Chapter 17 Music Enacting (Re)humanization Concert Introduction, Program, and Link

Musical Connection and Reconnection

I’d like to start with a few words about the power of music. What does music do? Mostly, we consider music as mere entertainment. But what does it actually do for people? Philosophers and ethnomusicologists have provided many answers to this question in the past. My position is that music is a powerful social technology like no other, a technology forging and maintaining intersubjective connections (Frishkopf 2018, 2021). In particular, music offers powerful potential for resisting the dehumanization of refugees.

Our concert is entitled “Transpositions.” In a musical context, the word transposition carries the sense of “transfer”: to transpose a song is to change its key by moving all its pitches by a fixed tonal distance in a single direction, up or down. A transposition thus preserves the relationships between tones, even if their absolute locations change.

There are also social transpositions—movements of people through space and time. People, like tones, are related through social connections. But, unlike music, social transpositions do not move all people a fixed distance in a fixed direction. Some groups of people may move together. Others move independently or not at all. Social transpositions thus strain relationships—social connections—stretching, and even breaking them. Many connections are resilient. But sometimes they are stretched beyond their capacity. Social strains are more intense when transposition is forced and sudden, resulting from unpredictable disasters, natural or (more often) human-made, scattering people in different directions as refugees, seeking safe havens elsewhere.

We are social creatures. Connections are not accessory but integral to our humanity, which is essentially interpersonal. We live intersubjectively through our myriad connections to others. Our existence through time also depends on the continuity of the self, on an identity that changes only incrementally, continuously. This continuity of the self can also be interpreted as a set of connections of the self to its own past, producing a series of selves, linked together over time. These self-connections too are resilient, but social transpositions can strain them as well, sometimes to the breaking point.

Music can ease the pain of social transposition and the attendant loss of human connection in a specific space and time by strengthening intersubjective connections, enhancing their resilience, and creating new ones. Music supports social resilience by fostering sustainable, robust human connection. This is among the most important answers to this question: “What does music actually do?”

I argue that the most socially powerful such music possesses three key attributes, leading to an emergent dialogic process and intensive affective state I call social “resonance.” First, it is fully participatory. Anyone can join as an active participant, though this participation can take many forms: performing an instrument or singing, certainly, but also dancing, clapping, tapping, exclaiming, singing along, or simply swaying—any social projection of inner feeling. Second, it is flexible, containing parameters (sonic or social) that adapt dynamically to its environment. Third, it enables communicative feedback loops among participants, and that feedback in turn enables an adjustment of music’s dynamic parameters to maximize musical emotion. Musicians react to feedback by fine-tuning their performances, seeking an ineffable resonant frequency, as this emotion, projected outward to active listeners and returned through various forms of expression (sonic, verbal, gestural, postural, kinetic), spirals upward. Through this process, everyone is brought together into a shared musical alignment, a collective, empathic “mutual tuning in” (Schutz 1951) and thus an implicit recognition of our common humanity. Intersubjective bonds arise, and individuation fades, as all “tune in” and recognize that such “tuning in” is shared.

This “common feeling” is analogous to what has been called “common knowledge” (Chwe 2001): during collective musical experience, we deeply feel that we feel one another’s feeling. Extrusions of each participant’s self—diffusing, diffracting, and interpenetrating through highly charged expressive media—congeal in an intersubjective space, producing a powerful, even if ephemeral, sense of a unified collective body, permeated and supercharged with an intensively human sense of empathetic connection. This is the state of intensive shared emotion that I call social resonance. At this point, boundaries of self dissolve away, and the Golden Rule of humanization—treating the other as one would treat oneself—becomes a mere tautology as I-it relations (to a dehumanized other) shift first to I-you (recognition of the other as a person), then to I-thou (full recognition of the other as a spiritual being; Buber 1958). Finally, at its ecstatic emotional pitch, interpersonal differences may be entirely erased, dissolving into a collective “we.”

Of course, not all musical styles and performances produce such a dramatic outcome, and there is a continuum from the most distanced to the most intimacy-generating forms. The more participants are separated—in space or in time (e.g., through mediated forms such as radio)—the weaker the feedback cycle, the lesser the resonance. Perhaps the ideal type occurs most often in ecstatic ritual—when music nearly always plays a central role. But even if the ideal type is seldom encountered, many partial resonances illustrate the same principle.

Beyond binding participants to one another, resonance-inducing music is tightly bound to memories of past resonances, which each resonance evokes, thus sustaining connections to people who were formerly present, in other times and places, including our former selves, in an imagined interaction. Intersubjective connections, depending on empathy, are thereby recharged.

Resonance itself may be ephemeral, but its connective residue can be enduring, particularly when other factors—proximity, a common social group, or shared beliefs—are available to sustain connections afterward. These factors help ensure continuity of connections, imbued with the emotions of performance and periodically recharged by them. This is the phenomenon Durkheim (1976, 217–18) analyzed as “effervescence” in stabler small-scale communities, but the same process applies to any collectivity, even those connected by mediated (i.e., via virtual, broadcast or product media) rather than face-to-face links.

Refugees, whether fleeing political persecution, war, or environmental disasters, are in particularly dire need of intersubjective reconnection, by which “self” and “other” are mutually perceived as fully human. They have escaped acutely difficult and dehumanizing circumstances. This experience, as well as rapid flight to a safer place, leaves them disconnected. They may remain in a liminal state, whether in transit, or living in shelters, guest rooms (hotels or homes of friends and family), or temporary camps (“temporary,” for such camps can persist for years, even decades), excluded from the wider society and often suffering deprivation, and lacking basic needs, including security. Or they may have found refuge in a stable, secure destination, even a welcoming one.

Whatever the situation, for a refugee community, social well-being requires new intersubjective connections of three basic types: connections to one another, generating social empowerment; connections to the host society (whether in transit or as a destination), fostering social integration; and connections to the homeland, preserving continuity of the self. Each will be considered in turn.

First, forced migration gathers refugees, hailing from all walks of life, in a disconnected jumble and in a new place. Beyond close family, they do not necessarily know one another; indeed, many would never have known one another in the home society had fate not collected them through some tragic dispersive event. But here, in a new place, they meet and begin to connect collectively, whether via intensive musical resonance or in more pedestrian forms of social interaction. Newly wrought intersubjective connections weave a supportive and empowering network, enabling them to help one another, producing a new sense of community (potentially crossing lines of class, gender, religion, and ethnicity in the home society), whereby they can begin to advocate for one another, to seek and secure basic human rights. The prominent role of music in refugees’ voluntary associations, including church congregations and other ethnically based community groups, illustrates the importance of social resonance as a technology weaving this new social fabric.1

Second, there is also an acute need for social integration with the host society through the formation of adaptive connections. It is not only refugees who must adapt, as per an imbalanced and outdated assimilative model, for the host society must also adapt to the refugees, in a dialogic process of integration, through which members of both refugee and host communities change, humanizing one another. This process transpires through the weaving of an intercultural connective fabric, comprising connective threads of intersubjective recognition.

Once again, musical resonance—in different contexts (perhaps at a church congregation, school assembly, civic event, or neighbourhood association meeting)—plays a key role in fostering this recognition, this transformation from “I-it” (the dehumanized refugee, as constructed by xenophobia) to a recognition of personhood as “I-you” and finally “I-thou” and “we,” through a deep affective understanding that “self” and “other” are one—mere variants of the same underlying humanity. Integration is a fundamentally intersubjective and dialogic process, leading to empathy, acceptance, and friendship instead of mistrust, demonization, or fear: a process of humanizing the other.

Finally, it is of utmost importance that refugees retain connections to their home societies, not merely because family and friends may continue to reside there, but because their past selves will always reside there. The continuity of the self is tantamount to a slowly changing identity transmitted from past to present. Music unlocks memory and thus supports continuity. It powerfully adheres to all the contexts of its past production, particularly moments of resonance, evoking them with visual, auditory, and affective vividness. Musical resonance not only imbues contemporary relationships with humanizing emotion but also brings the past to life, enabling the individual to reconnect with past selves, to root the new life in a prior life, stabilizing the self like the roots of a tree. While that old life may be gone, it grounds the present. And sometimes it returns, at least in part, when the refugee returns home once again.

Tarab in Arabic Music

Social resonance is never more apparent than in the Arabic music known as tarab (Racy 1991). Such music is highly participatory. Singers sing and musicians play, but the audience too is free to exclaim, to gesticulate, to emote, to dance—to play. Tarab enables a high degree of flexibility through melodic ornamentation as well as reinterpretation and full-blown improvisation. And it offers many opportunities for feedback among participants, including singers, musicians, and listeners. All this enables resonance. In Arabic, such resonance is also called tarab, sometimes translated as “ecstasy.”

Arabic music provides a rich palette of musical resources for ornamentation and improvisation, including several dozen scales called maqamat, many featuring subtle microtonal intervals as well as distinctive ornaments, improvisations called taqasim, and a set of rhythmic cycles known as iqaʿat (Farraj and Shumays 2019).

Traditionally, the music is performed by ear, but even when a score exists, musicians rarely feel enslaved to it. Rather, they typically enjoy flexibility, including great freedom to respond to listeners. Arab audiences are very expressive. They react to beautiful music through gestures, claps, cries, or expressions, such as ya salam (oh wow!), sometimes directly requesting a repetition, as in marra tanya (repeat!).

This concert is a participatory demonstration of music’s power to reinforce, create, and recreate connection, one I hope you will not only witness but also feel. Allow yourself to be moved, to react to the sounds you hear, as our live audience did. Music breaks down barriers, as it reminds us of our shared humanity, allowing new, more humanized, connections to form.

The Musicians

Now it is my pleasure to introduce two virtuoso musicians whom I have the honor of calling my musical companions and friends, with whom I’ve had the privilege of performing, and from whom I’ve learned immeasurably.

Both were highly successful musicians in their home countries of Syria and Iraq. Both are refugees of tragic wars. Arriving in Canada, they connected to the local Arab community and to the wider Canadian communities, including non-Arab musicians like myself, while maintaining a connection to their homelands. And they have done so through the power of music. Everyone who has had the opportunity to hear them has been greatly enriched by their extraordinary musicality.

Roy Abdalnour, virtuoso violinist, hails from Syria, where he studied at the music conservatory. He has performed with several of the greatest singers of the Arab world, such as Elias Karam, Sabah Fakhri, Nancy Ajram, Dominique Horany, George Wassouf, and many others. He participated in the Fourth Arab Music Festival and Conference in Cairo. A member of the Syrian Artists Association, he ran a musical institute to teach children and adults in his native land. In Canada, he continues to perform with touring Arab singers, such as Mohammed Eskander, Hadi Khalil, and Ziad Burgi, as well as with many local musicians.

Ahmed al-Auqaily, virtuoso percussionist on the riqq (frame drum) and tabla (goblet-shaped drum, also known as darabuka or dumbek), hails from Baghdad, Iraq, where he began playing music at age thirteen. He studied in music school for three years, then launched a professional career. Displaced by the first Gulf War, he arrived in Canada in 1997. Here he has continued to play with many bands, including the University of Alberta’s MENAME, our own Middle Eastern and North African Music Ensemble, and also to teach, and he is constantly in demand for community events.

We are delighted to have this opportunity to present a program of Arabic music for you.

I should add that in Arabic music, the ultimate creator of tarab is the mutrib (literally “generator of tarab”): the singer, for the voice is the ultimate expressive instrument. Our concert lacks a singer. Since most of our listeners don’t understand Arabic, it is perhaps suitable that we are performing tarab music instrumentally. But in the expressive tone of Roy’s violin, you will hear him singing, as you’ll hear Ahmed singing through his riqq and tabla. The mutrib, generator of tarab, is our instrumental group.

Toward the end of our program, we introduce a surprise: a Canadian-born guest artist, Professor Guillaume Tardif, bringing a song from Québec about the pain of exile, further demonstrating music’s power of connection.

Program Notes

We begin with a traditional introductory prelude called dulab in the maqam Shadd Araban, followed by a taqsim (improvisation) by Roy on the violin, leading into a traditional Turkish form, samaʿi, in a related maqam called Nawa Athar:

1. 1. “Dulab Shadd Araban,” traditional.
2. 2. Taqsim (violin), improvised.
3. 3. “Samaʿi Nawa Athar,” composed by Jamil ʿUwis (1890–1955), a Syrian composer from Aleppo.

Next, we perform a famous song, “Ana Fintizarak” (I’m waiting for you), composed by Zakaria Ahmed (1896–1961) in 1943, with lyrics by Bayram al-Tunisi (1893–1961), and performed by Egypt’s greatest singer, the incomparable Umm Kulthum (1898–1975). Here, the violin becomes her singing voice. This is followed by another taqsim, this time on the nay (reed flute), and a song originally performed by Lebanon’s legendary icon Fairouz, composed by her son Ziyad, with lyrics by her husband, Assi, and his brother Mansour. We conclude this section with two instrumental pieces, a longa (fast, virtuosic instrumental piece from the Ottoman tradition) and the introduction to another Umm Kulthum song, “Laylat Hubb” (Night of love):

1. 4. “Ana Fintizarak” (I’m waiting for you), 1943, Zakaria Ahmed and Bayram al-Tunisi, in maqam Hijaz.
2. 5. Taqsim Bayati, improvisation in maqam Bayati, nay.
3. 6. “Saʾaluni al-nas” (People asked me), 1973, melody composed by Ziyad Rahbani, lyrics by Assi and Mansour Rahbani, in maqam Bayati.
4. 7. “Longa Sabukh,” nineteenth century, by Sabukh Effendi.
5. 8. Instrumental introduction to “Laylat Hubb” (Night of love), 1973, composed by Mohamed Abdel Wahab for Umm Kulthum, in maqam Nahawand.

To further demonstrate the connective power of music, we conclude by featuring special guest artist and violinist Professor Guillaume Tardif in a duet with Roy Abdalnour, demonstrating how musical connections—from Arabic to Canadian music—foster social ones.

Two songs—one Arabic and one Canadian—each express, in similar musical ways, the longing induced by separation from the beloved, whether person or homeland. We then close with a famous Turkish longa:

1. 9. “Zuruni kulli sana marra” (Visit me yearly), Sayyid Darwish (1892–1923) and Muhammad Yunis al-Qadi, in maqam ʿAjam.
2. 10. “Un Canadien Errant” (A wandering Canadian, i.e., exiled from his home), a Québécois folk song, presents a similar theme.
3. 11. “Zuruni,” reprise.
4. 12. Longa Nahawand, Jamil bek, Turkish, nineteenth century.

Thank you very much for joining us in this program full of musical connections.

Our sincere thanks to Russ Baker and Pat Strain for the beautiful sound, to the Department of Music for the hall, and to Nancy Hannemann and Yasmeen Abu-Laban and their teams, sponsors of International Week and the workshop on refugees, respectively.

1. Concert link. Please point your browser here to watch and hear “Transpositions: Music for Resilient Communities”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8QP45UFlWA.

References

1. Buber, Martin. 1958. I and Thou. New York: Scribner.
2. Chwe, Michael Suk-Young. 2001. Rational Ritual Culture, Coordination, and Common Knowledge. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
3. Durkheim, Émile. 1976. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. New York: Free Press.
4. Farraj, Johnny, and Sami Abu Shumays. 2019. Inside Arabic Music: Arabic Maqam Performance and Theory in the 20th Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://public.ebookcentral.proquest.com/choice/publicfullrecord.aspx?p=5825015.
5. Frishkopf, Michael. 2018. “Music for Global Human Development, and Refugees.” Ethnomusicology 63 (2): 279–314.
6. Frishkopf, Michael. 2021. “Music for Global Human Development.” In Transforming Ethnomusicology: Political, Social & Ecological Issues, edited by Beverley Diamond and Salwa El-Shawan Castelo-Branco, 47–66. New York: Oxford University Press.
7. Racy, Ali Jihad. 1991. “Creativity and Ambience: An Ecstatic Feedback Model from Arab Music.” World of Music 33 (2): 7–26.
8. Schutz, Alfred. 1951. “Making Music Together: A Study in Social Relationship.” Social Research 18 (1): 76–97.