Event: Popular Music in Lebanon and its Surroundings: From Tradition to Spectacularisation
Date: 5 March 2020
Venue: OH 124
Time: 09:00
The Department of Music Studies, at the School of Performing Arts, University of Malta, is pleased to announce a lecture by Professor Jean Lambert from the Musée de l'Homme (National Museum of Natural History, MNHN, Paris, Laboratoire d'Eco-Anthropologie).
The lecture will be held on Thursday 5 March 2020 at 09:00 in Music Room OH 124.
Students, academics and the general public are invited to attend.
Traditional music in Lebanon is characterised by a strong discrepancy between cities and mountains. Until recently, coastal cities such as Beirut, Tripoli and Saida were in constant interaction with other cities outside: on one hand Cairo in Egypt and on the other hand Damascus and Aleppo in Syria, which practiced Ottoman-inspired Arab music, accompanied by the lute, the zither qânûn and the violin. On the other hand, in the Lebanese Mountain, inhabited by villagers engaged in agriculture and breeding, the music was mainly vocal, and accompanied secondarily by the double reed clarinet, mijwiz, as well as by percussions such as derbakkeh. The village songs, to which I will be particularly interested, accompanied the works of the fields as well as the rituals of the life cycle: birth, weddings, funerals. Both linguistically and musically, these songs are largely influenced by an ancient Syriac or Semitic substrate. They were also common to different religious communities like Maronite Christians, Chiite Moslems and Druze.
Through listening to sound examples taken from both Lebanon and Syria, I will show how these songs fulfilled these functions, and what it implied for their forms. At the same time, with the French colonial presence in Lebanon from 1920, and the associated economic opening, some traditional genres developed into a spectacle. This led to the modern song of the type of the famous singer Fayruz. This is also the case with zajal, a form of sung poetic joust which also benefited from sound recordings, radio and then cassette recordings, television and finally the Internet. This emblematic genre of the Mountain ended up expressing a kind of neo-patrimonial Lebanese patriotism, in a country that is fragmented by the tribal and confessional system (and today in full existential questioning). Another challenge of the spectacularization concerns the modes of composition: do poets retain the same capacity of oral improvisation as in the past? Or are the texts prepared in advance? We will analyze these issues by exploring concepts such as orality, memory, poetry, music, and identity.
Bio note:
Prof. Jean Lambert is an Assistant professor at the Musée de l'Homme (National Museum of Natural History, MNHN, Paris, Laboratoire d'Eco-Anthropologie) and an associate researcher in the CREM-LESC. He is an anthropologist and an ethnomusicologist specialised on Yemen and the Arabian Peninsula, Lebanon as well as the history of Arab music. Prof. Lambert’s research is mainly focused on performance context, ritual practices, the mythical representations of music, musical systems, the relations between language and music, as well as the formation of contemporary identities through music. He also researches Arabic oral literature (poetry, tales, legends) in both Yemen and Lebanon. Prof. Lambert is the author of several books and articles. He also produced more than thirty CDs on traditional music from Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Egypt, Iraq, and North Africa.