Customer Reviews

Among the Jasmine Trees: Music and Modernity in Contemporary Syria (Music Culture)

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This is a beautifully written, comprehensive study of music culture in the Arab world, in Syria. One walks with the author as he explores this ancient country and how music is intertwined in its contemporary culture.

Jonathan Holt Shannon, author of this book, is an anthropologist whose research uses the performance, forms, and religious, political, and social aspects of music as the focus to examine the roles of traditions or heritage versus and modernity in Syria specifically, and also among Levantine Arabs. The conservative forces of authenticity are in conflict with the often liberal elite views of incorporating modern, i.e., European or Western classical and popular, structures in music. The problem arises from the very existence of Syria as a relatively new nation (1946) carved out of the centuries old Ottoman Empire. For a Mediterranean area at the crossroads of empires, East and West, authenticity is a highly moot matter among indigenous scholars, critics, and musicians. Aside some agrarian folk tunes and dances, perhaps, how much of Arabian music is truly Arabian when Turkish, Persian, Byzantine, Kurdish, Andalusian, and Syriac Christian influences are found? Even the oud is closely related to the Chinese pipa, lutes having developed, shared, and adopted along the length of the Silk Road. This book seems to present more questions than answers: a very good thing, since Orientialism and stereotypes have influenced Arabs and Western scholars alike. Even the number, names, and origins of maqam modes are debated.

Scholarly but highly readable, Among the Jasmin Trees is a perfect follow-up book to Racy's Making Music in the Arab World, Waugh's Memory, Music, and Religion, and Marcus's survey and documentary CD, Music in Egypt. The scholar-musician tells delightful anecdotes, and interviews with many Syrian experts send him, and us, on a grand tour of the complex musical and cultural issues confronting this people. If these questions seems esoteric and not germane to our own contemporary life, consider when and how the United States developed its own unique American (not including Native American) music after 1776. This surprising, worthwhile book has lessons for us as well. After reading it, Arabic music is no longer a simple category.

This book on music and people deals with authenticity and its construction in a place where music is much more than just music. Scholarly in its orientation, it is written so clearly that one needn't be an ethnomusicologist or anthropologist to read it. It has important implications for the way that we all approach the aesthetics of our identity.

This is a beautifully written book that illuminates many aspects of Syrian music and culture. I will teach it often in my graduate and undergraduate courses.