2024-03-21 08:24:59
The France Musique-Claude Samuel Book Prize 2023 selected this work for La Sélection:
The book
The book asks the question of why composers from the Arab world adopt the aesthetic universe of “contemporary music”, a musical genre which is nevertheless difficult to understand. By simple personal choice, one might say, a choice stimulated by a world that is more open than ever. Or perhaps because of the fascination that Western modernism still exerts on the subjectivities of the South, as a postcolonial approach might postulate. Such explanations, however, say nothing regarding the intimate, but also critical, relationship of the composer with his culture of origin. Many of these composers, in fact, reappropriate traditional music from their childhood without ever displaying them as marks of identity. In their works, traditional musical material is often blurred, distorted, going to the edge of neutralization. Where does this desire to transfigure cultural heritage come from? What is it in the original culture that drives such tension with established conventions? In Fragments Accordes, Anis Fariji seeks to answer these questions by placing this creative process in the cultural context of the Arab world. It focuses on the ways in which traditional musical material has been affected since the introduction of sound recording. He explores the discourses of musical creation in the Arab world. Finally, through the music of Ahmed Essyad, Zad Moultaka and Saed Haddad, he analyzes the critical development of traditional material in forms that are as singular as they are demanding.
The Author
Anis Fariji is a lecturer in ethnomusicology at the Arts Department of the University of Lille. Originally from Morocco, he arrived in France in 2005 to resume his studies, first in music at the Caen conservatory, then in musicology and ethnomusicology at the universities of Paris8 and Paris-Nanterre. His research focuses on questions relating to musical creation in relation to music of oral tradition, particularly in the Arab world, as well as vocal forms in religious practices in Islam.
3 Questions to Anis Fariji:
- What is the place of this work in your career?
This work comes from my doctoral thesis that I defended at the University of Paris8. While I was studying musical composition at the conservatory, I myself confronted the questions that would subsequently determine my research, leading to Fragments Accordes. What is the meaning of invention, or even transgression, in the face of traditional music from the Arab world which is part of my musical heritage? This is the fundamental question that I tried to explore with the example of the Arab composers, Essyad, Moultaka and Haddad. To articulate musicological questions and the sociocultural context, I found a formidable foundation in critical theory, which I was able to develop thanks to the teaching of Jean Paul Olive, my thesis director.
- What did you try to show with this work?
The main idea that emerges from Accorded Fragments is that the critical relationship with musical traditions in the Arab world, as it is implemented by the composers studied, cannot be reduced to a simple personal choice or to a self- saying alienation from Western culture – overwhelming otherwise, without a doubt. As little known as these composers are in the Arab world, their emergence is however in no way contingent with regard to the original culture, due to the profound upheavals that it has experienced since the beginning of the
- What are your projects ?
Lately, I have been busy with questions that question the relevance of the separation between so-called “learned” written music and music of tradition or oral transmission, a fairly clear separation from the rest. I believe in the possibility of considering these two categories along a continuum free of any idea of pre-eminence, in one direction or the other.
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