Maqām Beyond Nation explores a field of music-making that stretches from North Africa to Central Asia; a set of historically fluid and inter-connected creative practices which were transformed under 20th century nationalisms into fixed repertoires. The project seeks to understand the major changes which are now weakening these nationalist models. We attend to the musical materials and their potential for new creativity, and to the social: how a focus on expressive culture can further our understanding of the aesthetics of religious revival and cultural responses to the experience of forced migration. Our case studies are fault lines across the maqām world – among them the former Soviet-Chinese border, and the border between Iran and Azerbaijan – key spaces where shared traditions of music-making were split apart by the formation of new nation states. To understand these spaces, we draw on archival, analytical and ethnographic research, as well as practice- based creative collaboration. Our findings will be shared through an exciting programme of workshops and conferences, publications and films, collaborative performances and compositions.

Credit: Heyrunisa Yasin reciting hikmet in interview with Aziz Isa Elkun, Istanbul 2019.

From North Africa to Central Asia, driven by Soviet ideology and postcolonial movements, the 20th century saw widespread efforts to document, fix and canonise national cultures. These projects transformed fluid and improvisatory shared music cultures into fixed repertoires, each with its own national characteristics and discrete history. Today, heritage and safeguarding initiatives, and much of the scholarship beyond the Western academy, remain tied to these national models of culture. 

MAQAM works against the grain of these 20th century developments. We engage with the revival movements now reaching across borders in search of new creative and spiritual connections, and with forms of musical mobility impelled by forced migration. The project works against the grain of the 20th century, to restore our understanding of shared traditions of music-making, and to study contemporary border-crossing mobilities and revivals. 

Through our research and engagement we explore the cosmopolitan histories, contemporary mobilities, and future cross-border potentials of the diverse, yet interlinked, musical world of maqām. Forged in histories of pre-modern exchange across the Islamic world, and subject to radical re-invention under twentieth century nationalisms, these repertoires provide a rich terrain to explore questions of bordering and unbordering culture.

MAQAM fosters an emerging set of disciplinary norms, within which multi-sited ethnographic research is central; in which the emphasis on geographical, disciplinary and historical borders is replaced by a focus on contact zones and exchange. Central to this project is a commitment to directing our attention not only towards cultural leaders and elite musicians but also toward the everyday cosmopolitanism of musicians beyond the academy. 

We are developing a model of collaborative research by a close-knit group of performer-scholars rooted in their respective cultures of maqām. The “in-between” position such scholars adopt in order to investigate neighbouring traditions challenges the conventional dichotomy of insider-outsider; we propose instead a new field of regional ethnomusicology. We approach decolonisation as a creative process as well as a historical and political one, involving participatory research, performative ethnography, reflexive and critical praxis which blurs the boundaries between researcher and research participants. Our creative projects are specifically designed to stimulate new cultural flows and exchanges in knowledge and practice across the maqām cultural sphere.

  

 

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