The Social Spaces of Music Traditions in Baghdad before and after Destruction

Abstract

It is a great honor for me to have been invited to deliver the Charles Seeger Lecture. Besides celebrating the legacy of a humanist who covered many and varied aspects of music, the occasion gives me the opportunity to share with you, through my personal involvement, the state of music and its sound space in my country, Iraq, and particularly in its historical capital, Baghdad, and how it was affected after the destructive war, embargo, and invasion.In 1990 the United States, a former major ally who used to befriend the local regime, threatened to send the country back to the Stone Age. In other words, the whole country, including its people, history, society, and culture, was menaced with being destroyed, with results locally compared to the thirteenth-century Mongol invasion.In forty-three days of continuous bombing, the first Gulf War of 1991 led, among other things, to the complete destruction of infrastructure—water, sewage system, factories, electricity, and medical facilities—followed by thirteen years of the most drastic sanctions ever known in the history of embargos and designated by the United Nations humanitarian coordinator as genocide. Oil could not be sold, and money in foreign banks could not be used; medicine, food, books, even pencils were sanctioned. The drastic inflation of the local currency value led some to sell their doors and windows. The death of half a million children in that period was declared by no less than the US secretary of state as worth the cost. These sanctions remained in force until 2003, when the cataclysmic invasion destroyed what remained of an afflicted society.The state was terminated; institutions were disembodied; academics were assassinated; social space was shattered; museums, archives, and libraries were burned; archaeological sites were violated, their objects looted; airports were built on them; and a new layer of earth was added to hide their age. The radiation, a consequence of the use of depleted uranium, white phosphorus, and other heavy chemicals, has led to the disfiguration and death of one million adults, in addition to the half-million children already mentioned, and is also responsible for the pollution of the two great rivers, Tigris and Euphrates, and the contamination and desertification of agricultural lands.The most backward sectarian constitution that Iraq has ever known was imposed, dividing the population into ethnic and religious groups and thus generating chaos and criminality, leading to today's continuous tragic dismantlement of state and society and the destruction of many Iraqi cities. These catastrophes penetrated every web of society, destroying history and culture and driving four to five million individuals into exile across the five continents, with another three million surviving today in the open air. The thunderous obsession with the country was followed by an almost general denial on every level, which continues today by circulating disinformation that diminishes the number of victims and denying the extent of the general destruction. Ignoring the significance of the country and its contributions, including music, took many forms. Iraq is being erased to the point where I myself have met a woman in a university in the United States who, perplexed at hearing the name Iraq, asked me if it was a new country. The Iraqi tragedy is explained as a deliberate policy of cultural annihilation (Baker and Ismael-s 2010), and we may add that the destruction of every possible aspect of Iraq lives up to the metaphor of sending the country back to the Stone Age. And when we think that local music has always been interwoven in the social fabric, we can imagine the extent of the damage it faced.Seen from the perspective of Baghdad alone, “what was once,” according to an observer who came with the invaders to work for the US Agency for International Development, “a capital of literature, learning and high society is now a grim city of endless checkpoints. The institution of Arab hospitality, elemental to Iraqi society, has been deeply damaged. A country where literacy was once near universal now struggles to educate its children” (Kunzig 2017:38).Allow me first to give you an idea of the Baghdad in which I grew up in the 1950s and knew until the invasion in 2003. Celebrated as an ancient historical center of civilization at the crossroads of commercial routes from the East to the West, with its multitude of historical sites and spiritual shrines, Baghdad had attracted, since its creation in the eighth century, peoples from Eastern countries that often chose to stay and become Baghdadis. Throughout the twentieth century, this cosmopolitan city was always an important, thriving, secular, and pluralistic center, a multicultural, ethnically and socially diverse city. Religious or sectarian affiliations were not in the foreground and were never an obstacle in administration, in political representation, in work, in friendship, or in social relations. We used to know ourselves as Iraqis; we celebrated each other's festive occasions and could visit each other's places of worship, which by the way, were open to both men and women. Throughout all the different regimes in the last century, the country was known to be one of the most advanced in the Arab world, the first country in the region in which illiteracy was eliminated in 1987. Its open modernity lived side by side with deep-rooted tradition.In the 1930s, women were demonstrating in the streets against colonial policies. Medical doctors, directors, engineers, architects, poets, and artists were abundant. The first woman judge and the first female minister in the Arab world were from Iraq. Male and female students were present at every level of education, and in remarkable contrast to some Western countries today, Iraqi women have always been paid exactly the same as men and had economic independence; many of them had personal bank accounts.Baghdad has always been a hub of encounters that attracted people of all social strata from different parts of Iraq who brought along their regional musical expressions. The city's musical space, which had parallels with different configurations in other Iraqi cities, could be seen roughly in three broad categories. These consisted of traditional music with its many-layered genres performed live; music transmitted through the media that since 1936 broadcast a variety of traditional and modern genres through three state radio stations, Arab, Kurdish, and Turcoman; and finally, a more circumscribed category, that of Western music, to which I will return later. These broad categories have many zones of intersection, and while possibly sharing musically well-known genres, they often created new hybrid expressions.The proper Iraqi traditional musical space was structured around a large number of generic types of sound expression: the central art genre, the Iraqi maqam (IM) with its huge repertoire, the hundreds of much-admired urban songs, numerous religious genres, various ethnic traditions such as Kurdish and Turcoman (al Wardi 1964; Kojaman 1978), and a significant number of folk categories, among which are the widely appreciated rural and Bedouin vocal genres. Gypsy music, music of the black population, women's specific genres, children's songs, work songs, popular street music, military music, the short songs of street vendors, and many other sound expressions that differ in their aesthetic and social functions were an inseparable part of the city's soundscape. With their horizontal and vertical configurations, these genres were an integral part of the old city's daily social life, woven into the webs of its acoustic environment.It is important to point out that all the traditional and oral genres known in the country were not and still are not designated as “music” by the people who perform them or by those who hear them, for each genre has its own name. This fact never excluded the presence of an array of scholarly and learned musicological terms other than “music” to identify categories, classifications, and distinctive theoretical terms. These continue to be used to designate the sound phenomena such as al ghina’ (singing), al laḥn (melody), al nagham (melody) is good, al sama’ (hearing and a ceremony), al qira'a (recitation), and other sets of interrelated conceptual categories, depending on their contextual use.Despite the fact that terms other than music and equivalent to it are used in many traditional societies, some Western writings perpetuate a stereotype that goes so far as to deny the existence of music itself in the Arab world simply because it is not designated as such, added to what appears as a generalizing dogma of its illegitimacy in Islam. Historical facts and contemporary performances are not only much more complex than that but also contradict this kind of perception.“Music,” a Greek term, has been used since the ninth century in Arab manuscripts to indicate the theoretical and scientific aspect of sound expression, which includes reference to the rhythms and meters of poetry. Beginning in the second decade of the twentieth century, the term attributed to Western hegemonic influence (to refer to Charles Seeger's expression) began to be applied to modern institutions of formal teaching and used in publications emanating from that period onward. However, concurrently, the traditional sound expressions in Iraq, as well as throughout the Arab world and beyond, have continued to be designated generally by their proper local names by those who perform them without omitting the use of the distinctive scholarly terms I mentioned above.As regards the widespread idea of the illegitimacy of music in Islam, serious research that considers the complex historical and contemporary contexts and is based on rich and contradictory philosophical debates beginning in the Middle Ages is much needed today. Edward Said mentioned that humanism did not begin with the Renaissance; instead, it was an outcome of the eighth-century Arab “colleges, madrasa, mosques and courts” spread “between Iraq and Andalusia” where “traditions of legal theological, as well as secular learning” based on “disputation, dissent and argument were the order of the day” (2005:27–28).In Iraq, the Sheikh Jalal al Hanafi (1914–2006), imam of the Abbasid mosque in Baghdad, from whom I learned a great deal, was one of the foremost specialists in the traditions of Baghdad. This scholar mastered ten languages, wrote forty books on the city, including two on its music (al Hanafi 1964, personal communication, 1989), and an important number of articles on this art. He played the ‘ud, and I could see the instrument hanging in his office when I used to visit him in his mosque.Like most Baghdadis, he was fond of the city's musical traditions. He used to sing the IM, and his Friday religious sermons were based on its melodies. For him, neither the Quran nor the Prophet's Sayings (ḥadith) forbid singing (ghina’) or melody (nagham). He argued that melody is God's creation and that “he who considers singing as illegal (ḥaram) would then have to stop reciting the Quran” (personal communication, 2002). Hence, the issue here has to do with the terms used to define the mutual interdependence between music and language rather than about forbidding music per se. It must be added that the possible undesired reactions expressed by some religious men are often related to the performance context, as well as to the second facet of melody, the text, which could be vulgar, expressing immoral issues and lacking respect. Although numerous old manuscripts describe performances with dead-drunk audiences and immodest behavior, they never implied forbidding singing, or what we would designate as music. In sum, melodic sound expressions are present everywhere in the Islamic world, including in religious representations, even if not designated as “music.”Besides the presence of the deep-rooted traditional music, with the end of the First World War a new sequence of time appeared, a historical phase in which changes, considered as a requirement for the future of the country, started to take place on more than one level. Whereas in traditional music the acquisition of knowledge and experience of local genres required continuous immersion with musicians, for modernists, the new transmission process should be based on transcription using Western notation. Besides reducing the time of the learning process, it was seen as the sole guarantee for a precise method of learning in which the musical piece would not change from one performance to another, unlike traditional music, whose essence is based on constant creativity and variations in the course of performance.But since not many modernists knew about the oral theory and the formal complexities of traditional music, they considered it inferior in many aspects. A number of musicians who studied with the head of the Baghdad ‘ud school, the prince Al Sharif Muhieddin Haider (1892–1967), transmitted his view that music at that time in Iraq was imprisoned, in general unwritten folk frameworks, known as the art of Maqam (Al Mada 2016). And since subject to unwritten rules, it was not considered or studied seriously. Consequently, the bottom-up reality of the historical presence and transmission of traditional music, which has always been the focus of interest of the majority, was reversed in formal institutional learning. And with the exception of one unsuccessful attempt to introduce traditional music, mainly the IM, due to its different methods of teaching, the State Institute of Fine Arts, founded in 1936, drew a line of separation around local music to focus on written compositions of both Eastern and Western classical music. When, by the end of the 1960s, a new institute was established to teach traditional music, including the IM, it combined hearing recorded music with verbal descriptions of the formal order of the different IMs. And despite attempts at transcription, notation was not used in learning the IM, and its basically oral character did not wane (Hassan 2002).The fact that Iraqis were great patriots who struggled against colonial policies was not incompatible with their universal humanistic tendencies. And that they were known in the Arab world as the most avid readers of translated world literature did not imply necessarily a wide acknowledgment of Western music, which, as an abstract language, differs from the use of words and from local sound aesthetics. Although Western music had been infiltrating Iraq gradually since the nineteenth century through European religious missionaries under the Ottomans, its acceptance in the twentieth century was limited. In the 1930s and 1940s it was restricted to some urban intellectual aficionado circles that met to listen to records, as well as to some instrumentalists who played chamber music before the creation of the first symphony orchestra in the 1940s.Even though Baghdadi traditional music was part of our daily life and inseparable from social life, those among us who wished to learn music but had little time to follow traditional musicians in a deep way had to enroll in modern institutes. If, for some, studying Western music did not imply less appreciation of traditional music, for others, it meant separating the two musical worlds. Later in the 1980s and 1990s, when I started working in other parts of the Arab world (Yemen, Syria, Egypt, Qatar, Bahrain and the Emirates, and North Africa), I could witness that the duality between oral traditions and new tendencies of modernity, based on transcriptions, was spread throughout the whole region.I was in my teens when my father took me to a concert given by students of the Western section of the Fine Arts Institute. A young Iraqi girl who was a bit older than me and who later became a physician played Mozart's alla Turca. This impressed me and was the motivating factor that made me decide to take piano lessons at the institute in the afternoons after school with Romanian, Iraqi, and Polish teachers. I remember buying Beethoven's Ninth Symphony with Toscanini conducting when I was thirteen or fourteen years old, and I showed Schiller's poem “Ode to Joy” to a classmate who was the cousin of Iraq's foremost woman poet, Nazik al Mala'ika (1922–2007). This classmate suggested that Nazik, who knew English, would agree to translate the poem into Arabic, and this is what she did.When in the 1960s my father was appointed with other Iraqis to the Iraqi Embassy in Prague, I enrolled at the Prague conservatory and then studied musicology at the Faculty of Philosophy at Charles University. I had the occasion to hear great soloists and conductors from all over the world. It is there that I heard of Charles Seeger and his melograph and learned that a melograph was housed at the Academy of Science in Bratislava. I decided to use it to analyze Iraqi melodies in preparation for my MA degree. The aim was to compare the acoustic analysis with my transcriptions to look at their degree of analogy with the theoretical models of intervals and scales.When in the late 1960s, long before I started my PhD work in Paris, I became an assistant professor at the Baghdad University, there was still no music department. I was supposed to give lectures on music and its aesthetics to students of theater and plastic arts, but with complete freedom to choose the program I considered appropriate. The ambient Iraqi cultural background of local interest in traditions was a great help. Iraqi literati were fond of writing books and reviews describing the customs and life of different groups of populations; a “Center of Folklore” was then active, and the first journal on folk traditions in the Arab world had been regularly published since 1963. Since my students came from different Iraqi locales (cities, towns, and villages) and from various ethnic and religious groups, I thought that through their lived experience and through their elders they could tell us about their musical traditions. Their presentations and reports on musical practices in their respective areas were enlightening and fascinating: doors were opened to me and to the students, who realized that what they had considered as obvious, irrelevant, or nonmodern had great value. The fact that Iraqi society at that time was undergoing rapid modernization persuaded me of the urgent need to start systematic field surveys to locate, record, document, and describe urban, religious, ethnic, and folk musical traditions spread around the country. But acquiring an extensive knowledge of the different musical genres and of the practices all over the country was a project that could not be done without some backing. In 1971, in the Ministry of Culture, a female director who was responsible for the school of music and ballet, as well as for the Iraqi symphony orchestra, recommended that I address myself to the Baghdad radio and TV establishment because they had the most recent technical equipment, such as the Nagra IV recorder, professional cameras, and cars for traveling around the country. The director-general of that institution accepted my project and designated a place for it. This is how the Centre for Traditional Music was born in 1971. I had to start working on a system of documenting the collected material, followed by a schedule to start fieldwork. With the efficient help of the directress of the university's library, we worked on preparing an analytical card system with more than nine cross-referenced entries, which was our pride.In order to prepare for fieldwork, it was important to have a general idea of the practices and genres of every region of Iraq. Thus, addressing a questionnaire to the cultural sections of the fourteen governorates with their major cities, towns, and representative villages and inquiring about their specific traditions, regional particularities, names of well-known singers, and poetical genres, the language and dialect in use were of great help to establish further field questionnaires on the oral accounts, individual expression of tradition, group opinion, and performance practice. It was clear that besides dominant local genres, there were many others that overlapped in the region and on a nationwide scale.Over a period of seven years, I had the chance to work at the Centre and conduct field surveys (see figure 6), sometimes with other colleagues, in almost all regions, cities, towns, and important villages of the country.Our work embraced all the ethnic groups (Kurds, Turcoman, Yezidis, Shebek, and Arabs) and social groups (urban, rural, and Bedouin populations), and it covered the religious ceremonies of Christians, Muslims, Yezidis, and Sabaeens. Before the American bombing, the collection contained four thousand large-size tapes corresponding to two thousand hours of music; many old 78 rpm records of Iraqi music; a cylinder collection; around one hundred musical instruments bought in the field or in Baghdad; an important number of documentation cards (see figure 7); a photo archive; films on certain traditions (Sabaeens, Zurkhana); interviews with musicians, amateurs, and connoisseurs; and, finally, manuscripts and books. We also bought an important collection of a singer who, during the 1950s, worked on transcribing all genres of urban music and their lyrics, which he had added to audio tapes of his performances.With the exception of some six hundred tapes in poor shape from the four thousand recorded ones and one of the book indexes, all the enumerated material was incinerated during the bombing in the first days of the invasion of Baghdad in 2003. The whole Centre, its archive, and its collection, with a few exceptions of some reels, were turned to ashes. No one from among the international institutions such as UNESCO who claim to work on preservation of traditions ever expressed the slightest concern about what happened to the Baghdad Centre, nor did they heed our cries (Hassan 2011), maybe because the Baghdad Centre for Traditional Music was only one among numerous other archives of Baghdad that were obliterated.At the present political juncture, which is a continuous series of destructions, we know little about the state of the regional musical traditions and the circumstances of loss and transformation that have occurred. And although the devastation did not spare the traditional music in its social space in Baghdad, it is possible to give an idea of the actual state of the country's most inclusive genre, the Iraqi maqam.The significant repertoire of IMs that depends on melodic modes, designated angham or maqam, is historically related to the vocal maqam traditions known on the eastern borders of the country. Their Iraqi counterpart, al maqam al ‘iraqi, functions locally as a bond of linkages between all the diversities of Iraqi society on three levels: IM integrates and unifies in its formal structure heterogeneous melodic sections representing Kurdish, Turcoman, and Arab urban, tribal, and rural traditions. It uses different Arabic poetic genres just as it uses multilingual poetry; its performers and audience have always been of different ethnic and religious backgrounds. Added to this, its vast repertoire represented all types of performances, whether secular or religious, ritual or entertainment. At the same time, it was the major source of melodic inspiration for other urban genres of the countries that paraphrase it or cite it.I should add that since IMs were not reserved for one particular occasion, and since they were almost always performed as cycles that included, in addition to the IM proper, other urban, ethnic, rural, and Bedouin genres, and since they involved people of all conditions and all social classes, this genre functioned as a referential system to Iraqis who felt that IM represented their cultural roots. (This also attests to the fact that high cultures in Islamic societies were not reserved only to elites.) Thus, destroying the social space of the IM meant destroying a long historical line of complex social and cultural interdependencies beyond the nation-state paradigm.There is ample evidence that people considered the Iraqi maqam as part of the public domain in which many felt free to comment, discuss, and criticize. At the beginning of the last century, men used to hum or sing maqam melodies while walking in the streets of Baghdad (personal communication, Bahir Faik, 1989). Nine decades later, I witnessed that Baghdadi streets still served IM amateurs, their colleagues, and specialists as spaces of interaction. It was not unusual for those who wanted to learn some of the particularities of the IM structural system to stop maqam singers or amateurs whom they met in the street, asking them to explain and perform a difficult sequence. Streets were also places for popular criticism. Hadji Hashem al Ridjab (1920–2003), a well-known singer, santour player, and theoretician, recalled that once on his way back to his house after having sung an IM on a live radio transmission, a fruit merchant was unhappy and criticized him, saying, “What on earth did you sing today? Are you poking fun at us?” (personal communication, 1993).IM lovers had amazing figures of speech to express their profound love for the maqam and its “melodies,” which they often compared to “the air that they breathed” (personal communication, Bahir Faik, 1989). And when Quranic recitation, supplication, and other religious genres based on IM were heard from the minarets, it was not unusual for people to express their appreciation by shouting for encores (personal communication, Abboud al Shaltchi, 1985). What may seem to us as an excessive way to appreciate religious renderings was explained by the imam of the Abbassid mosque as not being contrary to religion: “The need for melody, naghma, is a religious need. With it, the holy text is recited and the dead are buried” (personal communication, al Hanafi, 2002).During the period I knew, IM lovers were spread in the souk district among merchants and artisans who often met in their shops to listen and discuss IM performers and performances. Performances extended to the banks of the Tigris River, where maqam professionals and amateurs used to meet during the cool summer nights, as it was performed in gardens and palm groves that surrounded the city, offering a fresh performance space. All this disappeared after 2003.The most important informal public institutions for IM performances were the coffeehouses, whose internal spaces opened into the streets. Those who specialized in performing the IM were known by the name of major IM singers who used to sing in them. These were places where IM lovers of all social backgrounds would meet, listen, and discuss the details of their art. When gradually performances were replaced by phonograph recordings, a new specialized maqam coffeehouse was founded by the end of the 1960s in a beautiful space within the Baghdadi ethnographic museum. Iraqi Maqam specialists, singers, critics, and aficionados of all levels used to meet every Friday to hear professional and amateur performers, including religious ones. When I attended these performances, I was able to witness how this art generated the desire of the audience to communicate, exchange technical views, and, upon hearing good renditions, express ecstasy. This lasted up to 2003, when this café closed its doors after the invasion.In the context of an ancient tradition of hospitality, wealthy and middle-class houses used to organize house concerts. This ancient tradition suffered during the period of sanctions, which drove many homes to poverty because of the great inflation: families had to send at least one of their members to work outside the country and send back money. And with the great outflow of middle classes who left the country during the sanctions period and, especially, in the aftermath of the invasion in 2003, the tradition of house concerts shrank to the point that, with very rare exceptions, it has all but disappeared.IMs were also performed in interior religious settings in both Christian churches and Jewish sacred ceremonies. It is also the crucial repertoire on which many Islamic genres depend, including the significant ceremony of the Prophet's nativity, al mawled al nabawi, and the Qadiri Sufi dhikr. However, today's declining performances at the Gaylani mosque are partly attributed to the pressure of the Wahabi sect, which infiltrated Iraq during the embargo period.Nevertheless, until 2003, and despite the hardships faced by the population during the thirteen years of sanctions with its lack of electricity and water and its extreme poverty, and despite the fact that many maqam masters were pessimistic about the future of this art, the IM continued to be performed, and the maqam community known as ahl al maqam (maqam family) regrouped its critics, knowledgeable amateurs, and singers, who interacted with one another and maintained contacts with performers and connoisseurs in other Iraqi cities than Baghdad. A doctor from Kirkuk, a great amateur of this art, installed a direct phone line with an IM specialist in Baghdad whom he most admired to discuss his passion for this genre. When he used to come to Baghdad to visit him, he took care of all the sick persons in the neighborhood without accepting payment (personal communication, Al Ridjab, 1993). In the maqam café that I regularly visited, the maqam family materially helped those in need, yet doing so in an indirect and dignified way in order not to hurt their feelings and pride. And those who emigrated to send money to their families also used to send money to be distributed among IM performers in need during their weekly performances.After the 2003 invasion, the state of this central and inclusive genre and its performers, with its devastated social spaces, implies considering a binary of internal dispersion and external diaspora. In Baghdad in 2017, the IM is almost nonexistent or very rare in the social space. There are no maqam cafés, no house concerts (or very few), and none of the external presentations of a former time. Public spaces have closed or have disintegrated; performers and amateurs who are still alive are dispersed in a big city full of checkpoints and multiple walls of separation with few possibilities to meet. The dismantlement of the state services that include public transport complicates the lives of musicians, and the new proliferation of privatization with the creation of multiple commercial radio stations that broadcast bad songs is of no help to perpetuate the classical music of the country. Possibilities for public performances of that music in the city are now limited to one group of musicians who agree to perform some easier versions of the repertoire once a week in a restaurant, addressing a general audience. They explain performing in this place as a minimal duty to remind the public of their heritage of urban music.Religious practices that involve Iraqi maqams, such as the Sufi dhikr and the Prophet's birthday ceremonial, though still performed at the Gaylani mosque, seem to be much less important than they were before, and the presentations are poor. Some reciters and IM singers are invited to private homes to perform the traditional mawled ceremony, while others perform on YouTube outside any social frame.Meanwhile, singers of the diaspora, who are scattered around the world, are often alienated and encounter difficulties to adapt; their “fragmented communities,” which were previously cohesive, have been transformed into uprooted identities (Khalaf 2020:11). In their new alien societies, most of them are not able to form a maqam ensemble with a singer and four instrumentalists. A few years ago, the Azerbaijani Muqam festival in Baku wished to invite an IM ensemble. The result was that the singer came from Jordan, the santour player from Holland, the djozé from Baghdad, and the percussionist from the Emirates. They met in Baku and had little time to rehearse. The only example of musicians who have the possibility to perform together with an ensemble is that of a family who lives in Holland and who are often invited to perform in different festivals. They frequently confront the question of what to perform for an audience unfamiliar with the principles of their tradition, and they conclude that whatever they can perform must involve many cuts. Whether inside the country, where performers are dispersed, or outside in the different exiles, deprived of their cultural roots, performers have very limited social opportunities to perform.How could this inclusive traditional music, which had penetrated the fabric of social life irrespective of ethnic, religious, or class background, possibly continue in its social space when that space has been disturbed to such an enormous extent? How can tradition be preserved when the country has been decimated, and millions who were implicated in its continuity have been thrown into scattered exiles?It is difficult to foresee the future of the IM, given its continuous entanglement with the ongoing tragic events and the destruction of the country; and if it will certainly survive through recordings, its social endurance through the webs of society has ceased. Although religious practices that involve Iraqi maqams are still performed at the Gaylani mosque, though poor and less impressive than they were before, certain optimists think that it is through performers who meet in their private homes to perform religious ceremonies added to the new talents of religious singers discovered on YouTube that the urban classical repertoire can be perpetuated in the future.Among those who are inside the country, as well as among those who have the uncomfortable position of being outsiders in new societies, painful feelings of great sadness, loss, and nostalgia dominate. With this cruel truth, many displaced Iraqis living in the diaspora, as I do, have Iraq as the driving force for all they do. As one of our great painters said, “Iraq is the inner soul which kept me working for all these years” (Nayeri 2016).This article is based on the Seeger Lecture, which I gave in Denver in 2017. It reflects the situation of music in Baghdad at that time. Since then, many changes and developments have occurred that are not indicated here.