PMC First Session: Meditations on the Palestinian Music Industry
Written by Shams Hanieh
Last week, Jafra Productions held the inaugural edition of the Palestine Music Conference (PMC), a forum bringing together all players in the Palestinian music industry. The 2-day event united everyone from musicians and cultural programmers to educators and legal experts, to discuss the issues faced by local music production today.
The first panel of the conference, entitled “The Music Industry in Palestine - Reality and Vision”, brought together two veterans of Palestinian music: Suhail Khoury, General Director of the Edward Said National Conservatory of Music, and Samir Joubran, founder of Le Trio Joubran. The discussion was moderated by Samer Jaradat, Executive Director of Jafra, and discussed the particularity of Palestinian music, the history of its industry, and the tensions between artistic creation and commercial demands.
Suhail Khoury, Samir Joubran and Samer Jaradat at the first session
The panelists began by recounting on the humble beginnings of music in Palestine as an industry or career path. Suheil Khoury reflected on past societal views, saying “If someone was carrying an oud on their back in the 70s and 80s, the boys on the street would make fun of them”. Music was viewed as an unserious pursuit, often relegated to the realms of weddings or folkloric musical tradition, unworthy of serious study or career prospects.
Many Palestinian musicians have previously discussed this social pushback, with artist Reem Talhami saying in a 2013 interview: “From the beginning, I faced social pressures and prohibitions regarding standing on stage [...] [the] main claims were basically either social—musicians are seen as socially flawed—or economic, as in ‘art does not provide bread’”.
The panelists went on to reflect on these social pressures, and how institutions and individual musicians helped create a new attitude towards music in Palestine. Khoury mentioned how musicians were rarely paid for performances, as concerts were often organized by charities, and performing was seen as a national duty. He stated musicians were largely unpaid until 1993, when the first Palestine International Festival for Dance and Music was held in Ramallah. Samir Joubran also referenced an attitude shift, “In Palestine, music and the oud are largely linked to singing. We have a weak repertoire of instrumental music; I wanted to escape this control of the singer over instrumentalists”. Joubran recalled a solo oud concert he held in Nazareth in 1994, noting it as likely the first time a large audience in Nazareth gathered for an instrumental oud performance. “When I was studying oud as a child, I was ashamed to admit this to my classmates; now, a girl proudly carries an oud on her back and walks through the streets proclaiming ‘I’m an oud player’”, he reflected.
Both musicians attributed the change in attitudes to slow accumulation and build-up in the development of the Palestinian music industry. Khoury stated that the National Conservatory only began to have a real ripple effect on Palestinian music production 10 years after its founding. He also mused on how past local initiatives may have contributed to paving the way for this inaugural PMC, such as a 1999 conference by Sabreen on music education, or a 1941 conference in Jerusalem by the Palestine Music Teachers Club. “It’s important to contextualize our work to get a full understanding, and recognise that we are one step in this path where we build upon the efforts of our predecessors”.
Joubran noted how online spaces have impacted Palestinian musical practices, particularly for those from 1948 Palestine; “Musicians in 48 were only able to have a career if they worked with Israeli institutions, whether as an educator, performer, or organizer. Over the last decade, musicians in 48 can build an audience online and launch their career, allowing them to work and have concerts without Israeli institutional involvement”. Although their success is not solely due to the rise of social media, 48 musicians in recent years have been able to launch their careers independently as Palestinians, without having to heavily cooperate with Israeli institutions; such as artists Dalal Abu Amneh, Jowan Safadi, and others.
Samir Joubran
Samer Jaradat remarked on the unique development of the Palestinian music industry, and asked whether there is an intrinsic Palestinian musical identity. Joubran remarked that Palestinian music does have a singularity due to our occupation and pursuit of freedom. However, he mused “Does every creative piece have to be connected to a political conception? [..] Mahmoud Darwish once told me to differentiate between being a Palestinian musician, or a musician from Palestine. A Palestinian musician is pressured by politics in every work, whereas a musician from Palestine understands this pressure, and attempts to creatively adapt to it and evade it”.
The discussion of whether political expression is inherent in Palestinian music is a frequent discussion within Palestinian art. Regardless of artistic intention, many thinkers believe Palestinian art is inherently political, as even depiction of daily life is inevitably coloured by experiences of the occupation. Edward Said stated that “[...] aesthetics and politics are intertwined [...] [due to] the ever-present repression and blockage of life, on every level, by the Israeli occupation”. Academic Hala Khamis Nassar described the political situation as “the driving force and the medium that insistently has provided the backdrop for the stage, the landscape, the content, the chisel, and the brush.”
Suhail Khoury
Khoury viewed Palestine’s unique situation as allowing it to escape commercialist models of music production, “Production companies in the rest of the Arab world are profit-oriented and favor creating superstars with easy hits that are indistinguishable from one another. Palestine can’t fit in this framework, we have a political cause and a wide variety of experiences, and our music reflects it”.
The panelists meditated on the tension between commercialization and artistic expression. Khoury stated that production companies and the commercialized industry prioritize music that requires less effort and care, saying “The market prefers music that doesn’t need a lot of effort in its creation. If someone spends six months composing a symphony, it’s very different from someone who one day came up with three notes they put over a beat, and the song happened to become a hit”. He stressed he is not privileging one form of creation over the other, but merely stating one requires more “depth and seriousness”, while the other is a form of entertainment.
Samer Jaradat
Jaradat pushed back against the contrast of depth versus entertainment, and stressed the evolution of music production and its reflection of lived reality. “Artists today want their music to express their lives and behavior. They don’t need it to tackle a political or humanitarian cause, they want to express how they feel”, he continued, “Music involves interacting with your audience and environment. Artists today see creation differently, electronic music and hip-hop have become part of the street, and have a massive audience”.
Indeed, electronic music and hip-hop have seen a meteoric rise in the Arab world in recent years, we only need to look at the success of Palestinian rappers such as Shabjdeed or Daboor. These genres democratize music production due to ease of access to mixing programmes, and succeed through their lyricism reflecting the daily life of listeners. However, this music can often be frowned upon as cheap entertainment or “low culture”. Mahraganat, the electronic and explicit iteration of Egypt’s shaabi musical tradition, has faced similar critique. Despite it being one of the most successful genres in Egypt and the wider region, it has faced bannings by official musical bodies and critiques from more classical composers, such as Egyptian composer Helmy Bakr dubbing it “musical chaos” and “for [...] uneducated persons”.
Joubran presented a potential middle-ground for these ideological and artistic tensions, “When I compose, I do it with two ears. One ear is academic, aiming to satisfy the academic listener, while the other ear is for the regular listener, who is seeking to be stimulated by their sense of hearing. If I balance both ears, then I succeed”.
Overall, the panel discussion elucidated the development of the Palestinian music industry into its current form. Joubran and Khoury stressed the gradual build-up of work by institutions and musicians as shifting society’s view on music, from folkloric tradition to a viable endeavor. They also highlighted Palestine’s political singularity as giving Palestinian music a unique position in global music production.
However, the panel also brought to light certain gaps between the perception of Palestinian musical institutions and the actual experience of music creation today, potentially signaling a need for another mindset shift. The discussion of “profit-oriented production companies” as determining musical production signals an outdated understanding of the music industry, and a neglect of new non-traditional modes of music creation and promotion, such as TikTok and other platforms. This is not to say these new avenues escape the pressures of commercialisation, but they are worthy of discussion as they are relevant to the wider industry today.
Additionally, although the participants clarified they are not privileging one form of music over another, there was clearly a view that classical music is artistically above most popular music genres today. While classical musical composition undeniably requires a dedicated effort and skill-set, this does not make more popular genres less worthy artforms, relegated to the realm of “simple entertainment”. The music that resonates on the street today does not stem from a classical training, which is precisely the reason for its success. Bridging this gap between institutional perception and current musical practice would greatly benefit the Palestinian music industry, and initiatives such as this inaugural PMC are a significant step in this direction.
