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Listening to Discourses of Ethics and Aesthetics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 October 2012

Christopher Witulski*
Affiliation:
Department of Musicology, University of Florida, Gainesville, Fla.; e-mail: witulski@ufl.edu

Extract

Music, as sound, physically and figuratively transcends previously erected or conceptualized boundaries. Artists and listeners each have the ability to aurally extend their values into new spaces, where others hear them. Passions and ideas gain traction through a constant aural negotiation that exists within the music that individuals use to soundtrack their public and private lives. As argued by the contributors to this roundtable, music both resides within the larger societal and cultural constellations that surround it and helps to shape those dynamics in active ways. Music, as a loosely defined social practice, plays an important role in self-identification. Musical aesthetics provide an avenue through which listeners and performers place themselves within specific social groups. Al-āla and Andalusian genres typically associated with North African elite classes constitute one prominent example that is threaded throughout this roundtable. These social groups are rarely exclusive, however, and musical aesthetics provide a significant set of data through which scholars might read (or, perhaps better put, listen to) the dynamic nature of social institutions and the cultural formations that mold them.

Type
Roundtable
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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References

NOTES

1 Mahmood, Saba, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005), 2829Google Scholar.

2 See Timothy Fuson, “Musicking Moves and Ritual Grooves across the Moroccan Gnawa Night” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2009) for a description of the engagement between musical and various extra-musical elements of the ritual progression, which he terms “co-enunciation.”

3 It is more common for only a small number of people to trance during a specific segment of the ritual: those who are possessed by the spirit whose music is concurrently performed.

4 See Crapanzano, Vincent, The Ḥamadsha: A Study in Moroccan Ethnopsychiatry (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1981)Google Scholar for a discussion of the various origin legends that surround Lalla ʿAʾisha and Sidi ʿAli bin Hamdush, the founder of the ḥamādsha brotherhood.

5 The qurāqib are the central rhythmic instruments in the ceremony. Their consistent rhythmic backing and high volume (echoing around the interior of the house) give a great deal of energy to the dramatic high points of the ritual event. The third instrument, a handmade large marching drum called a ṭbāl, appears in the opening and closing of the ritual.

6 Because there is only one melodic instrument, the ḥajḥuj, tuning is relative within Gnawa performance practice. The group's leader will tune the ḥajḥuj to match the range of his voice or that of the primary vocalist for a given section of the ritual. In the example here, I assume the lowest pitch of the instrument to be G. It is significant that this song shifts between an incomplete G minor and an incomplete B-flat major because these two scales share constituent pitches.