Among the Jasmine Trees. Jonathan Holt Shannon
heritage.7
What is it about contemporary Syria that allows for discourses of authenticity to flourish there perhaps more than in other Arab contexts? The turn to heritage in contemporary Syrian art does not occur in a vacuum, isolated from the social and cultural contexts in which artists and audiences engage in aesthetic experiences. Syrian artistic production and reception occur within the context of Syria’s relationship to the other Arab lands, and especially to Egypt. Moreover, many contemporary Syrian artists have studied at European academies, sometimes those of Paris, Rome, and Madrid, but more often institutes and universities in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Syria’s connections to Eastern Europe have been stronger as a result of military and economic cooperation. New York and Los Angeles, for their part, historically have drawn few Syrian artists and intellectuals. Thus, the work of postcolonial Syrian artists and intellectuals needs to be understood in these large circuits and orientations, both regional and global.8
Among the Jasmine Trees seeks to identify and explore some of the discourses, assumptions, theories, and ideologies of contemporary Syrian artists for whom the question of authenticity is an important determinant of their artistic practices. Many but certainly not all Syrian artists are concerned with heritage and authenticity, and even for those who are, conceptions of cultural heritage and authenticity vary and there is little consensus on what constitutes authenticity. In fact, there is more consensus on what is inauthentic culture, the most often mentioned example being the contemporary popular song. For that reason, the aesthetics of authenticity is constituted largely in cultural performances as a negative aesthetics. In addition, for many artists, the urge to work with heritage derives from its potential financial benefits as well as (or in lieu of) any innate dedication to heritage preservation or authenticity. Heritage pays, both in terms of local and foreign consumption of heritage commodities (especially so-called “traditional” handicrafts) and in terms of official sponsorship and patronage of heritage-related arts: paintings of the Old Cities, the “classical” Arab musical repertoire, folkloric dances, and festivals, for example.9
My analysis of the turn to heritage focuses on musical performance, though I refer to a range of cultural practices that constitute the contemporary Syrian art world (Danto 1964), including painting, poetry, and certain spiritual practices. With respect to music, I focus not primarily on popular music but on the performance and reception of the waṣla, a suite of instrumental pieces and songs in both classical and colloquial Arabic arranged according to melodic mode (maqām). Syrians of all walks of life associate this music with Arab-Ottoman high culture, the Andalusian heritage, and earlier Arab-Islamic civilizations, and across the Arab world it is heard as one type of Arab classical music.10 The genres of the waṣla include instrumental preludes (samā
In Syria, the waṣla is associated closely with the city of Aleppo, the traditional seat of music in the pre-modern Levant and still a rich source for contemporary musical performance and the birthplace of many important Syrian artists, including Ṣabāḥ Fakhrī, perhaps the greatest living Arab vocalist. For this reason, I conducted much of my research on musical aesthetics in Aleppo and with Aleppine artists, both instrumentalists and vocalists. Yet much of what they say about the music applies to musical communities and discursive practices in Damascus and elsewhere in Syria, as well as across the Levant. Readers familiar with the high-culture musical traditions of Egypt and Palestine, for example, will find similarities in my discussions of Aleppine practices and ideologies.
Although I do not focus on the performance of popular music—in the sense of Arab pop music and transnational and World Music styles—I refer to a variety of pop songs and the contexts in which they are produced and consumed in Syria because the contemporary pop song in its different guises features strongly in debates about contemporary cultural trends. In many ways, the popular songs are more “authentic” than the songs of the waṣla in that they more accurately and authentically convey the concerns and stylistic choices of Arab youth today. Given that approximately half of the overall population of the Arab world is age fifteen or younger (UNDP 2002), their consumption habits are not insignificant for understanding Arab aesthetics today. Although most Syrian youth today do not actively listen to heritage music, many of those I interviewed argued that the music of the waṣla is the most “authentic” expression of Syrian musical tradition; this was echoed in interviews with pop music artists, music producers, and recording engineers, suggesting the symbolic importance of the music for Syrian and Arab understandings of self.11
I focus my analysis on musical performance and aesthetics—ways of music making, discourse about music, and habits of listening (what Christopher Small (1998) has termed “musicking”). These aesthetic practices are not unique to Aleppo or to Syria, but parallel region-wide musical aesthetics and performance practices in other urban Arab and Mediterranean environments. Nonetheless, both because the context of my research was Syria and because musical performance in Syria has been little studied, I devote most of the following pages to a discussion of the particularities of musical aesthetics in Syria, with a special emphasis on Aleppo. Scholars of other regions of the Arab East, and especially Egypt, will find in my analysis many similarities as well as important differences between conceptions of tonality, rhythm, emotional responses to music, and the overall social significance of musical performance in Aleppo and other urban centers in the Levant. In fact, given the very different trajectories of Syria, Lebanon, and Egypt in the twentieth century, the social and cultural contexts of musical performance can vary significantly in these countries, even when artists borrow from a shared vocabulary of terminology and aesthetics discourse about music making (see Racy 1986, 2003). The musical performance practices of North Africa, while often claiming similar origins in Andalusian Spain, are for the most part distinct from those of the Arab East (see Guettat 2000; Touma 1996).
Any study of aesthetics necessarily implies a study of the relationships among power, authority, legitimacy, and ideology—not the least being ideologies of art and aesthetics. Aesthetics has never been merely or primarily about conceptions of beauty abstracted from its social context and reified as an ideal (Eagleton 1990). Rather, like standards and judgments of authenticity and in-authenticity, aesthetic valuations are socially constructed. All aesthetic judgments are what Kant termed “dependent”—that is, grounded in certain contextual conditions; there is then no free beauty, in Kant’s sense of the term, nor can aesthetic experience be disinterested (Kant 1952).12 In Syria, judgments of musical authenticity are relative to the cultural context in which they are made and subject to changing tastes over time. No single standard suffices for determining any musical work’s or musician’s quality or authenticity.
Furthermore, the study of aesthetics and aesthetic judgments necessarily implies an ethics, for labeling an art form or cultural practice “beautiful” or “authentic” often is to associate it with ethically proper behavior, if not virtue. Just as importantly, to call something “ugly” or “inauthentic” is to equate it with the dangerous and morally suspect. In many ways, the aesthetics of authenticity constitutes a moral discourse. In a similar manner, a given aesthetics also implicates a politics, since all artistic productions and cultural practices occur within the context of relations of power and authority that, through systems of patronage and censorship, condition or limit forms of production and consumption. As Robert Plant Armstrong has noted, “it is more useful . . . to think of the nature of the aesthetic as being more rewardingly approached in terms of relating to power than to beauty, for example” (Armstrong 1981: 6; see also Armstrong 1971). Following Armstrong’s insight, it is perhaps more fruitful in this context to examine what a particular work of art (whether oral or visual) does and not