Book description
How does a Middle Eastern community create a modern image through its
expression of heritage and authenticity? In Among the Jasmine Trees:
Music and Modernity in Contemporary Syria, Jonathan H. Shannon
investigates expressions of authenticity in Syria's musical culture,
which is particularly known for embracing and preserving the Arab
musical tradition, and which has seldom been researched in depth by
Western scholars. Music plays a key role in the process of self-imaging
by virtue of its ability to convey feeling and emotion, and Shannon
explores a variety of performance genres, Sufi rituals, song lyrics,
melodic modes, and aesthetic criteria. Shannon shows that although the
music may evoke the old, the traditional, and the local, these are
re-envisioned as signifiers of the modern national profile. A valuable
contribution to the study of music and identity and to the
ethnomusicology of the modern Middle East, Among the Jasmine Trees
details this music and its reception for the first time, offering an
original theoretical framework for understanding contemporary Arab
culture, music, and society. "Shannon provides an evocative and
highly readable discussion of how music and discourse about music factor
in processes of identity-formation in modern Syria."--Anne Elise
Thomas, Ethnomusicology JONATHAN HOLT SHANNON is an assistant
professor in the department of anthropology at Hunter College of the
City University of New York.
