Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t7czq Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-25T02:29:06.679Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Study of Women and Music in Morocco

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 October 2012

Alessandra Ciucci
Alessandra Ciucci*
Affiliation:
Departments of Music, Sociology, and Anthropology, and International Affairs, Northeastern University, Boston, Mass.; e-mail: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

The 1987 publication of Women and Music in Cross-Cultural Perspectives, the first anthology on the topic of women and music in the field of ethnomusicology, marked a critical turn in the scholarship. The ethnographic-focused essays on women's genres and roles in music in diverse societies around the world, including the Middle East, presented new analytical frameworks and research on authority, gender and access, and notions of power and performance. Today, research on the musical practices of women continues to expand in ethnomusicology and in fields such as anthropology. Many scholars now acknowledge the centrality of gender for locating “how society is in music and music is in society.” This is a particularly important approach for the Middle East and North Africa, where the undervaluing or silencing of women's musical practices and abilities had continued to dominate ethnomusicology. An important study to break from the paradigm was Virginia Danielson's 1997 monograph on Umm Kulthum. Danielson analyzes the development and the construction of a musical and a social “voice,” looking at what it means for this particular artist to both be the voice of and have a voice in colonial and postcolonial Egypt. In the discussion that follows I outline the academic trajectory of writings on women and music in Morocco, which I have divided into three distinct historical moments, each exemplifying different approaches to the subject matter: work by 20th-century French colonial scholars, by contemporary European and American scholars, and by contemporary Moroccan scholars.

Type
Roundtable
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 44 , Issue 4: Maghribi Histories in the Modern Era , November 2012 , pp. 787 - 789
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

NOTES

1 Koskoff, Ellen, ed., Women and Music in Cross-Cultural Perspective (New York: Greenwood Press, 1987)Google Scholar.

2 Danielson, Virginia, The Voice of Egypt: Umm Kulthum, Arabic Song, and Egyptian Society in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Aubin, Eugène, Le Maroc d'aujourd'hui (Paris: A. Colin, 1904)Google Scholar; Houël, Christian, Maroc: Mariage, adultère, prostitution—Anthologie (Paris: H. Daragon, 1912)Google Scholar.

4 Chottin, Alexis, Tableau de la musique marocaine (Paris: Paul Geuthner, 1939)Google Scholar.

5 Chottin, Alexis, “Les visages” de la musique marocaine (Rabat: Imprimerie Nouvelle, 1928), 11Google Scholar.

6 Burke, Edmund, “The Creation of the Moroccan Colonial Archive, 1880–1930,” History and Anthropology 18 (2007): 2CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Rovsing-Olsen, Miriam, “Contemporary Issues of Gender and Music,” in Garland Encyclopedia of World Music: The Middle East, ed. Danielson, Virginia, Marcus, Scott, and Reynolds, Dwight (New York: Routledge, 2002), 299–307Google Scholar.

8 Langlois, Tony, “Heard but not Seen: Music among the Aissawa of Oujda, Morocco,” Music and Anthropology 4 (1999), http://www.muspe.unibo.it/period/ma/index/number4/ma_ind4.htmGoogle Scholar.

9 Baldassarre, Antonio, “With the Daughters of the Houara (Morocco): From Fieldwork to World Music,” Music and Anthropology 4 (1999), http://www.muspe.unibo.it/period/ma/index/number4/ma_ind4.htmGoogle Scholar.

10 Julia Banzi, “Women's Andalusian Ensemble of Tetuan, Morocco” (master's thesis, University of California, Santa Barbara, 2002).

11 Alessandra Ciucci, “Poems of Honor, Voices of Shame: The ʿAiṭa and the Moroccan Shikhat” (PhD diss., The Graduate Center, City University of New York, 2008).

12 Soum-Pouyalet, Fanny, Le corps, la voix, le voile: Cheikhat marocaines (Paris: CNRS, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kapchan, Deborah, Gender on the Market: Moroccan Women and the Revoicing of Tradition (Philadelphia, Pa.: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 Joseph, Terry Brint, “Poetry as a Strategy of Power: The Case of Riffian Berber Women,” Signs 5 (1980): 418–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 Hoffman, Katherine, “Generational Change in Berber Women's Song of the Anti-Atlas Mountain, Morocco,” Ethnomusicology 46 (2007): 510–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 In his most recent work the musicologist Ahmed Aydoun discusses the role of women in a musico-poetic and dance tradition practiced among the Saharawi population from southern Morocco. See Aydoun, Ahmed, Azawan, la musique hassanie. Voyage au cœur du Maroc saharien (Rabat: Editions DTGSN, 2011)Google Scholar.

16 Najmi, Hasan, Ghinaʾ al-ʿAita: al-Shʿir al-Shafawi wa-l-Musiqa al-Taqlidiyya fi al-Maghrib (Casablanca: Dar Tubqal li-l-Nashr, 2007)Google Scholar; Bahrawi, Hasan, Fann al-ʿAita fi al-Maghrib: Musahama fi al-Taʿrif (Rabat: Ittihad Kitab al-Maghrib, 2002)Google Scholar; Rakuk, ʿAllal, al-Ghinaʾ al-Shʿabi al-Maghribi: Anmat wa-Tajalliyat (Rabat: Maktabat al-Talib, 2000)Google Scholar; Muhammad Bu Hamid [Buhmid], “Innahum Yuridun al-ʿAita ka-Dajij li-Jamiʿ al-Hushud,” al-Ittihad al-Ishtiraki (April 1995): 6. Khadija Abdeljamil, “L’énonciation dans la chanson populaire arabe de femmes au Maroc (chikhat)” (PhD diss., Université Lumière–Lyon II, 1993).

17 Ciucci, Alessandra, “De-orientalizing the ʿAita and Re-orienting the Shikhat,” in French Orientalism: Culture, Politics, and the Imagined Other, ed. Hosford, Desmond and Wojtkowski, Chong J. (Newcastle upon Tyne, U.K.: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2010), 71–96Google Scholar.

18 Reyes, Adelaida, “What Do Ethnomusicologists Do? An Old Question for a New Century,” Ethnomusicology 53 (2009): 12–13Google Scholar.