of musical genres he calls the “nūba complex” that situates the nūba, a limited body of multi-movement suites of sung Andalusi poetry, at the heavier core of national patrimony and relegates other colloquial genres (including sha‘bī) to the lighter peripheral space around the center of prestige and tradition. Despite the richness of Glasser’s historical and ethnographic investigation, his expert formal analysis and deconstruction of complex discursive and ideological tropes, his work only addresses the unfolding dynamics of actual musical performance in a limited, indirect fashion. In this way, my research complements Glasser’s analysis by focusing on the construction and negotiation of meaning during the moment of performance. This difference in approach can be explained in part by the differences in the musical genres themselves: whereas practitioners consider Andalusi as a fixed entity to be (re)presented in formal contexts of performance, sha‘bī aesthetics of performance rest on the unpredictability and immediacy of improvisation, impromptu programmatic decisions, and interpretive license. While the differences between the two practices help dictate this gap between Glasser’s approach and that of my own, it is also precisely this aspect of sha‘bī that draws me to the practice and where I feel I make the greatest contribution to the growing body of literature on North African music. A primary aim of my study is to understand the overlapping legacies of colonial occupation in Algeria and immigration to France as they inform contemporary sha‘bī praxis. Malcolm Théoleyre’s dissertation, “Musique arabe, folklore de France?” (2016), expands upon Glasser’s historical analysis of Algiers’s Andalusi associative milieu by critiquing what he views as an overdetermined reading of monolithic colonial domination in postcolonial studies. By presenting the intersections of government policy and the city’s civic musical life, Théoleyre argues that French colonial administrators treated Andalusi music as part of the national folklore of greater France and used it as a tool for social integration. Central to this project of folklorization, he argues, was Algerian national radio. Just as Glasser observes a taxonomy of genres within the “nūba complex,” Théoleyre recounts radio staff decisions to codify classical 14
and popular genres and thereby establish Algiers’s Andalusi heritage as a national folklore of the French colonial empire. During my own fieldwork, I observed that colonial-era ideas of patrimony and heritage remain affixed to discourse on both sha‘bī and Andalusi music. My collaborators affirmed the perduring attitudes surrounding sha‘bī as a popular, even amateur tradition, an assessment that greatly impacts the work of professional musicians who promote the genre in France. More broadly, these notions impact whether sha‘bī should be considered a product of Franco-Algerian heritage.
Francophone Postcolonial Scholarship
Théoleyre’s work fits within a broader conversation about France’s Algerian migrant communities among scholars of Francophone postcolonial studies, cultural studies, and sociology. This scholarship informs my own study of the visibility, stigmatization, integration, and economic precarity of Algerians in French society. Paul Silverstein’s book Algeria in France (2004) examines the multiple subjectivities of Algerians in France and Franco-Algerians within a shared, transnational political space. His appraisals of French cultural policy echo Théoleyre’s. Given Algeria’s status as an integral part of French territory during colonial occupation, Silverstein contextualizes French-Algerian colonial policy within the Third Republic’s domestic project of late nineteenth-century nation building. Among other topics, he explores the effects of urban planning and spatializing practices on Algerian migrants in Paris. I build on his analyses in my own work, exploring how migrants’ tenuous relationship to public space, characterized by marginalization and voyeurism, have shaped contemporary attitudes toward performance spaces in the metropole. Central to this literature is the research of Abdelmalek Sayad, whose studies of French colonialism and Algerian immigration profoundly shaped French sociology, beginning with his ethnography on the shantytown of Nanterre (1953) and followed by his economic study of rural displacement in colonial Algeria (1964) as well as his posthumous collection of essays on the psychological effects of immigration, La double absence (1999). Drawn to the psychological trauma of immigration and stigmatization of Maghribi minorities in the republic, Sayad’s impact is palpable throughout contemporary French postcolonial studies, notably in Alex Hargreaves’s Multiethnic France (2007) and Richard Derderian’s historical study of Algerian cultural
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activism, North Africans in Contemporary France (2004). Other recent ethnographies, including Nadia Kiwan’s Identities, Discourses, and Experiences (2009) and Questioning French Secularism (2012) by Jennifer Selby, examine the negotiation of migrant subjectivities against pressures of assimilation and stigmatization. Chantal Tetreault’s ethnography Transcultural Teens (2015) analyzes the creative linguistic practices used by Franco-Algerian youth to negotiate their contested subjectivities. Tetreault’s work provided me with a useful model for examining the creative and conflicting responses to stigmatization among sha‘bī musicians in Paris, an effort that continues to respond to questions Sayad posed decades before. In 2009, France’s National Museum of Immigration History mounted an exhibition chronicling the literary, artistic, and political expression of Algerian migrants in France over the course of the twentieth century, a display that reflected the emergence of scholarly studies of Algerian musical practice in France. The project's resulting publication, Générations: un siècle d'histoire culturelle des Maghrébins en France (2009), brought together several dozen authors who contributed brief, engaging articles for general readership. One of its co-editors, Driss El Yazami, contributed an informative overview of Paris’s mid-twentieth century oriental cabaret scene. Another co-editor for the project, Naïma Yahi, offers a look at the female vocalists who helped shape the cabaret scene. Her 2006 article “L’expression musical des enfants de l’immigration algérienne, 1980-1988” surveys the political and musical activities of the beur movement among second-generation immigrant musicians. Algerian scholar Hadj Miliani has published extensively on popular music and theatrical production in Paris. His co-authored book Beurs’ melodies (Daoud and Miliani 2003) presents a historic sweep of the major artists and musical styles of Algerian music in France, beginning with the earliest immigrants and ending with recent activities of the Franco-Algerian community. His work provides insights into the interaction of the recorded music industry in Paris with new musical styles originating from postcolonial Algeria and how this continuing relationship has affected Algerian and Franco-Algerian artists working in France. Most recently, Armelle Gaulier’s article “Chansons de france, chansons de l’immigration maghrébine” (2015) examines how French musicians of Algerian origin critique questions of citizenship and oral histories of migration by engaging with the sonic heritage of the Algerian diaspora.
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Performance and Community in Diaspora
My study is marked by the performative turn in anthropology, a paradigmatic shift in the humanities that works to understand processes of bodily practice and meaning. Where performances of sha‘bī’s poetic texts are concerned, this means that I am interested in the expression of cultural ideas beyond semantic content. As much of sha‘bī poetry is lyrically abstract, I am faced with the question of how this music—which is neither static in meaning nor monolithic in form—becomes actualized and relevant to listeners in performance contexts. Jonathon Shannon presents a similar approach in his monograph on Syrian musical practice, Among the Jasmine Trees (2006), arguing that concepts of authenticity and aesthetics emerge from the particular contexts of performance. “Performance,” writes Shannon, is a “particular strategy of framing and differentiating diverse modes of practice and being” (17). In this study, I draw inspiration from Shannon’s work as I seek to understand the novel ways audiences engage with the entire performative realm of sha‘bī expression to render the music emotionally relevant. My focus on the dynamic interactions between social actors—or between those actors and their environments—also influences how I define diaspora and diasporic community in my study. Ethnomusicological literature since 1990 has widely expanded the use of the term diaspora from its classical concerns of exile versus homeland, displacement and transnationalism, to a more eclectic range of interpretations of what it means to experience and perform in diaspora (Ramnarine 2: 2007). Without denying the importance of a broader, imagined community of Algerian migrants and their Franco-Algerian descendants in France, I delimit my understanding of diasporic community to a community of informed listeners, comprised of a network of concert-goers with shared knowledge and experiences. This follows Kay Shelemay’s definition of a musical community as “a collectivity constructed through and sustained by musical processes and/or performances, […] whatever its location in time or space” (2011: 364). This conception is reinforced by the reality that few Franco-Algerians show interest in sha‘bī music, representing what Shelemay observes in her earlier ethnography on the Syrian Jewish diaspora as “multiple diasporas” across different locales and generations of immigrants and their descendants (Shelemay 1998: 68). Following Shelemay, I understand the Algerian diaspora in broad and shifting terms throughout this document, according to its context of use. This approach is supported by recent
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scholarship in postcolonial studies cited above, which accounts for individuals’ negotiation of multiple, simultaneous subjectivities. The Algerian diaspora can either be defined strictly as those born in Algeria or expanded to include Franco-Algerians who choose to retain, in certain circumstances, affiliation to the imagined community. Conversely, this marker of identity is also imposed upon individuals with visibly Maghribi family heritage by social othering and stigmatization. In this complex arrangement, my project focuses on the construction of communal identity in the form of a listening community that is largely overlapping, yet not congruent with, this contested marker of shared identity. Generally speaking, I refer to subjects in this study who were born in Algeria and have retained Algerian citizenship as Algerian, while Franco-Algerian refers to French citizens of Algerian heritage. Lastly, my performative approach to musical community in diaspora is informed by Eckehard Pistrick’s ethnography Performing Nostalgia (2015). Pistrick approaches Albanian migration song as a performative category that encompasses multiple thematic concepts and is characterized by “constant social transformation” (7). His ethnographic study fills a lacuna in diaspora studies by expanding his focus beyond the fixed materiality of song texts. He writes, “migration songs are […] not artifacts but socially active in their immateriality everywhere where they are performed and listened to” (4). I follow Pistrick’s approach as I analyze the multiple, simultaneous constructions of meaning in the moment of presentation that are contingent upon individual subjectivities and the conditions of performance. Secondly, I build on Pistrick’s observation that migration songs “are both out of place and strongly placed” (7). Depending on choice of repertoire, its manner of presentation, and the interpretation of audiences, sha‘bī songs can be both abstracted from traditional contexts of performance and strongly marked by the localities of the genre’s topographic imaginary. His approach offers me a productively flexible starting point from which to comprehend how meaning-making among sha‘bī practitioners involves much more than home/exile binaries. Sha‘bī artists and audiences instead transmute the music’s significance according to constantly evolving constructions of community and individual identities.
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Embodied Emotional Experience
My analytical approach to contexts of performance is also informed by literature in ritual studies, emotion, and music cognition. In each of these areas, research has shown how interpersonal interaction with music produces rewarding effects of social solidarity and involves complex appraisals of “good,” or moral, behaviors. I am inspired by Randall Collins’s work Interaction Ritual Chains (2004) and his treatment of everyday social interactions as rituals in which individuals are attracted by mutual entrainment of emotion.11 His work encouraged me to view sha‘bī performances as rituals and to consider what factors encourage people to engage with—and continue to create—this music. Musicologist Marc Leman adopts a similar frame in The Expressive Moment (2016). In this book, Leman unpacks the mechanics of pre-reflective, cognitive interactions with music, arguing that these interactive processes yield positive reinforcement that motivates repetition. My focus on the unfolding processes of performance is rooted in the view that musical experiences are perpetually in flux, contingent, and negotiated. This has been particularly influenced by constructive appraisal theories of emotion. Constructive appraisal theories share a dynamic understanding of the brain, wherein emotions are contingent upon individual productions of meaning within a specific performance context. Ian Cross, for instance, proposes the idea that music allows for “floating intentionality,” whereby each individual listener can arrive at his or her own interpretation without disrupting the overall cohesive effect of shared musical experience. (Cross 2014, cited in Christensen 2018: 51). Within ethnomusicology, my study reflects Thomas Turino’s application of Peircian semiotics to a phenomenological approach to musical experience (2008, 2014). Following his analytical approach, I explore how “living, breathing, varied individuals” derive meaning “in specific instances of complex experience” (2014: 187). A.J. Racy’s book Making Music in the Arab World (2003) explores the aesthetics of ecstatic musical experience in the urban musical traditions of Egypt and the Levant known as
11 Collins’s conception of ritual is indebted to Irving Goffman, who developed the miscrosociological idea of ritual as present in everyday social interactions. The implication of this idea is that society, in its structuralist conception, actually “subsists in the here-and-now” of micro-level interaction, an aggregate of momentary social solidarities and objects of shared symbolic meaning (Collins 2004: 17). As Goffman famously quoted from Shakespeare’s play As You Like It, “All the world’s a stage,” meaning that individuals are constantly performing representations of self across different social interactions. 19
ṭarab. His work contextualizes my own within broader cultural factors affecting musical practice across the North Africa-Middle East region. The study offers a major precedent to my own, showing how manipulation of environment and active participation by audience members in intimate space produce an ecstatic emotional state of musical experience, or salṭana. Furthermore, his work provides insights into the relationship between formulaic content of Arabic poetry and its affective delivery in performance. When sha‘bī musicians interpret a classic poem from the malḥūn repertoire, they bring forth a musical interpretation of text expressing universal themes of piety, love, loss, devotion, pain, and suffering, which listeners then filter through the lens of their own contemporary experiences. This means that all of the music’s practitioners engage in dynamic and changing sets of meanings that require continual negotiation and reevaluation.
Vocality
Equally important to my theoretical approach have been works on vocality and philosophical deconstructions of the body that have encouraged me to view the shaykh’s voice as a carrier for semantic and non-semantic meaning. As a vocal genre, sha‘bī’s affective power emanates from the voice of the singer, a figure who nuances text delivery through inflection, vocal effects, timing, and the personal qualities of his own voice. A singer must master all of these vocal displays in order to make ritualized sha’bi performances emotionally available to audiences. It is the signification that lies outside the semantic realm—what Roland Barthes famously coined the grain of the voice—that accounts for the uniqueness and emotional efficacy of its utterance. In her work For More than One Voice (2005), Adriana Cavarero appeals to the uniqueness of the human voice as a marker of the individual’s humanity, challenging the abstracted treatment of the voice in the Western philosophical tradition as mere vessel for semantic content. Nina Eidsheim (2015) also challenges conventional notions of the singer’s voice as a carrier of text-based signifiers by presenting an alternative ontology of musical sound as dynamic, unfolding, vibrational interaction. Both scholars address the voice’s materiality and the fundamentally relational nature of musical interactions, acknowledging the uniqueness of sound carriers, receivers, and the material constraints of transmission.
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The power of voice in sha‘bī’s performance reflects broader epistemologies of sound, voice, and embodiment in practices across the Middle East and North Africa region. Numerous studies in ethnomusicology have pointed to the affective power of the voice to incite change in the listener. Indeed, the affective power of music on its listener is what makes it an ambivalent force across different interpretations of Islamic law. Racy’s work, mentioned above, explores the overlapping conceptions of the voice’s affective power in Sufi devotional practices and states of emotional ecstasy in secular ṭarab performance. The centrality of the voice in Muslim life can be traced to the core of the faith itself, as outlined by Kristina Nelson’s seminal work The Recitation of the Qur’an (1980). Nelson explicates the Islamic science of tajwīd, or how to beautifully intone the text that embodies the voice of God. I also draw from scholarship on the ethics of listening and embodied morality to understand how the aesthetically pleasing voice of the sha‘bī’s singer becomes inscribed with moral significance. Charles Hirschkind’s work The Ethical Soundscape (2006) explores how the practice of listening to sermon cassettes in Cairo constitutes a personal ethic of bodily discipline. Hirschkind follows the same epistemological framework as Cavarero and Eidsheim by pointing to the occulocentric bias of the Enlightenment and arguing for a study of “affective and intersubjective dimensions of listening” (23). Finally, my focus on the voice as timbral signifier of shared, if contested, meaning is informed by Martin Stokes’s book The Republic of Love (2010). In this considerable contribution to ethnomusicological literature in the Mediterranean region, Stokes examines how popular music in Turkey offers alternative public narratives of the nation across the second half of the twentieth century. Stokes analyses the recordings of three singers at overlapping moments of transformation in Turkish public life. Each singer offers alternative discourses of citizenry by engaging with ideas of sentimentality and love in the public sphere. His theoretical framework of cultural intimacy parallels my own exploration of intimacy in public space, but at a different level of ethnographic inquiry. Whereas Stokes’s study remarks on the macrolevel of political transformation and how the voice of each singer becomes interwoven into public discourses of cultural intimacy and sentimentality, my work focuses on the microsociological level of live performance as ritual and the momentary constructions of intimacy among physically co-present bodies. Nevertheless, my work is informed by his analysis of the voice and its role in creating intimacy. In his analyses, Stokes connects the affective,
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timbral qualities of the voices of individual popular singers to the semantic field of political meaning among listeners. The resonance between Stokes’s approach and that of my own study can be summed up in the following statement in which he considers the singular impact of live performance by Turkish popular singer Zeki Müren. Stokes writes, “This evocation rests on what we might describe as a metaphysics of voice, a collective conception of the voice as a dynamic and productive agency at the heart of events, situations, and social relations” (58). In my own study, I place the voice—and the body evoked by it—at the center of affectively powerful musical experience. While Stokes’s approach here to the distinctiveness of Müren’s voice reflects my own approach to the voice as unique marker of identity, I focus on how interpretations of the voice by informed listeners enable momentary, localized experiences of musical intimacy.
Discourse as Performance
My work reflects previous ethnographic research on music in the Arab world that focuses on the importance of discourse as performance. This body of literature highlights the importance of audience participation in performance experience, characterized by aesthetic critique and use of discursive tropes that display specialized knowledge. Jonathan Shannon’s more recent work, Performing al-Andalus (2015), examines the ‘rhetorics’ of al-Andalus that inform performance practice of a diverse array of musical traditions across Spain, Morocco, and Syria, all of which are unified by potent symbols of Medieval Muslim civilization in Spain and tropes of heritage and loss. Virginia Danielson’s biography on Umm Kulthum, The Voice of Egypt (1997), also addresses the challenges of interpreting the discursive tropes of listeners. As with Racy’s work, she argues that cognoscenti listeners collaborate with performers on stage to craft an ecstatic experience. Danielson explores how, despite the seemingly uniform aesthetic tropes exchanged by listeners, the musical performance itself allows for the spontaneous and multifarious creation of meaning.
Nostalgia, Memory, and Place
Finally, my analysis of diasporic sha‘bī performances builds upon an overlapping body of ethnographies devoted to migration, memory, and nostalgia. These works illustrate how memory
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and nostalgia in diasporic contexts operate on multiple levels simultaneously during performance, highlighting the multiple subjectivities of participants. Kay Shelemay’s aforementioned book Let Jasmine Rain Down (1998) represents one of the first ethnographies in ethnomusicology to comprehensively theorize nostalgia and collective memory. In her study of religious song among the Syrian Jewish community in New York City, she shows how individual and collective remembrances are interpolated and mediated within a single performance. Jonathan Shannon’s 2015 monograph, also mentioned above, focuses on the discourse of loss and recovery surrounding the idea of al-Andalus that pervades musical practice in Spain, Morocco, and Syria. Likewise, Pistrick’s aforementioned ethnography on Albanian migrant song has led me to consider how nostalgia indexes place. Building on Pierre Nora’s concept of lieux de mémoire (sites of collective memory for a given community), his work specifically addresses the topographic nature of memory. His ideas shape my own treatment of nostalgia in two ways. First, I combine perspectives on topographic nostalgia with performance as emotionally heightened ritual as I examine the varied efficacies of performance spaces in Paris. Secondly, I consider how songs already imbued with nostalgic references to place are reinterpreted with new significations in the context of diaspora.
Overview of Chapters
This dissertation comprises seven chapters, including the present introduction and the conclusion. Chapter 2 recounts the presence of Algerian music in Paris. Beginning with an intimate restaurant in a Parisian suburb, I follow a history of Algerian migrants in the metropole whose work, social, and domestic lives have shaped how they create and interpret sha‘bī. This historical narrative proceeds along two axes. First, I explore the migrant community’s access to French public and private spaces, particularly as it relates to the colonial past and to blue-collar work experiences. Second, I tease out how this access has shaped the (in)visibility of Algerian migrants in French society over the past century. Both trajectories are fundamental to understanding how Algerians promote and transmit sha‘bī music in today’s France. In Chapter 3, I continue my exploration of sha‘bī performance at the nexus of the music’s affective power: the voice of the shaykh. I focus here on my conversation with a sha‘bī
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aficionado, Azzedine, and his description of Dahmane El Harrachi’s unique griffe, or signature style, as emblematic of “sha‘bī of immigration.” Using his comments as a starting point, I examine how the very grain of the sha‘bī singer’s voice, when combined with knowledge of his biography, is infused with meaning beyond the semantic content of the sung texts. I contextualize this claim through a broad approach to vocality, an attunement to the moral dimensions of listening in Sufi devotional practices, and within the more general tradition of Islamic aesthetics that privileges the physicality of sonic experience and its transformative potential. Chapter 4 is devoted to the rich substrate of sung poetry upon which sha‘bī is based. I position contemporary performance practice within the development of Algiers’s Andalusi associative movement in the mid-twentieth century, focusing on the life of M’hamed El Hadj El Anka as both a historic figure and as a palimpsest for contemporary narratives of sha‘bī’s emergence. The chapter opens with a concert at the Algerian Cultural Center, during which I unwittingly incited a debate among audience members over the authorship of the classic malḥūn text, “al-Ḥarrāz.” This story also factors into my examination of spoken discourse in maintaining aesthetic standards and establishing membership in the listening community. Equipped with an understanding of the genre’s aesthetics and historical background, I move in Chapter 5 to the musical event itself as an unfolding drama of ritual. Here again, aesthetic and ethical implications of best practice emerge as connoisseurs debate the ideal venue for intimate, ecstatic experience. I offer several contrasting ethnographic accounts that demonstrate the range of contexts in which sha‘bī music is enjoyed across the French capital, beginning with a performance by Abderrahman El Koubi at the Dunois Community Center. I then return to Yahia Bouchala at the Institute of the Arab World—this time as the featured artist at a concert in April 2017. I conclude by examining another concert at the Dunois Community Center featuring the singer Mourad Djaafri. Throughout this section, I evaluate how place—both as a performance environment and the nostalgic evocation of “home,” either facilitates or hinders sha‘bī’s affective emotional potential. Moreover, these three performances illustrate how singers foster intimacy through manipulation of abstract textual lyrics. What emerges is a musical feedback loop wherein the singer’s interpretation of lyrics and idiosyncratic vocal delivery meet with informed, skillful listeners to excite repeated sha‘bī engagement.
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In Chapter 6, I consider the future of sha‘bī music in France by comparing competing views on pedagogy and transmission within the diasporic community, as well as the promotion of the music tradition to broader, non-Algerian audiences. This debate highlights the psychological effects of othering and stigmatization experienced by the Algerian migrant community in France and the creative means of usurping those stigmas. I frame this debate around the opposing conceptions of “racial authenticity” and “racial sincerity” proposed by John L. Jackson (2005) to describe alternative responses to racial stereotyping and imposed authenticities on the racialized subject. Throughout Chapter 6, my interlocutors represent seemingly opposing viewpoints. The first, Mohamed El Yazid, is a professional artist and pedagogue whose insistence on fostering sha‘bī’s accessibility to the non-Algerian public is shaped by a strong belief in social reconciliation through cultural education. Hadi, a younger musician who first came to France for his higher education, offers a much more restrictive view of sha‘bī’s relevance to non-Algerian, non-Arabic-speaking audiences. The chapter ends with my conversation with Youssef, a young Algerian living in France and self-described amateur musician and avid fan of Algerian music. His comments reveal the tensions of tradition and creativity for younger musicians who are confronted with the weight of the genre’s history and pedagogical expectations. Using his thoughts as a starting point, I consider how notions of populism complicate the professional careers of aspiring sha‘bī singers. Lastly, in Chapter 7, the conclusion, the major questions of this study are brought around full-circle through an ethnographic account of sha‘bī’s “ideal” performance setting: a rooftop terrace wedding in Algiers. From this vantage point, I reflect on how the music’s affective potential surpasses specificity of place and constitutes an ongoing part of Paris’s cultural heritage, even as its center of gravity pulls the listener incessantly back to a nostalgic rendering of Algeria.
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CHAPTER 2
THE ‘PLACES’ OF SHA‘BĪ: LEGACIES OF THE MIGRANT CAFÉS
Sha‘bī is performed today across a range of city venues that span private and public spaces, from informal soirées to the concert hall. Whether in museums, cultural centers, apartment foyers, cafés, or even a park bench by the Canal St. Martin—when a performance is successful, the significance of the actual place recedes as musicians and audiences contained within the performance space collectively create intimacy. Despite this process, however, musicians and enthusiasts alike strongly assert their opinions over the ideal type of environments in which performances should occur. This discourse has been shaped by the development of the genre in its diasporic contexts and by a colonial legacy that simultaneously alienated Algerians and fetishized Algerian-ness throughout the republic. Indeed, when members of the modern-day Algerian community in Paris share their ideas about idealized performance contexts, they simultaneously reference the community’s complex, uneven, and ambivalent access to social spaces of belonging and concrete areas of the city. Their movements in the metropole have been bounded by historical socioeconomic marginalization and exclusion from public spaces on the one hand and voyeurism and intrusive state surveillance of their private lives on the other. In this chapter, I trace the evolution of sha‘bī and its connection to specific performance space(s) from the late 1800s to the present day. I start with the explicit exoticization of the colonial Other in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Parisian universal expositions that gave the first glimpses of Algerian culture to the French public, albeit highly mediated ones. I then examine sha‘bī performance in the emergence of migrant cafés and oriental cabarets from the interwar period up until the War of Independence, which corresponded to the rapid increase in the number of Algerian emigrants in the French capital. Next, I chronicle the beur cultural movement and its demands for increased social inclusion and recognition by second-generation migrant youth. Finally, this historical overview culminates in contemporary Paris with the rise of large public cultural institutions that formed the nexus of my field research. Interspersed with these histories is an extended concert vignette that takes place in Le Schwa des Artistes, a modern-day café in Paris that maintains the intimacy demanded by successful sha‘bī
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performances. Taken together, my goal is to highlight the interrelated nature of immigration, labor, formal and informal performance spaces, and access to social space that is crucial to an understanding of sha‘bī practice.
Finding Sha‘bī: Intimacy and the Importance of Venue
My own initial understanding of sha‘bī as a genre that interweaves migration and discrete places of performance deepened during conversations with Paris-based Algerian musician Mohamed El Yazid, who had invited me to his performance at a restaurant south of Paris in the suburb of Choisy-le-Roi. A warm, open man with a rich voice, El Yazid is a respected sha‘bī singer whose conservatory training and long performing career have contributed to his reputation as an esteemed pedagogue. Generous with both his time and his knowledge throughout my fieldwork, he offered me the first chance to hear sha’bī in a venue approaching what others had described as the “ideal” setting: a small restaurant or café with a crowd of connoisseurs smoking, chatting, and listening in close quarters to the musicians. Prior to the concert, he spoke at length on the significance of these venues for the social well-being of Algerian migrant laborers in Paris in the mid-twentieth century: As I mentioned, this music [sha‘bī] has existed in France for a long time, and it really met the needs of the immigrants who were already here at the time. Why is this? The poor immigrants who first came [to Paris] were those who didn’t have much instruction. Thus, they worked hard and played sha‘bī in the little cafés, not in the grand concert halls. It was in a café where one could afford just to purchase an espresso and listen to music. The music provided a diversion for these immigrants. It accompanied them after their week of work—and it was also a means of making Algeria exist here through music and helped them to remember their culture. After the years of colonialism, France was the closest country for us. So, really, it’s a simple concept: several musicians—four, […] five, or six people who played in a café—and it didn’t pay a lot, but it paid, nonetheless. (Donc, je t’disais, le chaâbi il a existé en France quand même depuis…un bon moment, et le chaâbi, il a existé en France, il a…aidé beaucoup une certaine détente pour des immigrés qui étaient ici auparavant. Pourquoi ? Parce que des immigrés, des pauvres immigrés qui étaient ici en avant étaient des gens qui n’avaient pas un grand niveau d’instruction. Donc, quand ils venaient en France, c’était vraiment pour travailler, à la dure, huh ? Donc, le chaâbi, il s’est joué dans les petits cafés. Donc, il fallait pas aller dans une grande salle, ni payer un concert, ni—c’était facile d’aller dans un café, prendre quelque chose à boire, et écouter de la musique. Donc, la musique, elle a aidé, si tu veux, de divertir, d’accompagner ces immigrés-là, à les accompagner, après leur semaine de travail, et, c’était aussi une façon de dire que l’Algérie existe à travers
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cette musique, à travers cette culture—que l’Algérie existe à travers la musique parce qu’il fallait commencer à reconnaître un peu ce pays qui était longtemps colonialisé. Donc, la musique a commencé à reconnaître ce pays, et le pays le plus proche pour nous c’était la France. Donc, le chaâbi est venu, et—c’était très simple comme concept—c’était des petits groups de cinq personnes, de quatre personnes, […] c’était entre quatre et six personnes, qui joué dans un café et c’était pas payé beaucoup, mais c’était payé quand même…)
Mohamed’s remarks demonstrate a tacit connection between the venues for sha‘bī music in diaspora and the broader development of the practice in both Algeria and France. The network of cafés that proliferated in the decades before and immediately following Algeria’s independence in 1962 provided spaces of intimacy that contrasted with the relative anonymity of everyday life in Paris’s industrial periphery. The working-class milieu mirrored that of the popular neighborhoods of colonial Algiers where sha‘bī first began, offering a nostalgic reprieve to young men working in the metropole. The subsequent concert in Choisy-le-Roi gave me a glimpse into a world that has largely passed by, and yet lives on through performances at restaurants and concert halls around Paris, linking the music’s diasporic past to the postcolonial present.
Finding Sha‘bī: Le Shwa des artistes I
The night of the concert, my companions and I boarded the regional rail toward the suburb of Choisy-le-Roi. We left the station and crossed a bridge overstretching the Seine and a dormant industrial plant, toward the direction of the venue. Even with the advantage of modern navigational technology, the location was difficult to find—and once we found it, we walked past it several times, thinking that the unassuming house with a ramshackle fence of corrugated siding could not be the right place. Behind the wall, however, we found a hand-painted sign reading “Le Shwa des artistes” above double glass doors with the light of the restaurant streaming out. Inside were a small handful of tables and a partial divider separating the dining area and kitchen. Against this small wall sat Mohamed with his mandole, a keyboardist, and two percussionists armed with an array of microphones in front and several amplifiers perched precariously on the partition behind their heads. The walls were dotted with dated photographs of Moroccan zawiyas, while an ‘ūd, a guitar, and several other stringed instruments were nestled
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into shelves holding flatware and terracotta tagines. We could see one of the café's owners, Nadia, as she busied herself with an enormous pot of couscous in the kitchen, which was soon brought to our table in steaming bowls by her husband (and our host), Lyes.
Figure 2.1: Mohamed and his accompanying percussionist and keyboard player begin the evening with a set of traditional sha‘bī standards as the audience enjoys their dinner (Photograph by author, April 2017)
With his sidemen ready, Mohamed gave a welcome in French and began a set of well- known sha‘bī standards. In our previous conversation, he had shared his strong belief in communicating textual meaning and performance conventions to his audiences in order to make sha‘bī music more accessible to all in attendance. I was now excited to see his approach in action. To my surprise, he offered only brief explanations about the music, usually constrained to naming and translating song titles. What is more, he limited these interludes to once every few songs, preserving the smooth elision of multiple songs together that I had come to expect at more formal concerts. While initially puzzled, I soon realized that most audience members did not need further introduction to the music: they were already well acquainted and knew Mohamed personally. Many sang along to parts of well-known songs and offered appropriately placed affirmations of 29
“Ya Shakyat” and “Shaykhadek” (“Oh, Shaykh!” and “That’s it, Shaykh!”). Mohamed responded in kind with nods and smiles, and occasionally thanked those by name whose voices he recognized. Reading the room, he knew that further explication was not needed for the group—they already shared a warm rapport that deepened as the night wore on. Toward the end of the first set, his percussionist pointed to me and leaned into Mohamed’s ear. Knowing I was currently working through the translation, Mohamed announced the next song, “Ya Maqnine Ezzine” (Oh, Beautiful Goldfinch), shouting, “This one’s for you, Chris!”
In exchanges with other musicians, I learned that the intimate ambiance fostered by Mohamed at Le Shwa des artistes is something of a rarity now in Paris. The Algerian-owned cafés that had supported sha‘bī in past decades have since atrophied in both number and in social importance. Unlike the cafés that served the migrant worker community of the mid- to late- twentieth century, Le Shwa des artistes attracts a broad audience by hosting musicians across a wide range of world and popular genres. Mohamed’s eclectic repertoire choices that evening reflected how his own artistic stance aligns with the restaurant’s marketing approach. Throughout the evening, he took the small audience on a journey from classic sha‘bī repertoire to his own innovative compositions. His programming evinced the pressures imposed on professional musicians today from within and without—from within the community of expert listeners who know and expect the classic sha‘bī repertoire, and from non-initiated and non- Algerian audiences whose tastes and expectations of musical performance are more varied. These two considerations reflect the dual nature of Algerians’ historical presence in France, marked at once by intracommunal insularity and a hyper-awareness of the colonizer’s gaze.
Algerians on Display: Colonial Bodies and Public Space in the Metropole
In 1889, Paris hosted France’s Exposition Universelle, an event that marked the 100th anniversary of the French Revolution. Entering guests passed beneath the fair’s controversial centerpiece, a monument that has since become the quintessential symbol of the French nation: a 1,063-foot tall cast iron structure designed by an innovative architect named Gustave Eiffel. Among the cultural attractions were a Javanese gamelan, a Wild West show featuring Buffalo Bill and Annie Oakley, an Aztec temple, and an Algerian exhibit offering the first known
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performances of Algerian musicians and dancers in France. They appeared in the Algerian section of the Pavillons des Sections Coloniales, an expansive mock-up of idealized North African spaces designed by French architect Albert Ballu. Taken together, the exhibit’s gardens, Kabyle house, minaret, and Moorish café showcased the colonial holds of the Third Republic in the Maghrib. Musicians and dancers from Tunisia, Morocco, and Egypt performed in roughly eight of these café-concerts across the Pavilion and on the Esplanade des Invalides (Miliani 2015: 156; Fauser and Boshamer 2005: 163).
Figure 2.2: Poster detailing the Eiffel Tower and main gallery spaces constructed for the 1889 Exposition Universelle12
Nearly a half-century later, Algiers’s first Andalusi music association, El Moutribia, gave a concert in Paris at the Colonial Exposition of 1931. As with the earlier Exposition Universelle, the orchestra performed within a mock-up village displaying indigenous populations from France’s colonial holdings across the African continent (Aidi 2014: 263). The orchestra’s director, Mahieddine Bachetarzi, had previously performed in Paris as a vocalist with the same ensemble—first in 1924, and then in 1926 as a muezzin for the inauguration of the Grand
12 Affisch för världsutställningen i Paris 1889, in Wikipedia, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Paris_1889_plakat.jpg 31
Mosque of Paris (262). Known as the “Caruso of the desert” for his mix of Andalusi repertoire, Italian airs, and adaptations of Tin Pan Alley songs, Bachetarzi started his career under the tutelage of his musical mentor, Edmund Yafil, who founded El Moutribia in 1912 (Glasser 2016: 139, 182-3). A musician, folklorist, and researcher, Yafil published his first collection of notated Algerian music, Répertoire de chansons arabes et maures (1904), in collaboration with the French musicologist Jules Rouanet. Those scholarly and musical activities helped launch the revival movement of Andalusi nūba, or musical suites of sung Andalusi poetry, that codified the tradition as Algeria’s classical music in the early twentieth century (Théolyre 2016: 113). As a civic ensemble made up of amateur musicians, El Moutribia represented a new format for the performance of Andalusi music in Algeria. Before the organization was formed, Andalusi performance remained the reserve of Algiers’s elite social class who patronized musicians by hosting private gatherings or in cafés of the Casbah. Instead of the traditional client-patron relationship of individual master musicians, or shuyūkh, the association operated as a more democratic, participatory organization akin to community bands in the United States. The group’s size reflected this change: El Moutribia boasted between thirty and forty members, far exceeding the roughly six-person traditional Andalusi ensemble (Glasser 2016: 180). Their concert decorum, including the unfolding of a planned program of repertoire, their stage presence in front of a seated audience, and even the relative shift from heterophonic to unison texture all suggest the influence of the Western concert hall. Lastly, this event was marked by the venue itself: the newly completed mosque in the heart of Paris’s Latin Quarter. By its nature, the new structure exuded a contradiction in private and public, formal and informal space. More broadly, the Grand Mosque represented the ambiguity of French policy toward its former colonies and the colonial bodies who came to inhabit the French capital (Mégevand 2016). First proposed in 1885, the project took on new urgency after the battle of Verdun in 1916 as recompense for the sacrifice of Muslim soldiers. Its neo-Moresque style pays homage to Moroccan and Andalusian constructions, reflecting a high degree of interest in the artistic and architectural heritage of North Africa. Yet despite its intended purpose as recognition of service in the Great War, the space also provided means of immigrant surveillance as a controlled, central site of worship (Mégevand 2016). El Moutribia’s 1924 premier performance in France serves as an informative starting point for the history of sha‘bī music in Paris and the negotiation of space. Throughout the history 32
of sha‘bī in Paris, changing contexts of performance have been marked by tensions between societal accessibility and intimacy, surveillance and invisibility, and marginalization and integration to French social life. The paradox of the Grand Mosque, designated by the French state as a site of religious worship—prefigures the negotiation of performance space for sha‘bī music through the twentieth century and to the present day. Cafés that provided intimate spaces of relief for migrant workers became the bedrock of sha‘bī performance in the city, while most recently large institutions, including those funded by the French government, continue the tradition of the 1924 performance by sponsoring and promoting Algerian music in the public arena. Today, the major institutions supporting sha‘bī in France follow a similar pattern: The Institute of the Arab World, as with the Grand Mosque, was founded on the political will to increase the underrepresentation of Arab culture in France. Like the Mosque, this institution is managed by representatives from various Arabic-speaking countries while also receiving substantial funding and support from the French government. And although this institution does not operate as a site of surveillance as the Grand Mosque had during the early years of migration, the presence of sha‘bī in this space and others like it continue a long tradition of uneasy visibility of intimacy and Algerian-ness in public space.
Creation of a Settler Colony and the Rise of Labor Migration
The rich cultural differences displayed in the 1889 Exposition Universelle hardly acknowledged a brutal truth: the invasion of Ottoman-controlled Algiers by French monarch King Charles X yielded one of the longest, costliest, and most violent colonial projects in modern history. Almost immediately after the initial invasion in 1830, the French occupation of Algeria was directed toward the establishment of a settler colony. By 1842, approximately 100,000 Europeans lived in cities and new urban settlements along the Mediterranean coast, a number that rose to around 244,000 in the next three decades. The number of Europeans in Algeria continued to increase through the early twentieth century, peaking at close to one million settlers and their descendants at the start of the Algerian War of Independence in 1954 (McDougall 2017: 89-90). The 132-year occupation ended in 1962 after a bitter conflict for independence, but the damage to the region’s rural, agricultural economy had been done: the
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French process of land expropriation set the stage for massive worker migrations in the twentieth century. The years between WWI and WWII saw a rise in rotational, temporary worker emigration from Algeria to France. Driven firstly by harsh economic conditions in the colony, able-bodied Algerians were equally needed in the metropole to fill France’s effort in the Great War, both on the front lines and in industry. Between 1913 and 1917, some 240,000 young Algerian men were conscripted for military or industrial service in France (Sayad 2004: 66). After WWI, roughly 100,000 additional Algerians migrated to the French metropole to fill industrial job openings in Paris, Lille, and elsewhere around France. From the beginning of worker migration, the majority of Algerian immigrants came from the Kabyle-speaking regions of north-central Algeria. Even before this first wave of immigration to France, Kabyle villages developed a rotational system of domestic migration to Algiers, compelled by the failing agricultural economy and forced uprooting of Kabyle villages by the colonial government (McDougall 2017: 137). The largest wave of Algerian workers would embark on the trans-Mediterranean journey in the years immediately following WWII when the liberated metropole again offered the appeal of available jobs in industry and construction. Algeria’s status as an integral département of France permitted relatively unhindered travel (Aidi 2014: 263). As a result, the Algerian population in France ballooned from just 20,000 in 1946 to 210,000 in 1954 (Selby 2012: 30). By the end of the War of Independence in 1962, labor migration and those fleeing the violence of the war pushed that number to 350,000 (Derderian 2004: 22). The French public regarded this generation of immigrants as a temporary labor force— appraised exclusively for its economic potential and therefore not considered as an integral or permanent part of society. Indeed, the first generation of young men saw themselves as representatives of their family and community with the goal of sending back their earnings for a limited period before returning to their village. This home-oriented system of rotational labor encouraged their social isolation from the rest of French society (Sayad 2004: 74; Hargreaves 2007: 75). The effects of social exclusion were only compounded by the economic constraints of the Parisian housing market at the time. Algerian immigrants in the early twentieth century encountered a city already grappling with a shortage of affordable housing. Priced out of more 34
amenable options, most early migrant workers lodged in temporary housing close to the factories that employed them and far from the city center. Others slept on rotating bunks in migrant- owned hostels known as hôtels de passage (Silverstein 2004: 90). As immigrant families uprooted to Paris to be with their husbands and fathers after WWII, more and more workers moved out of the temporary lodging to pop-up shantytowns in open fields on the outskirts of the Parisian urban center. Known as bidonvilles, these makeshift communities consisted of little more than sheet-metal structures cobbled together by residents themselves, devoid of plumbing, adequate insulation, or any city municipal services. In her ethnography of Petit-Nanterre, Jennifer Selby recounts first-hand descriptions of a typical family shack as “one or two shared beds, a coal stove, large tins for water, and suitcases filled with clothing that acted as insulation” (Selby 2012: 33). According to Abdelmalek Sayad’s ethnographic account, the squalid living conditions often paled in comparison to the “psychological trauma caused by physical and economic alienation” (Sayad 1995 [1953]: 6).
Finding Sha‘bī: Le Shwa des artistes II
I settled back into my seat along the wall in Le Shwa des artists as Mohamed began his second set. By this point in the evening, it had become evident that most of those present knew Nadia and Lyes personally, who by now were regularly darting out of the kitchen to listen and chat. What had started as an intimate and subdued soirée was growing into a more lively and amicable gathering. I noticed additional spectators filling up the backspace around the doorway, entering and exiting to smoke and banter outside. Eventually, the doors were simply left open to allow for the music to freely filter out into the street. Having filled the first half of the evening with well-known sha‘bī classics, Mohamed would now treat us to his own compositions. His keyboardist, Moho, switched from a piano sound to a synthesized accordion pad resembling the background tracks of vintage pop raï songs from the 1980s. As the music recommenced, the riqq player from the first set, Amin, sat down across from me and explained the meaning of the song Mohamed had sung earlier in the evening, “Ya Maqnine Ezzine” (“Oh, Beautiful Goldfinch”). Although I was by now familiar with the lyrics by Mohamed El Badji, he insisted that I likely did not know the true story behind the text and went on to explain how El Badji had written it during his five years’ imprisonment during the Algerian
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War of Independence. Missing his family and worried for their safety, he desired nothing more than to be freed, a sentiment expressed in the song’s text about a caged finch who longs to escape and fly away. In Amin’s view, Mohamed had faithfully captured the song’s melancholic sentiment and shared it with the audience, something that stood in contrast to the upbeat versions typically played during wedding soirées in Algiers.
Sha‘bī Music in Exile: the Algerian Café Scene in Paris
As the number of new migrants swelled in the French capital, a network of migrant- owned cafés and restaurant-hostels took root across the city (Mahfoufi 2002: 44). Establishments in the suburbs north and east of the city center such as Café Le Bejaia, Le Tlemcen, and Si Mokrane served as important centers of social interaction for the young men who labored in factories and construction sites of the metropole, while the transient hotels provided newcomers with a vital support system for practical needs and viable housing options. Those passing through brought news from their communities back home, and the camaraderie of the performance environment relieved workers from the weight of social isolation and homesickness (Miliani 2015: 162; Daoudi and Miliani 2003: 24; Silverstein 2004: 90). The majority of musicians who performed in the cafés came to France primarily as labor migrants, only later adopting side work as musicians. The clientele supported regular weekend performances that lasted through the night. As more families came to join the male workforce after independence, musicians also performed for important life-cycle events like circumcisions and weddings (Gastaut 2006: 110-111). Singers typically accompanied themselves on ‘ūd, mandole, or guitar, at times playing with a small orchestra consisting of darbūka, riqq, and banjo. Unlike early sha‘bī artists who set classical malḥūn poetry to music, many migrant singers penned their own original texts that spoke in plain language about living conditions in France. The lyrical form usually followed regular alternation of couplet and refrain, often with an introductory istikhbār in the manner of the more classic sha‘bī-malḥūn repertoire of early sha‘bī singers. In contrast to the strictly Arabic tradition of sha‘bī repertoire based in malḥūn poetry, a majority of popular café performers sung in a mixture of Kabyle, Arabic, and French. Texts spoke of the disappointment of migration and al-ghorba (homesickness), as well as gambling, alcohol, and women. Above all, their texts dealt with the disorientation of being uprooted from
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rural, traditional values and the trauma of being reduced to an economic value (Daoudi and Miliani 2003: 30; Mahfoufi 2002: 36; Gaulier 2015: 74-5; Mokhtari 2001: 22). The songs represented, in a word, “the veritable chronicle of their daily lives” (Gaulier 2015: 74). The songs of exile that were written for this performance context overlap with and exceed narrow definitions of sha‘bī music as a genre. In publications and in my own conversations with musicians, the distinctions between sha‘bī music, modern Kabyle song, and songs of migration or exile have never enjoyed a consensus. Rather, the musicians active in Paris at the time were immersed in multiple currents of creative musical expression that built upon a foundation of sha‘bī and Andalusi music while also incorporating elements of popular genres like jazz, rhumba, tango, and waltz that also influenced Paris’s oriental cabarets (Gaulier 2015: 76). Many of the Berber-speaking Kabyle artists who performed in the cafés were equally versant in the Arabic-language sha‘bī repertoire, including the founding figure of the genre, El Hadj M’hamed El Anka (Mahfoufi 2002: 32). The most famous Kabyle singer of exile, Slimane Azem, first moved to France in 1937 to work in the Longwy steelworks as a temporary laborer before being drafted during WWII and briefly captured by German forces. He returned to Occupied Paris in 1940 to work as an electrician on the Paris metro system. After the Liberation in 1945, Azem opened a café in Mont-Saint-Martin, Paris. His career as a singer and songwriter began that same year. At the prodding of the singer Mohamed El Kamal, he began to perform his own songs in cafés for appreciative audiences. Azem channeled his first-hand knowledge of the harsh experiences of a migrant worker into biting and bitter accounts. (Mahfoufi 2002: 45; Association Intermusées 2012: 7). In 1951 he recorded his first song, “A Moh A Moh,” which tells of his time working underground on the metro and the emotional turmoil of homesickness and economic precarity typical of the Algerian migrant laborer (Mokhtari 2001: 24): On my God, I implore you AnaY ya Sidi rebbi Oh, Generous and Tender One A lhanin ay amaâzuz My youth, fatigued, has departed from Temz iw truh d akurfi me In the metro, in a large tunnel Deg mitro daxel uderbuz Paris enchanted me Lpari tehkem felli Does she have talismans? Waqila tesaâ lahruz (Mokhtari 2002: 24)13
13 Due to the limited appearance of Kabyle song texts in this dissertation, I have elected to preserve the Mokhtari’s Francophone orthography of the transliterated Kabyle text. 37
In homesickness I wait for an open door In habitual exile But my heart longs to return To return, but I have no money To remain, I fear death Azem’s text illustrates the psychological turmoil of immigration for this first generation of labor migrants. Driven by economic precarity and the responsibility to provide for family back home and faced with the disillusionment of life in exile, the singer is caught in between two spaces and yet absent from both. Forestalled by political reasons after the War of Independence, Azem would never return to his native Algeria.
Paris’s Oriental Cabarets
Paris witnessed a golden age of its oriental cabaret scene from the 1940s to the early 1960s, driven by a rarefied era of collaboration between Jewish and Muslim Algerian musicians and French record labels (Daoudi and Miliani 2003: 27; Yazami 2009: 136). In contrast to the reclusive nature of the Algerian-owned cafés, the cabaret industry catered to a broader French and international audience. Across these two contrasting yet overlapping musical scenes we find the same tension between exclusion and voyeurism: in the café, young migrant workers found a protective haven from the prying eyes of the colonizer and a safe space for community where they shared the nostalgic salve of songs that reminded them of home. The cabarets, in contrast, represented a coming together of French exoticism with the creative energy of genuine artistic collaboration between Algerian Jewish, Algerian Muslim, and French performers. Following World War II, the community of Algerians in Paris reached a critical mass able to support a vibrant entertainment scene, with musicians and composers working across an increasingly diverse range of popular styles (Yazami 2009: 135). Dozens of the most successful singers, musicians, and songwriters from Algeria made their name on the stages of Paris’s vibrant Latin Quarter. The names of these cabarets—Le Baghdad, Dar-el-Beida, La Casbah, Les Nuits du Liban—suggest the Orientalist appeal that attracted French audiences and tourists alike. The oriental cabarets of Paris ushered in a wave of energy in modern Algerian music in diaspora. Singers, instrumentalists, and composers collaborated in large orchestras, adopted new instruments, and performed songs that catered to the international public (Ouahmi 2009: 138). One of its pioneers, Mohamed El Kamel, made his start in Paris by founding his own theater 38
group in the early 1930s, performing a fusion of vaudeville-style songs and musical hall numbers (Aidi 2014: 263). The cabarets served both as a training ground and a mutual support system for up-and-coming artists. Soloists regularly accompanied their fellow stars at other cabarets on different nights (Yazami 2009: 136). The Jewish singer Blond-blond (Albert Rouimi) appeared regularly at El Djazair, Line Monty and Maurice El Medioni at Le Poussin Bleu, (Miliani 2015: 160), and Salim Halali at Ismaïlia Folies and Le Sérail (Association Intermusées 2012: 6). Pianist and composer Mohamed Iguerbouchene opened the famous Cabaret El Djazair in 1935 on Rue de la Huchette, just one block off the Seine’s left bank. That same year the young Algerois14 singer Fadéla Dziria had her career debut on its stage, performing various styles of Kabyle, Oranais, and Saharan songs (Daoudi and Miliani 2003: 28). The precursors to this artistic efflorescence in Paris lie in the oriental cabarets of Algiers and Oran, where musicians and dancers developed a style known as franco-arabe, or simply moderne, that appealed to a mixed colonial audience (Association Intermusées 2012: 6). On both sides of the Mediterranean, an interconfessional network of Muslim and Jewish, Algerian and French musicians mixed French with dialectical Arabic and incorporated rhythms and instruments from Western classical, American jazz, and Latin American dance genres. The heterogeneous style particularly appealed to the recording industry in France. Unlike the emerging division between “popular” and “classical” found in Algerian national radio broadcasting, this division held far less sway among French consumers (Théolyre 2016: 622, 628). In actuality, many sha‘bī Algerian musicians performed and recorded in both realms, appearing in migrant cafés on one night and on the cabaret stage the next.
The War of Independence and Postcolonial Transformations
As the Algerian independence movement intensified, café performances became key events for mobilizing the diaspora to political activism (Association Intermusées 2012: 5). Battling for political dominance, the National Liberation Front, or FLN, emerged as the singular political voice for Algerian independence. During the war, the FLN required singers to relinquish half of their profits earned at soirées for the Algerian cause and used such concerts to garner
14 Following the practice of other Anglophone scholars, I adopt the francophone term “Algerois” as an adjective to designate nouns belonging to the city of Algiers. 39
support and spread pro-independence propaganda. Their efforts invited intense surveillance, curfews, and arrests by French authorities (Gastaut 2006: 113). Kabyle sha‘bī singer Cheikh H’sissen (Ahcene Larbi Benameur) was sought out by the police for alleged nationalist activities, while the popular singer, composer and orchestra director Amraoui Missoum was arrested for performing Egyptian Pan-Arab nationalist repertoire in 1952 (Daoudi and Miliani 2003: 40). Many singers composed nationalist songs in support of an independent Algeria. At the start of the war in 1954, Slimane Azem began to compose thinly veiled nationalist rhetoric in the form of moralist exhortations and coded language, such as his song in Kabyle, “Eff’egh ay ajirad tamurt-iw” (Oh, Grasshoppers, Leave my Country!) (Mahfoufi 2002: 38, 180-3). Other singers levied critique at the religious elite in Algerian society as an impediment to a modern, independent Algeria. Cheikh El Hasnaoui reflected this attitude with his song, “Ruh a bu tabani” (Move Aside, ‘Turban-man!’). Algerian artists in Paris felt an immediate commercial backlash following Algeria’s independence in 1962. With the end of Algeria as an integral département, French record labels lost their uninhibited access to North African markets, and many dropped their North African catalogues all together. Although the new migration of Algerian Jews leaving Algeria at the end of the war boosted the franco-orientale scene, many artists found themselves returning to café performances within the migrant community to make up for waning record sales (Daoudi and Miliani 2003: 55). Migration agreements set in place by France and the newly independent Algerian government allowed for worker emigration to continue apace, reaching a total of approximately 710,000 Algerians in France by 1975. The dynamics of migration would markedly shift, however, with the 1973 oil crisis and subsequent economic slowdown. As the prosperity that had sustained an economic need for the Algerian migrant workforce came to an end, Algerians’ welcome in France also soured. Because the French had always seen Maghribi migrant populations in economic terms, public perceptions of Algerians were directly affected by the changing state of the economy. The prevailing logic was that an unemployed foreign worker has no justification for remaining in the country. As unemployment rose, so did resentment toward the presence of Algerians in the republic (Selby 2012: 32). Alex Hargreaves identifies several mechanisms that further disenfranchised Algerian migrants from the mid-1970s onward. First, a predominantly male workforce previously 40
relegated to the industry found itself moving toward the growing service sector for jobs that French citizens did not want. Secondly, the vulnerable bargaining position of workers, combined with an unfavorable hiring environment, allowed employers to exploit them for lower wages and poorer working conditions. Finally, Algerians were more likely to be excluded from the workforce altogether due to disproportionate rates of layoffs (Hargreaves 2007: 48-50). In 1974 the French government under Valéry Giscard d’Etaing officially halted Algerian immigration. In actuality, this move did not stall the flow of people but merely changed its character due to the simultaneous acceleration of family reunification. As a result, the demographic of what had been a homogeneous male labor force transformed into settled family units. In an effort to stabilize migrant’s living situations, the government replaced the shantytowns with subsidized and permanent housing complexes on the urban periphery known as HLM’s (habitation à loyer modéré) (Derderian 2004: 8). From the late 1950s to mid-1970s, the government relocated approximately one million family units into HLM public housing (Silverstein 2004: 92). At first, the HLM’s appealed to lower-wage working families across ethnic lines. Over the ensuing decades, however, economic disadvantage relegated Maghribi families to the increasingly run-down units of the older complexes as other communities moved out in search of better accommodations. Whereas in 1975 only fifteen percent of HLM units were occupied by foreign nationals, by 1999 that number was over fifty percent (Hargreaves 2007: 64-5). The largest of these projects were the ultra-modern, industrial-looking complexes around the city’s ring of banlieues known as grands ensembles (Silverstein 2004: 94, Derderian 2004: 148). In the ensuing decades, these complexes were widely criticized as suffocating and impersonal barracks, architecturally and geographically removed from the wider cityscape. Despite the continuing net growth of Algerians in France, President d’Etaing intensified efforts to curb and even reverse immigration, including cash incentives for voluntary repatriation and an aggressive policy of deportation of Maghribi-origin youth for minor offenses (Derderian 2004: 8). These efforts culminated in preliminary plans to deport some 100,000 Algerians and their descendants, although this measure never came to fruition. Ironically, the government’s anti-immigration stance encouraged Algerians to remain in France for fear of being barred from returning (Hargreaves 2007: 26).
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Slimane Azem’s song “Carte de Résidence” captured the frustrations of Algerians during the late-1970s. Sung in a mixture of French and Kabyle, his lyrics protest the unfair policies toward Algerian migrant workers in France, the rise in xenophobia, and the lack of acknowledgement for the contributions Algerians have made to the prosperity and security of France (Gaulier 2015: 77-8). On the original recording, he and fellow singer Cheikh Noureddine accompany themselves on two mandoles and darbūka, producing a stark texture that captures the sound of a small sha‘bī ensemble typical of an Algerian café of the period: Labor, when it’s hard, it’s for the Le travail, quand il est dur, c’est pour immigrant, of course l’immigré bien sûr With a pure conscience, sacrifice and Avec la conscience pure, l’dévouement suffering, et des souffrances Sacrifice and suffering demand a L’dévouement et des souffrances, ça recompense mérite la récompense […] […]
Ladies and Gentlemen, if I must wish Mesdames, mesdemoiselles, you adieu messieurs, si j’dois vous dire adieu
Know well that my ancestors fought Sachez bien que mes aïeux ont for France combattu pour la France Fought for France well before the Ont combattu pour la France bien Residency [Card] avant la résidence
(Gaulier 2015: 78)
Both of the above incipits hint at the bitterness many migrants felt toward the unrecognized sacrifices of Algerians who served in WWI and WWII. The song reflects a shift in the migrant mentality from several decades prior by demanding recognition of Algerians as an integral—and permanent—part of French society. Unlike Azem’s earlier song, “A Moh A Moh,” which participated in the myth of return and the temporality of labor migration, this composition demands political rights and protection from social vulnerability as permanent residents in France.
The Beur Cultural Movement
By the early 1980s, frustrations boiled over among the children of Algerian migrants who were coming of age. Born in France, this new demographic spoke little to no Arabic and
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identified culturally with their French homeland as much as their Maghribi family heritage. They represented a new and inescapably multicultural generation, raised and brought up within the French education system as citizens of the republic yet marginalized as foreigners. In what would become known as the beur movement, youth and young adults of Maghribi origin in the 1980s produced an efflorescence of cultural expression and political activism that demanded recognition and equal rights. The term beur is French verlan derived from the French word arabe. In the hands of young activists and the press, the term came to stand for the reappropriation of social stigma. The beur cultural movement corresponded to a political shift heralded by the election of Socialist President Francois Mitterrand in 1981, whose policies acknowledged the concerns of Paris’s postcolonial minority communities and their cultural diversity within the republic. Crucially, Mitterrand lifted restrictions on associations run by foreign nationals and encouraged the formation of civic associations in marginalized neighborhoods (Silverstein 2004: 163; Hargreaves 2007: 78). The movement ultimately yielded mixed results for members of the second generation. While musicians benefited from increased visibility and access to public venues, the mediatization of the label beur threatened to trap them within ethnic stereotypes. The legacy of the beur movement is still felt in the contemporary debate over sha‘bī’s promotion to a broader French listening public that I explore in Chapter 6. Music played a central role in the movement’s political activism. Inspired by the model of Rock Against Racism in the United Kingdom, beur advocacy groups organized around a dozen free concerts between 1980 and 1982, culminating in the March for Equality and Against Racism in 1983 (Silverstein 2004: 160; Derderian 2009: 297). The militant music of the beur movement reflected the popular musical tastes of the broader French society, rather than that of their parents. But while the sound of these musicians reflected a rupture from earlier Algerian music in France, the subject matter of songs calling for acceptance, recognition, and equal rights followed in the tradition of nationalist songs by Slimane Azem, Cheikh El Hasnaoui, and others during the War of Independence (Yahi 2006: 138). The band Carte de séjour took their musical inspiration from Anglo-Saxon rock of the 1970s to protest discriminatory policies and express the challenges of balancing family expectations with societal pressures to integrate. Founded by lead singer Rachid Taha, the group’s name meaning “residency card” makes reference to the precarious legal position of Maghribi migrants in France at the time (Derderian 2009: 297).
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Following Mitterrand’s liberation of the airwaves, the independent station Radio Beur became an important institution for Maghribi musical and cultural expression in France. The station took an active role in organizing concerts and popularizing live performances of Franco- Maghribi artists for larger audiences. The well-known Kabyle singer Idir (Hamid Cheriet) credited Radio Beur with opening the door for Algerian artists to access large, high-profile venues like Paris’s Zénith and Olympia Theater (Derderian 2009: 298). In tandem with the promotional success of Radio Beur, the 1980s saw a resurgence in the North African music in the French market. Aside from the music produced by Franco-Maghribi musicians of the beur generation, the surge came principally from two Algerian-based genres: the modern Kabyle song movement and raï (Daoudi and Miliani 2003: 57). The first, also known as Kabyle “New Song,” accompanied the rise in cultural and political consciousness among the Berber-speaking minorities in post-independence Algeria, culminating with widespread protests in 1980 known as the Berber Spring. The second, raï, overran the popular music scene in the 1970s to become one of Algeria’s most recognizable musical exports. In 1986, Cheb Khaled exposed the international market to pop raï for the first time with his album Kutché, mixing traditional instrumentation of drums, flutes, and reeds with reggae jazz and funk. By the 1990s the genre had become immensely popular among youth of North African origin in the banlieues of Paris and Marseille. The commercial success of raï and Kabyle popular songs pulled artists out of the Maghribi-owned cafés and into larger concert venues. At the same time, the move out of the cafés followed a generational rift between immigrants and their French-born children. With family reunification, the café became less of a central point of social interaction in the migrant community, and the old songs written in Kabyle and Arabic bore less and less relevance for youth who grew up speaking French and who did not experience the colonial period. Lastly, this social transformation paralleled changes to the sha‘bī scene in Algiers during the years of intense violence from the early 1990s to the early 2000s. The conflict began in early 1992, when the military annulled the first multi-party elections. In a clear referendum on the longstanding single-party government, the first-round election results showed a large majority of seats going to representatives of the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) and the pro-Kabyle secularist party, the Socialist Forces Front (FFS). When the military dissolved the process, Islamic rebel groups and factions of FIS declared war on the government, sparking over a decade of incredible 44
violence on the civilian population (Le Sueur 2010: 51-52). Over the course of the crisis, various armed groups targeted journalists, intellectuals, foreigners, and artists. In 1994 alone, the Armed Islamic Group (GIA) assassinated Berber singer and political activist Matoub Lounès and raï star Cheb Hasni. Faced with such dire threats, many musicians fled the country for France in what amounted to another surge in immigration. In Algeria, the threat of violence all but asphyxiated the marriages, parties, and family gatherings that had served as the mainstay for sha‘bī music. In its place remained a few large concert halls with security checkpoints that meted some assurance of security for the listening public. For Azzedine, a former Algerian radio host now living in France, the violence of this period marked an end to a golden era of sha‘bī when both the spaces and the shuyūkh that enlivened them were more open to a non-paying public, before the rise of larger concert halls as the preferred venue: Previously, sha‘bī in the capital of Algiers was, first and foremost, the music for parties. Every day the parties were free—and you go could go every day for free! […] That's how it was in Algeria. Not here. So, when I was young, I was bathed in sha‘bī. Everyday there was a party featuring a different artist. […] That was before. Then, after the years of terrorism, the people were afraid to go to public spaces, with lots of killings and so on.… So, sha‘bī halted for a while and people became used to doing things ‘closed-off.’ […] So, you see? Terrorism changed the mentality. They adopted the method of a concert hall. It’s more expensive but more secure. With the presence of guards, people couldn't come in unless they were invited. (Avant, chaâbi, Alger, la capitale, c’était le premier pour les fêtes, que des fêtes, pratiquement…tous les jours, donc les fêtes étaient gratuites, heh ? […] C’est comme ça il est passé en Algérie—pas ici ! Donc…moi, j’baigné en chaâbi. Moi, quand j’étais petit, c’était pratiquement tous [les] jours chaâbi. Parce tous les jours c’était une fête ! Et tous les jours c’était un artiste diffèrent. […] C’est comme ça il s’est passé avant. Maintenant, après la période de terrorisme en Algérie, des gens ont peur. Des gens [ont] de la peur d’aller en plein public, parce que…des morts et du terrorisme.… Donc, le chaâbi a été bloqué un peu […]. Parce que des gens ont pris l’habitude de faire des choses en fermé. […] Donc, le terrorisme a changé la mentalité, d’accord ? Et ils ont adopté la méthode de la salle d’entrée. C’est plus cher, mais plus sécurisée. Avec des gardes aux portes, personne peuvent entrer sauf qu’ [avec une invitation].
Other musicians with whom I spoke in Paris described how this dark chapter of Algerian history affected musical production in both Algeria and France. While Azzedine’s comments pertain to his childhood memories of Algiers, the shift away from idealized performance spaces—familiar, informal, and free—affected a similar change in Parisian performance contexts
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as well. At a time when Maghribi musicians in Paris were already shifting their performances from small cafés to larger concert halls, the influx of new talent from Algiers encouraged larger venues to sponsor well-known musicians seeking refuge from the violence. When asked about the effects of the conflict on musical practice in Algeria, Youssef, another amateur musician now living in Paris, responded, Yes, there was a rupture in Algeria, and a ‘boom’ here. The artists who fled came here. […] Like [Cheb] Khaled and Matoub Lounès (Lounès would later return to Algeria where he was assassinated in 1998). […] So, in some ways [the violence] was the cause. The ‘dark decade’ severely affected the promotion of sha‘bī in Algeria—not just sha‘bī, but all styles—a sort of pause in the artistic scene. No cinemas, no theaters, no concerts. (C’était une rupture en Algérie et un ‘boom’ ici. Parce que des artistes qui sont venus sont exilés ici. […] Comme Khaled and Matoub Lounès. […] Donc, en quelque sorte, c’est ça. Mais, eh, la décennie noire a beaucoup affecté la promotion du chaâbi en Algérie. Mais pas que chaâbi—tous les styles de musique—c’est-à-dire, on avait, en quelque sorte, on a fait pause à la scène artistique. C’était comme un arrêt brusque de la scène artistique. Les scènes étaient fermées…pas de cinémas, pas de théâtres, pas de concerts.)
In my conversation with Samir and his friends and fellow musicians Nourredine and Mehdi the three reflected on the new performance opportunities in France for those fleeing Algeria. Mehdi, a French-born sha‘bī musician, described a renewed interest among French youth of Algerian origin in more traditional genres during this time, both as a response to the cultural shock of prolonged terrorism in Algeria and a desire among post-independence youth to re-engage with their country’s cultural heritage. The remaining Maghribi-owned record labels in traditionally migrant neighborhoods of Paris like Belleville and Goutte d’Or also noted a boost in their sales of older recordings of both traditional Andalusi music and sha‘bī (Daoudi and Miliani 2003: 57, 60). Mehdi even recalls courses in sha‘bī that were offered briefly at the Algerian Cultural Center during this period: Mehdi: [In the 1990s], we had a new arrival [of migrant musicians] (Après, on a des nouveaux arrivants)
Nourredine (interjecting): like Guerouabi.
Mehdi: …and with this influx, with the ‘black decade’ in Algeria and the terrorism and everything…there was hardly any music [in Algeria], because [musicians] were threatened…music stores were destroyed, [terrorists] said playing the guitar is not acceptable. […] There was also a wave of Andalusi associations founded [in Paris] —both Andalusi “pure” and sha‘bī—there were courses for both [genres], and so
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more techniques were introduced, […] even among players like Ptit Moh who taught himself to play. (Et avec tout ça, avec la décennie noire en Algérie avec le terrorisme et tout…il y avait plein pas de musique, parce que…ils étaient menacés, des magasins de musique étaient cassés, et de jouer avec une guitare c’était pas bien. […] Mais après il était aussi une vague des associations andalouses. Et eux ils font les deux—pas mal, ils font le « pur » et en même temps le chaâbi—mais ils sont très bon, heh ? Mais eux ils ont plus de techniques […] des gens comme Ptit Moh qui a appris toute seule.)
Nourredine (interjecting): But it was Amar Ezzahi who adopted him and taught him!” (…eh, Ptit Moh, c’est Amar Ezzahi qui l’a adopté—c’est lui qui l’a adopté et c’est lui qui l’a enseigné.)
[…]
Samir: I think there was a certain generation who arrived at this time to seek opportunities [in Europe] in a professional capacity. (Je pense qu’il y avait une certaine génération qui…des artistes qui ont arrivés à cette opportunité…pour suivant justement dans le monde dans une capacité professionnelle.
Nourredine: Not everyone… [inaudible]
[…]
Mehdi (interjecting): Like [Abdelkader] Chaou.
Samir (interjecting): Yes, he tried to make it here as a professional. (Oui, il est venu ici pour faire une chose professionnelle.)
When I ask Mehdi whether he ever performs onstage in a concert hall in Paris, he responded, Mehdi: No, no. […] Today, there are just three or four well-known [artists] who perform all the time [onstage]—and it doesn’t give a chance for younger musicians. Like Chaou, Kamel El Harrachi (the son of Dahmane El Harrachi), artists who everyone knows by name. (Non, non. […] Maintenant ici sur scène en France, il y a trois ou quatre qui sont connus, ils sont tout le temps—et il donne pas—regarde—il donne pas la chance aux jeunes, et tout. Comme Chaou, Kamel El Harrachi.)
Finding Sha‘bī: Le Shwa des artistes III
In the final portion of his performance at Le Shwa des artistes, Mohamed adopted a style suggestive of Gnawa music from Morocco and the south-west of Algeria (also known as diwan in the Algerian context) in a series of original, improvisatory compositions (Saïdani 2013: 42-43).
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He shifted his manner of mandole playing to a repetitious strumming of single notes that resembled the sound of the ginbrī, a box-shaped lute used by ensemble leaders in Gnawa ceremonies and by popular, Gnawa-inspired musical groups like Gnawa Diffusion. His playing and manner of singing became more cyclical, allowing for more space for free improvisation. Far from where the evening started, his sound now swept us up in the repeating melodic motifs that meshed musical ideas from the Andalusi repertoire with Gnawa, pop raï, and other, more far-flung popular influences. On the last song, the leader of an Algerian Gnawa group who frequents Le Shwa des artistes helped himself to the darbūka sitting idle by the keyboard and began to accompany the duo. A newfound energy infected the entire room, and those not already dancing rose to their feet and clapped along with rapid duple meter. At this point, any decorum between workers and clientele broke down as Nadia and several other women danced their way out of the kitchen and to the center of the dining area. Nadia removed the scarf from her neck and began swirling it above her head. She stopped in front of our group and enticed my friend to dance by looping it over top of her shoulders and around her waist, pulling her out of her seat and into the dance space. Stacy happily obliged, while a man across from our table exclaimed a “Yalla!” and laughed as our friend from rural Pennsylvania lost herself in the music amid the other dancers. The spectators continued clapping as Mohamed accelerated the final musical phrase to its exciting conclusion.
“Deserting the Cafés” and the Rise in Institutional Support
The crowd at Mohamed’s concert in Choisy-le-Roi reveals a continuation of the café tradition in Paris reworked to fit contemporary realities. Unlike the Algerian-owned cafés of the post-WWII and post-independence periods, Le Shwa des artistes welcomes a variety of clientele and markets itself as a promoter of live music more broadly. As my research would show, the most well-known sha‘bī artists now perform primarily at a few major institutions like the Algerian Cultural Center and the Institute of the Arab World. The decline of cafés as a venue for sha‘bī did not mean the disappearance of the social network supporting this music, however. Youssef illustrates this point with his own experience. When asked whether the network of cafés supporting local sha‘bī musicians has changed over the past several decades, he responded,
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If one compares to the ‘epoch of Ménilmontant,’ yes, certainly.15 At the time of M’hamed El Hadj El Anka and Dahmane El Harrachi, all of the ‘greats’ [came through]—including Hasnaoui. At that time there wasn't the technology, the means by which information could circulate, so, the people would simply find out [about an event] on the weekend, at this café or that one, via word-of-mouth. Back in the day, if I wanted to go and hear Dahmane El Harrachi or Kamel Messaoudi, they would often pass through 40 Boulevard Ménilmontant. (Si on l’compare à l’époque de Ménilmontant, certainement, depuis l’ère de M’hamed El Hadj El Anka, et Dahmane El Harrachi et tous les grands, je parle de tous les grands—à l’époque on n’a pas tous ces technologies de réseau social, de comment les informations circulent rapidement, donc, les gens à l’époque, ils avaient comme repère, le weekend et telle café, ‘telle ou telle café,’ et…bouche à l’oreille, si j’allais au 40 Boulevard Ménilmontant, c’est un weekend, certainement, il y aura Dahmane El Harrachi ou Kamel Messaoudi, qui a joué là-bas à l’époque.)
But after that, we experienced a deserting of cafés […] to the large performance spaces like the cultural centers, community centers. So, for example: this month on April 20th is the [celebration of the] Berber spring. It subsumes all of the protest against political oppression etc. and is a unique mark of our cultural identity. And so, for example, if you look around Paris, certainly you will find at minimum two-three concerts on April 20th in support of the Berber cause. And I have a great number of other chances [to see sha‘bī] as well. Like the Centre d’animation Dunois, almost every month they invite an artist. So, within our social network, [the music] lives— and many [of these performances] are better than those of the epoch of twenty or fifty years ago, it’s just that the individuals change. (Mais là, certes, on a désertifié les cafés […] on a passé dans une autre étape, qui est les spectacles, des centres culturels, des animations. Pour exemple on a le 20 avril. Le 20 avril chez nous les Berbères c’est le Printemps berbère. Ça reflète toutes les manifestations contre le pouvoir, contre…c’est unique pour notre identité donc actuellement c’est un jour très important et célèbre. Voilà, uniquement 20 avril à Paris, certainement on ira minimum deux-trois concerts berbères pour la cause berbère. Je prends l’exemple d’autres occasions. Par exemple, le Centre Dunois chaque mois pratiquement on invite un artiste. Grâce à notre réseau social on sait qu’il y a une place beaucoup plus meilleure que d’il y a vingt ans ou cinquante ans. Sauf que, il y a des têtes qui changent.)
The “deserting of the cafés” across Belleville, Barbès, and Ménilmontant coincided with a rise in concert opportunities in large venues and major cultural institutions over the past several decades. As the social importance of Algerian-owned cafés declined for the migrant community, organizations such as the Institute of the Arab World and large concert venues likes the Zénith and the Bataclan took up the role of musical patronage and transmission that has been crucial to
15 Youssef made reference to an Algerian café in the neighborhood of Ménilmontant in Paris’s twentieth arrondissement that regularly hosted local sha‘bī musicians. 49
sha‘bī music’s enduring vitality. As suggested by Mehdi’s comments above, these opportunities have been restricted to a small group of sha‘bī musicians who have garnered enough notoriety in Algeria to be invited to Paris as featured performers. Nevertheless, recognition of sha‘bī in the programming of public institutions has given the music unprecedented publicity in French public life that reflects an increasing, if at times uneasy, visibility for a minority community with a legacy of socioeconomic marginalization. The contemporary concerns of musicians toward sha‘bī performance in these venues carry the residue of suspicion toward public displays of Algerian-ness and a fear of losing control over the tradition. In spite of the changes to aesthetic norms and performative conventions they might provoke, these venues have become incredibly popular among the migrant community and serve a valuable purpose in the perpetuation of sha‘bī music in the French capital. Several major cultural institutions now offer regular opportunities to attend formal concerts by well-known sha‘bī artists. Located in Paris’s thirteenth arrondissement, the Dunois Community Center is part of a confederation of centers known as the Ligue d’enseignement, an organization dedicated to the promotion of continuing education and cultural initiatives across France. For the past several years, the small center has hosted a successful monthly concert series of sha‘bī music, representing one of the few public venues where one can regularly hear the music in Paris. The current director of musical programming at the Institute of the Arab World, Rabah Mezouane, has given sha‘bī a privileged position at the institution since he assumed the post in 1994. Raised in the Casbah before immigrating in 1976, Mezouane admits to a special affinity for Algerois sha‘bī and regularly books top-name artists from Algiers for concerts (Degeorges 2017). A year after the first homage to Amar Ezzahi, Mezouane organized a three-day sha‘bī festival, with one night again dedicated to an homage to Ezzahi by Kamel Aziz and another featuring the respected singer Abdelkader Chaou. The Dunois Center, the Institute of the Arab World, and the Algerian Cultural Center all provide opportunities to hear current sha‘bī artists based in Algiers. Other recent initiatives, however, highlight the increasing historical awareness of the migrant cafés, hotels, and bistros, and their legacy as important venues of musical life in Paris. In 2012 the Cabaret Sauvage, itself an important venue for Algerian musicians in Paris, hosted a theatrical production chronicling the cafés of Paris’s Eighteenth Arrondissement. Written and directed by the cabaret’s owner, Meziane Azaïche, the show presented a historical montage of Maghribi artists who animated the 50
bars and cafés of Paris. By employing contemporary performers of Maghribi origin, the show presented this history as an integral part of the French cultural patrimony today (Centre national du Patrimoine de la Chanson 2012). The production team included Nadia Yahia, a researcher who helped spearhead the 2009 exhibition at the National Museum of the History of Immigration entitled “Generations: A Century of Cultural History of Maghribis in France.” Even with these high-profile projects pushing Algerian sha‘bī toward institutional recognition and legitimacy, one aspect that has remained consistent since the beur generation is a division of musical taste between Algerian immigrants and those of Algerian heritage born in France. By and large, sha‘bī remains limited to listeners with personal memories of Algeria, typically with a good deal of exposure to the music as a child and young adult. This trend was illustrated in the musicians with whom I interacted. The vast majority grew up in Algeria before migrating to Paris as an adult. Several individuals first came to France as university students, while others fled the violence and musical stagnation of the 1990s. Many of my collaborators have moved back and forth multiple times over their adult lives, maintaining close ties to their hometown and keeping up-to-date with musical developments there. A few weeks after his performance, Mohamed informed me that he and his wife would soon be returning to Algeria for the summer to be with his extended family. He would recommence his pedagogical activities with his Algerian mandole students in Paris upon his return later that year. Despite the long and rich history of the music in Paris, Algiers remains the point of reference for most practitioners today: “If you want to really know sha‘bī music, you must go to Algiers,” I was often told. Among its listenership, sha‘bī remains a genre rooted in popular neighborhoods of Algiers, even as those same stakeholders actively adapt and promote the music within the diasporic community of Paris. At first this seems like an unavoidable reality for a seemingly displaced tradition in diaspora whose ideal context of performance simply does not exist abroad. Yet, as I would discover, artists use these differences to recreate and reimagine the possibilities of the music in diaspora. One thing became clear to me as I embarked on my research: the musical relationship between France and Algeria is ongoing and never stagnant. Sha‘bī music is as much an expression of this interaction today as it was in its early development. As I will argue in the following chapters, the aesthetics of the genre continue to be negotiated within this shared history. 51
CHAPTER 3
THE GRAIN OF THE VOICE AND THE SINGER’S MORAL AUTHORITY IN SHA‘BĪ PERFORMANCE
Oh migrant, to where are you traveling? You Yā rāyah wīn tusāfir trūḥ ta‘ayya wa-twilī will inevitably end up returning How many naïve ones have gone before you Sh-ḥāl nadamū-l-ba‘ad-l-ghāflīn qablik u- and me? qablī How many overcrowded nations have you Sh-ḥāl shift buldān l-‘amrīn wa-l-brr l-khālī seen, and others empty? How much time have you already lost and Sh-ḥāl ḍayy‘at awqāt wa-sh-ḥāl zīd mā zāl how much more will you lose? tkhalī
- Dahmane El Harrachi, “Ya Rayah”
This chapter examines sha‘bī singer’s voice and the timbral, material qualities that undergird its affective power in performance. In an effort to tease out the crucial but elusive nature of vocality, I consider the non-semantic aspects of vocal communication and how those attributes play a central part in connecting audiences to the emotional content of sung texts. I then turn to appraisals of vocal aesthetics in Islamic practice to show how singers’ unique, embodied voices are imbued with a moral significance that establishes their social authority. Through the power of the voice, sha‘bī performances constitute communities of ethical listening that mirror Islamic devotional practice.
Moho’s Studio
On a Saturday in January, Samir invited me to an informal gathering at the art studio of his friend Moho in the suburb of Villejuif. He met me late that evening at the light rail stop, a short transfer beyond the final metro station in Villejuif’s downtown area. We moved quickly in the frigid air down the wide suburban sidewalk to the building where Moho’s studio is housed— a small, three-story apartment building of beige stucco and red-tile roofing that, though run- down, resembled a rural home in Normandy or the Loire Valley. The building was set back from the street in a rather messy and overgrown lot, further cloistered by a stone wall along the property front. Samir directed me out of the cold and into a stuffy, cluttered apartment. I later 52
discerned that Moho did not live here but rented a room from his friend Zinoub to keep as his work studio. Nourredine, Moho, Kamal, Madjid, and Zinoub were sitting around the cramped studio space in folding chairs, the air saturated with the smoke of self-rolled cigarettes and raucous conversation. Nourredine reclined behind Moho’s office desk, his mandole laid out atop stacks of paper and canvases. The walls of the cluttered room encroached into the already-limited seating area with easels, propped-up canvases with half-finished works of acrylics and watercolor, and disorderly cabinets with supplies spilling out of drawers. Bottles of paint, charcoal sticks, and brushes of various sizes lay strewn across every available surface, the walls awash with bright blues, oranges, red and deep greens of completed paintings up to the ceiling. Moho sat crouched over an easel, paintbrush in hand, while Kamal watched from a small folding stool, back against the minifridge and microwave while sipping a beer. Samir introduced me to everyone before taking his place in front of the work desk across from Nourredine. Moho appeared to be in his forties, his long hair pulled back into a braided ponytail that exposed an angular face capped with a dark blue beret. He eyed me from his chair and immediately smiled and welcomed me in with a commanding, yet raspy voice. Detecting my sensory overload, he jumped out of his beat-up swivel chair and commenced a tour of his artwork around the apartment. He described his style as a mixture of influences, not adhering to any single one, yet betraying a clear homage to Cubism with abstract forms and iridescent outlines. His current works focused on the visual incorporation of text on canvas—at times intentionally chosen excerpts of malḥūn poetry, but often chosen simply for the beauty of the script itself, whether Arabic, Tamazight (Berber), or even Chinese. We paused at one canvas in particular: three-dimensional Arabic characters in acrylic emerge then melt into the multicolor watercolor backdrop, the letters swirling into the contours of the abstract landscape of aqua and dark orange. This painting, he explained, will be one of those featured at the upcoming exhibition. The event’s theme, he continued, would be the experience of migration and exile. More than a general idea, this focus reflected Moho’s own personal experience of migration from Algeria to France in the 1990s during the years of intense violence. This experience of upheaval in Algeria was in fact the creative spark that led him to a career in art, culminating in formal study at the University of Paris XIII. We passed several painted suitcases in the bedroom, potent 53
icons of itinerancy. Moho explained to me his artistic vision for the opening night of the exhibition next week: He will read poetry by the renowned Kabyle author and political activist Kateb Yacine, after which Nourredine will perform improvised adaptations of sha‘bī songs whose lyrics deal with the topic of exile, including those of Dahmane El Harrachi and Cheikh El Hasnaoui. Moho revealed his close friendship with Kateb’s son, who also happens to be the leading musician of the world music rock-fusion group Gnawa Diffusion. He then played for me a video of him painting onstage during the group’s performance in a warehouse north of Paris.
Figure 3.1: Portrait of Amar Ezzahi by Moho Sahraoui16
We settled back into the studio as Nourredine picked out the notes of El Hasnaoui's song, "Maison Blanche.” A musician raised and trained in the eastern Algerian city of Constantine, Nourredine was less familiar with Kabyle repertoire than the others present. Since he would not be singing the lyrics at the exhibition, he concentrated on mastering the melody as an instrumental arrangement on mandole while Samir offered his occasional input and corrections.
16 Used with permission of artist, personal communication. 54
Even though Cheikh El Hasnaoui (Mohammed Khelouat, 1910-2002) is considered a “voice of immigration,” Moho seems satisfied with Nourredine’s performance sans voix, reasoning that most people would be familiar with the texts anyways, and the performance would serve as ambiance for the event. Cheikh El Hasnaoui “exemplifies the artist of exile,” Samir explained to me, having lived and composed most of his life in France before his puzzling final retreat from public life on the isolated island of Réunion. His song, “Maison Blanche,” supremely speaks of the Algerian experience of exile in France with the following opening lyrics: Algeria is tormented, it’s the epoch of Elğazayer tethewwel, mkkull yiwwen s widespread misery tbalizt i εewwel Straight ahead, without hesitation, they Eqqbala ur i sewwel, ar la “Maison [migrants] head toward the “Maison Blanche” Blanche”17 (Mahfoufi 2002: 196-7)
El Hasnaoui released the song in Paris in 1953, after already spending sixteen years in exile and twenty-two years away from his native Tizi Ouzu (Mahfoufi 2009: 29). For listeners familiar with the composer’s biography, El Hasnaoui’s quivering, untrained voice evokes both his life experience and his artistic background: his vocal style suggests the subdued, rapid vibrato that characterizes a Kabyle vocal style, while the emotional fervor of the delivery exudes the pain of exile that he himself experienced. As Nourredine played and experimented with an instrumental, improvisatory arrangement, Moho turned to share with me his conception of the evening and the role of the music: Nourredine will not just be interpreting the songs, but “recreating” them anew. Moreover, he points out, this process of free adaptation reflects the informal nature of sha‘bī’s transmission and continual reinvention more generally. The evening's conversation moved organically in and out of event planning, jokes and banter, and at times to more serious debates about sha‘bī music, prompted no doubt by my own presence there and Moho’s desire to give me helpful information for my project. At one point, Samir borrowed the mandole and distractedly noodled around on the instrument while participating in the conversation. As though by design, he transitioned into the istikhbār of a song by Mohamed El Badji, something that he’s been working on and that he shared with me the
17 “La Maison Blanche” was the old name for the airport in Algiers during the colonial era and serves here as a synecdoche for immigration to France. 55
week prior at our interview. The side conversations subsided as he began the introductory vocal part. A focused energy settled in the room with the common understanding that a performance was underway. Moho listened or a moment, then abruptly shifted his chair back toward his easel as though suddenly reminded of something. He meditatively picked up his brush and began adding horizontal strokes of orange, red, and yellow to the emerging work on a small square canvas, acting out the same process as his collaboration with Gnawa Diffusion. Samir finished the istikhbār, paused briefly, then moved into the first refrain. Kamal picked up the darbūka by his feet and softly accompanied him, while Nourredine sat back in his chair to listen, occasionally nodding in approval. Later in the evening, Moho and Nourredine engaged in a rather intense debate over the political convictions of Amar Ezzahi and whether he should be regarded as a politically minded artist. Moho touted Ezzahi's humble and private demeanor as evidence of his fundamentally apolitical nature. His accessible character, he argued, made Ezzahi the ideal sha‘bī artist. Nourredine took offense at this notion, asserting from personal interactions with Ezzahi that he did indeed hold strong views on contemporary politics affecting the everyday lives of Algerians during the difficult years of the années noires. Despite their difference of opinion on this matter, both men hinged their arguments on the espoused aural and autodidactic nature of the music’s transmission and the “unofficial” status of its masters—qualities personified in the figure of Ezzahi. By 3 a.m. I was becoming aware of my growing fatigue. To my relief, Nourredine offered to give me a ride back into Paris, when seemingly out of nowhere, Zinoub immerged from his small kitchen with freshly baked flatbread, a kettle of couscous, and a spicy red Kabyle sauce. Everyone exclaimed their approval as he arranged the platters across the low coffee table in the middle of the group, and we all gathered around to break bread together.
Dahmane El Harrachi and the Timbre of Immigration
In seeking to understand the basis of sha‘bī’s allure among its listenership, a dilemma emerges regarding the primacy of text. Musicians and enthusiasts insist upon the need to understand the semantic content of the classic poetry used in sha‘bī known as malḥūn. In his effort to lay out for me the parameters of sha‘bī as a genre, Azzedine asked me rhetorically, “Why is sha‘bī monotone? Because it’s [performed] for the text.” Youssef echoed this statement 56
when trying to explain the paucity of contemporary sha‘bī songwriters, “Today there are virtuosos, they master the banjo or mandole, and when you play with them in an orchestra they are formidable—but they don’t know the text.” The theme was further reinforced by Hadi, another young amateur musician now working in France: “If you understand the text, you get to the real profundity of sha‘bī music.” And finally, this sentiment was imparted to me most directly by a concert-goer at my first sha‘bī concert at the Dunois Center, “To really understand sha‘bī music, you have to know the texts.” Taken together, these statements obviously point to the power of text in the sha‘bī genre. Yet, from my own observations I understood that the texts alone do not account for the ecstasy of performance. Something else appears to be left unaccounted for—something further in the interpretive moves of musicians and their spontaneous interactions with audience members. To reference Mladen Dolar, something is “leftover” in the voice of the sha‘bī singer who melodizes and embodies the texts—accent, intonation, timbre—that remains unaccounted for in the binary logic of phonology (Dolar 2006: 19-20). Melodic text painting alone does not account for the full impact of the interactive experience of sha‘bī (indeed, Azzedine’s point of the necessity for “monotone” melodies that do not distract from the text’s semantic meaning seems to support this). Beyond the affective enhancement of poetic text set to melody, sha‘bī connoisseurs focus on the unique vocal timbre and style of beloved singers. In our conversation, Azzedine identified the indelible aspect of the sha‘bī voice as the griffe, or ‘signature stamp’ of each artist whose oeuvre falls within the canon of sha‘bī tradition. A former Algerian radio host in Algiers, Azzedine touts an extensive resumé of interviews with many of the top sha‘bī performers and can speak to their personalities as well as the idiosyncrasies of their playing styles. Despite modest appeals to his novice level of musical knowledge, it became clear from the confidence he exuded that he harbored great insight into the uniqueness of each shaykh within the sha‘bī tradition. He spoke rapidly—even impatiently— with an assuredness and briskness of someone who worked the music business and did his homework. Broadly stated, the griffe of each master artist distinguishes the uniqueness of the voice by its timbre and manner of delivery. Any sha‘bī connoisseur can immediately detect the rasp of Dahmane El Harrachi, the pleading laments of El Hachemi Guerouabi, and the crooning tones of Abdelkader Chaou. Augmented by insider knowledge of artists’ biographies, these timbral 57
markers become signifiers of identity.18 Therefore, when informants insist on the importance of understanding the “text,” the assertion implies an understanding that extends beyond semantic content to include the voice’s non-semantic meaning through timbre, inflection, and nuance. Ultimately this leads us to consider the role of the shaykh in fostering an ecstatic musical experience and the means by which the shaykh’s authority is evaluated. When I asked Azzedine whether Dahmane El Harrachi was a good example of an immediately recognizable vocal timbre in sha‘bī, he agreed, but with a qualifier: Dahmane El Harrachi’s voice is natural—He’s ‘sha‘bī françias!’ He sung the sha‘bī of immigration. He sang for the immigrants. He sang “Ya Rayah,” (He sings the refrain, “You will finish by returning”). He spoke of himself—and that’s what happened: after some years he returned to Algeria, but he still sang for those who were back here [in Paris]. (Dahmane El Harrachi, sa voix est naturel. Dahmane El Harrachi, il est chaâbi français ! Il a chanté le chaâbi d’immigration. C’est-à-dire, il a chanté pour les immigrés. « Yā rāyah wīn tusāfir trūḥ ta‘ayya wa-twilī », il a parlé de lui. Ça veut dire, « tu vas où, tu vas finir par revenir ». Ce qui est la vérité. Après des années il est revenu en Algérie. Donc, si tu veux il chante pour ceux qui étaient là.)
Azzedine’s clarification of El Harrachi’s position in the sha‘bī pantheon echoes the opinions of other musicians and enthusiasts. Their assessment of his rough vocal texture and untrained style imbues the migrant labor experience with aesthetic dimensions. Moreover, their evaluations of his music as “the sha‘bī of immigration” depends upon an awareness of his biography, and specifically the years he lived in Paris performing for migrants in Maghribi cafés. The insistence that El Harrachi’s voice telegraphs the experience of immigration suggests something about the capacity of the voice to communicate the uniqueness of its host. Stated another way, it is the grain of El Harrachi’s voice that exposes his personal history of migration, and by extension enables the listener to find El Harrachi’s songs relevant to their own lives. I borrow Roland Barthes’s term grain from his essay “The Grain of the Voice” (1977) to refer to that which is unaccounted for in the semantic content of vocal utterance, i.e. the timbre expressive qualities that render the voice of the shaykh unique. In his essay, Barthes used the term to refer to the materiality of the voice that lies beyond technical training (Szekely 2016). In
18 In American popular music the voice of Bruce Springsteen comes to mind as a prominent example of this effect, his raspy tones and straining vocal delivery understood by audiences as an index of the blue- collar worker striving for the American dream. Combined with Springsteen’s stage persona, audiences are led to consider him an authentic voice of the everyday American, even if that image is heavily mediated. 58
her monograph For More Than One Voice (2005), Adriana Cavarero argues that the voice is best understood in terms of its uniqueness to its host and its fundamentally relational nature. In contrast to the logocentric philosophical tradition of voice as mere carrier of signifying speech, she proposes that the voice “communicates first and foremost […] the acoustic, empirical, material relationality of singular voices” (13). The uniqueness of the sha‘bī singer’s voice infuses the singer’s interpretation with affective power. In the case of El Harrachi, his vocal timbre communicates ideas about his physical body and his life experiences and how they were affected by immigration. The idea that his voice indexes his personal experience of “sha‘bī of immigration” reflects Barthes’s notion that the voice divulges the speaker’s native tongue through the very materiality of vocal production—beyond the “representation of feelings” communicated through textual meaning (Barthes 1977: 182). Paired with the subject matter of his songs, his vocal distinctiveness becomes a mark of authenticity for informed listeners. The conflation of “natural voice” and “sha‘bī of migration” also reflects a larger narrative that associates sha‘bī with the proletariat class that filled the demand for migrant labor in Paris, Lille, and Marseille. As we explore in the following chapter, this populist association stems from a class-based distinction of Andalusi music as Algeria’s classical repertoire, set against other, more recent popular traditions. The same population of rural workers that poured into the Upper Casbah of Algiers also participated in worker migration to France, driven by the same socioeconomic pressures. The populist connotations of sha‘bī music became more pronounced in the 1960s with a new generation of contemporary song texts known as chansonnettes, including those recorded by El Harrachi. These shorter songs spoke in plain language of the hardships of everyday migrant life in diaspora. Dahmane El Harrachi (Abderrahmane Amrani) migrated to France in 1949, moving around between Lille, Marseille, Lyon, and Metz before settling in Paris to perform in the city’s migrant cafés (Daoudi and Miliani 2002: 52). Once in Paris, El Harrachi eschewed malḥūn texts in favor of his own short, five- to ten-minute songs that made him synonymous with the migrant experience. His texts spoke to the bitterness of exile and made appeals to moral uprightness as protection against the deleterious effects of living abroad, isolated from one’s family and culture (53). He wrapped these themes in his distinctively hoarse, gravelly voice that seemed to strain under the burden of the words it carried. In his most famous song, “Ya Rayah,” the voice 59
provides a link between the text of the song and the physical body in which the voice is located.19
Figure 3.2: Dahmane El Harrachi (1926-1980)20
On the one hand, El Harrachi’s own life experience amplifies the text’s semantic meaning in a way that resonates with listeners who relate to his emotional delivery and perceive it as authentic. Samir, for example, argued that El Harrachi’s best work was composed exclusively while living in Paris: In his album Ya Rayah from the 1970s, El Harrachi really felt the nostalgia with sincerity, really a feeling of missing his country. So taken was he by this feeling that all of his music created in France was marked by that sentiment—even if he wasn’t exiled. […] With all that Dahmane wrote after that [period], the sentiment didn’t work, because it no longer carried the same nostalgia once he returned to Algeria. (El Harrachi, quand il a créé son album « Ya Rayah » dans les années soixante-dix il avait vraiment senti cette nostalgie, vraiment ce manque du pays. Donc, il était tellement, tellement pris par ce sentiment, il était tellement sincère, que toute la
19 Dolar treats the voice as occupying a conflicting space between the body and language—a point of connection to both while belonging to neither. In this paradoxical relationship, the voice is common to both and serves an intercessory role yet does not originate from either source: “What language and the body have in common is the voice, but the voice is part neither of language nor of the body” (Dolar 2006: 73). 20 Dahman El Harrachi, in Wikipedia, https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fichier:Dahman.jpg 60
musique qu’il a créé dans cet album ici en France, elle était vraiment touchant— même s’il n’était pas exilé. […] Il a créé des albums après qu’il est rentré en Algérie, beaucoup…la qualité de, le sentiment de tous qu’il a fait, il a fait à cette époque n’a pas fonctionné. Il n’a pas marché—parce que, ces dernières chansons qu’il a créées et tout, il n’a… il n’a plus cette nostalgie, il était en Algérie !)
On the other hand, the grain of El Harrachi’s voice evokes the singer’s physical body as a synecdoche of the migrant body: the body in transit, the body of pain and exile, the temporary laborer whose bifurcated existence leaves one’s thoughts with one’s family back in Algeria. In the eponymous recording of “Ya Rayah,” El Harrachi’s voice is immediately present, yet hauntingly absent—a vocalized embodiment of the psychological malaise coined by Abdelmalek Sayad as the migrant’s “double absence,” or the absent physical presence from loved ones in Algeria that results in the psychological absence from one’s immediate surroundings in exile. One feels in El Harrachi’s grating tones the pangs of loss, homesickness, and regret as his voice connects a material body to the painful words confirming its fate. The psychological pain of the immigrant’s bodily absence from loved ones as explored by Sayad resembles Lacan’s object of the drive—a concept characterized by its perpetually deferred aim, never reaching its goal and thus defined by lack.21 The text of El Harrachi’s “Ya Rayah” plays out this drama, wherein the narrator warns the young, foolish migrant against seeking that which cannot be found, or from desiring a France that is neither real nor attainable. The haunting narration implores him not to leave the very family for which he cares, only to “inevitably return empty” and filled with regret. The recording of “Ya Rayah” opens with a chorus of male voices singing the refrain: Oh migrant, to where are you traveling?/You will inevitably end up returning/How many naïve ones have gone before you and me? The words are bellowed (almost shouted) in a haphazard, unrestrained fashion by the musicians. Their voices contain nothing of the refined vocal technique of the Andalusi choral style (defined by precise intonation, a restricted back throat and wide vibrato). Their imprecise delivery of pitch evokes instead an informal gathering of friends who exclaim the lyrics in vivacious heterophony while strumming the supporting instrumental parts. After an interlude, El Harrachi’s solo voice enters with the opening lines of the first verse: How many overcrowded nations have you seen, and others empty?/How much time have you
21 Lacan’s concept of the drive elaborates on Sigmund Freud’s notion of the subject as perpetually searching for an original homeostasis lost at birth. The perpetual attempt to return to that which is unobtainable forms the basis of every drive and constitutes the ego (Verhaeghe 2016: 166-7). 61
already lost and how much more will you lose? His gravelly voice slides up and down the melody’s repeating pattern of A-D perfect fourths before straining up to an E on the phrase “How much more…” within the second line, cresting on the accentuated expiration of the emphatic consonant ḥā within the word sh- ḥāl (how much). It is the very untrained nature of El Harrachi’s voice that makes it relatable to members of the Algerian diaspora, and it is this relatability, in various guises, that is common to all distinctive sha‘bī singers. This element of identification in an artist’s unique voice is necessary for ecstatic experience to take place. Listeners perceive El Harrachi’s own life experience as embodied in the timbral and affective delivery of the text, telegraphing an authenticity of experience and emotive content.
Sufism, Text, and Moral Authority of the Voice
The importance sha‘bī enthusiasts place on text is also derived from the heritage of musical practice among Algerian Sufi orders that employs vocalized text as a means of ecstatic devotion. In sha‘bī performance, the power of the shaykh’s voice lies in the affective delivery of the text, couched in the individuality of the voice. This combination of affect, timbral quality, and textual themes of morality reflects the aesthetics of the voice in Sufi devotional practice, laying the foundation for ecstatic listening in live performance. Emotionally powerful delivery, in turn, leads listeners to attribute morality on the voice and its host, his or her life, and his personal character. These ascriptions of morality are founded upon a Sufi—and, more broadly, Islamic—ontology of the voice and ethical listening. During our discussion of textual interpretation in sha‘bī, Samir and another musician, Hadi, turned to the figure of Amar Ezzahi as an example of a shaykh who could exact profound meaning from texts through spontaneous interpretation. Hadi: If you understand the profundity of the text, that’s the real heritage of sha‘bī music—a treasure to discover which you can’t grasp at first. After the music, you discover the deepness of the meaning of the text. […] Not everyone listens to sha‘bī in this manner. I think there’s a level of initiation in sha‘bī—very profound. The shuyūkh,22 even they don’t obtain this degree of comprehension. […] Many
22 In this context, Hadi’s reference to the shuyūkh connotes professional musicians who may play for financial gain but who lack a deep understanding of the texts they peddle, as opposed to a ‘true’ shaykh of the genre like Amar Ezzahi. I will explore the tension between the designations of professional and amateur musician in Chapter 6 as they relate to best practices of transmission. 62
other artists I like for their musicality. But Ezzahi is the most profound. (En fait, je pense que, c’est le texte—quand tu découvres, au moment donné le texte, et tu comprends la profondeur du texte, c’est là où la valeur du chaâbi, le patrimoine du chaâbi est devenu vraiment—c’est comme un trésor en fait, c’est quelque chose de découvrir qu’au départ tu n’as pas saisi. La musique est ramenée est après c’est le texte, c’est une profondeur tellement vaste. […] C’est pas tout le monde qui écoutent du chaâbi de cette manière-là, et je pense qu’il y a des niveaux d’initiation en chaâbi, il est très profond, il y a des gens, des cheikhs, ça veut dire des musiciens professionnels, ils n’atteignent pas ce degré de compréhension. […] Amar Ezzahi, qui pour moi, eh…beaucoup de gens—fin, je les aimais juste pour une musicalité qui peut-être jouent avec une certaine légèreté, mais finalement lui, il est le plus profond.)
Samir: Yes, he fostered an image of someone very spiritual—an unparalleled attitude of Sufism. (Oui, il a donné une image de très, spirituellement, portée par, par cet—bon, il avait une certaine attitude de soufisme qui n’était pas pareille.)
Hadi (interjecting): Yes, that’s it. (Oui, c’est vrai)
Samir: This is the real attitude of sha‘bī artists, it’s this sort of attitude—in fact, he gave us a beautiful image of sha‘bī and made us fall in love with sha‘bī via his attitude, first and foremost. By his way of talking, explicating things. All it took was one or two phrases, and, frankly, the listeners would cease their conversations—time would stop. Just like El Anka when he would speak in a café: when Ezzahi began to speak, the people there wouldn’t know what to expect. That’s what those close to him in Algiers would say about him. When I lived with my grandmother while she still living in Bab El Oued, Ezzahi would walk down all the time to the Garden… (C’est vraiment l’attitude des artistes du chaâbi, c’est ce genre d’attitude, en fait, il nous a donné une belle image du chaâbi. Il nous fait aimer le chaâbi par son attitude, d’abord. Par sa façon de parler, par sa façon d’expliquer des choses. Il suffisait qu’il dise qu’une phrase ou deux…franchement tout le monde se sont arrêtés de parler le—le temps s’arrête. Dans un café, que la façon d’El Anka a parlé, Ezzahi…des gens n’attendent pas souvent savoir…Alger, moi…je l’attendais vraiment d’parler…c’étaient des hommes, des gens qui étaient à côté de lui qui ont animé plus des choses. Quand ma grand-mère était vivante…et marché en Bab El Oued…il est descendu tout le temps du jardin…eh…)
Hadi (interjecting): Marengo
Samir: Marengo! He would go there and pass by all the time in front of my home and play games every night with people. You see? He was like that. And if he spoke, honestly, time stopped. And everyone listened—even those who were from his generation, heh? He was listened to really attentively because he was very wise and very poised as a person. He could be angry too, you know! But only for good reason. (Marengo ! Et il est passé tout le temps chez moi, c’est comme ça il a marché et joué tous les soirs au ballon…tu vois ? Il était comme ça, il a 63
écouté…s’il a parlé, franchement, tout s’arrête. Tout le monde l’attendait, même des gens de son génération, heh ? Ils l’ont écouté parce qu’il était très sage et très posé, comme personne. Il peut être coléreux, heh ? Mais pour des bons raisons !)
Figure 3.3: Entrance to the Garden Marengo in Bab El Oued, Algiers, with multiple photos of Ezzahi taped to the wall in memory of the shaykh (Photograph by author, December 2018)
Hadi (interjecting): He ‘guarded his secrets.’ (Il avait eu ses secrets, en fait.)
Samir: Yes, he had a…in a sense he had an aura about him. (Oui, il avait une aura, d’dégager quelque chose…)
Hadi: Ezzahi also really impressed me and impassioned me because he never performed a song the same way twice. With Ezzahi, it was really a live production. (Ezzahi, moi, il m’a aussi beaucoup impressionné et—en fait il m’a beaucoup passionné parce que aussi il a joué jamais d’une chanson de la même façon. Ezzahi…c’est la production en live.)
Samir (interjecting in agreement): Impressive, an inspiration of the place and the moment. (Impressionnant, oui…inspiration de l’endroit et du moment.
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Hadi: Because, a song was never repeated [the same way twice], because it was his inspiration of the moment. He had a connection with the public, the ambiance—that is to say, there’s a connection he had with the universe: the universe gave him something, and then he expressed it through the music. It takes a lot of time to understand this, because when you’re young you don’t necessarily understand these things. (C’est que, une chanson n’était pas répétée…parce que c’était une inspiration. C’était une connexion avec le public, avec le climat, avec—c’est-à-dire, il avait une connexion avec l’univers, et cette connexion avec l’univers l’a donné quelque chose et cette chose il a exprimé à travers la musique. Il fait beaucoup du temps pour comprendre ça, parce que quand tu es jeune tu ne comprends pas forcement ces choses-là.)
Hadi then reflected on his own journey toward maturity in coming to appreciate and understand the profound meaning of sha‘bī texts, which grew in tandem with his appreciation of Ezzahi’s interpretations. He moved to Paris as a university student, at which point he began actively learning the mandole and banjo while developing a passion for textual interpretation of malḥūn poetry. He tells me that his journey of personal growth to maturity led him to appreciate Sufi-inspired texts and their musical interpretation:
The first time I encountered this music was in the context of my own family. My grandfather was not a musician but knew practically everyone in the Casbah who played music. In addition to that, he had a piano in his home and he was a friend of M’hamed El Hadj El Anka. […] So, [my grandfather’s] children grew up playing instruments. It wasn’t an apprenticeship, but simply the culture in which they grew up. […] My mother grew up like this, playing the piano. And so, when I was young she bought me a small piano as a birthday gift. She played sha‘bī for me on the piano, like [Mustapha] Skandrani23. After that, no one encouraged me to play this music, but I heard it from a very young age, because there were lots of records in the house also. My grandfather had a stereo and I listened to vinyls, and so my first introduction to sha‘bī music was probably a record of El Anka. (La première rencontre avec cette musique-là, c’était plus, une rencontre familiale. Mon grand- père il n’était pas musicien, mais comme il a connu pratiquement tous les musiciens de la Casbah…il avait eu un instrument à la maison, et était ami aussi avec M’hamed El Hadj El Anka. […] Il avait un piano à la maison, et donc ses enfants et ils ont grandi dans les instruments de la musique, et joué de la musique, parce que…c’était pas un apprentissage mais quoi que ce soit, ils ont fait parti…dans une culture […]. Ma mère a grandi comme ça, et joué du piano. Et moi, quand j’étais jeune, elle m’a acheté, comme un cadeau d’anniversaire un petit piano. Et elle m’a joué dessus, du chaâbi, parce que, pour elle…donc elle a joué à la Skandrani. Après, personne ne m’a transmis cette musique, personne ne m’a encouragé à faire cette
23 Mustapha Skandrani was one of the most influential Algerian popular music composers and performers of the twentieth century. He led the “orchestra moderne” at the direction of the national radio following independence and helped to define pianistic technique for sha‘bī. 65
musique-là, mais, très vite j’ai commencé à écouter cette musique-là, parce que aussi il y avait des disques qui traînent, dans la maison aussi. Mon grand-père, il avait un stéréo j’ai écouté des vinyles et peut-être ma première consommation du chaâbi c’était un disque d’El Anka.)
In fact, I didn’t start playing this music until I attended university—so, not young. I played the piano [as a child], but as for sha‘bī, not until in the university, because that’s when I discovered all that is art [in life]. Because for me, [in my youth] I was rather scientifically minded, exact—not living in the artistic domain until high school. When I went into architecture, however, I discovered all that is artistic in the world—beyond the precise nature of Cartesian thinking. And from that moment, I explored all that I hadn’t before, and I explored music also, to search for something beyond “1.2, 1.3,” etc. (Mais le chaâbi, commencé à jouer vraiment, c’était à université, parce que j’ai, on peut dire découvert un peut tous qui étaient arts. Parce que moi, j’étais plutôt science exacte, maths, physique, etc., jusqu’au lycée, je n’étais pas vraiment dans le domaine artistique. Et quand j’ai commencé l’architecture, j’ai découvert tous les aspects artistiques qu’on peut avoir dans le monde, au-delàs l’aspect cartésien. Et c’est à ce moment-là, pour avoir un—pour explorer tous qui je n’avais jamais exploré auparavant, je voulais faire de la musique aussi, pour d’aller chercher quelque chose d’autre que ‘un-virgule-deux, un-vergue-trois,’ etc.)
For Hadi, the idea of hidden textual meaning is directly informed by the tradition of recited texts of Maghribi Sufi orders. After commenting on the power of Ezzahi’s musical performances, Hadi discussed the Sufi heritage of Maghribi musical practice and the religious connotations found in sha‘bī song texts. Sha‘bī musicians, he argued, achieve an ecstatic state through the interpretation of esoteric texts in the same manner as the Sufi performance of the madīḥ: The relationship between Sufism and sha‘bī is longstanding and inseparable, though not many people would admit it. You have to understand the place of this music in the historical context of the Maghrib. The musicians are descendants of the meddaḥ [singers of madīḥ]. And it’s no coincidence where this music is played today. At its core, this music isn’t music of the studio. It's music for celebrations of marriages and circumcision—both of which are religious in nature. Therefore, in a way, sha‘bī is a music for religious purposes. (Par la relation entre le chaâbi et le soufisme, c’est une relation pratiquement immuable, ça veut dire ils sont pratiquement indissociables mais il n’y a pas beaucoup des personnes qui veulent dire ça. En fait, il faut comprendre un peu de l’histoire et la place de la musique dans la culture maghrébine. Parce que, pour pouvoir comprendre quand les musiciens qui sont sortis, ils sont venus des meddaḥ…et c’est pas pour rien que la musique chaâbi, il se joue où ? La musique chaâbi c’est pas une musique de scène, c’est pas une musique du studio, c’est une musique qui se joue pour les célébrations des mariages et les fêtes des circoncisions, qui sont tous les deux, en fait, religieuses. Donc, c’est une célébration religieuse, en quelque sorte.) 66
The meddaḥ are practitioners of madīḥ, a genre of devotional song practiced by Sufi orders across the Islamic world in praise of the Prophet and Sufi saints. Unlike the singer of secular repertoire (mughanna), the leader of the madīḥ is commonly addressed with the honorific of shaykh. The shaykh leads the group through a responsorial series of chanted phrases that lead to “a desired state of ecstatic union with God” (Marcus 2007: 43-44, 50; Elsner 1998: 466). Depending on the Sufi order, devotional activities may be accompanied with instrumentation or conducted strictly a cappella. Sufi brotherhoods across North Africa participate in regular ritual gatherings that incorporate the genre into a variety of dhikr ceremonies (“remembrances”) that focus on the veneration of the founding saint, coupled with responsorial recitation of sacred texts, prayer, sermons, and religious lessons (Elsner 1998: 466; Frischkopf 2014: 37). Sufism, or al-tasawwuf, has long played a profound role in North African society. Despite my informants’ use of the term soufisme to discuss the spiritual implications of sha‘bī singers, I understand the idea as a wide range of mystical religious practice within Islam, defined broadly as the “process of achieving ethical and spiritual ideals.”24 Although prevalent as a both an insider and outsider term, Sufism carries the restraining legacy of the Enlightenment project to define a practice by its essence, as well as the baggage of Orientalist and colonial-era scholarship that perpetuated misinformed understandings of Islam, most often presenting Sufism as either an exotic derivative from orthodoxy or a preferable alternative to fundamentalist dogma. In contrast to this intellectual legacy, Carl Ernst approaches Sufism as a “prescriptive ethical concept” (Ernst 1997: 19), rooted in mystical themes and interpretations of the Qur’an and the hadith and organized around the authority and lineages of charismatic teachers. Beginning in the eleventh century, lodges or residential centers for Sufi adepts emerged across the Islamic world. These centers became important social institutions and were increasingly linked to centers of political power through institutional support. In the following two centuries, societies based on the teachings and practices of a founding figure were organized into orders (turuq), often named after the founding figure (Ernst 1997: 126-7). While these formalized schools of practice may in some ways be compared to formal institutions or monastic orders, Ernst argues they are better understood as a particular set of teachings on techniques of
24 Ernst, Carl W., Marcia Hermansen, and John O. Voll. "Sufism." In Encyclopedia of Islam and the Muslim World, edited by Richard C. Martin. Gale, 2016. https://login.proxy.lib.fsu.edu/login? url=https://search.credoreference.com/content/entry/galeislam/sufism/0?institutionId=2057 67
spiritual practice, passed through particular salāsil, or chains of transmission (singular: silsila) from a founding figure (121-2). By the fifteenth century, Sufi orders had acquired considerable influence and acted as the organizational bedrock of rural communities through the end of the Ottoman regency in 1830. With the Turkish dey in power in Algiers, Sufi leaders executed quasi-autonomous administration over their local populations (Lapidus 2014: 319-20). Places of assembly for Sufi brotherhoods called zawiyas acted as schools, hostels, hospitals, and training bases for soldiers. These institutions served the local population and—at least initially—resisted the control of French colonial government (Laremont 1995: 28). In the first decades of French occupation, several major Sufi brotherhoods took up arms against the invaders and transformed their zawiyas into staging grounds for organized resistance (36). According to tradition, a mufti (Muslim legal expert) of Algiers in the late eighteenth century instructed local brotherhoods to incorporate the melodies of Andalusi repertoire into their sung madīḥ with altered texts in order to preserve the melodies (Hachelaf 2001: 175). The account reveals the longstanding role of the zawiyas as custodians of musical traditions in the region within their devotional practices (Elsner 1998: 466). In fact, at the turn of the twentieth century, a majority of musicians in Algeria’s artisan working-class participated in a Sufi brotherhood. Their devotional practices influenced the musical activities of the first amateur music associations in Algiers, incorporating “melodies, modes, and poetic forms” of the Sufi orders into secular musical practice (Glasser 2016: 72). To illustrate his own approach to textual interpretation, Hadi discussed with me his own group and their process for choosing new repertoire. “It’s not by [recording] artist that we search [for new repertoire], but the members of the group search for qṣāyid and bring them to rehearsal.” He explained that he evaluates new repertoire not according to a favorite recording that can be mimicked, but by “virtue of the text itself.” That way, the group can choose texts which may have never been interpreted (or at least never recorded) by a previous sha‘bī artist. If they do choose a text of an existing song, he makes it a point to reinterpret the text anew according to his own predilections. By choosing to reinterpret songs or explore obscure malḥūn texts, he allows himself the space to create original musical ideas while still honoring the legacy of respected maîtres. Azzedine advocated something similar, stating during our interview, “The problem is that the new generation wants to change sha‘bī, but sha‘bī doesn't need to change, it 68
needs to be interpreted—Not the same!” (La problème c’est qu’ils veulent changent le chaâbi, mais le chaâbi n’a pas besoin d’être changé, il a besoin d’être interprété. Pas pareil !) I had the opportunity to see Hadi’s process in action through the group’s rehearsal of “Ya Waḥdani.” In this example, Hadi admittedly borrowed from Boudjemaâ El Ankis’s and Amar Ezzahi’s recordings of the same text. He does, however, depart from these prior versions in important ways by changing the order of the poem’s nine couplets as well as the progression of modes and rhythms. The text serves as a good example of a malḥūn text with pious overtones and multiple layers of meaning for the singer to exploit. The poem was written by Abou Abdellah Mohammed ben Ahmed Ben Msayeb between 1760 and 1776. Born in the late-17th century in the west Algerian city of Tlemcen25, Msayeb grew up in an elite family descended from refugees of al- Andalus who fled the Reconquista. His early works depicted bacchanal exploits and erotic subject matter. After declaring his love for the young daughter of a Tlemceni textile merchant, the city governor ordered him into permanent exile from the city. In all likelihood, Msayeb incited the governor’s anger not from licentious lines of poetry but through open critiques of the Ottoman provisional government in the city. Whatever the case, Msayb fled to Meknes before settling in Fez. Around this time, the thematic content of his poetry changed radically from earthly romance to divine love and regret for the sins of his past life. According to Hadi, this oral history of Msayeb’s life explains the shift in his oeuvre and provides the impetus for the remorseful text of “Ya Waḥdani” as penitence for the author’s past deeds: I show you my account, Oh Waḥdanī Ilīk nashkī bi’umrī yā waḥdanī (The Oneness of God) Oh Karīm (The Generous One), I ask Yā karīm naṭalbik ta‘afū ‘aliyya you for forgiveness Do not count against me all of the past Lā taḥāsibnī ‘an mā fāt fī zamānī actions of my life I console myself in Mohammed, the Ilīk natwasil Yā Mohammed abū father of Ruqayyah Ruqayyah I spend my nights alone, hidden Layla namsī waḥdi khaft fī kifānī underneath my kaffan (Muslim burial shroud)
25 A city in modern-day western Algeria close to the Moroccan border. Debates often arise among connoisseurs over the question of malḥūn poetry as either a Moroccan or Algerian heritage, with poets falling on both sides of the border. The fluid movement of people and ideas across what is today Morocco and Algeria, however, points to the shared heritage of this tradition. 69
Oh Laṭīf (The Gentle One), have Yā-l-laṭīf al-ṭīf Yā raḥmān-nī mercy upon me I am your servant, oh God, grace and Yā Allah anā ‘andik wa-l-‘afū minik peace are with You narjāh Oh Prophet, I implore you, and the Bi-l-nabī natwasil lik wa-l-kitāb wa- book in which He writes min yaqrāh The heavens, Your throne, and the Wa-l-samāwāt wa-‘arshik wa-l-qalam quill and the tablet with You wa-llūḥ ma‘ah
Hadi explains that his interpretive choices are both artistic and pragmatic; they convey the meaning of the text and create the variety needed to hold the interest of the listener. The group’s performance moves through three modes: raml maya, siḥli, and a final change to zidān just before the song’s conclusion. The use of these three modes, he argues, enhances the text’s penitent tone. The moments of modal shift also highlight important junctures in the poetry. For example, he argues that the first change from raml maya to siḥli augments the tragedy of a line in which the narrator cries out to God for mercy. Hadi also plays an introductory and medial istikhbār in his group’s arrangement. The middle istikhbār serves the practical purpose of curbing the natural acceleration of the tempo, dissipating some of the energy and allowing for the song to continue for several more abyāt (verses) without spinning out of control.
Figure 3.4: Three modes used in Hadi’s interpretation of the text “Ya Waḥdani.” Accidentals in parenthesis show permitted variations in performance (Aous 1996: 19-20).
Aside from the direct historical influence of Sufi orders on contemporary Algerian music, Ezzahi’s “attitude of Sufism,” to quote Samir, hints at a deeper synergy between an ecstatic 70
musical experience and Islamic aesthetics of sound. The overlay of voice, text, affect, and aesthetic power are predicated upon an Islamic ontology of voice and the listener in which the vocal utterance contains real power to affect change upon the listener, not only via semantic meaning but also through its physical attributes and sonoric beauty. This same ontology has been documented in other practices across the region. In Making Music in the Arab World, A.J. Racy notes how the ecstatic experience of the divine in Sufi ritual mirrors the psychological and physiological outcomes of sulṭannah, or the ideal, transformative state of ṭarab musicians during performance. The Sufi adept achieves fana’, or “mystical annihilation” in the quest for the divine through participation in dhikr, or ritual remembrance of God. In the same way, musicians empower their listeners through their own submission to the music’s overwhelming ecstatic force—an opposition akin to the Sufi attainment of a higher level of spirituality through sublimation of the lower self. (Racy 2004: 123). Sha‘bī connoisseurs frequently refer to the similar concept of khelwa to describe the musician’s ideal psychological state of otherness, separated from one’s immediate surroundings while simultaneously drawing in the audience toward a place of emotional ecstasy. During one of his group mandole lessons, Mohamed El Yazid described khelwa as a solitary voyage in which “you leave your world and go into your own in the midst of playing.” The word’s Arabic root denotes a sense of aloneness, separated from time and space. This state of ecstatic suspension is dependent upon the voice of the shaykh, which leads the attuned audience into a place of spatio-temporal transcendence. “Ya Rayah” offers a prominent example of how the voice of the sha‘bī singer conveys non-semantic meaning through the singer’s interpretive abilities and the listener’s knowledge of the singer’s embodied experiences. Apart from the singer’s personal experience, however, the voice of the singer also communicates something of his moral character that deepens the impact of the music for the listener. Biographical knowledge of the singer can infuse the voice with moral imperatives that raise the stakes for facilitating an ideal performance environment. Driving back from a sha‘bī concert on a rainy, winter evening, my friend and fellow Andalusi musician Aziz reflected on the performance by drawing comparisons to the spontaneity of Ezzahi’s more intimate soirées. I took the opportunity to ask him why so many listeners were enamored with Amar Ezzahi. Aziz responded,
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The profundity of Ezzahi, it’s the giftedness of his fluidity in changing modes and rhythms spontaneously—but also his character as a person and the timbre of his voice—that is to say, people love the sound of this voice, and his manner of interpretation is profound, almost Sufi. You see, he’s almost like a saint, or walī.
Aziz continued, explaining how one can hear the biography of Ezzahi in the timbre of his voice: Well, there are really ‘three Ezzahi’s’: the early Ezzahi has more energy, until les années noires, when he stopped [performing in public] for nearly a decade, because he said, ‘I can’t sing while people are being killed.’ Then, the middle Ezzahi—after les années noires, you can tell he sings with more wisdom, more maturity, even a spiritual maturity. Then, the late period: after his coma, around 2003 and 2004. After this, he was very tired and you can hear this in his voice.
As with Azzedine’s commentary on El Harrachi, Aziz’s insights on Amar Ezzahi show how the timbre of his voice takes on moral significance when informed by biographical knowledge of the singer, conflating the man behind the voice with the voice itself. Admirers of Ezzahi with whom I spoke jumped freely between his gifts as a musician and the way he led his life and treated other people, as though one determined the other. During an interview, Nourredine recalled his visit to Ezzahi as a young man when he brought the master a collection of poetic texts he had just gathered from the town of Mostaganem in western Algeria: Nourredine: At the end of 1988 I met the maître, Amar Ezzahi, in Algiers. And so, I learned much from him. […] I was eighteen or nineteen years old. After I returned from Mostaganem, I brought him texts of poets. And so, I stayed with him, showed him what I had brought, and he gave me advice on them, saying, ‘this is good, that bit’s wrong, etc. …’ and confirmed with me if I had found a false text. And he encouraged me. He showed me many things— (Fin 1988, là où j’ai rencontré le maître, Amar Ezzahi en Alger. Ensuite, je l’ai rencontré et j’ai appris beaucoup des choses de lui. […] dix-huit ou dix-neuf ans. Ensuite je reviens de Mostaganem, je l’ai ramené des textes des poètes. J’étais avec Amar Ezzahi, je l’ai montré ce qui je l’avais ramené. Et, il m’a donné des conseils, « c’est bien, » ou, si je ne connais s’il était un faux texte etc., et lui il m’a confirmé « Oui, tu peux faire ça, tu peux faire ça, » etc. Et, il m’a encouragé, d’ailleurs. Il m’a montré pas mal de choses.)
Samir (interjecting): Ezzahi was a very generous man. He never took money, but just shared with people. Really a keen sense of human relationships and a simply an exceptional man—In fact it’s rather impossible to describe his character, it’s really something you had to experience yourself. For me, he’s someone from whom I could feel a positive energy. (Ezzahi était un homme généreux. Il pouvait même pas prendre de l’argent, il a prêté de l’argent. Il a vraiment une philosophie, très, très développée, dans le sens des relations dans le monde…c’est exceptionnel…on peut pas décrire ce genre de personnage, c’est quelque chose on a besoin de ressentir…Il était quelqu’un… [inaudible] une onde positive.) 72
In this rich overlay one gets a sense of the extent to which the personality of the shaykh and his musical knowledge are mutually reinforcing. In other words, the moral authority of the shaykh is a necessary piece of the musical experience itself. Islamic aesthetics of the voice explain how beautiful vocal expression becomes conflated with moral authority, and how that voice then impacts the ethical life of the listener. In his study of cassette sermons in Egypt, The Ethical Soundscape (2006), Charles Hirschkind observes that ṭarab music and devotional listening share the common “goal of honing one’s moral sensibilities so as to be able to draw near to God” (37). Hirschkind continues, “Much like the talented and sensitive listeners of ṭarab-endowed music, the sermon listener realizes the performance through her own ethical-aesthetic response and, in doing so, hones and deepens the sensibilities that incline her to act morally across the domains of daily life” (37). In Sufi epistemology, moral truth can be received through an experiential knowledge of the aesthetically pleasing voice. Hirschkind writes regarding the eleventh-century Andalusi philosopher, Ibn al-Arabi: For Sufi mystics, such as Ibn al-Arabi, it was by means of the sound, rhythm, affect, and harmony afforded by both poetry and recited Quranic verses that imaginal knowledge of the right and true (as opposed to rational knowledge) could be achieved, or, in Ibn al-Arabi’s term, “tasted” (dhawq). While the continuing da’wa movement rejects many aspects of Islamic mysticism, it has incorporated this tradition of linking the realization of ethical being with the resonant body. (102)
The ethics of listening plays an important role in the spiritual life of North African Sufi practice. Regarding the practice of Sufi dhikr ceremonies in France, Deborah Kapchan writes, “Sufis believe that the activity of spiritual audition, or sama‘, polishes the heart, purifying the disciple and thereby making space for the love of God to inhabit the whole being” (Kapchan 2009: 74). During such a ceremony, participants engage in the repetition of the names of God while simultaneously listening to one another, entraining with one another’s rhythm and intonation. The ceremony carries implications for the moral life of the community of participants outside of the listening act. Kapchan continues, Sama‘ is a pedagogy whose practice benefits the individual and society at large. For the North African-identified Sunni Sufi in France, practicing the liturgy is a means of purification, a way of unveiling the secrets of the divine to the self and for the community. Akhlaq, good acts or ethics, is one of the stated goals of the Sufi in community, and the dhikr, or remembrance of God ceremony, polishes the heart so that right conduct and ethical behavior prevail. Part of this active cultivation of the ethical self is done through music: “every song contains its own secret (sir).” (75)
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The power of the voice to provoke moral and ecstatic responses of skilled listeners can ultimately be traced to the aesthetics of Qur’anic recitation that equates beautiful expression of the voice, or ṣawt al-ḥasan, with the oral expression of divine precepts for an ethical life (Nelson 2001: 71). The power of music to affect the soul stems from the power of the Qur’anic revelation as an aural phenomenon. Received by the Prophet Mohammad from the angel Gabriel, the text of the Qur’an exists firstly as an aural phenomenon, and oral transmission of the text acted as final arbiter over textual discrepancies in the period immediately following the Prophet’s death (3). In addition to an authority vested in oral transmission, “the beauty of the Qur’anic language and style is itself considered a proof of the divine origin of the text” (7). Nelson writes, The beauty and inimitability of the Qur’an lie not in the content and order of the message, on the one hand, and in the elegance of the language, on the other, but in the use of the very sound of the language to convey specific meaning. This amounts to an almost onomatopoetic use of language, so that not only the image of the metaphor but also the sound of the words which express that image are perceived to converge with the meaning. (13)
Taken as such, the moral weight of the recitation as received by the listener depends on the beauty of the vocal delivery, connecting aesthetics to the moral authority of semantic meaning over the community of the faithful. The Islamic science of recitation, or tajwīd, governs every aspect of recitation so as to guard the text from distortion, “such as duration of syllable, vocal timbre, and pronunciation” (Nelson 1985: 14). Sha‘bī listeners attribute moral authority to the shaykh and internalize their performance in an ethic of listening that equates beautiful, affective performance with moral truth. This process, founded in Sufi tradition of transmission of embodied knowledge and morality, renders the shaykh the embodiment of moral rightness on behalf of the community of skilled listeners. In the same way that tajwīd controls the vocalization of the divine text, sha‘bī singers are directed by a legacy of aesthetically pleasing interpretation, resulting in a balance between artistic (timbral) distinctiveness and adherence to an established tradition of performance practice as defined by earlier shuyūkh. As Azzedine observed regarding Ezzahi’s voice, Yes, he had the griffe of El Anka. I recognize his voice immediately. […] He changed and improved the music to his liking but remained within sha‘bī music. He didn’t modernize it, but left behind his own griffe. (Oui, c’est sa griffe—la griffe d’El Anka, je la reconnais toute de suite. […] Il a improvisé, changé de la musique dans une façon plaisante à lui. Mais, il est resté toujours dans le chaâbi. Il ne l’a pas modernisé, mais a juste donné sa propre griffe.) 74
Informed by the tradition of attentive spiritual listening of sama‘, listeners of sha‘bī music garner feelings of moral uprightness and community solidarity through performances of respected shuyūkh who lead them in emotionally powerful performances of sung texts. From the singer, listeners expect affectively powerful interpretations of poetic texts. To fully grasp the profundity of their interpretations, listeners require an understanding of the poetry’s multiple layers of meaning, combined with knowledge of the singer’s biography and accounts of his personal character. These details inform their reading of the singer’s vocal timbre and fill the musical experience with greater significance. The most profound sha‘bī singers, according to my interlocutors, are those whose lives exude a spirit of ethical living, moral uprightness, humble demeanor, and a heart attuned to the divine. As with listeners of sermon tapes, the informed listener of sha‘bī music derives moral sensibilities of ethical living from the very grain of the voice. In the aesthetic pleasure and experiential knowledge achieved in the state of khelwa, listeners ascribe their admiration and love to the shaykh, the embodiment of affective power and ethical authority. As I will examine in Chapter 5, the singer accomplishes these goals through the expert manipulation of vocal timbre, timing, and intonation. In Chapter 6, I explore how these sonic markers of authority place the shaykh within an established canon of tradition that works in tension with artistic creativity. Listeners experience the voice of the talented sha‘bī singer as evidence of that individual’s moral rectitude, inasmuch as the individuals’ biography reinforces those same assertions, offering models of inspiration for their own daily lives. Beauty and morality overlap in ethical aesthetics of established tradition.
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CHAPTER 4
POPULAR POETIC TRADITIONS AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF SHA‘BĪ MUSIC
In this chapter I turn to the development of sha‘bī as a performative tradition and to the historical narratives that inform its contemporary performance practice. Any consideration of this music would be incomplete without an understanding of its place within the web of related musical and poetic genres that intersect its development, or the social and political forces informing its evolving performance practice. On one level, distinctions of genre may seem arbitrary and artificially stagnant when used to describe a dynamic and expressive tradition. Nevertheless, the conceptual categories of genre prove central to the history of Algerian music, inasmuch as these distinctions carry connotations of class, place, and identity for those who invest in them. To that end, the development of sha‘bī within the context of other Algerian musical practices in the twentieth century follows the progressive stratification of “classical” and “popular” genres by musicians, government officials, record companies, and radio staff—a boundary inspired first by colonial discourses of revitalization and integration and later governed by a postcolonial rhetoric of national heritage. I end the chapter with a description of the music’s conventional performance practice, setting the stage for our analysis of live performance experiences in Paris.
Abdelkader Chaou at the CCA
I rounded the street corner in Paris’s eleventh arrondissement to find Samir standing on the white stone terrace in front of a high glass edifice with Arabic script that read, “The Algerian Cultural Center.” He immediately recognized me and warmly shook my hand, “Chris! Ça va mon ami?” Days before, I had invited Samir to attend a concert at the center featuring the sha‘bī singer Abdelkader Chaou. Fully expecting him to jump at the offer, I was only mildly surprised when he hesitated before responding, “Sure, why not?” By that point, I was familiar with Samir’s ambivalence toward formal sha‘bī concerts at larger venues like the CCA. He appeared swayed, however, by his personal connection to Chaou, recalling numerous memories of seeing him
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perform at weddings and other celebrations in Algiers as a child. “We’re from the same neighborhood—he might even recognize my face, if I haven’t changed too much!” he joked. We shuffled across the packed row of seats and settled in as the accompanying musicians onstage tuned their instruments: two banjoists, a violinist, keyboardist, and two percussionists. Chaou’s mandole rested prominently beside his still-vacant chair at center stage. I waited in anticipation as the small auditorium filled to capacity. Meanwhile, Samir continued his discussion of Chaou: “Women love him because of his smooth voice. He has a fan club who really only attend concerts to wait for the moment when they can stand up and dance.” The musicians merged their variegated tuning notes into a single pitch, and the darbūka player began to play in a moderate meter to signal the start of the introductory tūshiyya, an instrumental genre from the Andalusi nūba. Soon the tūshiyya’s long, winding instrumental melody wove across the complex, asymmetric inṣarāf rhythm—also borrowed from the Andalusi nūba—provided by the riqq and darbūka players. Finally, Abdelkader Chaou appeared from behind the curtain, his face beaming with a movie-star smile that incited cheers and applause from the audience. The musicians settled back down into a drone on “D,” and Chaou began to explore the minor mode raml maya on his mandole, rising up the scale and dissolving back into the D drone for the start of a meditative, improvisatory istikhbār. True to Samir’s prediction, the arrival of the final berwāli section with its rolling triplet meter at the end of first song compelled audience members (men included) to stand and fill the open space in front of the stage, overflowing out through the exit on the right side. Others filled in the space immediately behind our row, clapping and dancing with arms raised. A few songs later, Chaou appeared a bit ill-at-ease. The sound and lighting crew had taken advantage of the auditorium’s advanced lighting capabilities by flooding the stage with a barrage of ever-shifting hues of green, blue, purple, and yellow. During one song, he repeatedly gestured toward the light trusses above in annoyance while looking intently at the sound booth, motioning that the light show was interfering with his ability to see the text on his music stand. With no apparent change of behavior from the crew, he squinted back down at the lyrics and resumed the song. After several verses, Chaou abruptly changed to another song that he knew by heart. The keyboard player and two banjoists caught the shift and followed the shaykh into the modal territory of the new song without pausing.
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Figure 4.1: Dancers gather down front during Chaou’s concert, March 3rd, 2017 (Photograph by author)
The audience did not seem to mind the unpredicted change. Chaou brought the first set to an exciting conclusion and everyone erupted in applause as the house lights came up, signaling intermission. Given Chaou’s unfortunate battle with the lighting design, I jokingly complimented Samir for memorizing El Hachemi Guerouabi’s version of “al-Ḥarrāz,” a famously long text and one of the staples of classic malḥūn poetry interpreted by sha‘bī musicians. As we talked, an older man near us turned quickly and exclaimed, “Chaou is playing al-Ḥarrāz? But that’s not in his repertoire!” I rushed to clarify that we were speaking of Samir’s own process of learning “al- Ḥarrāz,” and that I did not know whether the song would appear on the program. The man nodded slowly, not completely satisfied, then continued, “You know, most people think that “al- Ḥarrāz” was written by Cheikh Mekki ben al-Qorchi, the blind poet—but it’s not true!” He went on to explain that, contrary to popular belief, the text was originally written by the Moroccan poet Ali al-Baghdadi. “Not many people know this,” he said, “but, in fact, al-Qorchi merely borrowed and amended the text that Baghdadi had originally written.”
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Samir was unconvinced. The two men launched into a vigorous discussion, diving further into arcane details of the two poets, the differing versions of the text, and the well-known sha‘bī artists who have interpreted each. Intrigued, a woman sitting a few seats down away overheard the ensuing debate and could not help but contribute: “Ah, yes, I’ve also heard that El Baghdadi is the author!” she called from across the row. The conversation drew her in one folding seat at a time, until she sat in the chair adjacent to Samir in the midst of the discussion. The charismatic older gentleman in front of us was gaining steam, and the debate showed no sign of resolution. By the end of intermission, Samir seemed amused but not the least surprised by the man’s enthusiasm. The three resembled three scholars at an academic conference relishing the rare opportunity to spar in their shared area of expertise. At the end of the concert, Samir and I walked out with the gentleman, who by now was aware that I was a researcher. “Ah!” He turned back to me with urgent purpose, “Let me explain to you—” He paused and gestured with one hand while steadying himself on the aisle railing, “To know sha‘bī, you must start with El Anka…” As I would later learn, roughly forty-two works entitled “al-Ḥarrāz” comprise an identifiable subgenre of long, narrative poems within a larger body of colloquial poetry known as malḥūn. The various versions of the poem all tell the same tale: a young and beautiful princess is trapped in a palace by the spells of the Hijazi sorcerer, the “Ḥarrāz.” Through various ploys of trickery, the protagonist deceives the sorcerer and rescues his beloved from the grasp of her jealous captor. When he insisted that the text had much deeper roots than the nineteenth century, our fellow concert-goer may have been partially correct. In fact, the first extant version of the Ḥarrāz story is attributed to the poet Jilali Mthired (1792-1822) (Dellaï 2006: 14; Guessous 2012: 34), and the two other poets mentioned, al-Baghdadi and al-Qorchi, each composed their own subsequent version around the turn of the twentieth century, and both poems are original enough to be considered independent works (Dellaï 2006: 183; Madigow 2013: 55-6). The distinction is more than pedantic, however. Rather, the complexity of this debate hinges upon the dense overlay of poetic and musical repertoires that populate sha‘bī connoisseurs’ discourse. The distinctions between these genres are not empty categories, but hierarchical delineations that represent cultural values crucial to the discursive tradition of Algerian music. By disentangling them, I will delineate the notions of heritage and patrimony that buttress contemporary sha‘bī performance. 79
The Andalusi Poetic Heritage
In his study of Algeria’s Andalusi traditions, Jonathan Glasser adopts Michael Bakhtin’s assertion that “to describe genre is always to describe genres” (Glasser 2016: 81, emphasis added). Glasser proposes the “Andalusi complex” as a conceptual framework to describe the hierarchy of genres within and outside of Algeria’s Andalusi tradition, with the nūba suites occupying the place of prestige at the center of Algeria’s cultural heritage and “lighter,” or more popular genres toward the periphery (14-15). In this sense, sha‘bī, along with newer, more popular musical styles, has always provided something for Andalusi aficionados to “listen against” (109). At the same time, musicians have always traversed and transgressed these delineations in their own musical practice. The elasticity of boundaries between center and periphery has allowed musicians to adapt this hierarchy of musical traditions to their own ends, according to changing cultural politics and public tastes. In France, this relative freedom was extended even further as musicians adapted traditional genres to new audiences and new contexts of performance in diaspora, most notably those artists working in the broadly defined franco- orientale style of Paris’s cabaret scene. Sha‘bī’s development can only be fully understood within the context of the related genres comprising the “Andalusi complex” and, in particular, within the Andalusi revival movement of the twentieth century. The Andalusi nūbāt are multi-movement suites of vocal and instrumental music performed by orchestras of ‘ūd, kwitra (North African lute), violin, rabāb, mandolin, and percussion. Andalusi music encompasses several distinct yet related urban conventions in cities across Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia. Algeria contains three of these regional musical traditions, with gharnāṭī claimed by western Algeria and the Moroccan frontier city of Oujda, mā’lūf by Constantine and Annaba in the east, and ṣan‘a by Algiers and Tlemcen in the center. Uniting these traditions are similar rhythmic cycles, formal structures, and overlapping melodic, modal, and poetic content. Above all, they are bound together by the claim of shared origins in the courtly music of Córdoba, Toledo, and Grenada during the Medieval Islamic civilization of al- Andalus. As the fragmented kingdoms of al-Andalus fell to Spanish conquests, waves of refugees fled to North Africa’s major cities, bringing their music, knowledge, and cultural sophistication with them.
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Any direct link between the music of Medieval Iberia and modern-day performances of the nūbāt remain largely conjectural since most historical records only date to the nineteenth century with the advent of songbook compilations (Glasser 2016: 33). Nevertheless, communities across North Africa and even the Levant claim al-Andalus’s intellectual and cultural inheritance, a discursive action that anthropologist Jonathan Shannon refers to as “rhetorics of al-Andalus” (Shannon 2015:14). The appeal of al-Andalus rests upon the idealized remembrance of a golden age in Arabo-Islamic civilization, when Jewish, Christian, and Muslim communities lived in harmony under Islamic rule, and arts, science, and philosophy flourished under state patronage.
Figure 4.2: Political Map of Algeria26
26 United States Central Intelligence Agency, Algeria map from CIA World Factbook, converted from original GIF format, 2005, https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/ag.html 81
The most tangible link between contemporary Andalusi music and Islamic Iberia is the continued musical interpretation of its poetic forms, the muwashshaḥ and zajal. From the eleventh century onwards, these two forms came to distinguish Andalusi poetry from the rest of the Arab world, both in terms of form and thematic content (Benbabaali and Rahal 2010: 37). Unlike the isometric, monorhythmic form of the qaṣīda,27 the muwashshsḥāt follow a five-line strophic form with a two-line recurring rhyme followed by three lines of changing rhyme scheme: AABBB, AACCCC, AADDDD… etc. (Glasser 2016: 85). The reoccurring rhyme at the beginning of each strophe holds the poem together, as its etymology implies, like a string upon which pearls can be strung (Rosen 2000: 167). The poems’ textual themes typically deal with metaphors meaningful to the Andalusi courts, such as love, wine, and paradisal gardens (Rosen 2000: 169; Glasser 2016: 130; Benbabaali and Rahal 2010: 42-3).
Malḥūn and Genres of Colloquial Sung Poetry
Sitting at a café by the Saint Lazare train station, Nourredine takes my notepad and scribbles in between sips of espresso. He is explaining to me the taxonomy used to describe the poetic and musical traditions that make up the sha‘bī repertoire. “The madīḥ,” he says, “is just one of three subgenres of poetic texts in dialectal Arabic that make up the malḥūn,” which is a more general label for colloquial poetry across the Maghrib. The first subgenre, the madīḥ, are religious texts in praise of God or the Prophet Mohammed and find their origins in the devotional practices of Sufi orders. The second,” he continues, “called ghazāl, is a fanciful story about love or nature.” He cites the “al-Ḥarrāz” poems as a prominent example. Finally, he writes down a third category called hidjā’, which, he explains, uses more direct language, like an order or degree from a king. For illustration, he mentions M’hamed El Hadj El Anka’s classic qaṣīda, “al- Maknāsiyya.” “These are separate from ḥawzi, ‘arūbi, and maḥdjūz,” he clarifies, “which are popular musical poetic genres from locations across Algeria.” He identifies maḥdjūz as a genre
27 The qaṣīda, or ode, is a polythematic, monorhythmic verse form of symmetrical hemistiches that developed into one of the most important poetic forms of classical Arabic poetry from roughly 500 CE to the ‘Abbāsid Court of 10th century CE Baghdad. Originally an expression of values of the pre-Islamic, warrior aristocracy, the form became the dominant poetic genre of the Islamic court during the Umayyad and ‘Abbāsid eras alongside several monothematic derivatives, including the ghazāl (lyric) and rubā’i (quatrain) (Stetkevych 2009: xiii; Ernst 1997: 149). 82
specific to the city of Constantine in eastern Algeria, ‘arūbi as belonging to the musical tradition of Algiers, and ḥawzi as originating in the city of Tlemcen. This somewhat confusing web of poetic and musical genres reflects the long tradition of sung poetry in North Africa. Genres are distinguished according to poetic form and meter, but also crosscut by hierarchies of linguistic register and geographic location. All of the genres listed by Nourredine contribute to the canon of sha‘bī repertoire. In the context of the Algerian diaspora, these traditional poetic genres are supplemented by the more contemporary body of song texts in dialectical Arabic and Kabyle that recount the experience of migration. Depending on the performer, such texts can be considered a part of the sha‘bī corpus or regarded as a separate tradition, variously referred to as either chansonnettes, songs of exile, or songs of immigration. Malḥūn coalesced into a shared school of colloquial Arabic poetry in present-day Morocco and western Algeria in the seventeenth century (Dellaï 2003: 13-14). Derived from the Arabic root laḥana, the word could either denote “melody,” referencing the poetry’s originally intended purpose as sung text, or “argot,” implying the dialectical register of the language (11). Taken as a whole, the malḥūn poems interpreted in the Algerois sha‘bī tradition span themes of “erotic, erotic-mystical, erotic-bacchanal, religious, political, and social” subject matter, but subjective interpretations inherent in the poetry are dependent upon the audience’s familiarity with the repertoire and its manner of interpretation by the musician (Dib 2010: 329). The sixteenth-century poet and Sufi saint, Sidi Lakhdar Benkhlouf, is widely considered to be the fountainhead of subsequent generations of malḥūn poets. His famous qaṣīda, “Mazagran,” recounts the Expedition of Mostaganem in 1558 in which Spanish forces were routed by the Ottoman Bey in their attempt to take the west Algerian town of Mostaganem (Dellaï 2006: 10- 12). In his anthology of ḥawzi and sha‘bī texts, Rachid Aous separates sha‘bī into two genres: sha‘bī-malḥūn, which are the musical settings of classic malḥūn poems, and modern sha‘bī songs called chansonnettes, characterized by simpler and more direct lyrics composed by the musicians themselves or by contemporary song writers (Aous 1996: 2). Madīḥ and ḥawzi can both be considered malḥūn, but musicians typically refer to any sung text from the classic sha‘bī- malḥūn corpus as a qaṣīda. As mentioned above, the qaṣīda of classical Arabic poetry is distinguished from the Andalusi muwashshaḥ by its simpler form, isometric meter, and origins in 83
pre-Islamic poetic practice. Even though malḥūn poems are commonly referred to as qṣāyid by musicians, a large portion of the texts are in fact not isometric like the classic qaṣīda but instead one follow one of several more complex strophic forms (Dib 2010: 326; Dellaï 2006: 15-18). One of the most famous texts of the classic malḥūn repertoire, “al-Maknāsiyya,” was originally interpreted by M’hamed El Hadj El Anka and remains a standard text for sha‘bī musicians. Written by the Sidi Qaddour al-‘Alami (1742-1850), the poem recounts a dramatic chapter in the poet’s life when he returned to his hometown of Meknes, only to find that his home had been confiscated by the townsfolk (Dellaï 2006: 35). As mentioned by Nourredine, the poem serves as a public rebuke of the town leadership in Meknes for betraying his trust. According to tradition, the poet eventually succeeded in reclaiming his house, and today the location has been converted into a zawiya where he is venerated as a saint (35, 45). This qaṣīda is an example of the simplest strophic form of malḥūn poetry, mbiyyt, which consists of two hemistiches of equal length (Dellaï 2006: 16). In the opening three lines of the first strophe, we can observe the two alternating rhythms that reoccur in each pair of hemistiches: How could my heart not be saddened Kīf mā yankad qalbi min shfāyat n- when they rejoice over my nās? * Kīf mā naḥzan yā wa‘adī misfortune? * Could I leave this ‘alā-l-mrāsam? place, oh my God, without feeling afflicted? After being from my country, how Kīf ba‘d khrūjī min waṭnī nrūm al- could I still mingle with these men? ajnās? * Ḥawz būṭība fīh adrakt al- * It is in Hawz Boutiba where I ghnāyam made my fortune There, where the noble men with pure Shmūs baṣrī al-ashrāf aṭ-ṭībīn al-infās hearts were my light * I abandoned * Hjarthum wu-frāqhum ‘alā-l-qalb them, a separation which injures shātam my heart
The text is separated into strophes of verses, alternating with a three-hemistich refrain, from which gives the poem derives its name: Shame on you, oh inhabitants of Ᾱsh dhā-l-‘ār ‘alīkum yā rdjāl maknās Meknes! Believing you to be virtuous men, I Mshat dārī fī ḥmākum yā ahl-l-krāyam placed my dwelling was under your protection Alas, my confidence in people has Sabti wa-halākī al-amān fī ibn ādam caused my ruin
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Texts such as this one provide the singer with a straightforward rhythm scheme and alternating bayt-refrain structure conducive to the dramatic musical devices of sha‘bī performance. Aided by its form, the singer can control the ebb and flow of energy through periodic returns to the vocal and instrumental refrains and the occasional arrhythmic, improvisatory istikhbār. El Anka’s multiple interpretations of “al-Maknāsiyya” demonstrate the freedom with which the singer interprets even the most well-known malḥūn texts, even if El Anka’s recordings of this text have become references for amateur musicians today.
The Andalusi Associative Movement and the Invention of Sha‘bī
The music known today as sha‘bī grew out of experimentation and mixing of styles by Algerois musicians in the early twentieth century. This blossoming of musical creative energy stemmed from two primary forces: the growth of civic associations for indigenous music and the domestic migration of rural, largely Kabyle, peasants from the decimated countryside. The story of the so-called Andalusi associative movement began with the passage of the Law of Associations in 1901 by French Parliament, which permitted citizens to form social organizations. Since Algeria was an integral department of metropolitan France, the parliament extended the same right to Jews and Muslims in Algeria shortly thereafter. The organizations formed by Algerians took on a wide range of forms, including social clubs, trade unions, and Sufi lodges. While in many ways a direct result of the 1901 law, these organizations were also mapped onto preexisting social forms from the Ottoman period (Glasser 2016: 34). Within this expanding circle of civil associations, the first formal indigenous music association, El Moutribia, was formed in 1912 under the leadership of musician and revivalist, Edmund Yafil. El Moutribia’s membership pulled from Jewish and Muslims residents of Algiers’s Lower Casbah—a cosmopolitan district by the port—as well as the Jewish quarter adjacent to the old city of the Upper Casbah. The personnel, as Malcolm Théoleyre argues, reflected a “middle-class in transition,” as the old artisanal working class was pushed aside and absorbed by a new middle class of French-educated professionals (Théoleyre 2016: 121-4). El Moutribia’s aims aligned with Yafil’s concerns for revitalizing Algerian music: both wanted to support social contexts for Andalusi performance and its promotion among young musicians. Unlike earlier professional ensembles that played in cafés or for private patrons, the association
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of amateurs would be featured in phonograph recordings and public concerts with pre- determined repertoire that more closely reflected the decorum of European concert halls (Glasser 2016: 179). The 1930s saw a proliferation of new indigenous musical associations. Several prominent groups formed with a majority Muslim membership, first with El Andalousia in 1927 and followed by a schism within the organization’s leadership that produced El Djazaïria (Glasser 2016: 186). Most participants in this latter music ensemble came from outside of the old Upper Casbah, a reflection of the demographic shift of Muslim elite leaving the increasingly overcrowded Upper Casbah (Théoleyre 2016: 150-1). With its labyrinth of Ottoman-era buildings and narrow passageways, Algiers’s Casbah had been the seat of the old city elite before the influx of rural immigrants prompted their exodus to other locales. Revitalization’s cultural politics among amateur associations, colonial government officials, and Orientalist scholars led to the establishment of the Andalusi nūbāt as Algeria’s classical music and its separation from other, more “popular” influences that would later be fixed under the name “sha‘bī.” Prior to the calcification of “classical” and “popular” by the municipal conservatory, Algiers Radio staff, and indigenous cultural elite during the 1930s and 40s, the term “Andalusi” simply referred to a loose collection of genres performed by the amateur associations (Théoleyre 2016: 353, 362). In the same way, one would be hard-pressed to distinguish early sha‘bī repertoire from among the various colloquial poetic and musical genres performed among cafés and by the amateur associations. Instead, it would be more accurate to view the musical milieu of Algiers at this time as a mixture of styles performed by the same musicians, many of whom belonged to an Andalusi association. One primary motivation to establish the nūba as a separate tradition came from a desire to place the tradition on par with European classical music, which implied a fixed, notated repertoire, and in turn justified its inclusion in the Algiers conservatory system (Théoleyre 2016: 382-4). The second and related impetus came from the national radio who sought to consolidate and control the heritage of “classical” nūba so as to save it from the “contaminants” of newer, modern influences. This motivation reflects the cultural politics of the Third Republic, which encouraged integration throughout the French Empire through valorization of local traditions (Théoleyre 2016: 227; Silverstein 2004: 43). Inspired by conservation efforts he observed at the 1939 Congress on Moroccan Music in Fez, the director of Arabic language programming for 86
Radio Algiers, Salah Azrour, had already called for Andalusi associations to end their performance of lighter genres in order to save the Algerian nūbāt from decadence (Théoleyre 2016: 448-9; Glasser 2016: 208). Ten years later, the leadership of Radio Algiers devised a plan of five permanent orchestras for radio programming. The compartmentalization of genres would ensure the preservation of the classical nūba from the contamination of popular derivatives. These ensembles included the orchestra “andalous” directed by Mohamed Fekhardji, a Kabyle orchestra under Cheikh Noreddine Meziane, a Bedouin orchestra headed by Khelifi Ahmed, an “orchestra moderne” directed by the pianist and composer Mustapha Skandrani, and, for the first time, a sha‘bī orchestra under the leadership of M’hamed El Hadj El Anka (Théoleyre 2016: 467, 535).
M’hamed El Hadj El Anka
Even before this defining moment, El Anka had established his reputation as a popular artist through live performances, phonograph recordings, and earlier radio appearances. A challenge in discerning his biography arises not from a lack of material, but the opposite: much of what is written about him in official and informal discourses comes packaged in the panegyric portrait of a man of destiny that can make historical fact difficult to discern. Although accounts of sha‘bī’s origins tend to center on El Anka and the Café Malakoff just off the Place du Gouvernement, it seems likely that a network of establishments in the Lower Casbah supported the creative energy for popular music during the interwar period. Both Muslim and Jewish musicians, including those belonging to Andalusi associations, performed for a variegated clientele and freely moved between genres. Théoleyre writes, We must think of the emergence of the earliest forms of sha‘bī as proceeding from a network of establishments: the singers coming from the indigenous music societies, moving and meeting through them, composing particularly in the genres called “popular” by Yafil or “light” by Rouanet—hawzi and ‘arubi in particular—confines within the Andalusi repertoire where creation was still accepted. This new generation of cafés was characterized by an openness toward a mixed clientele from various professional and religious backgrounds. In this sense, they reflect the composite nature of the neighborhoods of the lower Casbah, contrasting with the social homogeneity of the Upper Casbah. (410)
Ainsi, il faut penser l’émergence des premières formes du cha‘bi comme procédant d’un réseau d’établissements : les chansonniers issus des sociétés de musique
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indigène, s’y meuvent et s’y rencontrent, composant plus particulièrement dans les genres dits « populaires » par Yafil ou de « léger » par Rouanet—le haouzi et l‘aroubi notamment—, confins du répertoire « andalous » où la création est encore acceptée. Cette nouvelle génération de cafés, se caractérisent par une ouverture sur une clientèle bigarrée, issue de différents milieux confessionnels et professionnels. En ce sens, ils reflètent la nature composite des quartiers de la basse Casbah, contrastant avec l’homogénéité sociale de la haute Casbah.
By accounting for the socioeconomic complexities of Algiers’s indigenous population during the interwar period, one can better understand how El Anka’s Kabyle family origins helped shape his eventual status as a popular musician. Despite his close affiliation to the leading Andalusi musicians in Algiers, he appeared to be perpetually marked as an outsider to the social circles of the Lower Casbah—a status that would later help characterize sha‘bī as a proletarian and populist music (Théoleyre 2016: 398). Speaking of El Anka and his fellow Kabyle musician, Hadj M’rizek, Théoleyre states, The musical journey of El Anka and M’rizek underlines, among other things, the diffusion of “Andalusi” music through an Algerois social space divided by an internal partition, separating the old urbanites and the new arrivals, or “sons of the mountains”: the legitimacy and the visibility of the music known as “Andalusi” rested on its dominant position in urban space, to the point of turning the new arrivals away from the music of their parents. (404)
Le parcours musical d’El Anka et M’rizek souligne, par ailleurs, la diffusion de la musique « andalouse » à travers un espace social algérois divisé par une cloison interne, séparant vieux citadins et nouveau arrivants, « fils de la montagne » : la légitimité et la visibilité de la musique « andalouse » appuient sa position dominante dans l’espace urbain, au point de « détourner » les nouveaux citadins de la culture musicale de leur parents.
El Anka was born Aît Ouarab Mohamed Idir in 1907. His parents had migrated from Tizi Ouzou to the east of the city, along with a large number of rural refugees from the surrounding regions seeking relief from the collapsing agricultural economy. At the age of nine, the young M’hamed began sneaking out at night to musical performances in the Lower Casbah, where he met the musician Cheikh Nador (Saadallah 1981: 29). Nador sang in a variety of popular styles, including ḥawzi, ‘arūbi, and Moroccan malḥūn (Hachelaf 1991, cited in Théoleyre 2016: 403). As the story goes, the shaykh noticed El Anka’s propensity for rhythm and offered him a ṭār (frame drum) to play along with the orchestra, beginning a relationship that would eventually lead El Anka into a career as a popular musician (Cheurfi 1997: 32).
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As mentioned above, the madīḥ had traditionally been the province of Sufi brotherhoods who recited the laudatory texts with the accompaniment of percussion. Rabah Saadallah traces the musical transformation of this devotional repertoire to the late nineteenth century, when a musician named Kouider Bensmain expanded the accompaniment to include violin, qānūn and the gaspa (flute) (Saadallah 1981: 42). Shortly before El Anka first ventured to the lower Casbah, Cheikh Nador had sojourned for three years in Morocco, acquiring madīḥ repertoire from his time with the Sufi brotherhood in the northern town of Ouazzan (36). Building on the innovations of Bensmain, Nador fastened an adaptation of the madīḥ that was fast, animated, and more melodic than traditional performance practice. During this time El Anka began performing as a singer with another orchestra while continuing to observe Nador’s performances (Saadallah 1981: 37). At the prompting of his fellow musician Said Larbi, Nador begrudgingly permitted the young El Anka to officially join his ensemble (45). Realizing the potential of his musical talent, his prodigious memory of texts, and his tenacious desire to learn, Nador elevated El Anka to the role of mandolin, eventually allowing him to substitute as lead vocalist (50-51). With the sudden death of Nador in 1926, El Anka took over the late shaykh’s orchestra. Nador’s passing marked the beginning of a new phase in the young musician’s training. That same year, El Anka began an apprenticeship with Sid Ali Lakehal Cheikh El-Hadra at a mosque in Algiers to refine his pronunciation of Arabic poetry (Saadallah 1981: 59). At the suggestion of the shaykh, El Anka began attending weekly dhikr ceremonies as a way to refine his performance of the madīḥ (60). The following year, he sought out the linguistic expertise of a school teacher named Ahmed Ibnou-Zekri, who also corrected his pronunciation of Arabic poetry and introduced him to additional malḥūn texts (63). The year marked El Anka’s his first performance on Algiers radio and his first round of phonograph recordings with Columbia Records. Through the 1930s, his fame grew steadily as an innovative interpreter of the madīḥ. (Cheurfi 1997: 32). In 1937, he took a newly constituted orchestra to Paris to record and perform for the Algerian migrant community. He composed an original song for the occasion, entitled “L’ghorba saïba” (Homesickness is Difficult) (Saadallah 1981: 78). His eclectic radio appearances during this period reflected the general practice of the station to place a variety of colloquial styles under the amorphous label of “popular,” including everything from ḥawzi and ‘arūbi to franco-orientale. Most often, El Anka’s shows were billed 89
as “Musique orientale variée,” occupying a niche shared by many Jewish stars of the day (Théoleyre 2016: 413). At the end of WWII, El Anka’s music increased in popularity, as did his live performance schedule. In 1948, El Boudali Safir at Algiers Radio invited him to perform at the prestigious Ibn Khaldun Concert Hall, and in 1949 the radio named El Anka the director of the newly minted “sha‘bī” radio orchestra (Achour Cheurfi writes that the name “sha‘bī” was coined by the radio staff three years earlier in 1946) (Saadallah 1981: 88; Théoleyre 2016: 541-2; Cheurfi 1997: 33). El Anka is remembered for expanding the breadth of meter and melody in his musical settings of malḥūn texts by melding his knowledge of the madīḥ with popular music of the day. The journalist Achour Cheurfi stated El Anka’s innovations in the following terms: The great innovation brought by El Hadj El-Anka remains undoubtedly the note of freshness introduced into a music considered mono-vocal and which no longer spoke to current tastes. His manner of playing became more sparkling, lightened by his nonchalance. His manner of putting melody at the service of the text was, quite simply, unique. (Cheurfi 1997: 33)
El Anka interpreted or composed nearly 360 qṣāyid and cut approximately 130 recordings with Columbia, Algeriaphone, and Polyphone (Cheurfi 1997: 33). Perhaps most importantly, he ensured his lasting authority over the scope and direction of sha‘bī music through his pedagogical efforts. Although initially denied access to the municipal conservatory due to the “popular” style of his music, in 1959 he became a faculty member and taught sha‘bī classes in the building’s basement (Cheurfi writes that El Anka began teaching at the conservatory as early as 1955) (Théoleyre 2016: 605; Cheurfi 1997: 33). Musicians and aficionados today hold any connection to the El Anka as a supreme mark of authority and authenticity. I personally felt the weight of this connection when one musician invited me to meet Amar Al Achab. “The maître,” he told me in reverent tones, “is the last of El Anka’s five original students from his course at the conservatory—a living treasure.” The day of our rendezvous, Youssef led me to Mr. Achab’s favorite café just below his residence near Place de la République. I walked in to find a humble and amiable man who, after introductions, generously shared with me his own perspectives on El Anka’s legacy: “El Anka had a famously good memory…In sha‘bī, you have very long texts. Although the musicians learn orally, most performers have words in front of them—but not El Anka!”
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After independence, a new generation of sha‘bī chansonnettes overtook the classic malḥūn poetry. As discussed in Chapter 1, many artists in Paris sang in explicit terms about the struggles of migrant life, both in Arabic and in Kabyle. In Algiers, the mantle left by El Anka’s generation was taken up by Mahboub Bati (1919-2000), whose songwriting subverted the conventions of sha‘bī as sung malḥūn poetry. Already an established musician for the national radio orchestras, Bati sought to renovate and reenergize Algerian popular music in order to attract a younger generation of listeners. In 1968, he opened his own recording studio and oversaw a bounty of successful recordings of his own compositions by some of the best artists of the day. These included everyone from Abdelkader Chaou to Amar El Achab and Amar Ezzahi (Bendameche 2010: 8, 46, 49). In fact, a majority of Ezzahi’s most beloved renditions are Bati’s compositions. Today Bati is remembered first and foremost as a song writer, as his oeuvre comprised a majority of the most famous hits for a whole generation of younger sha‘bī musicians. Simply put, the canon of sha‘bī repertoire would not exist in its contemporary form without Bati’s prolific career. Bati’s most successful and impactful collaboration would be with the young sha‘bī singer El Hachemi Guerouabi. As an adolescent, Guerouabi received his formation in sha‘bī by frequenting cafés in the Lower Casbah and playing with the genre’s most influential musicians, including El Anka (Tazaroute 2010: 49). He was first thrust into the national spotlight by a television appearance in 1958 and his now-famous interpretation of “al-Ḥarrāz”. Beginning with the release of “El Barah” (Yesterday) in 1969, Guerouabi recorded a series of around fifty texts by Bati that launched him into the most successful decade of his career. Guerouabi proved adept at appealing to younger audiences while maintaining the respect of conservative listeners with his faithful interpretations of malḥūn. Critics and connoisseurs cited his impeccable diction and subtilty of interpretation as evidence of his training and talent, enabling him to bridge the generational gap in the music’s listenership (Tazaroute 2009: 59, 70-1). Guerouabi himself called upon other musicians to improve their poetic interpretations and to open themselves to musical innovation in order to save the music from fading into history (85). Sha‘bī underwent further transformation at the hands of Kamel Messaoudi, who revolutionized the sound of the music before his untimely death in 1998 at the age of thirty- seven. As with Guerouabi, Messaoudi was described to me by musicians as another example of someone who successfully re-energized sha‘bī with new creativity while remaining faithful to 91
the foundations of the genre. With the release of his 1991 album Echemâa, Messaoudi achieved national acclaim for his fusion of traditional sha‘bī with contemporary texts and electronic instrumentation and rhythmic background tracks, a style that became known as “neo-chaâbi” (Cheurfi 2010: 337). His success came at a low-point for the genre when the threat of violence inhibited the social gatherings that fueled musicians’ careers, while the ascendant commercial status of raï seemed to eclipse the waning interest in sha‘bī among youth.
Women in Sha‘bī Music
Sha‘bī’s assigned gender roles have been shaped by the social contexts in which the music is performed. While numerous female performers populated the roster of Algeria’s most successful “moderne” singers like Line Monty (often performing in cabarets or concert halls), the café as an exclusively male space reinforced the gendered expectations of sha‘bī. This association was arguably even more strongly rooted in France, where the extreme gender imbalance of the migrant workforce until the 1970s meant that cafés were a space for male sociality. Despite these barriers, several female interpreters of sha‘bī repertoire rose to prominence in the 1970s. Their success followed the rise in a number of Andalusi festivals and competitions in Algeria, and many female artists began their careers within an Andalusi orchestra as a solo vocalist. Fatouma Letmitti, better known by her stage-name Salaoua, became well-known for her interpretations of ḥawzi and ‘arūbi repertoire. After training with the Tlemceni Andalusi master Abdelkrim Dali, Salaoua began to interpret sections of the nūbāt, touring with orchestras in Algeria and abroad. Another artist, Nardjess (Nadia Bouchema), similarly achieved wide acclaim in her 1974 televised appearance with an orchestra led by pianist and composer Mustapha Skandrani (Festivalgérie). Most recently, a project called Chaâbi au féminin brought together six female artists in a collaborative effort that premiered at the famous Barbès Café in Paris in 2013. The most well- known of these performers, Mayla Saadi, has led a successful solo career as a sha‘bī artist since 2003. As with many male performers, Saadi traces her legitimacy as an interpreter of the qṣāyid through personal relationships to older musical mentors. In her case, her father, Hssicen Saadi, was a student of El Anka (Algérie Presse Service 2014). In an interview, she viewed the Chaâbi
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féminin project as an opportunity “to assemble female vocalists to sing sha‘bī, which is a very masculine style, but with female voices, and above all else remaining faithful to traditional sha‘bī.” 28 (de réunir des chanteuses pour chanter le chaâbi, qui est un style de musique très masculin, mais avec des voix féminines, et surtout en restant fidèle au chaâbi traditionnel.) She continued by explaining her approach to one of her most highly regarded interpretations, El Anka’s classic interpretation of “Ṣubḥān Allah Yā Lṭīf” (Praise be to God, Oh Gracious One): “When I sing, I think of the soul of sha‘bī, that is to say, how to adapt it to a female [voice], but also how to adapt it to another time, even a foreign audience—not necessarily Algerian—and to a younger audience. In any case, there are many young listeners who come up to me and say, ‘your “Ṣubḥān Allah Yā Lṭīf” is like a breath of fresh air, I understand it better, etc.’” (Quand je chante, je pense qu’une âme du chaâbi—ça se dit que c’est adapté quand même à une femme, c’est adapté à une autre époque, c’est adapté à une oreille étrangère, pas forcément algérienne, et plus jeune, peut-être. En tout cas, j’ai beaucoup des jeunes, en fait, qui viennent me voir en disant, « Son Ṣubḥān Allah Yā Lṭīf c’est quand même un nouveau souffle, on comprend mieux », [inaudible], etc.) Saadi’s “genealogical move” in this interview, to borrow Jonathan Glasser’s phrase, places her squarely within the center of the sha‘bī canon both in terms of repertoire (through one of El Anka’s most celebrated qaṣīda) and genealogy (through her father’s pedagogical training in close proximity to the maître). Her success as a female performer has challenged the gendered norms in sha‘bī by affirming her place at the center of its historical narrative. In my own study, women are present in the cultural institutions and concert halls that support live sha‘bī performance as audience members and employees. The increased number of public concerts has opened more opportunities for women to hear live sha‘bī music, where there exist none of the same social stigmas of gendered space as the café or the traditionally gender- separated wedding celebration. My friend, Imene, confirmed this reality of greater accessibility to live performance in France, yet also suggested that women have always taken pride in their participation: Women are very fond of sha‘bī music—at least the women that I know. We really love Andalusi and sha‘bī—of course, everyone has their tastes. Some prefer sha‘bī
28 Malya Saadi, une voix du chaâbi au féminin, Youtube video, 7:48, posted by “Algérie Presse Service,” January 29, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2QXFrYO9PE
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because it has more rhythm. With Andalusi, it’s more acquired, you have to have more patience, it’s slow—those who don’t love it, they sleep.
In my circle […] the younger women who play Andalusi music—they are fond of sha‘bī music. There are some [of them] who prefer sha‘bī music to Andalusian music. And I think that women—Algerian women—are really the ambassadors of our music and our culture. We really tend to—we really want to talk about it, and give that to our children, and are really very proud of this heritage. So, I think that women more and more want to possess this heritage as much as men [do].
Currently a master’s student studying arts administration in Paris, Imene grew up in Morocco after her parents moved there from Algeria. Her comments hint at the high proportion of women who participate in amateur Andalusi associations, a reality that contrasts sharply with the gendered assumptions of sha‘bī singers as male.29
“The Magic of Sha‘bī”: Poetry and Contemporary Performance Practice
A typical sha‘bī orchestra is comprised of five to seven musicians, with one or two banjoists and a violinist accompanying the shaykh, along with a riqq and darbūka player. Often, an electronic keyboardist forms part of the group as well. The melodic instruments provide vamping accompaniment for the sung verses, alternated with brief bursts of melodic activity that fill in the space before and after sung phrases of text. During instrumental responses, the keyboardist plays fast octave flourishes that echo the banjo lines, while during the sung verses the accompaniment is reduced to repeating, clave-like patterns in the left hand that alternate with triadic chords in the right. The shaykh leads the ensemble and accompanies himself on mandole. A unique and emblematic instrument of the genre, the mandole was fabricated at the bequest of El Anka by an Italian Algerois luthier named Jean Béllido in 1932 (Guemriche 2012: 242; Brahim-Djelloul 1996: 21; Saadallah 1981: 71). The fretted lute appears as a fusion of features from several related instruments, with the shape of an ‘ūd but a shallow body and fretted neck of a guitar and/or mandolin. The resulting timbre resembles that of an ‘ūd, but with an added brightness that cuts through the texture and supports the vocal melody of the singer.
29 The predominantly male demographic of individuals who comprise my group of research collaborators reflects this reality. In addition, gendered norms of social interaction among the Algerian diasporic community limited my extended access to female interlocutors, and the informal social gatherings to which I was invited tended to be exclusively male. 94
The doubled strings are typically tuned to E, A, D, G, (in ascending order of pitch) but, of course, there are variations. Sitting in his home outside of Paris, Mohamed El Yazid picks up his mandole during our interview and explains, You have two kinds of mandole. The mandole with D strings (ten strings, or five doubled courses), and one with eight strings [without the low D]. […] Alas, with sha‘bī musicians, there is always disagreement. You have people who say that those who use the eight string mandole are more professional than those who use one with ten—Why, you ask? [laughs]… I really don't care about this foolishness, but I'll explain it to you—When I tune the mandole, it’s tuned by fourths. So, starting from the [top], you have G, D, A, E, and D. So, for the purist, if I have a D chord, [the lowest course] it makes things easier. […] For them, the less chords you have, the harder your task and, therefore, the more virtuosic you are! (Tu as deux sortes de mandole. Tu as la mandole à D corde, ça veut dire cinq double, dix cordes…et tu as la mandole à huit cordes. […] Alors, dans la rancœur, les chaabistes sont mal à s’entendre. Il y a des gens qui te disent, « celui qui a une mandole de huit cordes, il est plus professionnel que celui qui a dix cordes. » Pourquoi ? Moi, je ne suis pas dans cette bêtise, mais je vais t’expliquer pourquoi. Parce que, moi quand j’accorde cette mandole, on accorde en quartes. Alors, en bas (sic), on a sol, re, la, mi, et là j’ai un re. Donc, pour les puristes de chaâbi, moi si j’ai un D corde, ça veut dire que j’ai un plus des cordes donc j’ai plus de facilité, pour faciliter la tâche. […] Donc, plus tu as moins des cordes plus tu es beaucoup plus performant !)
Brahim-Djelloul identifies eight principal modes, or ṭūbū‘a (singular: ṭab‘a), which are borrowed from the ṣan‘a Andalusi tradition of Algiers, along with the mode siḥli, which resembles the Middle Eastern maqam naḥawand. As with the maqāmāt of Middle Eastern practice, definition of each ṭab‘a goes beyond a scalar outline to include a host of melodic conventions dictating how pitches are approached, which melodic motifs can be used, and the overall arc of the mode’s presentation during improvisation (Brahim-Djelloul 1996:18). The Andalusi modes are distinguished from the maqāmāt, however, by the absence of quarter-tones. In fact, many musicians affiliated with the revival of Andalusi music in the mid-twentieth century sought to minimize what many saw as a contamination of quarter-tones coming from Egyptian popular music. In my own fieldwork, all the musicians with whom I worked were currently or had previously performed with an Andalusi ensemble, and most asserted the necessity of a good foundation in the Andalusi modal system as a prerequisite to playing sha‘bī. In spite of the different textual traditions, most musicians share the notion that sha‘bī’s system of rhythmic and melodic modes is directly derived from Andalusi performance practice. Furthermore, the prestige of the classical tradition necessitates any serious artist to have this
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foundation. The regular rehearsals and pedagogical classes offered by Andalusi associations in both Algiers and Paris offer the best means of mastering the music’s mechanics in an organized setting. Interpretations of malḥūn repertoire by sha‘bī singers typically follow what is known as bayt wa-siyaḥ, or “verse-improvisation” form. The siyaḥ, also known as istikhbār, is an unmetered and free improvisation typically performed by the shaykh. In the opening istikhbār, the shaykh chains together the opening abyāt, or verse couplets (singular: bayt), in an arrhythmic and highly ornamented improvisatory vocal style while accompanying himself on mandole. The verses are broken up into a series of alternating hemistiches, in between which the pianist, banjoist, or violinist offers brief melodic interjections that respond to the improvised vocal line (Brahim-Djelloul 2003: 17). The singer draws in the audience with his plaintive tones, setting the ambiance of the piece and introducing the emotional tenor of the poem. The highly ornamented style of improvisation allows the singer to show off his knowledge of the melodic modes, the virtuosity of his vocal technique, and his ability to evoke the expressive meaning of the text. After a dramatic pause, the singer typically sings the vocal refrain that identifies the song’s title, and the percussionists bring in the entire ensemble on the song’s principal instrumental refrain. Following the refrain, the accompanying musicians drop back down to a soft vamp to allow space for the vocalist’s continued chain of verse couplets. Unlike the solo istikhbār, the chain of sung verses in the song’s main section alternate with the full orchestra’s recurring instrumental reprise, at times with an added vocal reprise sung by all musicians. The shaykh enjoys the freedom to change the rhythm or mode, truncate the text, skip or repeat stanzas as he pleases. Rachid Brahim-Djelloul interprets this freedom according to the importance of spontaneous inspiration that lies at the heart of the genre: “The singer is free in his interpretation of the qaṣīda according to the inspiration and ambiance of the moment and the audience. He could change the rhythm of a bayt or add several khlāṣ to the qaṣīda. The music serves the text, and the text, in turn, can vary in order to let the music live” (Brahim-Djelloul 1996:17). The unpredictability of modal and rhythmic changes offsets an otherwise monotonous melodic rendering of text. Mohammed similarly emphasized spontaneity in the unfolding of a sha‘bī performance. The “magic” generated from this sense of spontaneity emanates from the creativity and authority of the shaykh: 96
There’s really a magic about sha‘bī, when the maître, unconcerned with the other musicians onstage, does what he wants—changes the tempo, the phrasing, the [rhythmic] movements, the modes, and it’s the others who must quickly follow. […] Sha‘bī involves much improvisation. The [other] musicians, what do they do? They listen closely and attentively. And the shaykh, he sings, […] as soon as he changes the mode etc., the other musicians can stop for a brief moment to perceive the shift in direction, then right away they change and follow him. (Ce qui est magique, je trouve dans le chaâbi, c’est que le maître est, il s’en fout sur scène, il est dans son monde, avec sa mandole, et il fait ce qu’il veut—ce qu’il veut. Il change de tempo, de cadence, de mouvement, de mode, et c’est aux autres de s’accrochent toute de suite. […] Dans chaâbi on fait beaucoup d’improvisation. Alors les musiciens, qu’est-ce qu’ils font ? Ils sont tellement concentrés, ils écoutent, un très, très grand écoute. Le cheikh, il chante […] et dès que le maître bouge, le mode etc., les musiciens ils peuvent s’arrêter pendant deux secondes, juste pour comprendre, pour voir la direction, pour voir le maître, et le suivre.)
In performances I observed, the shaykh signaled a modal shift with the subtle modulation of as little as one syllable in the vocal melody, at which moment the accompanying musicians immediately adjusted the tonality of their vamping patterns to match the implied modal shift of the singer. Often, this shift would be followed by an entirely new instrumental reprise that resets the ear of the listener for the new modal space and leads the shaykh smoothly into the next strophe. The shaykh’s spontaneous inspiration extends down to the details of affective delivery of the sung text. Writing on the melodic interpretation of malḥūn poetry, Mohammed Souheil Dib describes how the shaykh’s subtlety of diction and expressive timing work together with the poetic meter to magnify textual meaning: The length of verse favors vocal modulations and permits externalization of the poem’s emotional content. In sha‘bī concerts, variations of the voice, principally the pitch and intonation, depend closely on the rate of the breath. These caesuras, the distributions of the units in the hemistiches, and the rhyme all work decisively to mark the meaning [of the text]. The performance of sha‘bī song is the transmission of this linguistic dimension of malḥūn. (2010: 325)
Returning to our above example of Sidi Qaddour al-‘Alami’s text, “al-Maknāsiyya,” a brief comparison of different performances by El Anka and Amar Ezzahi reveals the range of possibilities for the shaykh to shape the performance as he pleases. In both examples, one observes the shaykh’s authority to change and adapt the progression of modes, as well as his capacity to evoke the emotion of the text through subtle changes in timbre, stress, and timing. A
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first glance reveals the obvious differences in melody and in the progression of melodic modes chosen by each performer. Upon closer examination, however, one also hears the subtle ways in which each singer evokes the emotional content of the verses. El-Anka30 acts out the drama of the bitter text through manipulation of vocal timbre. Like an actor monologuing on stage, his emotion overflows the limits of the melody with bursts of exasperation and cries of accusation that embody the pain of the poet’s verse. In the second verse of the opening strophe, he sings the final syllable (al-ghnāyam) with a mournful, forceful descent (shown below in bold). His voice breaks and wavers as through on the verge of crying, bringing together the textual painting of melodic descent with the timbre of distress. The line pulls the accompanying ensemble into the first instrumental reprise of the sung melody: After being exiled from my country, Kīf ba‘d khrūjī min waṭnī nrūm al- how could I still mingle with these ajnās? * Ḥawz būṭība fih adrakt al- men? * It is in Hawz Boutiba ghnāyaaam where I made my fortune
In a live recording of Amar Ezzahi,31 we hear a faster, more urgent interpretation. After his opening istikhbār, Ezzahi extends the dramatic pause before the initial statement of the opening verse, then enters a cappella in a soft tone of resignation that brings the listener smoothly out of the meditative opening improvisation and into the main body of the poem. In the third verse, Ezzahi plays with the line to augment the drama of betrayal in the poet’s rebuke. He interrupts himself and repeats the opening words, the second time raising his voice in accusation (shown in bold): Kīf ba‘d khrūj—Kīf ba‘d khrūjī min waṭnī nrūm al-ajnās? (How, after being exiled—How?! after being exiled from my country…) Reaching the end of the line, he again derivates from the sung melody by raising his voice in an interrogative tone of spoken rebuke. The emotional energy is picked up by the accompanying instruments in a brief, seven-note flourish, propelling the melody into the fourth line, “It is in Hawz Boutiba that I knew fortune,” and into another full instrumental reprise on the
30 Hadj M’Hamed El Anka. Meknasia, YouTube video, 48:05, posted by “zeghouani hadi,” June 1, 2011, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpaDS2ALbNg 31 Ezzahi - El Meknassia, YouTube video, 1:03:21, posted by “elhamra100,” December 3, 2011, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFugXIrolRs&t=1796s 98
sung melody. Although the repetition changes the length of the verse, the vamping musicians follow him and wait until the end of the phrase before playing the instrumental refrain. Ezzahi employs a similar effect several minutes later in the opening verses after his first medial istikhbār: I was unable to reconcile myself * So Mā-nṭīq ‘alā sulḥ wala-nkhamt preoccupied was I, in this passing lakhṣām * mashtghal bi-dduniyyat world, with my misfortune. al-fāniyya bahammī.
In the second hemistich, Ezzahi holds and alters the syllable mashtghal biiinnnn…, producing a nasal resonance32 that elides mashtghal and bi-dduniyyat. The resulting effect highlights the extent of the poet’s worries that consumes his thoughts (‘Sooo’ preoccupied was I…). After holding this syllable, he begins the line anew, this time singing through to the end. He ornaments the melody with a flatted second scale degree (E-flat) on the syllable dunniyyat (in this world) before descending back down to A, finishing out the line and leading the orchestra into the next instrumental reprise. Regardless of shaykh’s proclivities, songs always follow an overall arc of increasing tempo, culminating in a final dramatic shift in rhythmic mode from a moderate duple pattern to a fast triple meter called khlāṣ berwāli (Brahim-Djelloul 1996: 23). This roadmap mimics the overall trajectory of the Andalusi nūbāt, which follow a prescribed progression of increasing tempo across several movements and ending with an exciting khlāṣ that accelerates toward the nūba’s conclusion. As with the end of a sha‘bī performance, the arrival of the triplet-meter at the end of the nūba signals the opportune moment for the audience to stand up and dance. The progression from slow/stately to fast/lively also follows the same conceptual progression from ‘heavy’ to ‘light,’ discussed above with regard to the hierarchy of genres surrounding the nūba (Glasser 2016: 98-99). The opening vocal movement of the nūba, or mṣaddar, is not only the slowest and most stately of the nūba movements, but also the most revered of the repertoire (100). In a similar manner, sha‘bī enthusiasts often spoke to me about the challenge of placating an audience who “just came to dance” during the final khlāṣ while still giving due attention to the more ‘serious’ textual interpretation that occurs in the slower sections. Thus, the temporal progression from heavy to light within a sha‘bī qaṣīda reflects the same
ن This effect of sustaining the sound through the nasal cavity on the “n” sound of the Arabic letter 32 mirrors the practice of tajwīd, or the rules of proper recitation of Qur’anic text. 99
overlapping connotations of musical aesthetics and moral valuation that inform the hierarchy of genres in the Algerian musical taxonomy. From a broader perspective, the progression from heavy to light can be mapped onto an entire sha‘bī concert by following the order of repertoire from start to finish. Performers often begin with a tūshiyya, or instrumental introduction borrowed from the nūbāt to acclimate the audience and establish the appropriate ambiance for the performance. After this instrumental overture, the musicians typically pay their respects to the sha‘bī-malḥūn repertoire with several classic qṣāyid before moving on to newer chansonnettes with contemporary lyrics and more rhythmically exiting meters. The final, crucial element to the successful sha‘bī performance is the audience of attentive listeners whose expertise enables them to actively participate in the experience with the shaykh. Without this reciprocity, the affective power of sha‘bī does not exist. The interactive role of audiences in live sha‘bī performance reflects the aesthetics of traditions across the North Africa-Middle East region. The concept of sam‘a, or attentive listening, is linked to the Sufi devotional practice of communal singing of madīḥ in zawiyas across North Africa (personal communication with practitioner, Algiers). In Egypt’s urban secular tradition of ṭarab music, attentive listeners, or sammī‘ah, facilitate ecstatic musical experience via dynamic interaction with the performer. Through “culturally established vocabulary of gestures, facial expressions, body language, and verbal exclamations,” the audience “prompts the musician to excel” by feedback the energy of performance in continuous interaction (Racy 2004: 41). The aesthetic of participatory, interactive listening forms the basis of the sha‘bī experience as well. As I will show in the following chapter, listeners play an active role in propelling the musicians forward through constant, attentive feedback by means of appropriately timed gestures, vocalisms, dancing, and responsive singing. The act of listening attentively not only serves to maintain the energy of the musician’s performance but incorporates audience members into the performance as active participants. This gives the live sha‘bī performance the feeling of a shared ritual experience. The ability to listen attentively and react appropriately to the unfolding performance requires a base of knowledge concerning performance practice, biographical history of performers, and—most importantly—familiarity with sung poetic texts. Armed with such expertise, aficionados engage in debates and discussions during and outside of actual 100
performances. In the social context of fellow enthusiasts, these discourses serve as a performance of shared knowledge that also negotiate aesthetic standards of the genre. Virginia Danielson notes the tripartite nature of musical performance in her biography of Umm Kulthum which includes the performance itself, then Kulthum’s relationship to her own core group of sammī‘ah in dynamic interaction/reaction during that performance, and finally the proliferation of discourse around the performances which, in turn, establishes concepts of style through narrative tropes. All three of these layers become different aspects of the total performative phenomenon: Musical practice in Egypt includes three behaviors: the performing itself, listening to performance, and speaking about music and performances. […] The discourse of listeners is constituted by listening behaviors and also by speech about music. This discourse helps to produce the musical style as a cultural conception and identifies its place in social life. Musical meaning resides in the process of the production of sound, the subsequent interpretation of the sound, and the ensuing re-production of sound and interpretation. (1997: 6)
Through discursive performance, connoisseurs take on the important role as gatekeepers of established oral history and aesthetic standards of performance practice. In the example that I witnessed first-hand at Abdelkader Chaou’s performance, this curator role took place outside the actual moment of musical performance and involved acute debates over minute textual matters. The surprise debate over the origins of the various “al-Ḥarrāz” texts provided an opportunity for several expert listeners around me to correct the historical narrative of one of the most revered texts in the classic sha‘bī repertoire. Initially, the debate also concerned the established historical narrative of which singers are associated with which texts, implying certain interpretations as authoritative over others (“Chaou is playing al-Ḥarrāz? But that’s not in his repertoire!”). Upon realizing my own subjectivity as a young scholar, this man was quick to ensure that I understood the most important aspects of the genealogical history of the genre, taking upon himself the role as authoritative curator of its oral history. The ensuing debate was clearly an invigorating experience for all three attendees. This active social engagement contributed to their shared sense of social cohesion, creating a micro-ritual of interaction within the broader experience of the evening.
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In his study of “performances and “discourses” of Andalusi music across Spain, Morocco, and Syria, Jonathan Shannon similarly considers discourse among aficionados as part of the musical performance: I conceive of performance not only in terms of the actual musical performances I attended—from concerts to festivals to lessons and master classes—but also in terms of discourse about music (what people say about music, narratives about music and society), performative speech acts (statements that “do something”), and everyday life occurrences that perform something in the sense of linking private motivations to public actions. (2016: 9)
The opening vignette shows how sha‘bī audiences participate in a collaborative performance with the musicians onstage through attentive listening, informed interaction and “performative speech acts.” Each of these actions provide a means for sha‘bī audiences to display their knowledge of the genre and a mastery of its performance aesthetics, creating a shared sentiment of community that builds solidarity and implicitly excludes the non-initiated. The evening’s performance did not end when Chaou’s ambitious stage crew brought up the house lights for intermission. Rather, the debate among Samir and our newfound friends provided an opportunity for reinforcing the community of expert listeners, while at the same time blurring the lines between performers and audience members. In the next chapter, I explore the audience’s capacity to manipulate space in the creation of ideal performance contexts. The successful sha‘bī performance depends on an ambiance of intimacy among all participants, whether it be a private soirée or a public concert. The varied efficacities of each space prompts discursive debate among aficionados over best practice for sha‘bī performance in the diasporic context of Paris.
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CHAPTER 5
TRANSFORMATIVE ENVIRONMENTS, ECSTATIC EXPERIENCE: SHA‘BĪ AS AFFECTIVE PERFORMANCE
The lights dim and silence reigns over the small, darkened hall. A pianist and two banjoists on either side of the shaykh start a soft drone, then gradually fill in the texture with small melodic flourishes that establish the mode. Holding its collective breath, the packed house waits for Abderrahman El Koubi, who presides stoically over center stage. The banjoist weaves a florid improvisation, passing ideas back and forth with the keyboardist who drones underneath. Resolving the line, he looks up and waits for the shaykh. El Koubi lingers for a moment, his large winter jacket draped over his shoulders as he leans forward toward the music stand, his mandole placed deftly between two hands. Time is suspended, all are drawn in anticipation of the shaykh, who, in a quiet meditative tone, begins the slow, mournful opening line, Oh, what I wouldn’t do to see you Yāa leḥfī ‘an mā mdaā’… [strums] again, dear friend ma‘a lḥābū fāt
Instruments respond with a brief flourish, then settle back to drone. Those happy days are now gone, I no …‘An ayām as-srūr… ghābū maaaaa longer see them baaanuuuu…
El Koubi draws out the last two words of the phrase in a melismatic cadence, resolving the melodic line in a tragic, inevitable return back down to tonic in the mode siḥli. He turns and motions to the pianist, who offers his own pensive improvisation that mirrors the shaykh’s sung line. He completes his solo and El Koubi continues, this time starting a fifth higher in the middle of the mode as though to highlight the poet’s rising insistence: The days we passed together… Ayām lī maḍāt…
[piano responds]
…are never to return …lā torj‘a hihāt
[banjos respond]
In the next phrase El Koubi’s voice climbs still higher into a painful interrogation as the poet’s words decry his bitterness. Several audience members begin singing with the shaykh:
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The heart that loves another is content Wal-qalbī li ‘ashaq wāda‘a silwānuu
El Koubi begins his melodic descent, resigning to the pain of separation. Now more members of the audience are singing with him as he falls all the way down back to the bottom of the mode, growing stronger as the shaykh nears the end of the phrase: My body and spirit will die from the Jismī min dha-l-hawa’ a‘adm wa-rrūh pain of this love fanāt
Accompanying instruments strum, mimicking the final notes of the sung melody in ornamented echo. Audience members continue singing with El Koubi: Time punishes me…with loss and Ma‘āqabnī had zmān… bi-fiqduuuuu problems wa-maḥaaaanuuuuu…
Several audience members urge him on: “Ya Shaykh! Saḥa Shaykh!” (Oh, Shaykh! Thank you, Shaykh!) Ah! I looked up at the full moon…Ah! Ah! Rīt bedūr ettimān… ah rīt I looked up at the full moon… bittimaaaan…
The banjos strum in response, pulling the melody down one note at a time inevitably toward the bottom of the mode. A veritable chorus of voices from the audience now accompanies El Koubi’s own in the final cadential phrase:
…in the sky and I saw their faces …fi smāḥ-hum baaaaaanuuuuuuu
The audience responds with applause and vocalized praises: “Ya Shaykh! Saḥ Shaykh!” (Oh, Shaykh! That’s right, Shaykh!) As El Koubi reaches the end of his istikhbār, he pulls the audience into the final, extended tone of his voice. An electric anticipation fills the space as everyone hushes once again in anticipation of the opening bayt...
Place-Making and Emotional Entrainment in Sha‘bī Performance
My goal in this chapter is to describe the mechanisms by which sha‘bī musicians and listeners foster powerful musical experiences across different environments and varied performance contexts. Having considered the history of the Algerian migrant community, the power of the shaykh, and the aesthetics of musical practice, I now study how these elements come together in the dynamic unfolding of live performance. When musicians and skilled
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listeners in Paris discuss optimal places for sha’bi performance, they simultaneously express a yearning for embodied, emotionally-rewarding musical experiences that can only be achieved in the correct environment. The concern over ideal performance settings becomes more acute in diaspora, where an estrangement from sha‘bī’s ideological and historical place of origin presents additional obstacles. The shift in recent decades toward larger venues for sha‘bī performance in Paris has augmented anxieties among listeners in the diaspora. The large performance spaces of the Algerian Cultural Center, the Institute for the Arab World, and the Dunois Community Center press the informal, intimate nature of sha‘bī performances into the model of the concert venue, with row seating, pre-order tickets, a raised stage with lighting and sound equipment, and a scheduled start time (honored loosely, nonetheless). While all of these trappings of the professional music venue seem trite, their cumulative effect on the capacity of participants to create and control a certain ambiance of conviviality and intimacy is significant. Impeded by the resulting formality of public sha‘bī concerts, connoisseurs lamented to me the loss of a certain, palpable ambiance that one finds in the spaces traditionally associated with sha‘bī. In this chapter I work with the closely related yet distinct concepts of space and place, along with both concrete places and the more abstract concept of place-making. While space and place are closely overlapped in everyday speech and experience, geographer Yi-Fu Tuan opines that space is more abstract than place, and that space becomes a place through direct, sensorial experience and symbolic conception, both of which enable individuals to assign value (Tuan 1977: 6). The notion of place-making as rendering a space in which such intimacy is possible reflects the idea of a “sense of place” as outlined by geographer Doreen Massey. Her interpretation of place aligns with the processes of social, expressive interaction that seem to make certain performance contexts of sha‘bī so impactful to participants. Massey reasons that “the uniqueness of a place, or a locality, in other words is constructed out of particular interactions and mutual articulations of social relations, social processes, experiences and understandings, in a situation of co-presences.” (Massey 2012: 66, cited in DelCiampo 2016: 17). Musicians and their enthusiasts in Paris utilize tools of emplacement in two different senses, both of which help facilitate the emotionally powerful experience of live sha‘bī. First, musicians and audience members create a sense of place in the immediate context of 105
performance through the manipulation of space and dynamic interaction. Place in this sense is about creating an ambiance for intimate interaction that prompts collective emotional experience. In the second, physical sense of place, musicians employ textual references to other places, time periods, and scenes outside of the performance context—places almost always located in Algiers and which, when evoked, act as unifying symbols for the community of listeners. In this latter sense, place can be considered as a vehicle of nostalgia, or rather nostalgia is a catalyst for ecstatic performative experience. More than a purely nostalgic music of longing, however, sha‘bī is a thoroughly ‘emplaced’ music, entwined with the tapestry of neighborhoods across the city of Algiers. As one amateur musician explained to me, “You must understand, sha‘bī is a local music. It’s all about the localities of Algiers—about the different flavors of the various neighborhoods.” In the second half of this chapter, therefore, I explore how these local affiliations to place and nostalgic evocations of them—whether in sung texts or embodied by the shaykh—are exploited for the purpose of provoking ecstatic musical experience. I return to the February concert at the Dunois Center, just as Abderrahman El Koubi finishes the final line of his istikhbār. The orchestra members on this night appear particularly synchronized with one another, and, most importantly, attentive to the shaykh’s every move. As El Koubi’s rich voice reaches the end of the final phrase of the istikhbār, several men around me sing along to the melody and then respond with “Ya Shaykh! Saḥa Shaykh!” (Oh Shaykh! Thank you, Shaykh!) over top of the instrumental response. He releases the final note of the istikhbār and pauses for a brief moment. Then, as though suspended in air, he sings the long pick-up into the opening vocal refrain, supported by his own purposeful strumming on mandole: Oh, you whose beauty is astounding Yā allī zīnik zīn ‘ajīb [“aah!” – audience responds in recognition] Beloved, heal me with your ‘Ājīnī biraḍāk yā habība acceptance, you are my spirit’s repose I don’t have another love like you Lā mithlik ‘andī maḥbūb
The audience immediately recognizes the qaṣīda from the opening refrain and beings to sing along. As El Koubi rounds out the end of the third line the darbūka and riqq kick in, prompting vigorous applause and shouts of approval (“Ya Yemma! Ya Shaykh!”). El Koubi backs off the microphone, grins and nods knowingly to the audience while the orchestra takes up the
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instrumental refrain. He chuckles as the shrill sound of ululations fill the sonic space of the small auditorium. The two percussionists exchange glances, acknowledging the powerful outburst with laughter and nodding toward the sound’s source at the back of the room. Upon the completion of the instrumental refrain, the ensemble drops down to a nearly silent vamp to leave space for El Koubi’s voice to interpret the next bayt. All eyes again focus back on the shaykh as he continues the new text, “Habiba,” by the Moroccan poet, Cheikh Idriss al-‘Alami (1887-1962): Oh Friends, I saw that love is hard Yā ahlī rīt l-ḥubb ṣa‘īb [“Ah, Shaykh!” “Eeeh!”] and for lovers, it is the source of all Wil-maḥubba līha ll-‘āshqīn kul problems muṣība
Several men beside me catch the end of the phrase, “kul musība—Eeh! Allah ybarik shaykh!” (Thank you, Shaykh!) (Refrain)
If love descends on a mountain, the Law nzīl ‘alā l-jibāl tarīb mountain is crushed beneath Sultans submit to its majesty Wa-ṣṣulāṭīn takhḍ‘a ejjlāltūbtu heeeba!
Several listeners catch the final word and copy El Koubi’s stress on the long syllable. After another repetition of the sung refrain the orchestra backs off again in preparation for the next bayt, only this time retaining more rhythmic energy and volume than previous iterations. El Koubi mimes a see-saw motion with his arms at the keyboard player, who comprehends the cue and begins a more bouncy, syncopated pattern of left-hand bassline with right-hand vamping chords: Out of need, I will ask and come to Sālnīnātīk bi-tawwajība you Oh, friends, you haven’t tasted love or Yā allī mā dhqtī lahwa willa addatī sacrificed like I have ṭība
(Refrain)
Love has burned my cheeks Mā kawātik min l-khad ll-hīb You can’t quench the burn of its red Nār ḥamra mā ṭfī ḥarrha mizān fire nor cool the heart khuṣība aw lā iybardha min l-qlūb
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El Koubi finishes this bayt and draws off the microphone, delaying the expected refrain as the orchestra vamps. The drama is momentarily suspended, pulling in the audience as the tension builds. Eventually his voice reenters with the opening refrain, this time with an unforeseen diminuendo and unexpected tenderness. Reaching the second line, he sings, “Heal me with your acceptance…” and lets out an exclamatory “eeh!” Immediately the darbūka rachets up the volume, driving the refrain into a rousing full instrumental reprise of the opening melody. Invigorated by the sudden uptick in energy from the stage, the audience heaps lavish praise upon the shaykh with cheers and applause. The musicians ride the audience’s fervor as the final instrumental refrain draws to a close…
The audience’s emotional investment in this moment yielded what Randall Collins refers to as collective effervescence, or “an intensification of shared experience,” as “participants develop a mutual focus of attention and become entrained in each other’s bodily micro-rhythms and emotions” (Collins 2004: 35, 47). Collins borrows the term from Émile Durkheim, who theorized ritual interaction as the source of social solidarity and shared conceptions of morality. Collins proposes a theory of ritual entrainment based on “bodily co-presences" of participants, who become entrained with one another’s bodily micro-rhythms and emotions. Ascribing to a micro-sociological approach, Collins conceives of rituals as everyday social interactions. In a self-reinforcing loop, participants in ritual interaction lock into a shared, heightened emotional experience through a mutual focus of attention on shared symbols. The mechanism of emotional entrainment, he argues, is the rhythmic synchronization of physical bodies, which occurs at the rapid, unconscious level of cognition (75-6). The outcome of successful ritual, in which participants synchronize with one another’s bodily micro-rhythms and entrain with each other’s emotional states, produces group solidarity, feelings of morality, and shared symbols of belonging. Through his skillful manipulation of dynamics, texture, and melodic ornamentation, El Koubi animated the drama of the text and spurred the audience to higher and higher levels of emotional investment. The audience, in turn, fed this energy back to the musicians, pushing forward the energy of the performance while still remaining captive to the unpredictable whims of the shaykh. Seeking to set the evening’s ambiance, El Koubi pulled the crowd into an intensely shared focus of attention by drawing out his opening improvisation: hanging on 108
syllables, prolonging words, delaying entrances, and filling the text with expressive meaning. By the time he reached the beginning of “Habiba,” the audience entered with him into the new text in a single, unified expression of recognition and pleasure. The positive results of the emotional entrainment through the istikhbār were evinced by audience members’ clapping, ululations, and shouts of praise. The positive energy carried the musicians and listeners together into the opening bayt, where El Koubi both gratified and subverted audience expectations, thereby demanding their mutual focus and encouraging their bodily entrainment with one another through corporal singing and well-timed vocalisms. Recalling the final moments of another Dunois performance, one spectator commented to me, You see, sha‘bī is always about the daily lives of people, things people relate to […]. The people, they want to plunge into an ambiance—and the singer, he sings songs everyone knows from marriages and parties, etc., so that the audience can help to create that ambiance. So, you see, it’s really an ambiance from two sides. When they’re pleased with the singer and his adāʼ (manner of execution), they [the audience] enter into that ambiance with him.
Collins’s theory argues for the necessity of bodily co-presence in order for emotional entrainment to occur. His theory matches the findings of recent research in systematic musicology. Cognitive musicology Marc Leman points to the pre-reflective mechanisms of bodily entrainment, or what he calls expressive interactions, “through fast embodied process of assessment and prediction” in the rapid, back-and-forth corporeal interactions of individuals (Leman 2016: 3). Leman argues that a cognitive-motivational loop in the expressive system of cognition motivates individuals’ entrainment in shared musical experience. Like Collins, the process he proposes leads to an emotional arousal from the physical effort to align one’s body, feelings of agency and control from successful predictions in the resulting bodily motion, and expressive gesturing that leads to positive social interaction (Leman 2016: 168, 191-2). This process of emotional entrainment between musician and audience member is subject to the efficacies and constraints of the physical space in which the event unfolds. Nina Eidsheim reflects on this reality in her book Sensing Sound (2015) in which she reconceptualizes the traditional ontology of sound as static object, proposing instead the idea of musical sound as a dynamic, relational, and multisensory event. In this model, the sonic object is no object at all, but the aggregate of interactions between physical bodies in communication with one another,
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touching one another through vibrational energy. She argues that such an approach accounts for music’s “nonfixity and recognizes that it always comes into being through an unfolding and dynamic material set of relations” (Eidsheim 2015: 10). Eidsheim’s approach fits within the conclusions of both Collins and Leman by accounting for the contingency of bodies in space, and how those bodies—with variable physiologies, cultural biases, and experience—receive, resonate, transmute sound as vibrational energy in the dynamic, unfolding process of musical experience. The freedom of formal conventions in sha‘bī performance practice, within established limits, stresses this reality of a dynamic and unfolding ontology. The shaykh is free to spontaneously shift modes, elaborate melody or abruptly change the rhythm, often in direct response to the audience’s behavior. Even the most fixed element of the form—the text—is subjected to spontaneous change. In “Habiba,” El Koubi skips past several lines in the original qaṣīda, going immediately from the line, “Your beauty and goodness are renowned by everyone, your modestly and respect are sought after,” down seven lines to, “Oh, you whose comportment is without fault.” In another particularly powerful moment near the end of the song, the ensemble unexpectedly reduced their dynamics at the start of the refrain, only to suddenly return to a driving forte that propelled the musicians (and the audience) into the exciting instrumental reprise. For the connoisseurs who regularly attend concerts of visiting shuyūkh at the Dunois Center, the vagaries of interpretation create a pleasurable dance between predictability and surprise, with listeners’ expectations gratified, delayed, or thwarted altogether. As several connoisseurs remarked to me, the shaykh must change, adapt, and vary the qaṣīda so as to avoid becoming monotonous. Displays of connoisseurship, like singing along with the shaykh, play a crucial role in promoting feelings of inclusiveness in the community of informed listeners. One elderly man seated beside me named Mourad sang nearly every bayt of the evening softly to himself, occasionally leaning over to provide insights into the text’s meaning. The satisfaction gained in accurately predicting the unfolding events of the qaṣīda plays a central role in the audience’s feelings of active participation, encouraging them to repeat the ritual experience again. As I discovered, larger venues make responsive interaction with musicians onstage more difficult, but do not fully inhibit audience members from actively participating.
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Manipulation of Public Space and Creation of Intimacy
I jogged up the stairs of the Jussieu metro stop and hurried toward the entrance of the Institute of the Arab World. Out of all of the events I attended in Paris, the concert featuring Yahia Bouchala at the Institute du monde arabe provided the most representative account of sha‘bī adapted to large, public space. The concert coincided with the inauguration of the Institute’s newly renovated library. The institute occupies a prime location along the river Seine in Paris’s Latin Quarter, adjacent to the city’s most prestigious universities and cultural heritage. As I approached that evening, I saw the building’s exquisite facade of aluminum and glass facing out across the river toward the Isle de Saint Louis, its mashribiyya geometric patterns reflecting onto the placid water below. The institute had undergone a multistage renovation project from 2015 to 2017, and the reopening of its library marked a significant milestone in this process. My hurried commute brought me to the entrance just in time for the start of the performance. A security guard ushered me through the door and down to the lower level auditorium, when a middle-aged woman and her adult son eyed me bluntly as we stepped together onto the glass elevator car. “Do you know about sha‘bī music?” she asked skeptically. Although I had grown accustomed to my conspicuous presence at such events, I found her level of surprise to be curious, given the public nature of the concert. Wasn’t this a promotional event, oriented toward the Parisian public? I wondered. As I proceeded to explain my project, she expressed a blend of pleasant surprise and bewilderment as she elbowed her son, grinning, “an American! Interested in sha‘bī…” Her curiosity satisfied, the conversation ended when we passed through the corridor and entered the auditorium. Once inside, I appraised the large, cavernous hall. Based on musicians’ descriptions of ideal performance settings, this space seemed more like a large movie theater than a venue suitable for sha‘bī. Isolated pockets of people dotted the rows of overstuffed, faux-leather seats. In place of the hearty, pre-concert chatter at smaller venues I had attended, a faint din of whispered conversation echoed through the hall. Several minutes later Bouchala entered the stage unceremoniously with his three accompanying musicians, mandole in hand and seemingly unfazed by the sparse but steadily growing crowd. The ensemble tuned and chatted among themselves without acknowledging the spectators strewn about the dark sea of seats beyond the
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edge of the stage. Then, without introduction, Bouchala nodded to the darbūka player and launched into an introductory tūshiyya from the Algerois Andalusi repertoire. At first, the audience showed little outward engagement with the music happening onstage. Listeners sat politely in their reclining seats, a few with cell phones and iPads pointed toward the stage. The atmosphere would progressively thaw, however, through a repertoire set of half dozen texts that elided into one another, gradually building energy in the room over the first half-hour of the concert. All of the songs were originally recorded or had been covered previously by Amar Ezzahi, starting with a rendition of Amar Ezzahi’s “Ya Ashaq Ezzine” (Oh, Lovers of Beauty). Composed by the seventeenth-century Sufi poet Ben Triki, this classic malḥūn text garners its contemporary appeal from Amar Ezzahi’s recording, and Bouchala’s performance reflected the latter’s rendition…
The contingency of space on a successful experience of sha‘bī music incites debate among musicians over the changing realities of venues for the music in Paris. Different types of venues are evaluated by their impact on the capacity of the space to facilitate an ambiance of intimacy and, consequently, dynamic interaction and emotional entrainment among all participants involved. As Eidsheim points out, conventions of performative and listening practices naturalize certain listening conditions, which in turn shape listeners’ interpretations of the sonic interaction (Eidsheim 2015: 23, 60). Altering the normalized spatial, relational, and acoustic conditions for sha‘bī can provoke strong reactions from listeners. When discussing ideal contexts for sha‘bī to take place, Samir evoked the domestic spaces of the Casbah in Algiers, which, according to many, simply cannot be replicated in France: Sha‘bī really happens in Algiers. I think that if you really want to know sha‘bī, you have to go there, if you ever have the chance to go and listen and you will see for yourself that it’s not the same atmosphere or the same energy at all. The musicians play in a different way. We likewise, here in Paris, play in a way that is different [from Algiers]. Here in Paris, sha‘bī doesn’t have the same energy or atmosphere as in Algiers. It’s not the same charm. The authenticity is really there. This is not because we don’t want the music to promulgate but because [Algiers] is its birthplace. Now the genre has reached a certain age, but still we are pulled in by its origins, its source. […] We really don’t have an appropriate environment here for sha‘bī. For example: In Algiers, lots of sha‘bī is played during Ramadan or during circumcisions. […] But when I go to a sha‘bī concert here, even in a café or a ticketed event, it’s not the same. Because right off the bat there’s a certain ambiance created by placing the orchestra onstage—it’s a ‘show’ (spectacle). It’s not 112
convivial. In Algiers, by contrast, it’s about a small space and a certain preparation needed for a live event: palm leaves behind the singer, the preparation of sweets, people smoking, etc. (Le chaâbi se passe vraiment là-bas. Si tu veux vraiment connaître le chaâbi. Quand tu écoutes du chaâbi, quand à jour quand tu as l’occasion d’y aller et le voir, et d’écouter du chaâbi à Alger, tu verras que c’est pas la même atmosphère, c’est pas la même énergie du tout. Les musiciens jouent dans une autre façon. Et nous, quand on joue ici, on joue d’une autre façon. Parce qu’on est influencé par tout un environnement. C’est pas le même charme. L’authenticité est vraiment là-bas. C’est pas parce que on n’est fait pas sorti cette musique ! Mais c’est parce que c’est son berceau. Maintenant cette musique a un certain âge, mais nous, on est attaché aux ces origines, sa source. […] On n’a pas vraiment un environnement approprié pour le chaâbi. Chaâbi se pratique pendant le Ramadan, les soirées pour le Ramadan beaucoup, pour les circoncisions. […] Mais quand j’assiste une soirée ici, même dans un café ou dans une soirée payante il n’y a aucune [inaudible] avec le chaâbi d’ailleurs. Parce que déjà on est dans l’ambiance d’un orchestre sur scène, ça fait spectacle. C’est pas conviviale. Alors que chaâbi c’est pour une espace…des feuilles de palmier, c’est les gâteaux, c’est chaâbi c’est— alors c’est toute une préparation. Les gens font vraiment du live, ils fument des cigarettes etc.)
Despite the critiques of Samir and other musicians, the regularly packed concerts at institutions like The Institute of the Arab World, the Algerian Cultural Center, and the Dunois Community Center clearly show a powerful engagement with the music in larger, more public forums. Although the public nature of performances at concert halls necessarily distort the intimacy of a café or patron’s home, the audience members at these events actively manipulate the space in order to facilitate successful experiences.
…Bouchala sang through the refrain of “Ya Ashaq Ezzine,” ending with a its signature tag on “ah, la la la la la,” which led the ensemble into the catchy instrumental reprise: Oh, lovers of beauty * understand me, Yā ‘ashshāq azzīn * sā‘adū wāk al- my heart is sad qalb ḥazīn My cheeks are injured * by the tears Jraḥt l-khaddīn * bi-l-madāma‘a dīmā which fall unceasingly sayyāla The separation is prolonged and I am Sha‘alat nār l-bīn * fī dlīlī wilhajr consumed by its fire twālī My heart is bruised from saying, ‘no, Abwiyya ḥnīnī ṭāb qalbī min qūla lā lā no, no, no!’ lā lā!
At this point, groups of dancers began gathering in small clumps of two or three people, first standing in place at their seats, then moving down the sloping aisles and congregating on the A/V platform halfway up the amphitheater seating. Several women let out ululations as the 113
dancers became increasingly animated, arms raised above their heads, swaying and rotating their hips while clapping. The sung refrain returned a second time and the banjoist and darbūka players sang the well-known text with Bouchala, who encouraged the audience’s participation by periodically dropping out and listening for their voices. Bouchala sustained the audience’s building energy by eliding smoothly into the opening bayt of “Ya Maqnine Ezzine” (Oh, Beautiful Goldfinch) in the same mode, maintaining a rising intensity that crested with the song’s well-known refrain and instrumental reprise: Oh, beautiful Goldfinch! Oh, you, Yā maqnīn azzīn! Yā aṣfar ejjnīn, Ya with yellow wings, and red cheeks, aḥmar aḥḥnīn, Yā kaḥīl l-‘ayīnīn and black eyes It’s been two years since you’ve been Hāda muda w-snīn anta fī qufṣ ḥazīn in an iron cage Singing in a beautiful voice Taghannī bi-ṣawt ḥanīn Is there no one who knows to whom Lā lā man ya‘rif ghnāk mnīn you sing?
Bouchala nodded to his accompanying instrumentalists and they swept through the refrain one final time at full volume, capitalizing on the audience’s energy. He shifted the mode of the instrumental reprise immediately began the opening bayt of the next song, “Sali Trache Qelbi” (Come, Ask my Heart), the same song performed by Kamel Aziz at the institute several months prior: Come, ask my heart for its news and Sālī trāsh qalbi ya‘ṭīk khibārū, anti llī you’ll see that you own it and you milkātū tadrī mā bīh know what you’ve done to it Let it complain to you and recount its Khalīh yashtkī yaḥkīlik ḥiwārū discourse It’s up to you whether you punish it or Tima ta‘dhbīh wila anti tashfīh heal it Come, ask my heart for its news and Sālī trāsh qalbi ya‘ṭīk khibārū, you will see Ask it, ask it, ask it! Sālī! Sālī! Sālī! It’s up to you whether you punish it or Tima ta‘dhbīh wila anti tashfīh heal it
After several minutes, the musicians arrived at the anticipated rhythmic shift from duple goubāḥi to triplet berwāli, signaling the final sprint of the song set when everyone is encouraged to dance. The mode shifted from raml maya (D minor tonality) to ‘iraq (D major tonality), and Bouchala immediately began to sing the opening bayt of “Dirou Aouani” (Set the dishes):
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The words I have to offer will stir an Bīha na‘rbad mā bīn sādātī ambiance in my listeners Concerning love, I know how to speak Fī l-ḥub najhad w-ṭābat awqātī of it well at the right time I fall into new love continuously, but ‘Āshaq mujadad w-naghnam ḥaḍartī with you, my public, I will be ‘āshaq wa-fānī w-ana bi-yakum healed (i.e., even if I fall out of nubara love)
The move inspired a final burst of emotive energy from the audience. By this time, most members of the audience were standing and clapping while scores of young adults flooded the platform to participate in the final ebullience. Many, it seemed, had been anticipating this moment the entire evening. I recognized the Kabyle style of dance that Youssef had taught me: the slow, circular steps with hands raised and elbows at right angles as the torso pivots independently underneath. Young adults gathered together in pairs, trios, or fours, laughing and occasionally conversing with one another. Everyone sang back the refrain with Bouchala in its bouncy, syncopated rhythm reinforced by strong hits on the darbūka: Set—the—dishes! Set the dishes! Dīr—ū—awānī! Dīrū awānī! Set the dishes and pour me a drink so Dīr—ū—awānī asqyūnī nubara that I might be healed Oh, friends who know your limits in Yā ahl l-ḥumiyya qalbī yarūf li-yakum love, my heart attaches itself to you in love Be merciful with me, for I am Rūfū ‘aliyya annī ‘āshaq fī bi-hālkum enamored with your splendor
Their dancing remained a controlled exuberance. Several seats down from me a man raised his head and momentarily closed his eyes, a grin spreading across his face in ecstasy. Several others turned forward and vigorously clapped on the beat with arms stretched out toward the musicians, urging them onward as the tempo continued to accelerate. The banjoist and darbūka player laughed in amusement as the energy from the crowd reverberated back to them with every passing beat. The song ended with a final cascade of clapping and cheers as Bouchala thanked everyone with a simple “Yaḥkum saḥa” offered in Algerian Arabic. The audience applauded in appreciation and filtered back to their seats amidst a hum of lively chatter...
What had started as a somewhat monotone and detached performance evolved into something closer to a family ḥafla (party) as people gathered on the platform at eye-level with 115
the stage, dancing and calling out to the musicians in approval. The dancing of audience members seemed to close in the space and create an environment of intimacy by encouraging interpersonal interaction and audible engagement with the musicians onstage. Although I did not join the dancing (this time, anyway), their interactions pulled me in by expanding the performative space beyond the stage itself. Physical distance seemed to collapse, and audience anonymity dissipated as more and more people rose from their seats to participate. Throughout this set, I noticed an older gentleman gradually moving forward row by row, by himself and with camera phone in hand the entire performance. By the end of the final song, his head of wispy, white hair could be seen peaking just above the front row of seats at the feet of the musicians. While Bouchala and the banjoist retuned, the man took advantage of the lull to catch their attention. Looking through his phone and snapping another photo, he called up in a bellowing bass voice to the riqq and piano players on the left side of the stage, “Ya shaykhāt!” eliciting a chuckle from both musicians. The former gave him a wave turned to speak into the pianist’s ear, pointing back toward the man and laughing once more. Scarcely a moment had passed without the glow of this man’s phone reflecting off his weathered face as he took pictures and videos, reviewed what he had captured, and raised the device again for another shot. He appeared oblivious to the space around him, drawn in by the energy of the performance onstage. The intensity of his focus seemed to compensate for his anonymity in the darkened auditorium. As he drew closer to the stage, he fostered a sense of intimacy through direct interaction with the musicians and his own spatial proximity to the musical action. Even though I did not know this man, his actions impacted my own emotional investment as a fellow audience member. While still a successful manipulation of space, overall the hall lacked the same intimacy of smaller venues that afforded dynamic and personal affirmations from the audience. With the exception of the iPhone-wielding gentleman in my row, the anonymity of audience members vis- à-vis the musicians onstage prevailed. In addition, Bouchala did not profit from the same degree of integral feedback on each phrase, each syllable, each note and expression as afforded to El Koubi by the smaller Dunois space. Despite the space’s inherent limitations, however, Bouchala sustained a steady increase in emotional energy over the duration of his first set through his own programmatic choice of elision, facilitated by his skillful programming of repertoire in order of increasing animation and familiarity. 116
The audience also achieved measured success in creating a place of intimacy through active participation and displays of connoisseurship. Although the subtler forms of audience feedback were simply lost in the large chasm between the auditorium seating and the musicians onstage, the most emblematic element of participation in sha‘bī—the rhythmic shift to a fast triplet meter that signals the appropriate time to dance and clap—came across to the audience successfully, providing the best opportunity in the space to demonstrate one’s knowledge of the repertoire or, at the very least, a knowledge of the formal conventions of live sha‘bī performances.
‘Alger al-Bahdja’: Nostalgia and Emplacement Outside the Performance Space
Up until this point we have examined how participants in sha‘bī events foster a sense of place across different performance environments. The evocation of physical places outside this immediate context, however, plays an equally important role in the overall effectiveness of sha‘bī as a powerful, shared emotional experience. Nostalgic references to locations in song texts, usually pertaining to the city of Algiers, take on additional significance in diaspora. In the hands of the seasoned shaykh, these texts offer another tool to foster cathartic emotional experiences for the listening community in Paris. At a different Dunois concert, the sha‘bī singer Mourad Djaafri made extensive use of texts evoking specific locales from the Algerois imaginary. From his opening istikhbār, Djaafri’s warm rapport with the audience was particularly palpable. By the start of the concert the modest hall was packed, with all chairs filled and an additional row of spectators standing in the back by the sound booth. Djaafri brought his opening improvisation to a close, and with a jolt from the darbūka player he launched into El Hashemi Guerouabi’s instantly-recognizable hit, “El Barah” (Yesterday). The song speaks of a man looking back with regret upon his life and musing on what it would be like to be twenty years old again. A contagion of excitement swept through the small hall with the sounding of the song’s opening line, the audience erupting in cheers and ululations. The excitement built through the first bayt until we reached the heartrending opening leap of the refrain: Yesterday! Al-Bāraḥ! al-baaaraḥ When I was twenty years old Kān fī ‘amrīn Oh, to be twenty again Ya hasra ‘alā ‘ashrīn
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In the final portion of the program, Djaafri turned to several songs that maximized the affective power of shared memory of place, beginning with his rendition of “Wahdani Gharib” (The Loneliness of Exile). Composed by Mahboub Bati in the 1970s, the song explicitly addresses themes of migration. Presumably an emigrant living abroad, the narrator plaintively calls out to his long-lost countrymen, imploring them to provide news of family and friends back home. His appeal for them to call by telephone, made plain through the quirky, Francophone refrain, “Âllo, âllo,” emplaces the song at the peak of postwar migration when the telephone first became a viable means of international communication. Throughout the song, the protagonist calls out the names of various neighborhoods in Algiers: Speak to me, oh residents of El Kalmī līl-madaniyya Madania Hello, Hello? Âllo, Âllo? I am so lonely Rah lwaḥesh ktīr ‘aliyya From Belcourt Min “Belcourt” kbīr inshaan There where my father, my friends, Lī fīh rīḥa wildī waḥibānī wa-nnāsī my people and neighbors reside wajīrān
Refrain: Loneliness of exile Waḥdānī gharīb I live alone in the loneliness of exile Ana ‘āyīsh waḥdānī gharīb Oh, operator, give them my address Yā hātif līk l-‘anwān Talk to me, oh dear countrymen Kallam lī al-waṭan l-habīb Of Algeria, the most beautiful country Al-jzā’r zīna l-buldān in the world
Djaafri reached the line of the quoted text that calls upon the residents of Madania, and a large constituent from the audience responded in cheers, clapping, and ululations to show their affiliation with the neighborhood. Djaafri made space for their outburst by vamping for several extra measures while smiling out to the crowed. He then continued on, this time the audience singing along with him: I am so lonely Rah lwaḥesh ktīr ‘aliyya For the great people of Belcourt Min “Belcourt” kbīr inshaan
[“Eeh!” “Aywa!”]
A group in the audience toward the right reacted at the mention of Belcourt, one man standing directly at the foot of the stage and waving his arms.
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There where my father, my friends, Lī fīh rīḥa wildī waḥibānī wa-nnāsī my people and neighbors reside wajīrān
The sound of the audience’s collective voice rose as Djaafri neared the refrain. He repeated the phrase “Wa-nnāsī” and then reached the song’s signature, dramatic pause before the tagline, “Jīraaaaaaaaan!” (neighbors). The audience also honored the expressive lull before joining Djaafri in yelling the melismatic descent, which they peppered with ululations that threatened to drown out the phrase. At the start of the refrain Djaafri pulled away from the microphone, inviting the audience of Algerian immigrants to sing the words, Waḥdāni gharīb/Ana ‘ayīsh waḥdāni gharīb (The loneliness of exile, I live in the loneliness of exile). My friends seated around me took the lead and belted out the lyrics in full voice. By this point, having internalized the refrain, I found myself swept up into the emotional fervor of the moment and sang along with the plaintive lyrics. Despite my lack of shared memory of these places, I became enthralled by the collective effervescence in the room. The song came to an end in a peak of emotional energy with shouts and ululations. Amid the roar of the audience, Djaafri reaffirmed the final phrase, “Algeria, the most beautiful country in the world,” and offered his thanks for their participation. Djaafri’s use of songs with local place names were made effective, I discovered, because of his own cultural capital as a local musician “from the quartier” and close to his fanbase. From my conversations before the start of the evening, it soon became clear to me that many in the audience had personal connections to Djaafri. As we filed into the small auditorium and to the back row of folding chairs auditorium, my collaborator, Imene, told me how much people from Algiers admire Djaafri as an authentic, local artist. She went on to share her fond memories of growing up and listening to his recordings. An architecture technician by trade, Djaafri began performing in public at the age of fifteen in 1978. For the next decade, we could be seen performing constantly at wedding celebrations throughout Algiers (Cheurfi 1997: 118). Karim, a twenty-something amateur musician who was also present with me that night, also recalled seeing Djaafri perform as a child on numerous occasions at weddings in his Algerois neighborhood. He proudly displayed a picture on his phone of his dad with the maestro and an adolescent Karim standing off to their right. Djaafri used his relatability as a local singer from the geographic heart of sha‘bī’s historic imaginary to augment the affective power of place-names in his performance. His interpretation
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encouraged the audience to connect their own individual memories of place to a shared, emotional connection to idealized locales from Algiers’s recent past. In his ethnography of Albanian migration song, The Performance of Nostalgia (2015), Eckehard Pistrick remarks that “sonic nostalgia is only effective when a link between a remembered place and an actual sound exists. The precondition for sonic nostalgia must thus be seen in a nostalgia for a place” (137). The use of pre-independence, Francophone names like Belcourt instead of its current name, Belouizdad, reveals the nostalgia of the song’s composer, Mahboub Bati, for the epoch of his own childhood when sha‘bī first emerged. For middle-aged members of the audience, Djaafri’s rendition strongly mimics Guerouabi’s own reprise, made popular through several televised performances in the 1980s. Finally, the young adults seated around me recalled Djaafri’s performances from their childhood in Algiers, tinged with nostalgia and pain of the Algerian civil war in the 1990s. Nostalgia provoked by distances of time and place inherent in the experience of migration are made explicit in the refrain “Wahdani Gharib.” The Arabic word gharīb connotes a state of “foreignness” or even “strangeness,” and is derived from the same root as the word ghorba, a concept meaning separation from one’s homeland. The theme of l’ghorba runs throughout the songs of emigrant singers of the post-WWII generation, including Cheikh El Hasnaoui and Slimane Azem. Both singers composed songs contrasting Paris as a site of loneliness and hardship with idealized images of home in Algeria (see Mokhtari 2001). Despite the clear nostalgic theme of this song, however, it would be inaccurate to view Djaafri’s performance categorically as a diasporic longing for a distant homeland, or as cathartic space between a “lost past” and a “non-integrated present” in exile (Pistrick 2015: 102). Unlike the largely Kabyle-language migration songs of migrant laborers in the mid-twentieth century, the majority of poetic texts used in sha‘bī do not deal in explicit terms with the experience of migration. Rather, the high degree of emplacement in sha‘bī, both in textual references and through the genre’s localized historiography, evokes nostalgia for particular performance contexts in and around Algiers—contexts which the majority of the audience has experienced and continues to experience upon frequent return visits to Algeria. Nearly everyone with whom I spoke, in fact, could recall a recent wedding they had attended fī blad (back in the home country) that featured a sha‘bī ensemble.
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Furthermore, Djaafri in this instance employs place markers in the text to build a heightened emotional experience in the present, as opposed to the goal of recalling shared memories of a distant past. In this way El Ankis’s text on the migrant experience works in parallel to the other, classical poetry dealing with abstract themes of love and morality. Rather than evoking particular times and places of shared cultural memory, the singer and listener work together to recreate the ambiance in which they first experienced the song. Attendees with whom I spoke did not characterize Djaafri’s the performance as stirring feelings of home, but instead remarked on the times they saw Djaafri perform in Algiers and how they hoped to relive that experience with him at the present concert. For most of the listeners present at Djaafri’s performance, their attachment to the song “Wahdani Gharib” stemmed not from a shared experience of migration, but from a nostalgia for the environment in which they first heard the song, whether live or a recording of its composer, the late Guerouabi. More than nostalgic objects of migrant identity, markers of place in sha‘bī texts are charged objects with shared symbolic meaning that become useful tools in live performance. Sha‘bī as a community of enthusiasts trades on these shared symbols of place as means of denoting membership in a knowledgeable listenership, in the same way that knowledge of poetry and performative proficiency during a soirée enable listeners to imbibe a sense of solidarity through active participation. The alignment of shared symbols intensifies and focuses the emotional entrainment. As participants become increasingly aware each other’s presence and social cues, the emotional energy builds through alignment of bodily movement, vocalizations, and shared emotional states in a feedback loop of intensification (Collins 2004: 48). The shared effervescence of a successful interaction ritual results in group solidarity, along with positive feelings of confidence, strength, and belonging, which in turn reinforces the shared symbols as emotionally powerful tools with which to retain group cohesion until the following ritual experience (50). For the final song of the evening, Mourad Djaafri rides the wave of energy built through “Wahdani Gharib” by moving straight into “USMA,” a fight song he composed in praise of the local Algiers club, USMA. The song continues the use of emotionally powerful place markers established in the previous song by naming neighborhoods located around the USMA stadium:
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We come from Soustara33 (Aywa! Jīna min Soustara Aywa!) To where there’s a stadium Fīh sansirū ‘andna virāz The Black and Red34 Aḥkal wal ḥamra If they win, we’ll make mayhem Idha rabbaḥna ilyūm māt frāsh
Amid ululations and cheering, the audience engages in a call and response in between each of the following phrases, listing the neighborhoods around the USMA stadium: Casbah! [“ah ah aaaah!”] Bab El Oued! [“ah ah aaah!”] And Sidi Abderrahmaaan!” [“ah ah ah!”]
The audience then continues the vocable refrain on neutral “ah,” first with the help of Djaafri in the microphone and then overtaking him in volume. With the darbūka and riqq players at full tilt, Djaafri and the audience ride the energy into the refrain, with all musicians singing in unison: Allez! Allez! Allez USMA d’Alger! Allez! Allez! Allez USMA d’Alger!
[Djaafri: “Sing with me!”]
We come from ‘Soustara’
[Everyone screams the word “Soustara” then continues singing with Djaafri]
The Black and Red… [Djaafri: “Aywa! Aywa!”] If they win, we’ll make mayhem…
The last time through the refrain, Djaafri alters the text slightly, changing the refrain to “Vivez l’Algérie!” He calls out to the audience to do the same, and they finish the altered refrain together into a final roar of applause and ululations. Djaafri calls out a final “Vivez l’Algérie,” then thanks the audience for their presence and for a belle soirée together. With this subtle alteration in the text of the final refrain, Djaafri broadens the scope of the local fandom to create a celebration of Algiers, then all of Algeria. Seen through the perspective
33 Soustara is a neighborhood of Algiers, just 34 Colors of the USMA club. above the stadium of USMA in Bab El Oued.
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of diaspora, the song telescopes out from the most local of affiliations to a celebration of shared homeland. Sha‘bī has shared a long and close relationship to the clubs of Algiers, stemming from the genre’s popular themes and identity with the working-class youth where the music was born. Guerouabi was an aspiring professional player himself before his career as a musician swept him away to other horizons. He remained a lifelong fan of USMA, even composing his own ode to the team. This song and others take on another life in the stadium, where fans spontaneously perform songs written by sha‘bī artists. The song points to a populist, working-class demographic identified with sha‘bī, as well as Djaafri’s own proximity to the milieu of that demographic. More than an imagined community, the song allows the diasporic community in attendance to affirm their identification with the diasporic community present in the room—a community of listeners, through their intimate knowledge of those places referenced in the song. The result is a cohesion of sentiment, made alive through their individual memories of place, but forged together most explicitly in the final refrain when Djaafri broadens the scope the lyrics by changing the refrain to “Vivez l’Algérie.”
Shared Symbols and Floating Signifiers: The Mechanics of Emotional Experience
In the opening lines of “Habiba” sung by El Koubi at the Dunois Center, I observed the universality of lyrics lamenting unrequited love, rendered emotionally accessible for audience members to affix their individual experiences within a shared musical interaction. In the case of Djaafri’s performance, the songs evoked locales outside of the performance space, pulling at shared symbols of place and belonging. In their repetition across multiple performances, those places become “charged up” symbols of shared sentiment, helping participants maintain a sense of communal identity until the next emotionally heightened experience (Collins 2004: 37, 107). Before completing the chapter, however, I return to El Koubi’s performance for a twist in the story: the text he sings in his opening istikhbār, seemingly an abstract missive on the hardships of love, is in fact excerpted from a contemporary chansonnette by Guerouabi that explicitly deals with the pain of migration. Named after its refrain, “Tewheshet al-Bahdja" (How I miss Algiers), the song reflects Guerouabi’s own time living in exile in Paris during the 1990s:
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I remember and tears fall, only Atafkart w-jirāt dam‘atī zādatlī tankīd increasing my problems Warm, they burn on my cheeks and Askhūna taḥriq fawq khadi khilā leave a mark imāra I remember day and night, the time of Natfakr lyām wa-lyāli w-zmān al-‘ayīd ‘ayīd 35 I remember Ramadan in my home Atafkart ramḍān fī blādī l-hbāb country, staying up all night with sahāra my loved ones Alas, if only I weren’t so far away Yā husrah ‘āliyya wa-nmāra tmīt from them aba‘īd No one visits me or brings me news Lā man ya‘dharnī w-yazūrnī ījīb al- bishāra
As with Guerouabi’s other song, “Wahdani Gharib,” this text continues with a series of references to place-names, neighborhoods, and even artistic scenes across Algiers, juxtaposed with the pain of estrangement:
I miss Algiers and I won’t delay to Tawaḥshat al-bahja wa-manṭūlish return and tour al-Bahjda36 na‘amal dārū I remember how I would wander Atafkart kifāsh kuntu fīha namshī wa- nakhūl The city, all white Hiyya bayḍā kulha yā maḥlāha The shuyūkh, singing and talking Al-ashyākh annāṭqa taghanni tanshad wa-taqūl The musicians reciting poetry, the Mawsīqiyū ash‘ār zīd nagham al- guitar strings strumming with them awṭār ma‘āha
I and my friends, out all night Wa-ana ma‘a l- ḥabāb khalī l-līl īṭūl How could my heart support [this Kifāsh hada l-qalb yaṣīr a‘alīha wa- separation]? yansāha My heart could never forget the Al-warda al-bayḍā mā bi-ghāshī qalbi ‘White Flower’ (i.e., Algiers) yansāha
The text goes on to list the neighborhoods of Algiers, painting a mosaic of the city that sparks such vivid memories for the narrator: Hydra, El Biar, Sustara, and “the famous Bab El Oued.” This part of the text is left out of El Koubi’s improvised istikhbār, but for the audience members who know the song, its nostalgic implications remain. The juxtaposition of this opening text with the main qaṣīda, “Habiba,” demonstrates the two approaches of emplacement in sha‘bī performance within one, integrated song as interpreted by El Koubi. His freedom and
35 Religious holiday celebration 36 Historic pseudonym for Algiers
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authority as a respected shaykh, born and raised in Algiers just like Djaafri (in fact, his nom de plume is a place-marker for his neighborhood of birth, Kouba), grant him the creative liberty to combine the two texts as he sees fit. The fond memories of specific locales, expressed in nostalgic terms of the author’s exile, constitute what Pistrick terms “real-imagined” place of origin, or ideas of home to which individuals estranged by migration attach their personal memories and longing (Pistrick 2015: 101). Yet the nostalgia is understated in El Koubi’s performance—these latter couplets go unsung, merely implied through the mournful sentiment of al-‘Alami’s qaṣīda which follows the istikhbār. El Koubi's pairing of “Tewheshet al-Bahdja" with “Habiba" shows how classic texts from the malḥūn tradition are imbued with new meanings in the context of sha‘bī performance. The audience members singing along with El Koubi most certainly understand the former song’s back story, and so are able to bring their own experiences of migration to bear upon the emotion of the latter text, aided by their knowledge of Guerouabi’s biography. Just as likely, however, the song evokes nostalgia and sorrow for the loss of Guerouabi himself, who passed away in 2006. Thus, in combining the two texts together, El Koubi renders the latter more emotionally salient for the audience present that at that moment. Finally, this juxtaposition shows how the pre-reflective, aesthetic experience of the ineffable is paired with specific symbols of nostalgia found in the semantic content of song texts (Christensen 2018: 40-1; Leman 2016: 20). The multiplicity of individual interpretations applied to a single performance reflects Ian Cross’s notion of “floating intentionality,” whereby each individual listener can arrive at his or her own interpretation without disrupting the overall cohesive effect of shared musical experience (Cross 2008: 147). The varied, individual experiences of music’s multiplicity of meanings, combined with entrainment of emotions, encourages cohesion through participants’ “social emphatic response to music” (Christensen 2018: 53). The freedom to arrive at individual meaning within a shared experience of social bonding is reminiscent of the state of khelwa, which, while at its root suggests a state of solitude and separation from the rest of the world by losing oneself in the emotional ecstasy of performance, also incites social cohesion through the social empathetic response to the musical experience, or what Stefan Koelsch refers to as “co-pathy” (Koelsch 2013: 209). The capacity of sha‘bī texts to incite emotional response through ambiguous semantic references is also seen in the example of “Dirou Aouani,” cited above in Bouchala’s concert. 125
Instead of making reference to specific place-names, the text speaks to the creation of ambiance itself: The words I have to offer will stir an ambiance in my listeners (“my sirs”) Concerning love, I know how to speak of it well at the right time I fall into new love continuously, but with you, my public, I will be healed (i.e., even if I fall out of love)
Refrain: Set the dishes and pour me a drink so that I might be healed Oh, friends who know your limits in love, My heart attaches itself to you in love Be merciful with me, for I am enamored with your splendor
The text speaks directly to the creation of an ambiance through the poet’s skillful recitation, an act that will heal him and offer him reprieve from the incessant suffering of unrequited love. The nature of the text is ambiguous and opens itself up to multiple interpretations, according to the event, the singer, and individual listener. The “sirs” referenced in the opening bayt are either those listening to the original poet or, in the context of the performance, the listening public who were incited at Bouchala’s berwāli rhythmic change to stand up and dance. In addition, the text elides a love for the poet’s audience (in the context of performance, the singer’s listening public) with a deep affection for the unnamed beloved. Depending on context, the addressee could be interpreted as the poet’s beloved, the audience present to hear the singer or, in the Sufi context, the divine. This latter interpretation can be supported by final couplet, when the narrator implores God to heal and bless those for whom he cares deeply: Tell ‘them’ [my listeners or my Qūlūha niyya yas‘ad msākum beloved] sincerely that I wish their afternoons be filled with happiness Oh, God [“He Who Has No Second”], Yā man lālū tānī āh Yā mūl qudara He alone has the power
The multilayered and ambiguous meanings implied in the text of “Dirou Aouani” demonstrate the flexibility of sha‘bī texts to appeal to individual interpretations across varied contexts of performance. The celebratory tone struck by Bouchala at the start of his interpretation actualizes the ambiance spoken of in the poetry. And for the listeners in Paris, the
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text, although abstract, could be internalized as nostalgic longing for a specific ambiance of performance, or evoke particular memories from the first time they heard the qaṣīda interpreted. In this chapter we have seen how musicians and listeners engage in affective performance through the pre-reflective processes of emotional and bodily entrainment, while also relying on specialized knowledge and shared memories of place to evoke nostalgia and render these experiences meaningful. These two aspects of the performance experience reflect two related schools of psychological research on emotion and musical experience: constructive appraisal theories and constructive theories. The first group of scholarship argues that detection circuits in the brain appraise sensorimotor input and recognize the result as a particular emotion, contextualizing it to the individual’s present situation (Christensen 2018: 39, 47). Within this school of thought, Stefan Koelsch et. al.’s “Quartet Theory of Emotion” points to the importance of emotional percepts in musical experience prior to language (Koelsch et al. 2015). The authors suggest that emotional percepts first arise as “pre-verbal subjective feelings,” and are only later reconfigured into language through conscious cognitive reasoning. This model reflects Leman’s argument that expressive interaction with music “relies on ongoing, pre-reflective, back and forth corporeal articulations that mark and constitute the interaction,” prior to the reflective cognitive processes that associate experience with fixed symbols of meaning (Leman 2016: 3). As introduced in Chapter 1, I understand affect as this preliminary, pre-reflective phase of emotional cognition. Whereas feelings require prior experience and linguistic labels which then materialize as displays of emotion, affect persists in the unconscious, non-linguistic intensity of experience (Shouse 2005: 4). In this sense affects are “pre-personal,” implying that they exist in the abstract, prior to individuals’ ascriptions of experience as a particular feeling (Massumi 1987: xvi). As opposed to the semantic and personalized nature of emotions, affects act upon the subject as autonomous, external forces, felt as the body passes from one experiential state to another. To this end I have argued that sha‘bī performances in Paris are not simply emotional renderings of Algeria in diaspora, in the sense of restorative nostalgia for a lost home or construction of identity. Instead, the power of sha‘bī for its listenership, at least in what constitutes the musical interaction itself, lies in the immediate affective percepts of ecstatic experience, and it is the entrainment of this experience with other participants—rather than a focus on shared symbols of identity—which primarily creates the powerful ambiance that attracts aficionados to repeat the experience. 127
Nevertheless, the emotional experience of sha‘bī music also relies on shared, emotionally charged symbols of meaning through specific evocations of place, time, and musical lineage as embodied in the shaykh. Concepts of sha‘bī as a fixed tradition—bounded by norms of performance practice and a canon of repertoire—defies the enigmatic nature of pre-reflective emotional experience. Moreover, evocations of specific places during performances forge solidary among listeners as a people situated within an idea of the city of Algiers, whether that emotional experience occurs there or elsewhere. With these shared symbols in mind, the second body of research, constructive theories of emotion, claims that emotions are constructed as concepts prior to their experience. This is not to say that emotions are fixed entities, but instead emerge through a “process of meaning-making that develops from the effortless and automatic interplay of nonconscious affect systems, contextual memory, and sensory stimulation” (Christensen 2018: 55). According to this model, emotions are constructed as concepts prior to and during the musical experience. Individuals’ predictive processes of cognition continuously evaluate and predict their situation in tandem with ongoing sensorimotor perception, avoiding what would otherwise result in a sensory overload. As discussed above with regard to knowledgeable concert-goers, the gratification of one’s internal predictive models produces feelings of pleasure and gratification in the unfolding experience, a process linked to the brain’s constant maintenance of bodily allostasis and the pre- reflective, embodied responses to affective experience (Leman 2016: 188; Barrett 2017b: 28). Mark Johnson posits the rewarding capacity of successful prediction in his book on ethical naturalism, Morality for Humans (2015), arguing that our feelings of moral rightness arise from biological predictive mechanisms aimed at maintaining allostasis (78). In live sha‘bī performance, knowledgeable listeners are predisposed through prior experience and acculturation to interpret the voices of familiar singers through particular emotional states. In this way affect, and the learned emotional states it invokes, can either determine emotional experience through predictive responses learned via socialization or can function as initial, gut reactions to unfamiliar situations, such as unconventional performance contexts. Within constructive theories of emotion, Lisa Barret’s research brings together the importance of shared symbols of meaning as fixed in semantic ideas (and the source of nostalgic longing) with the emergent, variable, and pre-reflective characteristics of musical experience. Barrett argues that emotions are constructed through cultural concepts, through our own 128
individual psychological experience, and through the longer-term rewiring of our brains via experiential learning (Barrett 2017b: 34). Instead of viewing emotions as triggered by particular sets of stimuli, Barrett suggests that emotions must be constructed as concepts before we are capable of understanding an emotional experience as such. Her theory accounts for a dynamic brain adapting to new situations in tandem with the importance of fixed concepts that dictate individual perceptions of dynamic, unfolding events like music. Together, these two aspects account for the ineffable of expressive musical interaction which yields shared symbols of emotionally charged meaning, binding together participants in social cohesion. The examples of sha‘bī performance in this chapter reveal the capacity of singers to interpret sung texts that evoke both specific symbols of shared meaning and abstract affective states with the goal of creating a powerful emotional experience. The repertoire’s diversity of literary genres, time periods, and authors account for the presence of both types of expressive interaction. “Dirou Aouani” reflects the esoteric nature of Sufi devotional poetry, freely adapted to the context of musical performance where the nature of the “beloved” and the “listener” are open to multiple interpretations. On the other hand, Djaafri’s USMA soccer anthem evokes concrete experiences of daily life in Algiers. The soccer team, its affiliated neighborhoods of devoted fans, and the singer behind the microphone are all powerful symbols of place with the capacity to inspire feelings of belonging. These two extremes are contained within the sha‘bī experience, reflecting the music’s complex history and meaning for its committed listeners. I address this complexity in the final chapter by considering its implications for professional musicians and the continuing place of sha‘bī music in France. What happens when this music is placed into new contexts, with new listeners who are unacquainted with the shared symbols of its connoisseurship, lies at the heart of the debate over what it means for sha‘bī music to be considered a Franco-Algerian heritage.
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CHAPTER 6
PEDAGOGY, TRANSMISSION, AND THE SHAYKH’S AUTHORITY
“I’m a musician, so naturally, I want to share things with you,” Mohamed assures me as I set up my recording device on his living room table. He smiles and thanks his wife as she sets down an elaborate silver tray of baklava, cookies, metal tea kettle, and glass cups for the mint tea. Sabrina takes each glass and pours, gracefully raising the kettle a foot above the cup to allow the scalding liquid to cool on its way down to the glass. “The tea is an important part of the song!” he jokes. She guides his hand to the cup and cautions him, “careful, it’s hot.” We settle in with our treats and he continues, “After all, you, an American student, have come all this way to learn about sha‘bī. And so, it’s important that I share with you, and that you learn the right things.”
Mohamed’s words—and the intimate realm in which he shared them—reminded me that an ethnographer’s success in the field is largely dependent upon the generosity of his or her consultants, those expert practitioners who share their time to teach, correct, and enlighten. The bonds one develops in the field can ripen into friendships or even professional collaborations, but they are also laden with questions of authority and the responsibility (for both actors) of representation. For Mohamed, being certain that I learned the “right” things expressed more than his magnanimity. His remarks also reflected the primacy he placed on the ways I would share knowledge of sha‘bī with others and a long-term, internalized set of processes surrounding sha‘bī practice and pedagogy. In this chapter, I consider the competing, sometimes contradictory attitudes that surround the promotion and portrayal of sha‘bī music in France. Framing these debates are the contrasting views of two musicians, Mohamed and Hadi, whose opinions on the place that sha‘bī occupies in French society reflect their own subjective responses to racial stigmatization. While the ideas these men share about teaching, outreach, and publics differ, they align in expressive concerns
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about Algerian access to French social spaces and public assessments of Algerians living in the metropole. For the Algerian community, the stakes in this debate could not be higher. To tease out these tensions, I weigh interrelated questions of teaching and transmission of musical and poetic knowledge in sha‘bī. The sensitivities musicians voice about what they share—and with whom—take on particular cogency in diasporic contexts as they serve not only as pedagogues, but as de facto representatives of Algerians in the French capital. For Mohamed, the best response to these responsibilities entails openness and ready communication, an approach that bleeds into his experimental music making and his interactions with audiences. Hadi, on the other hand, opts for a more conservative cultivation of sha‘bī publics based on Algerian poetic heritage and mastery of Arabic. Both must also contend with notions of music professionalism and authority that run counter to sha‘bī’s identification as a popular genre. These ideas have roots than run much deeper than the colonial past, reflecting instead long-held ideas about music, transmission, and the shaykh’s moral authority.
Mohamed’s Mandole Class in Sarcelles
On a warm Friday evening in the spring, I attend one of Mohamed El Yazid’s group mandole lessons at the Maison des jeunes et cultures, a youth activities center in the far northern Paris suburb of Sarcelles. The center occupies the ground floor of a high-rise apartment building that forms part of Lochères, a high-rise apartment complex. Erected between 1954 and 1974, the complex was originally built to stave the housing crisis in Paris, including the flood of returning pied-noirs from Algeria after independence in 1962. Today roughly thirty-one percent of Sarcelles residents are immigrants (Andrieux 2016: 9). As Hamid cracks two of the windows in the rather spartan music room to enjoy the mild weather, the booming bass of Congolese music and the fragrance of roasted meat waft in from the kebab stand outside. Tonight’s crowd is small: Hamid, Sid Ali, Walid, and Sami sit in a small circle of folding chairs around their teacher. All of the students present tonight are young men and all are migrants born in Algeria. This is only the third or fourth meeting of the group, and although all the students are still novices on the instrument (Mohamed spent forty-five minutes during the previous class teaching the group how to properly tune their instruments), they appear to be making commendable
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strides on their assigned tūshiyya. Mohamed first tests their progress by asking them to play the piece together. He has taught them the piece by rote, encouraging them to learn the music phrase-by-phrase over the previous weeks.
Figure 6.1: Mohamed leads his class in rehearsing their tūshiyya (Photograph by author, April 2017)
Memorizing the piece proves deceptively challenging. The melody is highly repetitive and provides little structural mnemonic support other than an overall ternary form. On the final section, the group begins to speed up precariously and the unison performance breaks down. In the unfortunate ending cacophony, Hamid’s particularly rapid style of strumming cuts through the group’s sound. Mohamed goes around the room to offer feedback, first with a good-natured rhetorical question to Sid Ali, “You were a bit lost toward the end, huh?” and then with a praise to Sami for his progress. Finally, he turns to Hamid, “Hamid—you play well, but…” I’ve only known Mohammed for several weeks, but I detect from his interrogative vocal rise and characteristic pause that one of his extemporaneous, teachable moments is about to begin. He continues: Hamid, your tūshiyya is good, but sometimes you play it too fast. You must change your manner of playing—you shouldn’t be playing ‘brraaa brraaa’ (i.e. strumming on the mandole). When you play a note, you must leave space, because you’re 132
playing the mandole, not the banjo or guitar. And the mandole is not supposed to be played more than the other instruments—even if there are many singers today who play more than their accompanying musicians. In sha‘bī, there are roles: The violin has a role, for example. When there is a gap in the sound, we hear the bow of the violin fill it in. And the banjo is there to fill in the space as well. The mandole is present to accompany the shaykh. (Hamid, c’est bien ta tūshiyya, mais parfois tu le joues trop vite. Je veux que tu changes ta façon de jouer. Je veux pas que tu joues avec ‘brraaa brraaa’. Je veux que les notes soient évasées, espacées, pour [inaudible]. Parce que là tu joues pas d’un banjo, pas d’un guitariste. Vous êtes joueurs de la mandole. Et la mandole, il est pas censé jouer plus que des autres— même s’il y a beaucoup des artistes aujourd’hui, ils jouent plus que des musiciens. Le chaâbi…il y a un rôle ! Le violon il y a un rôle, heh ? Quand il y a un vide, on sente l’archet de violon qui va—qui comble un vide, qui met l’accord entre ça est ça […]. Le banjo, il est fait pour le rempli. La mandole il est fait pour accompagner l’cheikh.)
There are artists who sing and accompany themselves note-for-note on the mandole. And certainly, that’s a certain style of playing and it’s not for me to say what’s good and what’s not, ‘to each his own.’ But, when you play in this fashion, you limit the capacity of your voice. You limit the possibilities of expression with the words. Because we who sing sha‘bī are recounting a story. And to tell it well, you can’t be looking to your left and to your right at other musicians. (Il y a des artistes qui chantent, ils s’accompagnent note par note dans la mandole ! Beh…c’est leur façon c’est pas pour dire qu’il est bien ou que c’est pas bien, chacun fait comme il veut, comme il le sente—mais, quand tu joues exactement ce que tu chantes, tu vas limiter ta voix. Tu vas le bloquer. Et dès que tu t’accompagnes, tu vas donner la possibilité à ta voix de s’exprimer à tes mots. Parce que quand on joue…nous, quand on chante le chaâbi on raconte une histoire. Et pour bien la raconter, on va pas s’occuper de regarder à droite, à gauche.)
The most important thing is to have that “hit” on the mandole (i.e., a strong, single- note strum) and the darbūka—it’s the rhythm, after all! So, yes, we must respect that…After that, it’s the reading of our text that gives beauty to all that we do. Because, if we privilege the music in sha‘bī—if I begin to play too much on the mandole—I’ll forget my text. I’ll be too concentrated on playing and I’ll abandon the words. But in the end, the most important thing in sha‘bī is the text. The text is very, very, very important. There’s a message that we must convey via our singing. The text […] must have the highest place of importance. Then, it’s the voice of the shaykh, then the mandole, and after that it’s the instrument. That’s how it is! […] There are artistes who play only several notes, but when they sing, they are excellent. So this is what we need to strive for. One the other hand, there are many musicians who sound great with an orchestra and play well, but when they’re by themselves singing, they’re clueless. So, for us it’s the text that must occupy our attention. You are learning the mandole, so you need to listen to the sound when you play. [he demonstrates, playing the tūshiyya in clear, emphatic, single-stroked notes] When you play the banjo or piano you fill in all of the space—(Le plus important, c’est 133
d’avoir le « pas ! » dans le mandole, et c’est le darbouka, ou c’est le rythme ! Quand est censé respecter. Oui. Ça, oui. Et après, c’est le lecteur de notre texte qui donnera la beauté de tous ce qu’on fait. Parce que si on privilège la musique dans chaâbi—si moi, je vais commencer à jouer trop dans la mandole, je vais rater mon texte. Je vais être concentré sur le jeu, et je vais abandonner mon texte. Alors que, le principal— ou la principale chose, qui est le plus important dans le chaâbi, c’est le texte. Le texte il est très, très, très significatif. Il y a un message qu’on peut passer à travers notre récital, ou ce qu’on récite. Le texte […] il faut qu’il avoir une place haute dans le bar. Après, c’est la voix du cheikh, après c’est sa mandole, après, c’est les instruments. C’est comme ça ! […] Il y a des artistes qui jouent que quelques notes ! Mais quand il chante, quand il fait son récital, il est excellent. Donc, on retient beaucoup plus ça. Il y a beaucoup des musiciens qui jouent bien, il y a un orchestre. Mais, quand il commencer de chanter, de lire son texte, il est nul. Donc, nous, c’est le texte qui nous faut. Vous êtes joueurs de la mandole, donc…on a besoin d’écouter du son quand on joue. Parce que de la mandole on a le piano, les deux mandoles. Ils vont remplir tous les petits—)
Mohamed pauses mid-sentence with eyebrows raised. He grins slightly, as though catching wind of a thought, then continues, I will give you an illustration: Let’s say that you have a bowl—or a vase. We take some beads and fill the entire bowl. I show you and ask, ‘Is it full?’ And you answer, ‘yes.’ After this, I fill it with sand. The sand fills in the cracks between the beads. Now I ask you again: ‘Is it full?’ And you say, ‘yes!’ And then I fill it with water. I pour the water, and it finds its place! Thus, in the same way, we who play the mandole allow space for the other musicians to fill in. (Je vais vous donner une image. Quelqu’un qui a pris un bocal…un verre. Il a pris des billes. Il a rempli tout le bocal. Il l’a montré, il a dit, « est-ce qu’il est plein ? » Tout le monde a dit « oui. » D’accord ? Après, qu’est-ce qu’il a fait ? Il a pris du sable. Il a versé. Donc, le sable, qu’est qu’il a fait ? Il a rempli les vides ! Entre les billes. D’accord ? Il l’a montré, il a dit, « est-ce qu’il est plein ? » Tout le monde a dit « bah, oui. » Il a pris de l’eau. Il a versé de l’eau. Donc, de l’eau a trouvé sa place et rentré. Donc on va— nous, qu’est-ce qu’on dit ? Les billes c’est le jeu de la mandole. Et le sable, les autres musiciens qui remplissent.)
Mohamed’s class offered a window into his approach as an artist and a pedagogue. He pairs the traditional method of rote learning with illuminative explanations, colorful metaphors, and life lessons tucked within aesthetic principles of sha‘bī performance. As always, his concern centers on communication, imploring his students to be mindful that the audience hears what is most important in the texture. In addition, the rehearsal location at a Maison des jeunes et de la culture (MJC) center aligns with his belief in cultural education as a means of societal uplift, as well as the MJC’s aim
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to provide facilities for cultural activities to underrepresented members of French society. In the following example, Hadi’s rehearsal also takes place in a community center, this one sponsored by the local municipal government. Unlike Mohamed’s rehearsal, however, which is promoted as a music class for the benefit of local youth and adults, Hadi’s rehearsal reflects a more exclusive ensemble that also uses public space, but for a private, closed group of amateur musicians. This difference, as I would discover, reflects the two musicians’ divergent responses to stigmatization.
Hadi’s Group Rehearsal of “Ya Waḥdani”
Shortly after our initial interview, Hadi invited me to attend the rehearsal of his amateur sha‘bī group at a community center close by the Cité des sciences et de l’industrie in the northwest periphery of Paris’s eighteenth arrondissement. He informed me that group membership changes constantly as musicians come and go, making any consistent progress difficult. Most members at the time belonged to a larger Andalusi association specializing in mā’lūf (the Andalusi tradition of Constantine and Tunis) that rehearsed at the same community center. Their rehearsal space was in the center’s basement and could only be accessed through a trap door in front of the stage of the ground-floor auditorium, an arrangement that forced us to interrupt a lively theatrical rehearsal so that Hadi, his co-leader Uthman, and I could descend the narrow spiral stairs to the cellar. Five other members filtered in throughout the rehearsal—no doubt to the annoyance of the thespians upstairs. These included a banjoist named Mehdi, Brouia on qānūn, and Myriam on mandolin. Hadi and Uthman split the rehearsal time. In the first half, Uthman taught the group two songs in Kabyle. Since most of the group members did not speak Berber, he was forced to teach the refrain of El Hasnaoui’s song “Arwaḥ,” (You Have Abandoned Me) phonetically. Hadi then took over by introducing the sha‘bī song, “Ya Waḥdani.” The two leaders employed a pedagogical method similar to Mohamed’s that relied on responsorial, rote learning. After explaining the first song’s structure, Uthman demonstrated the principal melody in manageable chunks for everyone to imitate. We then took turns playing back our attempts to check for
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individual progress.37 In the absence of notation, Uthman and Hadi expected us to aurally learn the melody’s skeletal structure and then add appropriate embellishments. Despite the group’s volunteer status, membership required an invitation from one of the two leaders. Moreover, the formality of the rehearsal contrasted with other musical gatherings I had attended, driven by Hadi’s push to elevate the group to a level suitable for public performance. During our interview the previous week, Hadi expressed his hope that the group would soon be ready to perform at a small café in Paris; talk of a potential concert date in May brought newfound pressure on everyone to adequately learn the repertoire. Despite these developments, Hadi insisted to me that the group’s main purpose was not to promote sha‘bī to the general public, but “simply to gather a group, share something together, and to carry on the cultural heritage.” His pedagogical goals, then, had more to do with the intra-musical experiences of ensemble members rather than with musical outreach to or performance for audiences with variable degrees of knowledge about sha‘bī.
Legacies of Maghribi Stigmatization in France
When ensemble leaders like Mohamed and Hadi deal with the demands of public performance, they are contending with more than the varying levels of musical mastery among their students or collaborators. As North Africans in France, they navigate a performative terrain that has been shaped by a history of stigmatization through governmental structures and mediatization. Indeed, immigration policy, media coverage, and cultural attitudes have all shaped the ways in which Algerians and their French-born children have been perceived by broader society. From unemployed laborers, to juvenile delinquents, to unassimilated Muslims, these shifting stigmas over the past forty years increasingly focused on an assumption of insurmountable cultural difference that threatens the social fabric and national identity of France, rooted in the ideals of universal republicanism that presupposes a unified citizenry. The ethnoculturally homogeneous French nation-state was never a reality, but a project of nation- building that privileged the dominant set of cultural practices as universal and a reading of
37 Glasser identifies this pedagogical practice as akin to ḥifḍ, the Sufi methodology of preservation and memorization of devotional texts through responsive learning with the shaykh (Glasser 2016: 57). 136
national history that, until recently, was characterized by an amnesia of France’s colonial past and its legacy of immigration (Hargreaves 2007: 13). Reprobation of North African migrants has coincided with negative and sensationalist depictions of the places in which they live. For historical and economic reasons, these places are concentrated in the economically disadvantaged banlieues on Paris’s urban periphery. Chantal Tetreault writes, “For close to forty years, low-income suburban areas have been stigmatized by shifting labels that belie an insidious semiotic stability in French media representations and political rhetoric” (Tetreault 2015: 12). As I discussed in Chapter 2, the economic downturn of the late 1970s turned public opinion against the presence of North African immigrants in France. As the manufacturing industry declined, Algerian migrants were disproportionally affected by unemployment due to a combination of economic marginalization, vulnerability, and discriminatory practices in the job market (Hargreaves 2007: 48-54). Given the association of Algerian migrants as a temporary, economic labor force, rising unemployment and the end of the Trente glorieuses38 rendered their continued presence increasingly problematic in the eyes of the French public (Selby 2012: 32). Following the oil crisis of the mid-1970s, French media coverage and political rhetoric increasingly referred to les arabes as the cause of high unemployment and France’s economic ills (Tetreault 2015: 3). By the 1980s, the cités like Sarcelles in which Mohamed held his class became symbols of France’s social malaise. While their parents found these accommodations to be a reprieve from the shantytowns they left in the 1960s, second-generation migrant youth felt trapped in the bullseye of French public stigmatization and socioeconomic marginalization, while at the same time spatially removed from the center of French society. Negative media portrayals dominant at this time painted the so-called banlieues chaudes as “representations of crime, scholastic failure, and drug addiction (Tetreault 1992, cited in Tetreault 2015: 12). Originally built close to the factories and industrial centers that employed them on the periphery of the city, these complexes left migrants who lived in them after 1975 feeling socially isolated on the city’s margins, economically disadvantaged and subject to higher-than-average rates of unemployment. Amidst the perilous economic climate, immigration of “unassimilable” populations was cast as a threat
38 The Trente glorieuses refers to the era of economic growth and prosperity in France, starting with the post-WWII Marshall Plan and lasting roughly until the oil crisis of 1973. 137
to national identity, and by the mid-1980s integration of France’s migrant population had become a key political issue (Hargreaves 2007: 141). By the 1990s, the locus of public resentment toward foreigners shifted from an economic basis to fear of the Muslim Other. The Far-Right political party Le Front National profited from a greater acceptance of nationalist rhetoric in mainstream political discourse and capitalized on the growing fear of unassimilated, Muslim North Africans as a threat to France’s national security and identity. The FN centered its effective anti-immigration policy on the fundamental incommensurability of French and Muslim culture. The stance asserted a racist rhetoric couched in non-racists terms. Its line of reasoning appealed to France’s republican ethos by arguing that Muslim immigrants from North Africa are both unwilling and unable to fully integrate into the universalist model of French society (Davies 1995: 148). Public fear of Paris’s migrant suburbs was further galvanized in 2005 when riots erupted in banlieues across France. FN leadership felt vindicated for their warnings of the failure of immigrant assimilation when then-Interior Minister Nicholas Sarkozy famously called for the “deportation of all foreigners” who participated in the violence, included those with residency permits (Shields 2007: 313). Sarkozy’s framing of the 2005 riots broadcasted a conception of the banlieues as bastions of anti-French sentiment and containers of migrant youth whose cultural differences were insurmountable, rather than products of systemic social segregation and economic disadvantage. Today, mention of the banlieues evokes spaces of danger and alterity. Their place in the public imagination, and the socioeconomic realities faced by those who reside in them, contribute to the social alienation felt by the North African community. Geographer Mustafa Dikeç argues that urban rehabilitation programs in France’s banlieues reinforce negative images of the immigrant suburb, thereby fulfilling narratives of inevitable alienation and youth delinquency that must in turn be addressed by harsher edicts and judicial punishment (Dikeç 2007:5). In her ethnography of immigrant-origin youth from the banlieue of Chemin de l’Ile, Chantal Tetreault obverses how “French political and journalistic discourses that stigmatize les cités serve to construct youth of immigrant descent as trespassers in their own neighborhoods, as illegitimate users of public space” (Tetreault 2015: 24). She notes that youth are under “constant threat of removal by immigration ‘reform,’ eviction, incarceration, and political exclusion.” Another 2015 study surveying migrant-background youth surveyed from the northern suburb of 138
Seine Saint-Denis found that a majority feel segregated from French society. This sentiment takes the form of perceived neglect from the education system, discrimination by police, and lack of economic opportunity and social mobility. While many interviewees see their neighborhood as a tightly-knit community, the majority also feel trapped and claim they would not live in them by choice (Douzet and Robine 2015: 44). The stigmatization of youth in urban spaces in France coincides with a long legacy of youth organizations in France, beginning with the industrialization and urbanization of France in the late-nineteenth century. (Loncle 2009: 118, 122). This includes the Dunois Center and its parent organization, the Ligue d’enseignement, as well as the Maisons des jeunes et de la culture (MJC), whose center Mohamed used for his rehearsals in Sarcelles. Founded by André Philip in the immediate aftermath of WWII, the MJC was conceived as a means of promoting éducation populaire (translated to English as non-formal or continuing education) for the purpose of fashioning “conscious and active” citizens (Besse 2014). As such, the MJC centers facilitated a variety of activities for leisurely enrichment. This tenet positioned the organization against the Ministry of Cultural Affairs, which by 1960 was moving toward policy that promoted notions of high culture through specialized artistic practice. As a result, the organization would remain under the authority of the Ministry of Sports and Youth (Dubois 2011: 395; Besse 2015: 32). By the 1970s the MJC’s centers became important sites of performative arts, representing a combination of their earlier model of varied cultural activities with more pointed sponsorship of artistic development (Besse 2015: 31). Following the economic crisis of the 1980s, the MJC moved toward a “social-cultural” model in response to unemployment, economic precarity, and social activism among youth, particularly among disadvantaged communities. Nevertheless, the organization remained committed to éducation populaire, and by the 1990s began sponsoring activities in new, “urban” domains including dance, music rehearsals, video editing, and digital arts (32-33). The MJC’s move also reflected a shift in the Ministry of Cultural Affairs’s own policy in the 1980s toward the valorization of popular culture (Dubois 2011: 396). Today, MJC centers continue to facilitate diverse programming that maintains the organization’s civil and political approach to cultural enrichment (33). Although the experiences of Franco-Algerian youth in some ways closely mirror that of my informants, their vantage points of integration and marginalization in French society are fundamentally different, as nearly all the musicians with whom I worked were born and grew up 139
in Algeria before migrating to France as a young adult. While faced with similar external stigmas and socioeconomic vulnerability of living in the banlieues, the minority youth in Tetreault’s study are confronted with labels that belie their status as native-born French citizens. What is more, the experience of growing up in Algeria fundamentally altered the perceptions of many of my collaborators toward any political or economic peril they may feel as a Maghribi migrant in France. Driving back from an afternoon at his apartment in Sarcelles, Hamid, Mohamed’s student, recounts to me the difficult decision to leave Algiers during the worst years of violence. Turning the corner onto the main peripherique to head back into the city, he describes his current job as a wholesale produce deliverer. In the middle of detailing his early-morning delivery schedule, he points out the new city park by his grand ensemble complex which has just started to return to its verdant state for the spring. In comparison to the realities he and his family faced, he tells me, life here in Paris is good. Hamid feels he has freedom to return to Algiers when he wants, but for the time being, he is content to continue his life in the banlieue.
The Visible Other: Artistic Promotion and the Place of Sha‘bī in Postcolonial France
Hadi and Mohamed form their opinions about pedagogy and presentation in response to social scripts imposed upon Algerian immigrants and those of Algerian descent, or what John L Jackson, Jr. calls “racial authenticity.” Jackson explains that as we internalize the stage blockings of the Other’s gaze,39 racial scripts “turn us all into mere objects of our own social discourses” (Jackson 2005: 15). In a manner akin to the pressures facing North Africans in present-day France, Jackson sees the dominant American discourse of racial authenticity as an essentializing
39 The idea of the “gaze” as a disciplining force of power on the individual can be traced to the well- known works of Michel Foucault. In his monograph on surveillance and power in modern societies, Discipline and Punish (1977), Foucault’s metaphoric use of Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon captures both the power of the gaze and the self-discipline undertaken by individual subjects, for fear of being surveilled at all times (Manokha 2018: 221). As with Bentham’s original intent of modifying prisoners’ behaviors within a physical panopticon, Foucault uses the concept to describe a utilitarian means of discipline in modern capitalist societies that encourages constant self-discipline and self-restraint among all citizens (223, 225). In his study of asylums and medical clinics in History of Madness (2006), Foucault would again remark on “the penetrating gaze,” this time as a tool of medical professionals for regulating the behavior of patients (Foucault 2006: 488). 140
and constraining force that compels individuals to fit a prescribed collective identity. Racial sincerity, by contrast, allows room for the Other’s subjectivity and intent. While still performative, it “presupposes a liaison between subjects—a subject-subject interaction, not a subject-object” and therefore allows room for individual subjectivities (17). Despite considerable differences between conceptions of ethnicity in France and the United States, John Jackson’s theory of racial authenticity and racial sincerity helps explain how Algerian musicians represent and promote themselves in France by simultaneously adhering to and deferring identity stereotypes. For while race may very well be “over-imagined as real” in American society (11), in France stigmas of the immigré perdure across multiple generations to French-born minority youth, even as ethnic difference is not officially recognized by the government. In my own study, musicians and aficionados respond to the pressure of racialized stereotypes of arabe, North African, or immigrant by advocating for sha‘bī to remain within intimate performances among the diasporic community of listeners, out of sight of broader French society. On the other hand, my time with Mohamed El Yazid would show an alternative response to racial authenticity through deliberate engagement and renegotiation with multiple subjectivities that collectively subvert labels of difference. Nadia Kiwan proposes a similar model to Jackson’s for understanding how French youth of North African origin negotiate their own subjectivities against dominant social scripts. Borrowing from sociologist Michel Wieviorka, she builds her empirical study on a tripartite theory of subject formation to explain how youth in Parisian banlieues successfully negotiate their identity: individual identity and universal values, community identity, and subjective identity. The subjective component recognizes individuals’ capacities for creative negotiation and assertion of their own subjectivities: “It could be argued that the capacity of certain interviewees to resist social exclusion and construct future plans in the face of racial or cultural discrimination demonstrates that they are actors who demand cultural and social recognition as full members of French society” (Kiwan 2009: 15, emphasis in original). Tetreault’s study examines how youth of North African heritage negotiate and appropriate racial stigmas from dominant national discourses into their everyday speech acts. Their creative and humorous language practices translate their “experiences into communicative displays of social agency” (Tetreault 2015: 2). At the same time, Tetreault observes that ironic revoicing of dominant racial stereotypes of les arabes, while an effective critique of social 141
inequalities, may also serve to normalize the experiences of racism and prejudice implied in the stereotype (67). Tetreault argues that these practices enable youth to negotiate and construct their identities as simultaneously “Arab and French, identities that are often constructed as mutually exclusive in mainstream discourses” (195).
“Paris Is a ‘World’”: Mohamed’s Response to Stigmatization
Thinking in these terms, Mohamed’s approach to his performance career in Paris reflects a racial sincerity that seeks to renegotiate the assumed boundaries of creative practice imposed by perceptions of his national, ethnic, and linguistic backgrounds. As both an immigrant and a professional musician, Mohamed measures his success as an artist by his ability to connect to the audiences in front of him, in whatever place and time in which he finds himself. In the process, he defies his own assumptions of others as well as others’ assumptions of him. His attitude reflects a desired sincerity in cultural transmission through accessible musical performance. First and foremost, he sees himself as a communicator: As I said earlier, one must be intelligent. When you’re an artist onstage, you must know for whom you are playing—who’s listening to you. Is it a young audience, or old? Women, men? You must adapt. Of course, you don’t sing only songs for dancing, but you must adapt: make the audience listen a bit, dance a bit. You sing in the language of today, because not everyone understands the words. (Autant que, je t’ai dit tout à l’heure, il faut qu’on soit intelligent. Quand tu es artiste, sur scène, tu dois savoir où tu es. Qui va t’écouter. Est-ce que c’est un public de femmes ? Est-ce que c’est un public jeune ? Vieux ? Donc, il faut que tu t’adaptes. Bien sûr, tu ne chantes que des chansons pour danser, mais tu adaptes, tu fais écouter des gens un peu, tu les fais danser un peu, tu chantes leur langage d’aujourd’hui. Parce que c’est pas tout le monde qui comprend les chansons.
When playing in Algeria, I don’t need to explain anything. Everyone’s within the tradition! But when I’m here, I expect to explain things. I talk a lot onstage. Let me explain—For me, to pique the interest of my audience, I introduce the musicians in a joking manner and I explain things. I put them at ease. (Quand je suis en Algérie, j’ai pas besoin d’expliquer. Tout le monde est dedans. Mais, quand je suis en France, j’attends d’expliquer. Moi, je parle beaucoup sur scène. J’explique—Pour moi…pour intéresser mon public, c’est de présenter, d’une façon rigolote, je leurs présente mes musiciens…Je dis des petites choses. Je les mets à l’aise.)
One time, I played at a bar next to the Centre George Pompidou with three musicians. In a bar, with no Algerians or Arabs—just some français, British and Spanish listeners—a real tourist place. And the bar was owned by a français! I
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played sha‘bī there one Sunday each month. And while I sang, I tell you there was no one who spoke—total silence in the bar. Complete silence! But, before beginning I introduced myself, talked about the music generally, the musicians, the instruments, and I translated a paraphrase of the song text—and when I finished, people would come up after and tell me, ‘I understood everything’—even if they didn’t understand all the words, they were prepped for the performance. […] They were able to follow the music the entire time. So, we played there one Sunday every month and, I tell you, we were sad when the gig ended. It was extraordinary! (Une fois, j’ai joué dans un bar à Paris, à côté du Centre Pompidou. Et en jouant, on était trois musiciens. On jouait dans un bar, on n’a ni un algérien, ni un arabe du tout—que des français, des anglais, des espagnols, c’est tout. C’est vraiment un coin touristique. Le patron est français. Une dimanche chaque mois, moi, j’ai joué le chaâbi là-bas. Et, pendant que je chantais, on dirait qu’il n’y a personne—un silence dans un bar, je te dis. Silence compet ! Mais, avant de commencer, je me suis présenté, je parle de la musique, d’une façon générale, des instruments, des musiciens qui m’ont accompagné, de ce que j’ai chanté. Je leur ai traduit l’explication globale, pas mot par mot, et je te jure que quand j’ai fini un truc, et un membre du public m’est venu de me voir et dit, « J’ai tout compris ! » Même s’il ne pas tout compris, il était prêt. […] Il était au courant. Nous, on y a passé une fois chaque mois, et on a regretté quand il était fini là-bas. C’était extraordinaire !)
As a musician, Mohamed’s role in negating social scripts starts with bridging knowledge gaps at his performances through explanations and translations and reaching out to those who are not sha‘bī aficionados. Above all, he seeks to discourage ignorance of Algerian culture and its legacy as part of French cultural history. Throughout our meetings, Mohamed made certain that I understood his assertion, “So you see, sha‘bī existed in France for a long time.” He believes this music is woven into the French social fabric, both historically and in its current cultural expression, which drives his passion to promote it among the broadest possible audience in France. In his words, for sha‘bī to survive, it must be made accessible to French audiences and embraced as a piece of French heritage. This commitment to openness—and to a kind of localized cultural diplomacy—fully informs Mohamed’s teaching and his performances as he seeks to bridge gaps of understanding. He repeatedly expressed his frustration over the lack of effort (or willingness) on the part of most sha‘bī artists in France to engage a wider public in their work. During our interviews, he frequently spoke of the experiences that led him to this conclusion: In my opinion, sha‘bī does not enjoy a large degree of recognition in France today because the people who are responsible—the singers—don’t know how to give this music the place it deserves. Why? Because they keep the music among themselves which isn't good. […] They are those who don’t understand—and more than that, 143
they don’t want to understand. And it’s unfortunate for us all, because it penalizes us. Because, they don’t want to share [their knowledge]. And it’s not good—it’s not good for the music. Because music is a knowledge that must be transmitted. (Le chaâbi, pour moi, en ce moment, il n’a pas une grande place en France parce que, si tu veux, ceux qui tiennent comme responsables—les gens du chaâbi—ils savent pas comment donner la place à cette musique comme il faut. Pourquoi ? Parce que, on a laissé cette musique juste entre nous. Et ça c’est pas bon. On n’est pas ouverts. […] C’est des gens qui n’ont pas compris—c’est tout. Pas seulement qu’ils ont pas compris, mais ils veulent pas comprendre. Et c’est un dommage pour nous tous ! Parce que nous sommes pénalisés. On est pénalisé, parce que… ils veulent pas le donner. Et c’est pas bon—c’est pas bon pour la musique. Parce que, la musique est un…un savoir-faire que tu dois transmettre.)
Sha‘bī musicians onstage in Paris, they’re singing in a language not of this country and so they need to explain it, to translate it. But this never happens, and it’s a shame. These people are excellent musicians, but unfortunately, […] 95 percent of them don’t do this—because, they never learned how to ‘exchange,’ if you will. You take your mandole, you play, you sing and that’s all. But, we haven’t learned to be open. When I arrived in France, I was fortunate enough to have a brother-in-law already living here […] who told me, ‘Paris is a world, not a little village. You have to be open, to listen to others, and to share with others what you know’—And I remember that to this day. (Les gens de chaâbi sur scène…un artiste quand il est sur scène et quand il chante en langue pas langue du pays, il faut parler. D’expliquer. Traduire des choses. Des gens de chaâbi ne le font jamais. Et c’est dommage. Les gens de chaâbi ils montrent sur scène, ils sont excellents dans leur musique, mais […] 95 pour cent, c’est les gens qui ne parlent pas. Parce que, ils n’ont pas appris à échanger, si tu veux. Tu prends la mandole, tu joues, tu chantes des textes c’est tout. Mais, nous n’avons pas appris à être ouverts. Moi, quand je suis arrivé en France, j’ai eu la chance d’avoir un beau-frère ici avant moi. […] Il m’a dit une chose que j’ai toujours dans ma tête, il m’a dit, « Ici, c’est un monde, c’est pas un petit ville. Tu as besoin d’être ouvert, d’écouter aux autres et à donner ce que tu as pour des autres. »)
One time I had an ‘ūd with me at a café. […] It’s not everyone who knows what an ‘ūd is, but I forgot that I was in Paris! And so, I was drinking my tea when a français approached me and asked me about it, saying, ‘Could I see it?’ And I gave it to him and he began to explain to me that he studied in Syria. As he started to play I closed my eyes and thought to myself, ‘Am I in Paris? Iraq? Syria?’ It was on that day when I realized that here [in Paris] you can find anything, learn anything. So you must learn to communicate with and listen to others. Unfortunately, for sha‘bī singers, […] simply singing and playing isn’t enough. One must learn how to present things. (Et, le jour où je suis parti dans un salon du thé, alors ici à Paris. […] C’est pas tout le monde qui le connait. Mais j’ai oublié que je suis à Paris ! Et, je prenais un thé et quelqu’un est venu et s’est présenté, un français. Il m’a dit, « tu as un oud ? « J’ai dit, « oui. » Il m’a dit, « je peux le voir ? » Celui, je donne l’instrument et il a commencé à me dire qu’il était formé en Syrie. Des études. Et quand il a commencé 144
à jouer, et ben, j’ai fermé les yeux, et je me dis, « est-ce que je suis à Paris ? Est-ce que je suis en Iraq ? En Syrie ? » Et c’est à partir de ce jour-là, j’ai compris que, ici, tu peux trouver de tout. Tu peux apprendre tout. Et tu peux partager tout. Tu prends et tu communiquer. Tu apprends à écouter des gens. Malheureusement, des gens de chaâbi […]. Chanter et jouer ne suffit pas. Il faut savoir présenter les choses.)
Mohamed’s assessment of Paris as a multicultural “world” in which communication is essential for survival counters two social paradigms: first, a dominant political prerogative that demands assimilation by means of social and political pressures, and second, an exclusionary gaze upon the migrant over the past century that has created a shifting set of social scripts, from temporary worker migrant, to juvenile delinquent, to dangerous terrorist, to unassimilable foreigner.
Negotiating Multiple Authenticities Just as Mohamed’s attitude reflects a desire for sincere communication and cultural exchange through his performances, his performing and recording career in France evinces his skillful use of multiple authenticities that originate from discourses he seeks to subvert. Characterized by creative fusions and collaborations in the world music circuit, his success in Paris reveals his skill as a professional musician in Paris’s multicultural musical scene, as well as his sensitivity to the creative possibilities offered by such an environment. In his performance at Le Shwa des artistes (see Chapter One), Mohamed progressed from classic sha‘bī repertoire to his own compositions with allusions of raï, Gnawa, and franco-oriental. I often observed him advantageously deploying his connection to place, citing his hometown of Saida as inspiration for his use of Western Algerian musical styles and his family’s Saharan origins as a personal connection to Gnawa music. Once in France, Mohamed established himself as an innovative force that emanated from the tradition of Algerois sha‘bī, yet unafraid to transgress its borders of convention. His upbringing as a musician outside of the heart of the sha‘bī scene prepared him for open engagement with artists of diverse backgrounds and interests in the cultural mélange of Paris, propelled by the favorable climate of the beur cultural movement and the burgeoning world music market. While not directly influenced by the beur movement, Mohamed describes his entrée into the Paris scene as one that started within his own community of Algerian contacts, which then allowed him to branch out into new artistic horizons, “When one arrives in a new 145
country, they search for someone from their own community. For me, this community served as a bridge to Paris and allowed me to traverse and find other things.” Mohamed has long shown interest in the musical traditions of the Gnawa, or Diwan, of south-western Algeria, noting during our conversation, “I mix, I provoke the purists a bit. Because I’m not into the ‘extremes.’ I love the mandole, darbūka, tar, violin, and piano—but I introduced the ginbrī in my first album—which is used by the Gnawa—along with the qarāqib.” (Moi, je suis un peu provocateur aux puristes, aussi. Parce que, moi, j’aime pas des extrêmes. J’aime la mandole, le darbūka, le ṭar, le violon, le clavier, let piano. Mais, j’ai introduit dans mon premier album le ginbrī, qui est un instrument qui est utilisé chez les gnaouas, […] et les qarāqib.) In 2000 Mohamed collaborated with the Paris-based conglomerate the National Orchestra of Barbès on his original song, “Touba.” A creative fusion of talent in its own right, the orchestra consists of musicians from Algeria, France, and Portugal (Romero 2018). The group’s founding members bring influences of jazz, Gnawa, sha‘bī, raï, and rock to create a signature sound that appealed to the image of Paris’s Barbès neighborhood in the diverse eighteenth arrondissement. The track opens with a typical sha‘bī texture of Mohamed’s solo voice and accompanying mandole but with the addition of the low tones of the ginbrī and the buzz of a duff, or frame drum associated with Sufi ritual. At the end of his opening verse couplet the texture thickens with bass, drumkit, and a pair of Gnawa iron idiophones known as qarāqib. Mohamed begins a lively call-and-response with the rest of the ensemble, singing the line “wīn ḥabīb jiranī” that prompts the collective response from the other Barbès musicians in pentatonic melody, reflecting the sound and texture of music for the Gnawa līla, or all-night trance ritual (Witulski 2018: 64). The track ends with the ensemble’s responsorial incantation on the phrase “līla Allah tūba,” fading out to a jazz horn line played on saxophone and supported by electric bass and percussion. Within one track, Mohamed’s arrangement flies across Algeria’s vast musical landscape and proves his ease in diverse musical contexts. By traversing multiple ethnocultural authenticities, Mohamed negates expectations that might have otherwise constrained him, to the extent that—in the eyes of some sha‘bī connoisseurs—he forfeits a kind of authority that comes from fealty to the established musical aesthetics of the genre, or the “purists” as he refers to them. Rather than succumbing to a single
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set of genre expectations from within the Algerian migrant community, Mohamed frees himself to explore wherever his creative energies take him and wherever professional opportunities arise. From a more practical perspective, Mohamed’s open-minded approach to music-making is also motivated by the need to sustain an appreciative audience. As demonstrated in his performance at Le Shwa des artistes, social scripts of ethnocultural authenticity can be manipulated to one’s advantage. In his study of the commodification of Gnawa music in Morocco, Christopher Witulski explores how musicians adopt multiple authenticities to market themselves to multiple audiences. As Gnawa music has become increasingly desired and commodified by global audiences outside of its ritual contexts, musicians trade in multiple currencies of their own subjectivities across varied circumstances, whether by evoking their ‘blackness’ as a member of the socially marginal Gnawa, their expertise as a pious Moroccan Sufi, or their savvy use of popular music aesthetics in the global marketplace (Witulski 2014: 19). The successful negotiation of multiple authenticities depends upon adaptable performance contexts. Witulski observes how, unlike other examples of commodified musical traditions, Gnawa musicians have been able to renegotiate the contexts of their performances to their own advantage without losing control over market forces: I witnessed a schizophonia40 in Morocco that commonly allowed for artists to remove and revise ritual weight or meaning from their musical products in an effort to orient their own authenticity in performance. They used recordings and performances to perform their own type of context, demonstrating that they were a certain type of Gnāwa artist. In doing so, they re-contextualized and reoriented themselves in different settings for different audiences and to different ends day in and day out. The logic of being a freelance musician proved a powerful strategy for navigating the complexities of professional life (39).
Witulski’s observations reveal the agency of musicians to adapt performance practice according to their professional needs by pulling from their multiple scripts of authenticity to appeal to different audiences. In the same way, Mohamed’s openness to new audiences and performance contexts constitutes a willingness to re-present and redefine sha‘bī music in artistically meaningful ways. Mohamed’s collaboration with the Orchestre national de Barbès
40 The term “schizophonia” was originally coined by Canadian composer Murray Schafer in 1969 to refer to the separation of sounds from their indexical sources with the advent of recording technology (Feld 1994: 258). 147
(2000), as well as subsequent project with the Gnawa-fusion group Diwan de Béchar (2005), opened him up to new creative possibilities. Upon arriving in Paris, he navigated the musical scene outside of sha‘bī’s closed network by working within the alternative logic of the world music market that privileged music synthesis from “exotic grooves” of traditions outside Europe (Feld 1994: 267). In truth, Mohamed’s use of multiple, alternative authenticities within a single project allowed him to escape the dialogic frame of French/Algerian, French/immigrant, native/other by tapping into an international circuit of globalized popular music of the period. Moreover, his artistic engagement in France reflects a personal commitment to a multiculturalist approach to countering racial stigma, a perspective anathema to French republicanism and public discourse on the integration of the country’s migrant populations. It is an approach that also departs from the practices of other sha‘bī musicians, as Mohamed himself points out. While sha‘bī music may not be, strictly speaking, a sacred musical practice in the same manner as Gnawa ritual practice, concerns over audience comprehension of texts and appreciation of the profundity of performance experience preoccupy other musicians when they are asked to actively promote it to non-Algerian, non-Arabophone audiences. This is the perspective of Hadi, whose opinions on promotion of sha‘bī music in France reveal a different, though more common, reaction to the alterity felt by Algerians in the republic.
The Penetrating Gaze: Hadi’s Response to Stigmatization
The same penetrating gaze that compels Mohamed to undermine imposed social scripts has given Hadi a jaded perspective on the viability on such a project. Hadi doubts there can be a sincere appreciation of sha‘bī by those outside the Algerian community, not only from a language barrier and lack of cultural contextualization, but also due to the general French population’s closed-mindedness toward Maghribi cultural practice. Like Mohamed, Hadi concerned himself with the future of the genre by advocating for its effective transmission. He did not, however, share Mohamed’s passion for making sha‘bī more comprehensible to unacquainted audiences. His aim seemed more insular, reflecting his perspectives on Maghribi culture’s marginalized status in France more generally. He identified two related but distinct problems facing sha‘bī musicians who reside in Algeria and those living in France, respectively: [In Algeria] you have a country which was colonized, and after colonialization ended it remained colonized—because the effects of colonialization are still there. After 148
colonialization, the people still had a ‘complex’ of being colonized that closed off cultural expression. People couldn’t affirm their own culture but looked instead to the colonizer. But after a while, they had a desire to reaffirm themselves, such that one could exist with one’s own culture. That’s what I think is happening in Algeria now—sha‘bī, Andalusi, all of these traditional Algerian musics are now making a comeback—because I—my generation, we did not listen to Algerian music. In fact, those who listened to Algerian music were seen as ‘has-beens.’ You had to listen to Western music—Michael Jackson, Nirvana, etc. It’s a complex. As for me, today I still listen to Western music—It’s music that I enjoy. (En fait, c’est un pays colonalisé, et après la colonisation, on reste encore colonalisé. Parce que la trace de la colonisation c’est encore là. Il faut du temps, que le peuple au départ—après la colonisation, le peuple a eu encore le complexe d’être colonalisé. Donc il n’a pas affirmé leur culture. Il a affirmé la culture du colonisateur. Et après un certain moment il y a une réaffirmation de soi—de vouloir exister avec sa propre culture. J’pense aujourd’hui en Algérie, le chaâbi, l’andalous, toute cette musique traditionnelle algérienne, sont en train de revenir, même—parce que, moi, et ma génération, quand j’étais jeune j’ai pas écouté de la musique algérienne. Et en fait, ce qui a écouté de la musique algérienne a été vu comme un has-been. Il fallait écouter de la musique occidentale. Il fallait écouter de Michael Jackson, Nirvana, etc. Donc, c’est un complexe. Mois, j’écoute des musiques occidentaux—c’est de la musique qui me plaît.)
In France, there’s different problem, because here Algerians are still viewed poorly. And so, in France, the politics of immigration said that you must erase your own culture and replace it with another. So, in other words, you had to do things discretely—that is to say, you couldn’t play a kind of music that comes from far away, because it would be poorly received. In order to integrate, in order to succeed socially in France, one had to become ‘as French as possible,’ so to speak. But, today, [musicians] are much freer to live among themselves, and—so, they stay among themselves. In Paris, that’s easy to do because at least there’s a long history of sha‘bī here, and, for that matter, forms a part of Parisian history—and since there’s a large Algerian community, there’s the opportunity to gather and do things together. (En France, c’est un autre problème. En France, les Algériens sont toujours mal vus. Donc, en France, la politique d’immigration c’était qu’il fallait effacer ta culture et rentrer une autre culture. Donc, il fallait être discret. Il faut pas chanter une musique qui vient de loin parce que c’est mal vue. Alors, pour s’intégrer et pour réussir socialement en France, il fallait être le maximum français. Aujourd’hui les gens sont beaucoup plus libres d’exister par eux-mêmes. Et puis, à Paris, c’est facile parce qu’il y a quand même une longue histoire du chaâbi d’ailleurs, qui existée comme une partie d’histoire Parisienne, et puisqu’il y a une communauté de pas mal d’algériens, il y a cette possibilité de rencontrer, de faire des choses.)
Hadi’s distinction between the challenges facing Algerian cultural expression in Algeria and France helps explain his commitment to the continuation of sha‘bī as a cultural heritage,
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without a desire to broaden its reach to the rest of French society. Although both he and Mohamed acknowledge the historical importance of Paris in the genre’s development, Hadi feels less of an urgency for this reality to be acknowledged as such among the non-Algerian French public. In his opinion, French society’s closed-mindedness provided justification for musicians to cloister their music. Numerous writers of postcolonial theory have addressed the psychological impacts of colonialism that linger long after political independence is achieved. Albert Memmi argued in The Colonizer and the Colonized that a true decolonization of the mind can only arise from a rejection of the colonizer’s language, from which derives the latter’s cultural system of thought and way of seeing the world (Memmi 2003 (1957): 151). Memmi’s work reflected that of his contemporary, Franz Fanon, who studied the psychological effects of colonialism on the colonized subject. In his essay “On National Culture” from The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon addressed the dangers of adopting “national culture” as the counter-hegemonic statement of the newly independent nation. The attempts of the “native intellectual” to promote cultural practices could only result in an essentialized and illusory vision of the nation’s precolonial cultural heritage. While this project may serve the immediate political ends of galvanizing the popular revolt against the colonizer, the “native intellectual,” or artist trained in the European tradition, “turns paradoxically toward the past and away from actual events” in an attempt to “illustrate the truths of the nation” (Fanon 2004 (1961): 232). This tendency to folklorize and essentialize arises when one internalizes the colonizer’s perspective of the colony as a space lacking history or valuable heritage. According to Fanon, such an individual will be unable to completely reject his or her European linguistic and intellectual training. Even when seeking to break away from the colonizer’s cultural heritage and valorize that of the colonized, the “colonized intellectual” still falls prey, in Memmi’s terminology, to the dualistic “psychical and cultural realms” of their identity. This idea of “double consciousness,” first coined by W.E.B. Du Bois to describe psychological result of othering experienced by African Americans, becomes a central force in Abdelmalek Sayad’s analysis of the psychological turmoil of the migrant subjected to naturalization. A migrant to France from Algeria himself, Sayad devoted his career to understanding and articulating the total social fact of emigration. In his estimation, the decision to accept naturalized French citizenship causes tremendous guilt among second-generation 150
children of Algerian immigrants, representing a betrayal of family and country that was won out of the bloody conflict of independence. At the same time, the naturalized postcolonial subject is haunted by the stigma of Other in the very country in which he or she is granted citizenship. This means that while the naturalized children of Algerian immigrants become objectively French through the jus soli granting of French citizenship, they remain subjectively alienated through social stigma, resulting in a self-conscious othering from their own bodies. Sayad writes, An unhappy relationship with the body (and, correlatively, with nationality) betrays the discomfort experienced by anyone who feels betrayed by their body (and also by their nationality) or by any part of the body that is subject to representation—to being presented to others and to the way others represent it. This is why the body or part of the body can become the object of a stigma. […] The discomfort one feels in one’s body and through one’s body has its equivalent in the discomfort one experiences in one’s nationality or through one’s nationality (both old and new) and, therefore, when faced with one’s naturalization. It might even be said that there are circumstances in which a body of which we are ashamed simply reproduces and expresses the discomfort and ‘shame’ that are bound up with the fact of being naturalized. Always uncertain of themselves, always correcting themselves, the naturalized constantly watch themselves, as though they feel themselves to be under constant surveillance, and tirelessly correct their behavior. They often run the risk of overdoing it, of, as one might say, going too far in the attempt to get it right (which is another way of betraying oneself), rather than through mere clumsiness or inappropriate behavior. (2004: 261)
The parallel Sayad draws between the stigma of the body and the “legally justified violence” of naturalization illuminates how the expectation of social scripts imposed on Algerians in France influences the spaces and contexts in which musicians choose to perform. For Hadi, the insularity of an ideal sha‘bī performance provides a reprieve from the incessant gaze of the former colonizer. The pressure of the gaze to ‘overdo’ performances of imposed social scripts discourages sha‘bī musicians from actively promoting their art to a wider French public. While Mohamed embraces perceived differences as a basis for inclusion within a multicultural vision of Paris, Hadi resigns to the persistent realities of postcolonial stigma and seeks to protect sha‘bī as an Algerian genre, away from the judging eyes of the misinformed French public. Hadi’s turn toward the musical heritage of his youth coincided with his first-hand experience of the systemic challenges faced by North Africans in postcolonial France. While acknowledging the prolonged presence of sha‘bī in France, his acute awareness of
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marginalization and discrimination deterred any desire to advocate for sha‘bī as part of French society. His attitude follows a legacy of sha‘bī music as the music of the alienated, young male migrant, who for decades existed in the minds of the French as a temporary laborer, invisible to broader society. As noted in Chapter 2, the closed nature of sha‘bī cafe performances among fellow migrants after WWII stood in contrast to the popular Maghribi cabarets in Paris, and later to the mainstream appeal of raï music and beur recording artists among the younger generation of French-born migrant children. His biography reveals the generational divide that informs the differing perspectives of these two musicians. As a young man in his early thirties, Hadi belongs to the generation of Algerian children most directly affected by the artistic stagnation, terrible violence, and stifling fear of the années noires. By contrast, the timing of Mohamed’s arrival in France in the early 1990s coincided with the rapid expansion of “world music” as a market category (including the massive popularity of raï in France), along with an appeal to multicultural diversity that reflected the waning years of the beur cultural movement in the mid-1980s and 90s (Feld 2000: 149). Mohamed evinces a practical and conciliatory approach to the pressures of marginalization and stigmatization—an approach very much reflective of the migrant experience in France. Hadi has also internalized these experiences, but his attitude reflects a greater exposure to the figure of the migrant as a container of social assessments, which has given him a particular kind of self- consciousness in his attitude toward the promotion of Algerian music in France. Behind any internalized stigma, however, Hadi’s reticence toward promoting sha‘bī to a more general audience also stems from his concern with informed listeners and proper transmission of musical knowledge. He suggested to me that the future vitality of the genre depends on proper transmission of musical knowledge to the few properly educated in the tradition, and not to a general audience. This specialized knowledge depends upon an awareness of the profundity of the text. His belief in the importance of understanding the literary heritage contained within the classic poetry of sha‘bī has shaped his own approach to music composition within the genre. As observed in Chapter 3, Hadi prefers to interpret previously unknown malḥūn texts, permitting him space to create new musical ideas while remaining within sha‘bī’s performative tradition of poetic interpretation. He views this option as a productive alternative to staunch conservatism and superficial mimicry among contemporary musicians. Both extreme positions, he argued, are detrimental to the future of the genre. 152
Hadi framed this polarity of extremes between musicians in Algeria and those among the diaspora in France. On the one hand, he argues, conservative chaabistes in Algiers cling too tightly to classic recordings of early artists like El Anka and fail to embrace change. This penchant is part of a larger conservative turn and artistic stagnation in Algerian society in the 1990s. On the other hand, according to Hadi many amateur musicians in France treat sha‘bī songs superficially, without an awareness of the textual tradition or a proper sense of its interpretation. He analogized this ignorant attitude as “couscous merguez,” a ‘Maghribi’ dish of couscous and merguez sausage that is popular in France but does not actually exist as such in Algeria. The dish, he explains, is inauthentic and represents a French appropriation of traditional Algerian cuisine. After Rachid Taha’s hit cover version of El Harrachi’s “Ya Rayah” in France, amateur musicians everywhere tried their hand at the catchy refrain. Most of them, however, did not understand the entirety of the lyrics, let alone the body of older malḥūn texts that inform the song’s interpretation: “You see someone in a bar playing the refrain of ‘Ya Rayah,’” he complained, “and they assume it’s all dance music. But in reality, only a small part of sha‘bī songs are meant for dancing.” For Hadi, the concern over the lack of understanding of sha‘bī’s poetic tradition among amateur musicians mirrors his reluctance to share this tradition with uninformed audiences in France. His comments on the vagaries of amateur musicians in France, who imitate without fully understanding texts or performance practice, led me to consider the question of authority in contemporary sha‘bī pedagogy. Inasmuch as Hadi’s reservations toward promoting sha‘bī to broader audiences are predicated on the importance of proper training on the part of musicians and listeners, the question of transmission informs the debate over sharing this music with uninformed listeners and whether the genre can exist in the public sphere in the same fashion as other popular music genres in France, or whether sha‘bī is best suited to remain among connoisseurs who understand and appreciate the music’s profound meaning.
“Today, There Are No Poets”: The Shaykh and Responsibilities of Transmission
Just before leaving Paris, I met with my informant and friend Youssef a final time to share my findings with him before my return to the United States. We met in an Algerian-owned café close to the Place de la République. As I walked through the glass door my eyes drew to the
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Americana backwall above the leather booths, filled to the ceiling with memorabilia from the United States and its automobile culture: expired license plates from Michigan and Alaska, a metal road sign for “Route 66,” and small American flags just above the beer taps behind the bar. A fitting spot indeed for our final meeting, but I could hardly believe my time in France was soon coming to an end. Youssef introduced me to the bartender and one of the ‘regulars’ from the quartier. We chatted for a minute then found our seats by the window and viewed the rush hour traffic through the busy intersection just outside. On the tail-end of what had proven to be a productive few months, I was excited to tell Youssef of my new discoveries and insights shared by other interlocutors. After all that we had already discussed, I now wanted to get his perspective on the future of sha‘bī music—and he seemed like the ideal person to ask. As a young and talented amateur musician with a great personal investment in Algerian music, how did he see his own place in the shadow of the great shuyūkh? Do their accomplishments leave any room for creative freedom, or is the period of innovation closed, as was claimed by the orientalist Jules Rouanet regarding the Andalusi nūba over 100 years earlier? When broached with the question of innovation in sha‘bī today, Youssef stressed the importance of song texts but advocated for new poetry to be written by contemporary songwriters: Many musicians today are virtuosos. They master the banjo, the mandole, and when you play with them in an orchestra they are impressive—but they don’t know the text. There aren’t any lyricists [today] who write. No poets. Over the past twenty years I haven’t seen new sha‘bī songs—with the exception of Matoub Lounès, who died.41 (Dans le plan instrumental, il y a des gens actuellement qui sont des virtuoses. Donc, ils prennent, ils maîtrisent le banjo, et quand tu joues avec eux dans un orchestre ils sont formidables, mais il [ne connaissent pas] les textes. Il n’y a pas des gens paroliers qui écrivent. Pas de poètes. En tout cas, ces vingt dernières années j’ai pas vu une chanson chaâbi—à part que Matoub Lounès qui est décédé.)
I press him to explain the paucity of contemporary sha‘bī poets. He responds, I don’t know, perhaps they are satisfied with the patrimoine already. Also, artists aren’t as courageous to work on new songs […]. All of the great maestros of the past fifty years, each has left his mark. They sang about all areas of life: they sang of exile, love, family, misery, such that I feel it’s courageous for artists today to try and offer something new, because les anciens ont tout fait (the elders have already done
41 Lounès Matoub was a Kabyle Algerian singer/songwriter and political activist who was assassinated by Islamist militants. He is regarded as a martyr for the cause of Berber cultural identity and political autonomy. 154
everything). (Moi, je ne sais pas, peut-être parce que les gens sont satisfaits au patrimoine qui est déjà existant. Ou bien, les artistes sont pas aussi courageux de travailler des nouvelles chansons […]. Tous les grands maîtres que je connais ces cinquante dernières années, chacun a apporté sa tâche. Ils ont chanté sur tout. Ils ont chanté sur l’exile, ils ont chanté sur l’amour, ils ont chanté sur la famille, sur la misère, et ce que je trouve, c’est pas assez courageux, les artistes d’apporter un nouveau—ça veut dire, ils peuvent pas sortir—c’est comme si les anciens ont tout fait.)
Youssef’s assessment hinges on the proper transmission of musical knowledge through informed sources. With Mohamed and Hadi’s pedagogical philosophies in mind, I ask him whether he thinks it would be better for budding musicians to study within small, informal groups instead of more structured learning training at conservatories. Given his self-taught background as an amateur musician accustomed to informal settings I think I already know the answer, but to my surprise he replies, No, because if you have the chance there [in Algeria] to study with the greats, the shuyūkh, [it’s much better]. What’s important is that you find someone who experienced the past, who ‘rubbed shoulders’ with the ‘greats,’ and who transmits his knowledge. Alors, I know of little groups [in Algeria] which are created for their own enjoyment and that’s all […]. They don’t know the real history of sha‘bī. The things that are important, unfortunately, they don’t know very much about that which gets ‘to the heart’ of sha‘bī. For the promotion of sha‘bī music, it’s necessary to include large orchestras and the associations run by the great maîtres. Take Sid Ahmed Serri, for instance […].The nūbāt recordings of Serri are very well known. Did you hear about the violinist who was killed in the Bataclan? He was a disciple of Sidi Ahmed Serri. (Si tu as la chance avec les shuyūkh…C’est qui est le plus important, c’est de trouver quelqu’un qui a vécu la passée, qui a côtoyé les grands, et qui transmet son savoir. Donc, je connais les petits groupes qui se trainent comme ça, mais ils sont juste pour sa propre volonté, c’est tout. Ils connaissent pas la vraie histoire du chaâbi. Ce qui est important, c’est dommage, heh ? Peut-être il n’y a pas beaucoup qui connaissent [inaudible] qui ont percé le chaâbi. Pour la promotion du chaâbi, c’est inévitablement les grands orchestres les grandes associations tenues par les grands maîtres. Par exemple, Ahmed Serri. Les nūbāt de Ahmed Serri sont très connus […]. Tu as entendu parler le violoniste qui été tué au Bataclan ? Il était disciple d’Ahmed Serri.)
Serri was a specialist of the tūshiyyāt. And he had a school in the conservatoire of Algiers. If you went to the school of Sid Ahmed Serri, it would be certain that you would also know sha‘bī, perfectly. Not like the little groups on their own who just work [from their own inclinations]. (Il était spécialiste dans les tūshiyyāt. Par exemple, il a eu une école au conservatoire d’Alger. Si tu mettais l’école d’Ahmed Serri, soit certaine que tu connais le chaâbi, parfaitement. Pas comme les petits groupes qui sont par sa propre motivation qui sont pas tenus par [inaudible]. 155
[He pauses to search a photo on his phone, then shows me the screen]
Voilà, this is him. Ahmed Serri. He consecrated over fifty years of his life to classical Algerian music. Great interpreter and teacher of sha‘bī for decades. So, there you have it. There’s a great difference between a group managed by Serri and one all by itself. (Voilà, c’est lui, Ahmed Serri. Il a consacré plus de cinquante ans de sa vie à la musique classique algérienne. Professeur et interprète du chaâbi. Il a enseigné le chaâbi depuis des décennies. Donc, voilà. Il y a une grande différence entre un groupe qui était promit par Ahmed Serri et un groupe qui est toute seul.)
Youssef’s response to my questions seems at first to contradict commonly held notions about sha‘bī music as a “popular” genre which eschews authority and institutional affiliation. The ideal of the amateur performer, gathered among friends in a domestic setting or family party, serves as a counterweight to the Andalusi association with its established tradition of fixed repertoire and formal concert settings. On top of this, for a “proper authority” of sha‘bī music Youssef chooses as the example of Ahmed Serri, one of most highly revered masters of Algiers’s Andalusi tradition of the past one hundred years. As Youssef points out, Serri is perhaps most well-known for a massive, state-sponsored recording project at the end of his life that included the entire corpus of known nūba repertoire from the ṣan‘a tradition of Algiers. Why not reference a sha‘bī singer instead? To understand Youssef’s comments, I need to examine how ideas of transmission and pedagogical authority flow out of the broader historical narrative of Algeria’s Andalusi music revival, and how these shared ideas run up against the populist ideal of sha‘bī. The idea of sha‘bī as a ‘popular’ tradition carries implications for the professional musician, like Mohamed, who operates under competing authenticities of amateurism, professionalism, and Sufi modes of authority.
Authoritative Transmission: Embodied Knowledge and Proximity to the Shaykh
In our conversation, Yousef asserts that transmission of musical expertise and textual knowledge in sha‘bī clearly depend upon proper authorities. Moreover, he argues that the most important qualification of a shaykh is his intimate apprenticeship with an established master: “What’s important is that you find someone who experienced the past, who ‘rubbed shoulders’ with the ‘greats.’” This ideal of apprenticeship through personal relationship with an older
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shaykh reveals a further parallel with Sufi practice. We have already been introduced to the ideal of intimacy, informality, and proximity in the relationship between shaykh and devoted pupil. In Chapter 3, evidence of this lineage was found in the vocal trace of the master in the grain in the pupil’s own interpretations of sha‘bī repertoire. In this present section, I examine what Jonathan Glasser calls the “genealogical ethos” of musical transmission from shaykh to devotee in the context of sha‘bī music. Speaking to the similarities of authority between the shaykh of Andalusi music and that of Sufi orders, Jonathan Glasser writes, “Both are authorities who embody a prestigious form of sacred knowledge that is derived from past masters and that the present authorities in turn pass on to their own disciples” (2016: 199). “The Sufi shaykh,” writes Glasser, is necessarily linked to a deceased spiritual authority. In the Maghrib, a common model for such a link is the maraboutic lineage, in which a founding shaykh is understood to have performed miracles, and whose tomb and lineal descendants are said to retain and potentially transmit some of the grace, charisma, or blessing (baraka) embodied in the founder.” (73)
In addition to a chain of transmission, Glasser demonstrates that the authority afforded to the Andalusi shaykh, as with the Sufi shaykh, depends on “face-to-face” transmission of musical knowledge through personal relationship with a previous respected authority. Glasser writes, As one aficionado said of someone whose musical authority he does not respect, the problem is that this figure had just listened to some recordings, read some transcriptions, but had ‘never really had a master, he never lived inside this music.’ (73)
Glasser argues that the genealogical ethos between shaykh and disciple in Andalusi music rests upon two main foundations. First, musical knowledge is held to reside chiefly within individual master performers; in this sense, it is believed to be embodied knowledge. Second, this embodied knowledge is derived from the flows (even if only barely or incompletely) to other individuals who likewise become repositories of such knowledge. Hence each master musician ideally stands at a crossroads of overlapping dyadic relationships, and, when the musician passes along repertoire to younger generations, he or she constitutes a link in further chains of relation. (79)
In my conversation with Youssef and other sha‘bī connoisseurs, I observed the same valuation of personal connections to respected shuyūkh in the sha‘bī tradition. Within sha‘bī’s historiography, of course, these lineages all trace back to El Anka. I personally felt the weight of such a connection when introduced to Amar al-Achab, the last living student from El Anka’s
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initial class at the Algiers municipal conservatory in 1959. I experienced this aura again several times in Algiers, when in hushed, reverent tones, a musician would be introduced to me with the starting line, “he performed with Amar Ezzahi.” or, “you know that the banjoist appeared onstage with Guerouabi, don’t you?” These interactions reflect the attitude of musical knowledge as embodied in the musicians themselves, serving, as Glasser states, as “vessels, texts, conduits” to the music’s genealogical history (Glasser 2016: 12). While there exist clear parallels between the nature of transmission in Andalusi and sha‘bī musical practice, the idea of authority becomes muddled in the context of sha‘bī due to the pervasive assertion of the music as a popular genre. The same interlocutors who conveyed to me the importance of proper authority insisted in the same breath on the music’s fundamental popular character—a populism in the sense of a music “among the people” that demands a certain informality, class-based, anti-establishment ethos or even amateurism. How to make sense of the seemingly contradictory ideas of genealogical authority and populism? The answer lies in the dual nature of populism as it pertains to sha‘bī. The first, which I have already explored in Chapter 4, stems from sha‘bī’s peripheral position within the hierarchy of Algerian musical genres that came to define it precisely against the classical heritage of the nūba. I have already noted the hagiographic rendering of El Anka’s biography in the collective memory of sha‘bī enthusiasts, journalists, and scholars. These print and oral accounts all instill the “popular” ideology in the historical narrative by upholding El Anka, its heralded progenitor, as a child of the Upper Casbah and its “disinherited population” of poor, largely Kabyle Muslims recently migrated from Algeria’s destitute rural regions (Théoleyre 2016: 398). While the larger- than-life narrative around El Anka would take the form of a populist clash against an established elite, Théoleyre assiduously argues that his musical developments should not be “reduced to that of a proletarian spirit” as such but rather seen as a more nuanced narrative of migration and social class upheaval in the colonial capital: first with the migration of El Anka’s family from rural Kabylia to the Upper Casbah of Algiers, and then with his move as a musician from the Upper Casbah to the more cosmopolitan Lower Casbah. El Anka participated in performances in the more affluent, cosmopolitan neighborhood at venues like the Cafe Malakoff and made a conscious decision to take on Arabic as his language of musical performance over his native tongue. Rather than interpreting the Kabyle repertoire of his parents, El Anka focused on the Algerois classical repertoire of the nūba and related genres. Thus, the designation for El Anka 158
and his music as popular arises both as a socioeconomic distinction rooted in his outsider status as a Kabyle migrant to the city’s Upper Casbah and from the type of musical and poetic genres he performed— ḥawzi, ‘arūbi, malḥūn poetry—which had been designated in aesthetic and linguistic terms as lighter, peripheral genres to the classical core of the nūba complex (400, 425). Consequently, within the origin story of sha‘bī music we have a distinguishing feature of the music and its shuyūkh as “popular” in at least two senses: first in the sense of the genre’s outlying position to the heavier nūba core, and secondly its attribution to a proletariat, migrant identity of its listenership. The question remains, however, what to make of the ideal of amateurism in sha‘bī. How can a sha‘bī shaykh be both a revered artist and an unpaid professional who cares not for monetary compensation? As argued in Chapter 3, the moral authority of the sha‘bī shaykh depends on his generous character and approachable demeanor. Azzedine frames this trait of personalism in economic terms as both a populist and democratic ideal. After identifying Dahmane El Harrachi’s griffe as natural, he clarified his use of the term “populaire” not as commercial popularity, but in the folk sense of “among the people.” He argued, The mentality of sha‘bī is not pretentious. For example, if you were in a bar, you could go up to Guerouabi and ask, ‘Shaykh, can you give me some qṣāyid?’ And Guerouabi, as a singer, would respond, ‘You may not pay me, I will give them to you.’ Because this is how it worked—if a master had a student, he had to teach him. He had to give them away without charge—not paid. That’s the mentality of sha‘bī. (La mentalité du chaâbi c’est pas une attitude prétentieuse. Par exemple, quand tu es dans un bar, tu peux aller voir Guerouabi est dit, « Shaykh, moi je suis chanteur, est- ce que tu peux me donner des qaṣīda-s ? Et, Guerouabi, en tant que chanteur, chaâbi, il l’insiste qu’il—il ne peut pas être payé ! Il doit le donner ! Parce que c’est comme ça il fonctionne. Si un maître avait un élève, il doit l’enseigner. Il doit le donner. Pas payé. Ça c’est la mentalité du chaâbi.)
A minute later he reiterated, Sha‘bī is “POP-U-LAIRE”—even if you have an artist like El Anka, if someone were to approach him on the street and talk to him, he would respond! Because it’s popular. Pop-u-laire!—For the people— because in our country at that time, you could meet artists in cafés and ask, “Shaykh, how are you?” and you wouldn’t get a response like, “Hey! You can’t talk to him without an appointment, etc.…” But with artists today, they might say that. You understand what I’m saying? (Chaâbi est pop- u-laire ! Même si tu as un artiste comme El Anka quand quelqu’un vient de parler avec lui dans la rue, il va le parler ! Parce que c’est populaire—pop-u-laire ! Pour le peuple. Chez nous, en Algérie, à l’époque, c’était comme ça. Tu trouves un artiste dans à café, et tu viens et dis, « bonjour » au cheikh, « comment vas-tu ? » il dit pas, 159
« Eh ! Tu peux pas parler avec lui sans rendez-vous ! » Mais des artistes aujourd’hui, ils peuvent te dire ça. D’accord ? Est-ce que tu comprends ce que je dis, cette réalité ?)
Azzedine’s assertion of the ideal shaykh as an open source, freely and selflessly giving of his knowledge to doting pupils in the spirit of populist accessibility, contrasts from the image of the traditional Andalusi shaykh outside of the ‘modern’ Andalusi associations—a figure whose authoritative status is tinged with bitter accusations of shuyūkh who hoard melodies and poems all the way to their graves, thereby exacerbating the perpetual attenuation of the repertoire. Thus, on some level, the notion of freely sharing without recompense seems to contradict the genealogical ethos of authority shared by both Andalusi and sha‘bī traditions of transmission. At the start of our conversation, Azzedine held the two seemingly paradoxical notions in tension when he warned me to only speak with legitimate authorities for my dissertation research. Within the same argument, he makes an intriguing contradiction between the ideal shaykh as someone who performs for ‘art’s sake,’ without concern for monetary gain, and at the same time the need to find a someone who has proven their authority through financial success: When you talk to people, you need a solid teaching, because it's your dissertation, after all. You don’t need people who are [just trying] to ‘fill the fridge’ […]. There are those artists who don’t manage to make ends meet and so they are forced to resort to performing in cafés just to make a living. (Quand tu parles avec un artiste— toi, tu fais ça pour ta thèse—tu as besoin d’un renseignement solide. Pas besoin de quelqu’un qui dise quelque chose pour remplir le frigo. Il y a certains artistes qui arrivent pas à vivre […]. Ils sont obligés de chanter dans les cafés pour gagner pour leurs vies.)
In the same phrase, Azzedine critiques those musicians who concern themselves only with making a living from their art, while also cautioning me away artists who “can’t make ends meet” in a professional manner as a musician. His comments reflect the tension of a career as a sha‘bī artist, who must balance simultaneous expectations of professionalism and amateurism, exceptional talent and sincere relatability. In a similar contradiction, Nourredine and Samir justify their praise for Ezzahi’s moral character by pointing to his willingness to freely give of his knowledge, even while upholding him as a valid authority. Abiding by the genealogical ethos of transmission, Nourredine’s respect for Ezzahi rests upon the personal relationship he fostered with him. It goes without saying that this relationship operates without any form of monetary exchange. As shown in Chapter 3 during
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my conversation with Samir and Nourredine, the mere speculation on my part of a contractual relationship between Ezzahi and one of his pupils prompted a spontaneous outpouring in defense of his character from Samir and Nourredine: his generosity, his exceptional sensitivity to those around him, and his uncommon relation with the universe. At the same time that Nourredine held up Ezzahi as one who “never took money” and avoided financially advantageous opportunities to appear in public, Ezzahi is regarded as a supreme authority who recorded some of the most skillfully crafted interpretations of the sha‘bī repertoire. The ambiguities of the ideal sha‘bī shaykh as personified in the life of Ezzahi—a working-class, approachable spokesperson of the people, humble craftsman, and yet at the same time a master artist, refined musician with a saint-like aura of moral authority—captures the essence of the musical genre in all its apparent contradictions. All of this puts the professional musician in a somewhat precarious, if contradictory, position. As I would discover upon my time in Algiers, the majority of respected sha‘bī artists work another job during the day and—financially speaking, at least—are only making a small secondary income from their musical activities. In addition, musicians complain to me that there does not exist a system of artistic management. As one connoisseur in Algiers informed me when asked about the professional careers of musicians, The thing to understand is this: musicians are their own managers, promoters, etc. Also, there isn't really a vetting process here [in Algeria] where artists must first past through smaller venues, etc. Instead, an artist might be seen onstage at the Opera d’alger one night and appear in a small family party the next. Because, the singers need to ‘win their bread.’ And, they’re not likely to make much more money at the Opera than from a marriage gig.
The shared assumption that sha‘bī artists are (at least in financial terms) part-time, semi- professional musicians, reveals the practical realities of the genre that mirror the ideological expectations of a popular tradition that persists among the people, outside of sustained institutional support. The economic realities of maintaining a full-time career as a musician aligns with the ideal of approachability in sha‘bī artists, who are just as likely to be seen on high- profile performance venues as your cousin’s wedding. These practical constraints also help explain why the small group of well-known artists cycle through the concert venues of Paris, while the small number of opportunities for smaller gigs in Paris (wedding ceremonies,
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circumcisions, Ramadan) precludes the possibility of a similar circuit of semi-professional artists working regularly in Paris to the same degree as in Algiers. For Hadi, sha‘bī music is best left in this semi-professional context, performed among the community of Algerians in Paris who know and appreciate its repertoire and performance traditions and who are motivated not by financial gain but by the chance to bring together community, to indulge in their cultural heritage, and to share in the experience of live performance. The complexities of immigration, the pressures of social stigma placed upon Algerians in France, and the challenges of performing sha‘bī music as a full-time musician make Mohamed’s career all the more admirable—and a rarity. His dual role as pedagogue and performer overlap—as is often the case with gifted music educators—ultimately coinciding in his self-assumed role as a communicator and bridge of cultural difference. This spirit lies at the heart of John Jackson’s notion of racial sincerity, which when practiced, “doesn’t mean we can see fully into the other's intent, but allows room for their autonomy, and their interiorized validity that outstrips authenticity's imperfect operationalizations” (18).
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CHAPTER 7
CONCLUSION: CONTINUITIES, EVOLUTION, AND RETURN
A year after my time in Paris came to an end, I sit on a rooftop terrace in Algiers in the working-class neighborhood of Hussein Dey, awaiting the start of a sha‘bī wedding soirée, or ḥafla,42 in celebration of a newly married couple from the neighborhood. The space, while open- air, had been closed off by a temporary wall of tarps, covered by large carpets and decorative sheets. In front of the small stage, rows of chairs fill the space all the way back to the cloth division separating the male space from the bride’s side, who along with female family members and guests will listen but not view the musicians directly.
Figure 7.1: Chetouane’s accompanying musicians under the tinda (Photograph by author, October 2018)
42 Approximated here as “wedding soirée,” Algerians commonly refer to the all-night wedding celebrations as a ḥafla (party). While the general term for wedding, ’ars, is also used, ḥafla implies the presence of a sha‘bī orchestra to animate the evening and points to the overlap between the wedding as ceremony and the evening as shared musical performance.
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The thatch-roof structure over the platform, or tinda, shelters the musicians who sit around a square table, covered with ornamental cloth and adorned by flowers provided by the host from his apartment two floors down. Red and yellow ribbons adorn the woven straw roof, symbolizing the colors of the local football club of Hussein Dey. My friend, Aziz, explains to me that this celebration is open to all residents of the quartier. In fact, he says, tonight’s singer, Mohamed Chetouane, is a native resident and local star of this neighborhood who regularly performs around Algiers. In the past, a family wouldn’t think to hire a sha‘bī musician outside of their local neighborhood. Instead, out of loyalty to their quartier they would turn to their local talent, a move that supported the local flavors of sha‘bī across different parts of the city. More and more men filter in to find a seat, while young men and adolescents line the back wall and fill in the remaining space up front as we wait for the music to begin. The difference between this group and audiences at public sha‘bī concerts in Paris, where men and women freely intermingle, is noticeable. I am told that because this is a traditional wedding, the guests are separated according to gender for the duration of the celebration. On this side, the male relatives and neighbors sit and watch the sha‘bī performance with the groom, while the bride and her entourage listen from the other side of the cloth partition. This separation allows the bride and her family to remain at ease among themselves during the performance. The bride and groom will not see each other for the duration of the evening. Chetouane situates himself at the center of the table facing out toward the audience, while to his left and right sit two banjoists, a keyboard player, drebki (darbūka player) and riqq player. He begins to tune, first droning on a D then beginning a soft improvisation in raml maya (roughly D minor) and his fellow musicians follow suit, tuning and adding to the heterophonic bath of raml maya until the banjoist begins his own istikhbār, passing the solo around the table to the other musicians. Finally, Chetouane signals a pause. Time suspends for a brief moment of silence, then as if by magic, the group begins in perfect unison the opening line of a tūshiyya from the Algerois nūba. My friend points out to me the smooth transition from tuning to performance, which serves the purpose of warming up the musicians as well as the audience and sets the ambiance for the evening. One might even say that the tūshiyya itself continues this preparation, priming the atmosphere and the ears of those in attendance for an evening of music-making and collaborative, intentional listening. I am seated just off to the side of the platform, crammed into 164
a narrow space against the carpeted wall with a half-dozen mélomanes, or expert listeners, who have also been invited to attend by Chetouane himself. As I am introduced to each one, I am told of their status as respected individuals among the musical community who know the repertoire and the styles of all the best performers. The men are obviously well acquainted with one another. They exchange jokes and lively discussion before falling into deep, focused listening as Chetouane’s tūshiyya progresses. They are the singer’s privileged entourage, not necessarily connected to the family of the groom nor the local quartier, but to whom the hosts afford respect and special attention as they each arrive in turn during the opening minutes of the performance. The tūshiyya accelerates to the rhythmic shift of the berwāli meter, and the youth lining the back come forward to fill the open space in front of the stage and dance. Several older men seated in the front rows also feel compelled to join the rising energy, standing up and steadying themselves before jumping into the fray. The music accelerates further to a spirited close, and the audience responds with cheers and applause.
7.2: Wedding celebration in Algiers - the dancing begins (Photograph by author, October 2018)
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Everyone settles back to their seats as the hosts bring the mélomanes a tray of tea and honey pastries known as qablmūs (“heart of almond” pastries). Aziz takes the opportunity to explain to me the overall structure of a wedding performance. The evening is usually divided into several sets called rivshda, separated by brief intermissions. The tūshiyya, I am told, is followed by a second set of insarāfāt melodies taken from the Algerois nūba but overlain with religious texts from the madīḥ in praise of the God and the Prophet. The set then shifts to faster music that accommodates young people who wish to dance for a while before they leave the ceremony; once they depart, the heavier, classic qaṣīda repertoire will comprise the following set. I realized we were entering into this rarified portion of the evening when the host dimmed the lights strung across the terrace, sweeping a hushed silence across the terrace and signaling the exit of the event’s more casual observers. Chetouane commenced a series of qṣāyid, all classic poems written by poets from the malḥūn repertoire. And here we return to where our journey began, to the voice of Amar Ezzahi. Chetouane began his second set with a classic text written by the Moroccan poet Ben Slimane, entitled, “Yā Sāḥ Zārnī Mahbūbi.” The poem is a request for forgiveness from God for past misdeeds and, according to my friend, includes the poet’s premonition of his own early demise at age thirty- three. As the singer explored the piece, his timbre, manner of delivery, and emotive gestures reminded me strongly of Ezzahi’s own recording of the same text. Aziz confirmed this, telling me that Chetouane is well known for emulating Ezzahi’s declamatory style and manner of phrasing. This performance, he shared with me, is a clear homage to the master who so influenced Chetouane’s own development as a singer and interpreter of the malḥūn. Furthermore, I discover, Chetouane’s banjoist that night had also performed with Ezzahi. By this point, after so many personal accounts, venerations, and fond remembrances since the start of my research, I felt that I almost knew the reclusive musician from Bab El Oued who so inspired a generation of listeners and musicians. Listening to Mohamed Chetouane’s performance that night, I was able to discern the palpable traces of Ezzahi’s vocalisms in the younger singer’s delivery—particularly in vocal slides and in the subtle syllabic emphases at the ends of phrases that evoke the drama of the text over an otherwise monotone accompaniment. Most of all, I heard something in the timbre of Chetouane’s voice that sounded eminently familiar. In our post-concert conversation, I learned this was no mistake—the echoes of Ezzahi’s voice in his own reveal the personal relationship shared by the two men. 166
Sitting under the stars in the Mediterranean’s crisp autumn air, I understood then the appeal of an ‘ideal’ ambiance for sha‘bī performance and grasped how the ebb and flow of energy in a concert hall mirrors and condenses the events of an all-night wedding celebration. The desire for intimacy among participants clearly originates from such an occasion that the entire neighborhood attends, where everyone knows one another, greets one another, and freely comes and goes in communal celebration of the ḥūma’s newest couple. The esteemed presence of the mélomanes, invited as the singer’s privileged entourage, affords the event the same critical legitimacy and historical consciousness as the connoisseurs I met in the concert halls of Paris. Finally, I experienced the supremely multisensory nature of the event as Samir had described it to me, with sweets, tea, smoking and inside jokes all contributing to the ambiance of intimate conviviality. And true to form in Algerian musical discourse, participants warned me this ideal was increasingly rare and fading with the coming of the new generation. Traditional rooftop terrace weddings, my host lamented, were less and less common in twenty-first century Algiers and would soon disappear. In other words, I was lucky to have witnessed it. Had I arrived at sha‘bī music’s ideal? Despite the undeniably exquisite setting of the wedding terrace, I could not completely discount the concert hall and restaurant performances I witnessed in Paris as mere nostalgic derivatives of a singular experience. In fact, one might say the shaykh in diaspora works harder, even tests his mettle, in striving to achieve the same affective power that so naturally flows from the wedding ambiance. If the Paris concert hall presents a less-than-ideal environment for sha‘bī performance to take place, the occasion only increases the shaykh’s burden to adapt his interpretations according to his audience’s diverging emotional responses. Unlike the neighborhood audience in Hussein Dey, the audience at the cultural center in Paris presents the shaykh in diaspora with a greater set of variables: an audience which may not fully comprehend the text, or an institutional host who may not understand the music’s subtleties of dramatic presentation. The performance of sha‘bī in diaspora, therefore, represents the musical form at its most creative and resourceful. In this dissertation I have argued that the power and attraction of sha‘bī music lies in the ability of the shaykh and audience to create an ambiance of intimacy and heightened emotional entrainment. The changing realities of life in Paris have, to some extent, reshaped musical aesthetics: performers must choose how to reframe their interactions with audiences in response to the formality of the concert hall to incite emotional engagement. Similarly, audience members 167
bring alternative subjectivities wrought by their experiences of diaspora. Texts, oral narratives, and the singers who embody them take on new meanings. The shaykh must adapt and respond with an awareness of how sha‘bī’s symbols of place and history are recontextualized and received by audiences in diaspora. Despite these differences, the conditions for an emotionally powerful performance remain the same. As the preceding examples have shown, the immediacy of emotional experience usurps the seeming dilutionary effects of distance from home, social marginalization, or the anonymity of public space. In Paris, as in Algiers, the music engages, moves, and enraptures. The universal themes of the poetry still capture the imaginations of its audience through singers’ affective interpretation, and the discourse of connoisseurs animates the collective memory and solidarity of the diasporic community. For while the music and its practitioners still point inexorably back to an Algiers—whether past or present, realized or romanticized—the ineffable power of sha‘bī music is found wherever there are active listeners who conjure an environment in concert with the shaykh, together creating an indefinable state akin to Victor Turner’s concept of existential communitas so desired by all participants. Thinking beyond this project, the reflexive, performative approach to musical experience I have followed has much to offer to the study of performance in diasporic contexts. By illuminating the immediate, embodied effects of interactive music making, we gain a more compelling account of musicking among communities of migration than abstract notions of minority identity formation. As Marc Leman argues, the attraction of collective musical experience occurs in the pre-reflective realm of cognition, before subsequent reflection on shared symbols of community (204). In the case of sha‘bī performance, the “short-term predictive processes” of the interactive experience are reinforced by a priori knowledge of the sung texts, allowing listeners to make associations between the affective delivery and familiar semantic content. The examples analyzed in this study show that texts are made emotional available to listeners through their skillful delivery by the sha‘bī singer—texts which touch both the particulars of locality and the universals of human experience. Combined with listeners’ own knowledge, the abstract themes of the poetry’s semantic content are realized in the timbral icons of the experienced and authoritative shaykh, rendering them accessible and relevant to individual experience. The outcome: personal experience and individual memory become entrained with an imagined community through emotional ecstasy. 168
Finally, I reflect on the question of sha‘bī’s place in Paris and whether the music constitutes a cultural heritage of Paris. The short answer is most certainly yes, as supported by the city’s long and rich cultural history of immigration. Things are not so simple, however, when I think upon the intense hold of Algiers over the imagination of its listeners. Can a performative tradition be considered a heritage of a place when it so strongly pulls the listener elsewhere? For Algerois Algerians living as expatriates in Paris, many aspects of their lives may be seen as peripheral to their city of birth—a sentiment that extends to the attitude with which one hears sha‘bī music while in exile. As one aficionado told me in Algiers, “Sha‘bī in Paris is just filled with nostalgia,” on the periphery of the music’s source. Nevertheless, sha‘bī’s very identity can be read as derivative of a source. As argued by my own shuyūkh, scholars Jonathan Glasser and Malcolm Théoleyre, sha‘bī is defined—at least in part—by its peripheral relationship to the Andalusi classical tradition as Algeria’s national patrimony. While not the dominant motivational force, nostalgia becomes part of the affective framework for performances in diaspora, where the daily challenges of immigration provoke longing for a home. Sha‘bī garners affective power through its emplacement in the neighborhoods of Algiers, and the increased distance from that home—“La Bahdja,” “Alger la blanche,” “Dzair al-‘āṣima”—augments and romanticizes it in the imagination of listeners, rendering them useful and powerful tools of shared sentiment in the moments of musical entrainment. It is also important to note, however, that this nostalgia seems just as present among sha‘bī listeners in Algiers itself, the very object of nostalgia for those in diaspora. For musical enthusiasts in Algiers as well, there is a nostalgia for a former epoch, for an Algiers that, somehow, has been lost. This extends to concerns of the continuation of the tradition itself. As a young Algerois taxi driver confided to me, “all the shuyūkh are gone now.” For many, Algeria’s very young population seems less and less concerned with sha‘bī’s historical figures, while in France, few French-born youth of Algerian descent find meaningful connection to sha‘bī in the way their parents do. And yet, this very concern shows the health of the tradition, whose aesthetic boundaries, canon of repertoire, and pantheon of great figures are challenged but not overrun by new contexts and new generations. What is more, this temporal nostalgia reflects the same ideology of loss that permeates the “very texture of musical subjectivity” in Andalusi practice: the ideal performance context, the golden epoch, and the last great shuyūkh, are all 169
unobtainable by definition. They continuously recede into the past, becoming tools with which to define the present and imagine a future (Glasser 2016: 234). The fatalistic refrain of the passing of the great remaining shuyūkh runs against the reality of so many young, talented musicians in Algeria taking up an instrument and jumping into the vibrant sha‘bī wedding circuit and the growing number of concerts in France with consistent and loyal patronage. But this tension may very well be the heart of a music that emerged from the social margins of a crowded, convoluted, ebullient, and beautiful city whose vibrant contradictions are only matched by migrant life in Paris. In this dissertation I have suggested that sha‘bī would not exist in its current form without the social upheavals of colonialism and the waves of migration it precipitated. My conclusion follows Abdelmalek Sayad’s understanding of colonialism and diaspora as two sides of the same process of economic exploitation, push-and-pull factors that precipitated one of the largest migrations in modern history. This legacy necessitates a nuanced and layered approach to diaspora that I have advocated throughout this document—one which accounts for the varied subjectivities of music practitioners, the intersections of ideological and economic constraints, and the conflicting stigmas of individuals identified as both postcolonial subjects and bodies of migration. Perhaps most importantly, I have considered the fact that practitioners, despite living in a state of diaspora, do not think of this music in primarily diasporic terms, or from a self- consciously “diasporic stance” (Slobin 2011: 102). For these reasons, in this dissertation I have embarked on a miscrosociological study of musical practice that offers a picture of diasporic experience defined locally and contingently on transient moments of performance. In summary, my characterization of diaspora as continued, postcolonial interactions that break down simplistic notions of home and exile are predicated upon the lived realities of musicians whose experiences are less split than interwoven with two places, two musical scenes, two homes. In other words, the shared history with France is continuing and will continue for the foreseeable future. This notion may seem problematic, given sha‘bī’s increasingly vaunted position as a national heritage of Algeria alongside the Andalusi nūba—which, of course, it is. Nevertheless, this music may be a perfect example of dynamic cultural practice that defies boundaries of nation-state, despite—or because—of its rootedness in place. Moreover, the genetic, familial connotations of the French term patrimoine elucidates the principal manner in which transmission of heritage operates in sha‘bī, irrespective of national boundaries: the body of 170
the shaykh. At the moment of my research, no one exemplified this quality better than the figure of Amar Ezzahi. Like a member of an extended family, Ezzahi’s influence continues to resonate out as a vibrational, connective entity that ties together disparate communities of listeners and performers spread across multiple locales. The vested interest of enthusiasts for ideal environments and best performance practices in Paris, and their continued web of personal connections across time and space, suggest the music will remain a valued and relevant tradition there for years to come.
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APPENDIX A
HUMAN SUBJECTS APPROVAL
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The Florida State University Office of the Vice President For Research Human Subjects Committee Tallahassee, Florida 32306-2742 (850) 644-8673 · FAX (850) 644-4392
RE-APPROVAL MEMORANDUM
Date: 8/17/2017
To: Christopher Orr
Address: 2626 E. Park Ave, Apt 4108, Tallahassee, FL 32301 Dept.: MUSIC SCHOOL
From: Thomas L. Jacobson, Chair
Re: Re-approval of Use of Human subjects in Research Paris Sha'bi: Collective Memory and Identity in the Algerian Diaspora
Your request to continue the research project listed above involving human subjects has been approved by the Human Subjects Committee. If your project has not been completed by 8/16/2018, you must request a renewal of approval for continuation of the project. As a courtesy, a renewal notice will be sent to you prior to your expiration date; however, it is your responsibility as the Principal Investigator to timely request renewal of your approval from the committee.
If you submitted a proposed consent form with your renewal request, the approved stamped consent form is attached to this re-approval notice. Only the stamped version of the consent form may be used in recruiting of research subjects. You are reminded that any change in protocol for this project must be reviewed and approved by the Committee prior to implementation of the proposed change in the protocol. A protocol change/amendment form is required to be submitted for approval by the Committee. In addition, federal regulations require that the Principal Investigator promptly report in writing, any unanticipated problems or adverse events involving risks to research subjects or others.
By copy of this memorandum, the Chair of your department and/or your major professor are reminded of their responsibility for being informed concerning research projects involving human subjects in their department. They are advised to review the protocols as often as necessary to insure that the project is being conducted in compliance with our institution and with DHHS regulations.
Cc: Margaret Jackson, Advisor HSC No. 2017.21794
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Consent Form for Participation in Research Project: Paris Sha’bi: Collective Memory and Identity in the Algerian Diaspora
You are invited to be in a research study of sha’bi music in the French Algerian community in Paris. You were selected as a possible participant because you are either an active performer of sha’bi music or are an enthusiast of the genre. I ask that you read this form and ask any questions you may have before agreeing to be in the study.
This study is being conducted by Christopher Orr, a doctoral candidate in musicology at Florida State University in the United States.
Background Information:
The purpose of this study is to examine the role of sha’bi music performance in fostering a sense of shared identity and cultural heritage among the Algerian community in France. By interviewing enthusiasts of this music, the project seeks to discover the impact it has on individuals’ lives and why it is important to them.
Procedures:
If you agree to be in this study, I would ask you to do the following things:
Participate in an interview (approximately 20-30 minutes), in which you will be asked questions pertaining to your interest and participation in the local sha’bi music scene, including concerts you attend, your favorite musicians, and any experience you have as a performer of this music. You may be audio and video taped during your participation in this research. The researcher will use audio and image recordings for data analysis. These materials may also be used in professional academic settings only (for example, at academic conferences or teaching sessions). These materials will not be used for commercial purposes. These recordings will be kept indefinitely, with the explicit permission of the participant.
If you are a musician who performs sha’bi music, either in front of others or for your own enjoyment, I may also ask you to examine and interpret archived recordings of old sha’bi performances. You will also be invited to participate in a group discussion of these recordings with other local sha’bi musicians at a mutually convenient time. Additionally, if you are a performer who gathers with other musicians to play sha’bi music, I may also ask for your permission to observe your rehearsals and/or participate in playing with you over a period of seven months. This is at your own discretion and the discretion of all other musicians involved. With the consent of all parties involved, I may also video record portions of your rehearsals and performances. You have the right to object to any of these activities at any time during the course of the research. As stated previously, video and audio recordings taken by the researcher will not be used for commercial purposes. They may be used in professional academic settings only, and will be kept indefinitely only with the permission of the participant.
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Risks and benefits of being in the Study:
The study poses minimal risks for participants. Given the focus of the project, my interview questions may include those pertaining to your own cultural and ethnic identity, as well as your personal political views in relation to issues of immigration and minorities in France. These opinions may be included in my dissertation prose, whether under the assignation of a pseudonym or anonymously. Secondly, our discussion of sha’bi music may address your own personal history or the history of your family. This could include your family’s story of emigration from Algeria to France, which may or may not touch upon emotionally difficult material. You have the right to refuse to answer any questions or to stop the interview at any point.
It is hoped that this project will benefit the participants involved and the French Algerian community as a whole. By involving sha’bi musicians and patrons in the collaborative process of examining historical recordings, the project may energize the current musical practice with newfound interpretations and knowledge of the music’s local history. My findings may also help community actors and policy makers better understand the issues and desires of the French Algerian community.
Compensation:
You will not receive financial compensation for your participation. I am happy to provide you with recordings of your performances and assist your ensemble during times of my involvement.
Confidentiality:
The records of this study will be kept private and confidential to the extent permitted by law. In any sort of academic report that I might publish, I will not include any information that will make it possible to identify the subject without their expressed permission. Audio and Video recordings will not be shared with anyone besides the researcher, except with specific permission from the participant. However, research information that identifies you may be shared with the FSU Institutional Review Board (IRB) and others who are responsible for ensuring compliance with laws and regulations related to research, including people on behalf of the Office for Human Research Protections (OHRP).
Voluntary Nature of the Study:
Participation in this study is voluntary. If you decide to participate, you are free to not answer any question or withdraw at any time.
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Contacts and Questions:
The researcher conducting this study is Christopher Orr. You may ask any question you have now. If you have a question later, you are encouraged to contact him at:
His dissertation advisor, Dr. Margaret Jackson, can also be reached at:
If you have any questions or concerns regarding this study and would like to talk to someone other than the researcher, you are encouraged to contact the FSU IRB at 2010 Levy Street, Research Building B, Suite 276, Tallahassee, FL 32306-2742, or 850-644-8633, or by email at [email protected].
You will be given a copy of this information to keep for your records.
Statement of Consent:
I have read the above information. I have asked questions and have received answers. I consent to participate in the study.
______Signature Date
______I give my permission to be quoted directly in publications under pseudonym
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Formulaire de consentement pour participer au projet de la recherche : Paris chaâbi : La mémoire collective et l’identité dans la diaspora algérienne
Vous êtes invités à participer à une étude de recherche de la musique chaâbi dans la communauté algérienne française à Paris. Vous avez été sélectionné comme participant possible parce que vous êtes un musicien de la musique chaâbi ou un passionné du genre. Veuillez lire ce document et poser toutes les questions que vous pourriez avoir avant d'accepter de participer à l'étude.
Cette étude est conduite par Christopher Orr, doctorant en musicologie à Florida State University aux Etats-Unis.
Informations de contexte :
Le but de cette étude est d'examiner la capacité de la performance de la musique chaâbi pour créer un sentiment d'identité commune et du patrimoine culturel au sein de la communauté algérienne en France. En interrogeant les amateurs de cette musique, le projet cherche à découvrir l'impact qu'elle a sur la vie des individus et pourquoi elle est importante pour eux.
Procédures:
Si vous acceptez de participer à cette étude, je vous demanderai de faire les choses suivantes:
Participer à un entretien (environ 20-30 minutes), dans lequel je vous demanderai des questions concernant votre intérêt et votre participation à la scène locale de chaâbi, y compris des concerts auxquels vous assistez, vos musiciens préférés, et toute l'expérience que vous avoir comme interprète de cette musique. Vous pourriez être enregistré en audio ou vidéo pendant votre participation à cette recherche. Le chercheur utilisera ces enregistrements en audio et vidéo pour s’analyse. Le chercheur pourrait les utiliser seulement dans les milieux universitaires professionnels (par exemple, lors de conférences académiques ou des séances d'enseignement). Ces matériaux ne seront pas utilisés à des objets commerciaux. Ces enregistrements seront conservés indéfiniment, avec l'autorisation explicite du participant.
Si vous êtes un musicien qui joue la musique chaâbi, soit devant les autres soit pour vous-même, je pourrais également vous demander à examiner et interpréter les enregistrements archivés de vieilles performances chaâbi. Vous serez également invité à participer à un groupe pour discuter ces enregistrements avec d'autres musiciens de chaâbi locaux à une heure mutuellement convenue. En outre, si vous soyez un artiste qui rassemble avec d'autres musiciens à jouer la musique chaâbi, je vous puisse aussi demander à votre accord pour observer vos répétitions et/ou jouer avec vous durant une période de sept mois. Ceci est à votre propre discrétion et à la discrétion de tous les autres musiciens impliqués. Avec le consentement de toutes les parties concernées, Il est possible également que j’enregistrerai des vidéos de vos répétitions et représentations. Vous avez le droit de contester l'une de ces activités à tout moment au cours de 177
la recherche. Comme indiqué précédemment, des enregistrements en vidéo et audio qui sont prises par le chercheur ne seront pas utilisés à des objets commerciaux. Le chercheur pourrait les utiliser seulement dans les milieux universitaires professionnels, et il ne les conservera indéfiniment qu'avec l'autorisation du participant.
Risques et avantages d'être dans l’étude :
L'étude comporte des risques minimes pour les participants. Compte tenu de la mise au point du projet, il est possible que mes questions d'entretien incluent celles qui sont relatives à votre propre identité culturelle et ethnique, ainsi que vos opinions politiques personnelles en ce qui concerne les questions de l'immigration et les minorités en France. Je pourrai inclure ces opinions dans ma thèse, soit avec l’attribution d’un pseudonyme soit comme anonyme. Deuxièmement, il sera possible que notre discussion à propos de la musique chaâbi s’occupe de votre propre histoire personnelle ou l'histoire de votre famille et son émigration de l’Algérie à la France, qui pourrait ou pourrait pas évoquer de la matière dure au point de vue émotionnel. Vous avez le droit de refuser de répondre à toute question ou arrêter l'entrevue à tout moment.
J’espère que ce projet bénéficie aux participants concernés et la communauté algérienne française dans l’ensemble. En impliquant des musiciens chaâbi et ses mécènes dans le processus de collaboration pour examiner les enregistrements historiques, le projet pourrait dynamiser la pratique contemporaine de cette musique à travers des interprétations et des connaissances de l’histoire locale de cette musique. Il est possible également que mes résultats aider les acteurs politiques et les décideurs communautaires à mieux comprendre des enjeux et des désirs de la communauté algérienne française.
Rémunération :
Vous ne recevrez pas de rémunération pour votre participation. Ceci dit, je veux bien de vous fournir des choses telles que des enregistrements de vos représentations ainsi qu’assiste votre ensemble pendant les périodes de ma participation.
Confidentialité :
Les dossiers de cette étude resteront privées et confidentielles dans la mesure qui est permise par la loi. Dans toute sorte de rapport académique que je pourrais publier, je ne vais pas inclure toute information qui identifiera le sujet. Les enregistrements en audio et vidéo ne seront pas partagés avec personne d'autre que le chercheur, sauf que avec la permission expresse du participant. Toutefois, les informations de recherche qui vous identifie pourraient être partagée avec le FSU Institutional Review Board (CISR) et d'autres qui sont chargés d'assurer le respect des lois et règlements au sujet de la recherche, y compris les personnes au nom de l'Office de Human 178
Research Protections (OHRP).
Nature volontaire de l’étude :
La participation à cette étude est volontaire. Si vous décidait de participer, vous seriez libre de ne pas répondre à toute question ou de quitter à tout moment.
Coordonnées et questions :
Le chercheur qui conduire cette étude s’appelle Christopher Orr. Vous pouvez poser toutes les questions que vous avez maintenant. Si vous avez une question plus tard, vous êtes encouragés à le contacter à:
Vous pouvez également contacter son directeur de thèse, le Dr Margaret Jackson, à:
Si vous avez des questions ou des intérêts concernant cette étude et vous souhaitez parler à quelqu'un d'autre à part le chercheur, vous êtes encouragé à communiquer avec la FSU CISR à 2010 Levy Street, Building Research B, Suite 276, Tallahassee, FL 32306-2742, ou 850-644- 8633, ou par courriel à [email protected].
Vous recevrez une copie de ces informations afin de conserver pour vos dossiers.
Déclaration de consentement :
J'ai lu les informations ci-dessus. J'ai posé des questions et ont reçu des réponses. Je consens à participer à l'étude.
______Signature Date
______J’accord ma permission d'être cité directement dans des publications sous pseudonyme. 179
Parental Permission Form for Participation in Research Project: Paris Sha’bi: Collective Memory and Identity in the Algerian Diaspora
My name is Chris Orr and I am a doctoral candidate in the Musicology Department at Florida State University. Your child is invited to participate in a research study on Algerian sha’bi music as it is performed and listened to in Paris. Your child is invited to be in this research study because he or she attended a Paris chaâbi event at le Centre d’animation Dunois. We ask that you read this form and ask any questions you may have before agreeing to allow your child to take part in this study.
The study: The purpose of this study is to examine the role of sha’bi music performance in fostering a sense of shared identity and cultural heritage among the Algerian community in France. By interviewing enthusiasts of this music, I will seek to discover the impact it has on individuals’ lives, and why it is important to them.
Part of this endeavor is to discern how these concerts facilitate the passing on of cultural traditions to younger generations. As such, I am interested in learning about your child’s personal experience and impressions of this concert.
The Risks and benefits: There are no risks to your child in participating in this study beyond those encountered in everyday life. The questions asked will not address sensitive or highly personal material, and your child’s identity will remain anonymous in any resulting publications from this study. Likewise, there are no immediate benefits to you or your child if he or she participates in this study.
Confidentiality: The records of this study will be kept confidential. A recording of your child’s interview will be stored on a private computer by the researcher and deleted upon completion of the project. However, research information that identifies you may be shared with the FSU Institutional Review Board (IRB) and others who are responsible for ensuring compliance with laws and regulations related to research, including people on behalf of the Office for Human Research Protections (OHRP).
Voluntary Participation: Your child’s participation in this study is completely voluntary. Your child may skip any questions he or she does not feel comfortable answering. If you decide to allow your child to take part, your child is free to stop at any time. You are free to withdraw your child from the interview at any time.
The researcher for this study is Christopher Orr. You may reach him at or through email at . Please feel free to ask any questions you have now, or at any
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point in the future. If you have any questions or concerns about your child's rights as a research subject, you may contact the FSU Institutional Review Board (IRB) at 850-644-8633 or you may access their website at http://www.fsu.research.edu. You will be given a copy of this consent form for your records.
Please enter your child's name and sign below if you give consent for your child to participate in this study.
Your child's name: ______
Your signature ______Date ______
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Formulaire d’autorisation parentale pour participer au projet de la recherche : Paris chaâbi: La mémoire collective et l’identité dans la diaspora algérienne
Je m’appelle Chris Orr et je suis doctorant au département de musicologie Florida State University. Votre enfant est invité à participer à une étude de recherche à propos de la musique chaâbi algérienne en tant qu’elle est joué et soutenue à Paris. Votre enfant est invité à participer à cette étude de recherche parce qu'il ou elle a assisté à un événement du chaâbi Paris au Centre d'animation Dunois. Veuillez lire ce document et poser toutes les questions que vous pourriez avoir avant de permettre à votre enfant de participer à cette étude.
L'étude: Le but de cette étude est d'examiner la capacité de la performance de la musique chaâbi pour créer un sentiment d'identité commune et du patrimoine culturel au sein de la communauté algérienne en France. En interrogeant les amateurs de cette musique, le projet cherche à découvrir l'impact qu'elle a sur la vie des individus et pourquoi elle est importante pour eux. Une partie de cet effort est de discerner comment ces concerts facilitent la transmission des traditions culturelles aux jeunes générations. De ce fait, je suis intéressé à l'expérience et les impressions de ce concert de la part de votre enfant.
Les risques et les avantages : Il n'y a aucun risque pour votre enfant à participer à cette étude à part celles qui soient rencontrés dans la vie quotidienne. Les questions posées ne seront pas s’occuper de la matière sensible ou très personnelle, et l'identité de votre enfant restera anonymes dans toute publication qui résultera de cette étude. De même, il n'y a pas des avantages immédiats pour vous ou votre enfant si nous participons à cette étude.
Confidentialité: Les dossiers de cette étude resteront confidentiels. Un enregistrement de l'interview de votre enfant sera stocké sur un ordinateur privé par le chercheur et supprimé à la fin du projet. Néanmoins, les informations de recherche qui vous identifie peut être partagée avec le FSU Institutional Review Board et d'autres qui sont chargés d'assurer le respect des lois et règlements reliés à la recherche, y compris les personnes au nom de l’Office for Human Research Protections (OHRP).
Participation volontaire: La participation de votre enfant dans cette étude est entièrement volontaire. Votre enfant peut sauter toutes les questions auxquelles il ou elle ne se sent pas l'aise de répondre. Si vous décidez de permettre à votre enfant d’y prendre part, votre enfant est libre de le quitter à tout moment. Vous êtes libre de retirer votre enfant de l'entrevue à tout moment. Le chercheur de cette étude est Christopher Orr. Vous pouvez le joindre à: ou par courriel à .Je vous en prie de n’hésiter pas à poser toutes les questions que vous avez maintenant, ou à tout moment dans l'avenir. Si vous avez des questions ou des 182
préoccupations concernant les droits de votre enfant en tant que sujet de recherche, vous pouvez communiquer avec la FSU Institutional Review Board (IRB) à: +1 (850) 644-8633 ou vous pouvez accéder à leur site web à l'adresse http://www.fsu.research.edu. Vous recevrez une copie de ce document de consentement pour vos dossiers.
Veuillez entrez le nom de votre enfant et signer ci-dessous si vous donnez votre consentement pour votre enfant de participer à cette étude.
Le nom de votre enfant: ______
Votre signature ______Date ______
183
Assent Form for Participation in Research Project: Paris Sha’bi: Collective Memory and Identity in the Algerian Diaspora
My name is Chris Orr. I am a student researcher from Florida State University. I am asking if you would like to take part in a research study called “Paris Sha’bi,” which is about Algerian sha’bi music. If you would like to be in this study, I will ask you about ten questions about your experience at le Paris chaâbi concerts at le Centre d’animation Dunois.
This study will help discover why sha’bi music is important to people in Paris.
Please talk this over with your parents before you decide whether or not to participate. But even if you parents said “yes” to this study, you can still decide to not take part in the study, and that will be fine.
If you do not want to be in this study, then you do not have to participate. This study is voluntary, which means that you decide whether or not to take part in the study. Being in this study is up to you, and no one will be upset in any way if you do not want to participate or even if you change your mind later and want to stop.
You can ask any questions that you have about this study.
Signing your name at the bottom means that you agree to be in this study. You and your parents will be given a copy of this form after you have signed it.
Name of child (please print)
Signature of Child Date
For additional questions or concerns please contact the researcher:
Christopher Orr Phone: Email:
184
Formulaire d’assentiment pour participer au projet de la recherche : Paris chaâbi: La mémoire collective et l’identité dans la diaspora algérienne
Je m’appelle Chris Orr. Je suis chercheur de Florida State University aux Etats-Unis. Je vous demande si vous souhaitiez prendre part à une étude de recherche qui s’appelle « Paris chaâbi » à propos de la musique chaâbi algérienne. Si vous voudriez être dans cette étude, je vous poserai une dizaine de questions en concernant votre expérience à des concerts du Paris chaâbi au Centre d’animation Dunois.
Cette étude nous permettra de découvrir pourquoi la musique chaâbi est important pour les gens à Paris.
Veillez d’en discuter avec vos parents avant de décider de participer ou non. Mais même si vous parents ont dit «oui» à cette étude, vous pouvez toujours décider de ne pas y prendre part, et ce sera bien.
Si vous ne voulez pas être dans cette étude, alors vous ne devez pas participer. Cette étude est volontaire, ce qui signifie que vous décidez si oui ou non d’y participer. Être dans cette étude dépend à vous, et personne ne sera contrarié de quelque manière que ce soit si vous ne voulez pas participer ou même si vous changez d'avis pendant l’entretien et vous voulez arrêter.
Vous pouvez poser toutes les questions que vous avez au sujet de cette étude.
La signature de votre nom ci-dessous signifie que vous acceptez de participer à cette étude. Vous et vos parents sera donné une copie de ce document après que vous l’avez signé. Nom de l’enfant (Veuillez écrire en toutes lettres)
Signature de l’enfant Date
Pour des questions ou des préoccupations vous pouvez contacter le chercheur: Christopher Orr Telephone: Email:
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Human Subjects Waiver for Research Conducted in Algeria
186
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FILMOGRAPHY
El Gusto. 2012. Directed by Safinez Bousbia. Dublin, Ireland. Quidam Group. DVD.
DISCOGRAPHY
Ezzahi, Amar El-. 1974. “Sali Trache Qalbi.” Track 2 on Sali Trache Qalbi / Dhik Echemaa Elli Hrakna. Production Boubekeur, 45 rpm.
Harrachi, Dahmane El- [Abderrahmane Amrani]. 1973. “Ya Rayah.” Track 2 on Elli Fat Mat / Ya Rayah. Pathé 2C 016, 45 rpm.
Hasnaoui, Cheikh El- [Mohammed Khelouat]. 1969. “Maison Blanche.” Track 2 on Ennahar CHI 45 115, 45 rpm.
Yazid, Mohamed El-. 1999. “Touba.” Track 5 on Orchestre National de Barbès, Poulina. Samarkand 724384755324, compact disc.
———. 2005. “Bismillah Nabda.” Track 3 on Diwane de Béchar, Gaâda. Samarkand SKD002, compact disc.
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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
Christopher Orr is a musicologist, pianist, and multi-instrumentalist. His research interests address music and affect, diaspora studies, and the musical practices of North Africa. Christopher received his B.M. in keyboard performance from the Pennsylvania State University, where he was awarded a four-year, merit-based scholarship for applied study in piano. He went on to pursue his M.A. in musicology from the same institution through the integrated undergraduate-graduate program, graduating with both degrees in 2013. In 2012 he was awarded a summer residency research grant for his thesis, titled “Songs of Discontent: the Kabyle Voice in Postcolonial Algeria.” After receiving the Master of Arts in Musicology, Christopher pursued the Ph.D. in Musicology at Florida State University. During his program, he participated in the 2014 National Endowment for the Arts Summer Institute: Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia: Literature, the Arts, and Cinema since Independence, and from 2016 to 2017 he conducted his dissertation research as an HSS Chateaubriand Fellow in Paris. His dissertation, titled “ ‘Come, Ask My Heart’: Voice, Meaning, and Affect among Algerian Sha‘bī Musicians in Paris,” explores the performance of Algerian sha‘bi music among the diasporic community in France. In 2018, Christopher was awarded the Boren Fellowship for intensive Arabic language study and further study of Algerian music in Algiers. His publications include a contribution to the Oxford Handbook of Music Repatriation (2018), titled “‘Pour préserver la mémoire’: Algerian Sha'bī Musicians as Repatriated Subjects and Agents of Repatriation,” and an entry in the SAGE Encyclopedia of Music and Culture (2019). Christopher has presented his research at conferences throughout the United States and internationally. During his time at Florida State University, Christopher had the opportunity to teach undergraduate courses in American popular music and music in world cultures. While completing his doctoral candidacy, he taught courses in American jazz history at Tallahassee Community College as an adjunct professor of humanities. From 2016 to 2018 Christopher also directed the FSU Middle East world music ensemble.
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