Of that Music

Abstract

The music of the Levant – from the lands of the Fertile Crescent, the plains of ‘blessed Egypt’ and the edges of Turkey's mountains to the border of Mosul – when for a moment it glimmered, for a mere half century between the last quarter of the nineteenth and first quarter of the twentieth centuries, left behind almost nothing except a few musicians, reciters of the Holy Qur'ān and muṭribīn all living at the margins of the official story and televised publicity of what is known as Arabic music. The author writes of a music before which we can still sense beauty, strange and unfamiliar, capable of reviving in us that experience which Arabs have named ṭarab and in their language have defined as a levity which seizes in happiness or in sadness.