Music and Encounter at the Mediterranean Crossroads: A Sea of Voices explores the musical practices that circulate the Mediterranean Sea. Collectively, the authors relate this musical flow to broader transnational flows of people and power that generate complex encounters, bringing the diverse cultures of Europe, Africa, and the Middle East into new and challenging forms of contact. Individually, the chapters offer detailed ethnographic and historiographic studies of music’s multifaceted roles in such interactions. From collaborations between Moroccan migrant and Spanish Muslim convert musicians in Granada, to the incorporation of West African sonorities and Hasidic melodies in the musical liturgy of Abu Ghosh Abbey, Jerusalem, these communities sing, play, dance, listen, and record their diverse experiences of encounter at the Mediterranean crossroads.

Although scholars have long been aware of the crucial roles that gender plays in music, and vice versa, the contributors to this volume are among the first to systematically examine the interactions between the two. This book is also the first to explore the diverse, yet often strikingly similar, musics of the areas bordering the Mediterranean from comparative anthropological perspectives. From Spanish flamenco to Algerian raï, Greek rebetika to Turkish pop music, Sephardi and Berber songs to Egyptian belly dancers, the contributors cover an exceedingly wide range of geographic and musical territories. Individual essays examine musical behavior as representation, assertion, and sometimes transgression of gender identities; compare men's and women's roles in specific musical practices and their historical evolution; and explore how music and gender relate to such issues as ethnicity, nationality, and religion. Anyone studying the musics or cultures of the Mediterranean, or more generally the relations between gender and the arts, will welcome this book. Contributors: Caroline Bithell, Joaquina Labajo, Jane C. Sugarman, Carol Silverman, Goffredo Plastino, Gail Holst-Warhaft, Edwin Seroussi, Marie Virolle, Terry Brint Joseph, Deborah Kapchan, Karin van Nieuwkerk, Svanibor Pettan, Martin Stokes, Philip V. Bohlman

Politically and historically, the Mediterranean has been a space for critical dialogue for competing and often antagonistic voices, and still functions as meeting place for diverse and interdisciplinary approaches. Although other academic disciplines have attempted a unified approach to Mediterranean studies, until recently Mediterranean music as a singular concept has received relatively little scholarly development. This volume is a crucial first step and investigates several musical cultures that have traditionally demonstrated common threads, trends, and interactions. The music of Greece, Crete, Turkey, Albania, Corsica, Italy, Spain, Morocco, Algeria and Palestine are all considered in this volume as the scholars represented here reveal the musical commonality among otherwise divergent traditions. Unnecessary technical jargon is avoided, and an interdisciplinary approach embracing ethnology and material culture considerations makes this volume relevant not only to musicologists and anthropologists, but likewise to the general reader interested in tourism.

First Published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

"An ethnographic study of the emergence of a pan-ethnic style of music in Israel between the mid-1970s and mid-1990s. This two-decade period encompasses the coming of age of the Middle Eastern and North African creators of the grassroots music network in the 1970s and the sea change in the music's reception by mainstream Israeli society in the 1990s.

Performing al-Andalus explores three musical cultures that claim a connection to the music of medieval Iberia, the Islamic kingdom of al-Andalus, known for its complex mix of Arab, North African, Christian, and Jewish influences. Jonathan Holt Shannon shows that the idea of a shared Andalusian heritage animates performers and aficionados in modern-day Syria, Morocco, and Spain, but with varying and sometimes contradictory meanings in different social and political contexts. As he traces the movements of musicians, songs, histories, and memories circulating around the Mediterranean, he argues that attention to such flows offers new insights into the complexities of culture and the nuances of selfhood.