#Syrian artist Omar Souleymans Rise to Indie-Hipster Semifame He says that for Western listeners this CD is “a chance to know the music of a people [that] politics has long kept at arm’s length.” This is kinda like shipping a Bruce Springsteen compilation to Syria and saying, Behold the Music of America! (Or perhaps it’s the equivalent of taking some esoteric band and tagging it as the Music of America, considering that most Syrians have never heard of Omar Souleyman.) Syria, just like America, has more than one “music” and Souleyman is just a fraction of it. Would the reviewer take an album from some British band and categorize it as “the music of a people”? Probably not. Yet because Omar Souleyman is from Syria — a mystical land of tribes and reed flutes where apparently people all join together and agree on a collective sound — it’s acceptable to make unfounded generalizations? These types of statements compounded with a tendency for the “Western listener” to understand music on his/her terms and a refusal to accept that music can serve a variety of purposes in different cultures, makes me even more doubtful that music has the capacity to function as a “cultural bridge” of any sort. Listening to music for pure enjoyment is fine, but no one should claim that it brings them closer to understanding a culture.
Posted on: Mon, 21 Oct 2013 14:19:22 +0000
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