Musicologists without Borders: Exploring the State of Musicology in Difficult Areas of the Planet

To the memory of Amine Beyhom

At the end of April 2023, I heard news of a war that had suddenly exploded in a country that was building a difficult path to peace—Sudan. Among the few Europeans present in the capital Khartoum, were volunteers from “Music for Peace,” an Italian NGO that has been active for years in the region; they disseminated information through the international media news about the real situation on the ground. Many similar non-governmental music organizations are active in difficult areas of the world, including Music Fund (whose mission is to repair old instruments in places that cannot afford to pay for such services), SIMM (Social Impact of Music Making), MBB (Music Beyond Borders), Human Rights Orchestra, and the well-known West-Eastern Divan Orchestra. From the other terrible war in these times—the Russian invasion of Ukraine—news of more horrors arrives such as the killing of the heroic conductor of Kerson’s Philharmonic Orchestra, Yurij Kerpatengko.

Music can express in a clear and powerful voice the longing for peace and community among peoples and nations. But who cares about the fate of musicologists?

I coined the slogan “musicologists without borders” soon after my election as president at the 2012 Quinquennial IMS Congress in Rome when the Italian radio station RAI 3 proposed to me the idea of making a series of reports in collaboration with our society. Palestine was my first radio assignment. I traveled like an anthropologist on a field study, with just a microphone and recording machine, trying to capture the deep memory of places, institutions, and people.

Every trip I undertook as IMS President in the following years was always an occasion for another radio episode to discover unexpected situations and also to break down prejudices. In Palestine I discovered that there are no professional musicologists because there are no upper courses in musicology taught in the National Conservatory (named after Edward Said) or Birzeit University. The only Palestinian musicologists are the ones educated abroad. This is even more absurd if we consider the high level of Israeli musicology at an international standard (and I know many musicologists there who are open to help and welcome Palestinian students). Without musicologists at their side, the many good musicians active in Palestine are deprived of a secure guide to understand their own musical roots, and often play a generic mix of Arab music, sometimes taken from records or the internet but seldom learned from a living tradition. Today, ten years after my visit, the situation is even worse, despite the spread of the popular music schools of Al Kamandjâti.

However, there are also Arab countries where musicologists not only exist but are very engaged in the local society. Tunisia is the symbol of the Utopia known as the “Arab Spring”; music was involved in this dream. The Institut Supérieur de Musique de Tunis is part of the University and is modeled after the French university system. Dozens of the teachers and researchers there received their doctorates at Sorbonne or other French universities with eminent scholars. Many have published books or articles in French as well as in Arabic. A few of them cannot read English and never publish in foreign languages, and this has prevented good scholars from being internationally recognized. They sometime even ignore the best international publications on Tunisian classical or traditional music when written in English. I was first invited to Tunisia in 2017 for a conference (in Arab and French) on La modalité au prisme de la modernité where I presented a paper on the history of the IMS with a special focus on the presence of Arab countries among the members and articles on Africa and the Middle East in Acta Musicologica. In the following discussion on the identity of “Arab musicologists,” the Lebanese musicologist Amine Beyhom strongly attacked the IMS, accusing it of being a colonial, “European musicological society” filled with “Western musicologists” taking a “paternalistic” attitude toward the Arab world. He called for a new kind of musicology to be created by Arab musicologists to study Arab music heritage. I countered the accusations by explaining the new global reality of the IMS, and after a long discussion on Edward Said’s concept of “Orientalism” I shared the two concepts of “musicologists without borders” and “collaborative musicology.” This is how I started a deep friendship with Amine! I met him several times in the following years. He gave me a copy of his monumental book Théories byzantines de l’échelle et pratique du chant byzantine arabe (published in 2015)—“a revolution in modal studies,” he assured me; and I discovered Nemo (Near-Eastern Musicology Online), the journal he created and edited since 2012 until his death in 2022. This is a mine of information on the most advanced Arab music studies, fully accessible in English.¹

Lebanon is totally different from the other Arab countries. There are at least three universities in Beirut providing doctoral programs in music, and a group of professional musicologists active in different fields. Despite the tragic explosion that shook the capital in the summer 2020 and the pandemic of COVID-19, in November of the same year, the Université Antonine was able to organize a very ambitious international conference on the topic Monodies, Modalities and Cognitive Research in the Mediterranean, which included the annual meeting of the IMS Study Group “Mediterranean Music Studies” as well as the tenth international musicological meeting of the same university. Held online, the conference involved not only the best musicologists on the Arab side of the Mediterranean, but also scientists and experts of cognitive sciences from all around Europe, including specialized research centers on music and brain in France, the United Kingdom, and Denmark. The main organizer of the conference was Nidaa Abou Mrad, a professor of musicology who was educated in France and served as a member of the program committee for the 2022 Quinquennial IMS Congress in Athens. Both in Tunisia and in Lebanon I discovered a group of Arab musicologists working together and publishing widely but almost never in English, associated with eminent scholars especially of the Francophone ethnomusicological world.²

There are annual meetings where this group meets regularly, but only a few scholars come from countries other than Tunisia and Lebanon, due in part to the difficult situation in the areas such as Syria, Iraq, and Iran, and because of the absence of musicological programs in the universities in North Africa (in Egypt, only degrees in pedagogy of music are available in the local universities).

Another prejudice we should cancel is the presumed impossibility for women to became professional musicologists in the Muslim context. As we witnessed during the first triple-joint forum on music in Arab countries organized in Abu Dhabi in 2017 by IAML, ICTM, and the IMS, at least fifty percent of the participants were women, and this is the real situation in all Arab countries I have visited, with the exception of Egypt where the woman are almost the totality because the degree in pedagogy of music is intended mainly for primary school teachers.³ The female presence in the music departments is very evident also in Istanbul, a very important reference point for the Muslim world if we consider that no less than seventy universities are active in the capital alone, each involving some kind of music activity. But in Turkey’s present political situation, there are strong limitations of freedom even for a musicologist. In 2014 I read a paper on the IMS and the concept of “musicologists without borders” in one of the universities in Istanbul; at the end of my talk, two members of the audience came to me in tears, explaining that I was the first person they had heard explicitly referring in public to the music of Armenians and Kurds: pronouncing either term is forbidden. Later, I learned from a German colleague teaching in the same university that the music Turks love most and ardently listen to on the radio, internet or from CDs is Kurdish: but this fact cannot be said.

The last Muslim country I discovered is Pakistan, where I spent ten days in 2022 for a project that intended, quite literally, “to save the music” that was in danger of disappearing in that immense country. I immediately approved the project, proposed by the embassies of seven European nations in Islamabad with the local NGO “Face.” Pakistan is usually the place where we store our prejudices about societies we consider backward and unjust, due to its proximity to the Taliban of Afghanistan. I arrived there convinced that the music was in danger because of the religious limits imposed by fundamentalists. This artificial country, created with the bloody Partition of India, has today 230 millions of inhabitants, most of whom are in poverty despite the richness of the country’s resources. This territory was the authentic cradle of the first philosophical concept of Indian music and later of Sufi spiritualism, which combines music with the Muslim religion. The intensive program of activities we had in Islamabad and Lahore with a group of “surviving” traditional musicians coming from all of the provinces of Pakistan demonstrated that the real reason for the extinction of music in the country is not religion or any punitive political action, but the simple choice of the younger generation of Pakistani people: they refuse to waste their time in long programs to study very difficult instruments or music theory, without the prospect of finding a well-paid job. They prefer to practice international pop, which gives them immediate visibility on TikTok or other social media, and promises easy monetary gains. There are no music academies and no doctorate programs in music in the many universities of Pakistan, and I struggled to find professional musicologists active at least in the ethnomusicological field in the country. If we consider the flourishing state of music in conservatories and universities in neighboring India, the situation is really paradoxical. As in Palestine, musicians alone cannot answer to the strong changes of the society: this should be the role for musicologists.

I have mostly concentrated on the Mediterranean area as a good example of the need for mutual knowledge between Arab musicologists and the IMS. The great illusion conjured up by the “Arab Spring” is the trend for peace and freedom in the Mediterranean area, especially with the dissolution of ISIS and similar terrorist organizations in the last few years. The authoritarian turn of the respective governments in Turkey, Egypt, and Tunisia and the dramatic economic crisis in all the nations in the area are downsizing the small steps toward an international collaborative musicology with our colleagues, who are often working in very difficult conditions. Yet, this is a less dramatic situation than in the many war-torn territories: our thoughts go to our dear colleagues from both Ukraine and Russia, once members of the same family (I remember the IMS Directorium Meeting in Kiev organized by Liudmila Kovnatskaya and Elena Zinkevych in 2008). There are about 160 conflicts of some kind active all around the world, sixty of which are classified as real wars. Some initiatives are starting to question the role of musicologists in war contexts. The Levi Foundation in Venice will restart in 2023 the publication of the international journal Musica e storia and the first issue will be devoted to the topic “Music and Conflicts,” with two invited guest editors: Lukas Pairon, founder of Music Fund, and Janie Cole, founder of Music Beyond Borders, an association for human rights in South Africa. Africa is the continent with the most conflicts in progress. It is also the region of the globe least represented in our society. Some signs of a counter-tendency is evident in the recent times, as testified by the correspondence from Nigeria by Jude Orakwe in Musicological Brainfood 6, no. 1 (2021). And Janie Cole has created with Camilla Cavicchi the IMS Study Group “Early African Sound Worlds.”⁴

It is in my opinion especially important to take note of the the final sentence in Orakwe’s article: “Hopefully, as more Africans join the IMS, more sharing of ideas can lead to a development of fuller musicological knowledge and literature that is more balanced and globally encompassing.” As Edward Said and Daniel Barenboim knew when they started the utopian project of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra,⁵ mutual knowledge is the basis of any project of “collaborative musicology.” This is the ambitious project of the IMS: to be a society of “musicologists without borders.”

1. The six volumes published until 2022 are available online in open access: https://nemo-online.org/volumes. The journal was published by CERMAA (Centre for Research on Music from Arabian and Akin Countries), which was also directed by Beyhom. In 2022 Beyhom was awarded the Frances Densmore Prize for the journal. He died suddenly of brain cancer in December 2022, leaving his wife Rosy Azar, also a musicologist, to continue his oeuvre.
2. As an example, the Université Antonine is the co-publisher of Revue des traditions musicales, testifying to the intensive research activity of Francophone musicologists active in the Maghreb and Middle East. See the last issues: https://ua.edu.lb/Subpage.aspx?pageid=15831&lang=3.
3. I found an even more extreme situation in Pakistan, where young men only enter university programs that lead to secure jobs such as engineering or medicine, leaving the women to study all the humanistic degrees, which they consider a waste of time. As pointed out to me by the female rector of one university in Rawalpindi, women are ready in the near future to take charge of their country, since men are leaving them the highest levels of cultural preparation. Incidentally, the Pakistani constitution assures women equal treatments in careers, and this is another prejudice to be debunked.
4. The IMS Study Group “Early African Sound Worlds” was proposed after the successful experience of the first international conference La musique en Afrique et sa diffusion dans le monde à l’epoque moderne (1300–1650) (Tours, June 27–July 1, 2022). The proceedings are in preparation.
5. Knowledge Is the Beginning, not by chance, is the title of a movie by Paul Smaczny (Germany 2005), narrating the creation of the Divan orchestra, where Arab and Jewish young people are sitting side by side in Weimar 1999 at a concert in Ramallah in 2005.