International Council for Traditions of Music and Dance

A Non-Governmental Organization in Formal Consultative Relations with UNESCO

Cairo Symposium: A socio-cultural mapping of Music in the Arab World (January 2019)

ICTM Study Group for the Music in the Arab World Symposium: 

“A socio-cultural mapping of the Music in the Arab World”

A meeting held at the Institut français d’archéologie orientale in Cairo, Egypt, January 7 - 10, 2019.

(see Program, Abstracts, and Photo via links below)

In a territory that stretches over 13 million square kilometres, that is the Arab world, a great number of musical genres and forms exist on every possible level of society whether urban, rural or nomadic, and in both Arab and the various ethnic communities who live in this large territory. With some rare exceptions, the rich variety of this wide musical culture, especially the practices of smaller traditions, are not known throughout the region. The growth of research and field surveys in the second half of the 20th century, usually centered on one genre, one community or geographical space in one particular modern Arab nation state, is for the moment reserved to small circles of researchers or/and to particular institutions. These have revealed, however, an important amount of musical and social information that deepened our knowledge.