Issa Aji
Beginning in the late 1930s, the first Thursday evening of each month marked a special occasion for those within the Arabic-speaking world. On those evenings, which often turned into early mornings, millions planned on being within earshot of a radio. Taxis in Beirut, Lebanon would pull over to let nearby pedestrians gather around their car radios. Cafés and restaurants in Cairo, Egypt would clear their schedules to make room for those wishing to tune in to the broadcast. Drawing such massive attention was ṭarab vocalist (muṭribah) Umm Kulthūm (ca. 1904–1975), nicknamed “the Star of the East” (kawkab al-sharq). For nearly four decades, until 1973, Radio Cairo would broadcast her live performances on a monthly basis for millions of enthusiastic listeners across the Arabic-speaking world.
Among those listening was my father. He tells the story of family and friends gathering around the radio in his childhood home in Damascus, Syria, where local provisions, such as ʿaraq (a local alcoholic beverage) and māzah (small plates traditionally served with ʿaraq), accompanied their listening experience. He recalls witnessing enthusiastic displays of emotion in response to Umm Kulthūm’s skillful deployment of Arabic maqāmāt (melodic modes); her extended improvisations and lavish embellishments prompted a variety of expressive behaviors, both physical and verbal, that characterize the evocation of a local form of “musical ecstasy” known as ṭarab.
A multifaceted concept, ṭarab has influenced Arab musical aesthetics since at least the tenth century. In the Kitāb al-Aghānī (Book of Songs), a monumental compilation of Arabic poems set to music from pre-Islamic times to the tenth century, Abū al-Faraj al-Iṣfahānī (897–967) depicts in empirical and anecdotal form the social life of musicians and listeners in tenth-century Baghdad. One particularly relevant facet of musical life during this time was the occurrence of so-called “ṭarab competitions.” As documented by al-Iṣfahānī, numerous caliphs hailing from various courts held competitions, involving singers competing until the early hours of the morning for who could most effectively elicit the heightened state of musical ecstasy (Sawa 1989, 178–83). The effectiveness of a performance was judged, in part, on the amount of praise received by the performer from the audience. Such praise took various forms, ranging from verbal requests to repeat a single phrase or an entire song to general words of affirmation such as “aḥsanta!” (“You did well!”) and “hakadhā wallāhi yakūnu al-ghinā!” (“This, by God, is how singing should be!”) (al-Iṣfahānī 1963, 6:282–3).
Today, the semantic reach of the term has evolved, and it is used to denote the state of heightened emotionality—often translated as “rapture,” “ecstasy,” or “enchantment”—as well as the style of music and musical performance in which such emotional states are evoked in performers and listeners as both a compositional and a performative goal (Shannon 2006, 161). Nonetheless, we can observe a certain continuity in the musical practices thought to elicit ṭarab. Similar to the ṭarab competitions described by al-Iṣfahānī, Umm Kulthūm’s Thursday night broadcasts often lasted until two or three in the morning; and although ṭarab competitions have since fallen out of fashion, it is worth noting that instilling a sense of musical ecstasy in listeners is still of upmost concern for modern ṭarab performers. One would also be hard pressed to attend a performance today and not witness certain participatory habits akin to that of the tenth century; many of the verbal exclamations heard in Baghdad’s tenth-century courts, such as “aḥsanta,” for instance, are still used today, particularly in Syria, in a wide variety of performance settings (Sawa 1981, 76).[1]
But what I aim to emphasize here is not just the apparent continuity of a particularized form of listening and related performance practices. Rather, in my current research, I aim to draw on the concept of ṭarab to define the expressive disposition that foregrounds the experiential “we” of music making made possible through the shared, outward display of emotional expression by both performers and listeners. Now while it is certainly true that not all musics share this priority, my current research on ṭarab has led to a series of broader questions that revolve around understanding musical emotion as an intersubjective, kinesthetic, and empathetic phenomenon.
Within the context of performance, the efficacy of ṭarab hinges on the shared exchange of emotional expression between performers and listeners, involving various bodily gestures and vocal exclamations that are interpreted as signs of expressive approval and reassurance of an effective performance.[2] Emphasizing this point in a 1990 interview, celebrated ṭarab vocalist Ṣabāḥ Fakhrī (1933–2021) states:
Of course I sense people’s reactions from their movements and by observing their inner emotional tribulations and their responses (tajāwub) to what I am singing. […] It is the audience that plays the most significant role in bringing the performance to a higher plateau of creativity (ibdāʿ). I like the light in the performance hall to remain on so that I can see the listeners and interact with them. If they respond I become inspired to give more. As such we become reflections of one another. I consider the audience to be me and myself to be the audience (quoted in Racy 1991, 8).
Fakhrī’s description of performers and listeners becoming “reflections of one another” is a particularly telling characterization of the experiential and participatory aspects of ṭarab performance. His preference for keeping the lights on so that he can sense people’s “movements” and observe their “inner emotional tribulations” works to dissolve the boundary between Fakhrī and his audience, achieving what Alfred Schutz (1977) described as a “mutual tuning-in relationship,” the experiential “we” of music making. But more than mere kinesthetic byproducts of some felt emotion revolving around “musical ecstasy,” expressive gestures within this context are also performative enactments of a particularized form of listening.
In line with Harris M. Berger’s (2009) notion of stance, these gestures provide physical evidence for how listeners within a particular social milieu expressively engage with the music they hear, reflecting a disposition to listen with a particular kind of focus that I call ecstatic listening. Informed by the aesthetics and social dynamics of ṭarab performance, ecstatic listening describes the inclination to prioritize music as emotional expression, mediated through direct social interactions between performers and listeners. Ṭarab thus presents an especially salient opportunity to address musical emotion not as a series of acoustic cues leading to static snapshots of so-called “basic emotion categories” (e.g., the mapping of a piece’s brisk tempo and wide melodic leaps onto emotions associated with happiness or joy), but as that which is imbued with a sense of intersubjective connectedness, a kind of kinesthetic solidarity between bodies. In this way, the history of ṭarab has kept me aware of the fact that our experiencing of musical emotion does not end with music’s sonic properties, and that music’s ability to mobilize bodies in shared styles of movement and feeling can facilitate other meaningful ways of engaging with music emotionally.
Works Cited
Berger, Harris M. 2009. Stance: Ideas about Emotion, Style, and Meaning for the Study of Expressive Culture. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press.
al-Iṣfahānī. 1963. Kitāb al-Aghānī. Cairo: Dār al-Katub.
Racy, Ali Jihad. 1991. “Creativity and Ambience: An Ecstatic Feedback Model from Arab Music.” The World of Music 33, no. 3: 7–28.
Sawa, George D. 1981. “The Survival of Some Aspects of Medieval Arabic Performance Practice.” Ethnomusicology 25, no. 1: 73–86.
———. 1989. Music Performance Practice in the Early ʿAbbāsid Era 132-320 AH / 750-932 AD. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies.
Schutz, Alfred. 1977 [1951]. “Making Music Together: A Study in Social Relationship.” In Symbolic Anthropology: A Reader in the Study of Symbols and Meanings, edited by Janet L. Dolgin, David S. Kemnitzer, and David M. Schneider, 106–19. New York: Columbia University Press.
Shannon, Jonathan H. 2006. Among the Jasmine Trees: Music and Modernity in Contemporary Syria. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press.
[1] Although certainly seen and heard in a variety of modern-day performance settings, expressive participation (including verbal exclamations) tends to manifest differently depending on the formality of a given performance setting. In general, I have observed that formal settings (e.g., a large-scale performance given by Umm Kulthūm later in her career) tend to restrict expressive behavior more than those that are less formal (e.g., a small, informal musical gathering known as a jalsah).
[2] As explained by ethnomusicologist Ali Jihad Racy (1991, 11), ṭarab “derives its momentum, emotional efficacy, and aesthetic consistency from human interplay, through a feedback process involving active and direct communication between the artist and the initiated listener.”
History of Music Theory 
Excellent and accurate depiction of emotions during an era in the Mideast when Tarab was the only positive emotional trigger. Good job
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