Locating the Galilee Region Musically

For Palestinian Arab wedding musicians, the Galilee serves not just as a convenient geographical designation, but as a bounded region of musical practice, sharply differentiated from other Palestinian regions within Israel and the West Bank. Most recent academic work on Palestinian music has assumed a Palestinian musical community to be broadly coterminous with the Palestinian national community; nevertheless, in our interviews, it was striking that Galilee wedding musicians primarily described their musical practice as regional, emphasising points of distinction from surrounding communities. The geographical narratives within which they situated their own region likewise differed considerably from conventional ways of describing borders in the region. Notwithstanding the hard political borders between Israel and Lebanon to the north, and Syria to the northeast, Galilee musicians spoke in intimate terms about Lebanese and Syrian artists and music, readily identifying commonalities in taste and practice. By contrast, they emphatically identified Palestinian regions just a short drive to the south—the Triangle region (a string of Muslim-majority Arab towns within Israel adjacent to the western border of the West Bank, from Umm al-Fahm to Kafr Qasim; see Figure 3) and the West Bank—as culturally foreign. “When you leave Haifa heading south,” commented one musician, “you are already in a different galaxy” (interview, 2019).Footnote ¹³

Figure 3.

Palestinian Arab cultural regions in northern Israel/Palestine. Darker colours indicate areas with greater Arab population. Numbers indicate selected locations mentioned in this article: 1: Haifa; 2: Acre; 3: Kufr Yasif; 4: Fassuta and Mi’ilya; 5: Nazareth; 6: Mount Carmel villages; 7: Eilaboun; 8: Tuba.Footnote ¹⁴

The regional nature of wedding music practice as described by musicians draws upon several interlocking points of musical and social distinction: musical tastes, wedding customs, and the geographical routes traced by musicians themselves as they perform at weddings. While many of the musicians whom we interviewed reported performing in Arab—and occasionally Jewish—communities throughout Israel, as far south as Be’er Sheva and even occasional events in Eilat, the vast majority of their work is concentrated in their “home region,” extending northwards from Haifa, the villages of Mount Carmel, and Nazareth, to the Lebanese border and the Golan Heights (Figure 3).

The Galilee was characterised by many musicians as an ideal ground for the performance of serious Arab music. Musicians cited the presence of skilled musicians, the prominent place of serious music in the local core wedding repertory, particularly Lebanese and Syrian light tarab repertories and qudud halabiya, and the sophistication of local audiences, who included many sami’ah (expert listeners), and continued to insist on tarab repertories that were being overtaken by pop music elsewhere in the Arab world. Musicians saw their affiliation to tarab music as according the Galilee region a place on the musical map of the Arab musical world, despite its physically peripheral position. Percussionist Alaa Sirhan enthused, “[i]n my opinion, the audience in the Galilee is the best and the highest quality audience in the country, and even in the Arab world” (interview, 2019) Musicians and audiences were willing to make great efforts to maintain this connection: qanun player Safi Sweid cited the willingness of Galilee audiences to travel to Jordan or to Taba—just over the Egyptian border—to hear musicians from Arab countries who were not able to perform in Israel: “In my opinion, music alone causes us to be in communication with the Arab world: we go to Egypt or Jordan just to see performances; thousands go to Jordan to see Wadih el-Safi, Marcel Khalife, Fairuz, Julia Boutros or Wael Kafouri” (interview, 2018).

By contrast, if attitudes to tarab music in the Galilee region accorded cultural prestige, in thinly veiled criticism musicians regularly contrasted musical practices within their own region with those of the Triangle region just to the south, which were consistently portrayed as less musically valuable. While musicians were guarded about offering explanations for musical differences that might directly touch on sensitive subjects like political, sectarian, and social class difference, their descriptions of musical practice nonetheless reinforced the social differences between the two regions. Synthesiser and nay player Ahmed ’Abd al-Ghani noted: “Everything is different in the Triangle. There, Palestinian folklore and dabkeh rule the evening” (interview, 2018).

Audiences in the Triangle region were perceived to be distant from repertories considered culturally prestigious in the Galilee: at a wedding, tarab music might be limited to an instrumental version of an Egyptian song at the beginning of the evening, and music in the Triangle was felt to lack saltaneh, the emotional engagement expected of expert listeners to tarab music. Rather, the core repertory played at weddings in the Triangle was Palestinian folkloric music—dabkeh or dehiyyeh—together with fast sha’abi songs from Egypt and Syria. Whereas most audiences in the Galilee felt closest to Lebanese and Syrian music, they noted that audiences in the Triangle preferred Egyptian music, and included Iraqi repertory unfamiliar to Galilee musicians.

Others complained that the repertories performed at weddings in the Triangle did not fully allow musicians to utilise their skills. If the oud was present, its function was to accompany folkloric songs, rather than as a solo instrument, and several musicians noted that the music generally had a faster pace in the Triangle, which limited musical opportunities for players. Percussionist Haiman Suleiman recalled:

Similar differences in wedding customs and musical taste and practice between the Galilee and Triangle regions have been noted by previous researchers. Researching Palestinian Arab music in Israel during the 1960s, Israeli ethnomusicologists Dalia Cohen and Ruth Katz noted that,

In their comprehensive study of Arab wedding customs in Israel, Adel Manna’ and Kussai Haj-Yehia point to similar regional distinctions. They suggest that the much larger Palestinian Arab population in the Galilee has supported the local development of a wedding industry, including growing numbers of wedding halls, whereas the 1948 borders left the Triangle region isolated from nearby West Bank towns (Reference Manna’ and Haj-Yehia1995:112–114). Further, they note the different sectarian makeup of the regional populations. Like its northern neighbour Lebanon, the Galilee has a mixed Arab population including Muslim, Christian, and Druze communities. Historically, Christian communities have been significantly influenced by the West due to their extensive contact with European missionaries and clergy, who played a dominant role in local educational establishments, and due to the greater presence of Christian communities in cosmopolitan urban settings. The mixed population, suggest Manna’ and Haj-Yehia, has allowed each group the opportunity to learn from the others. By contrast, the population of the Triangle is almost entirely Muslim, and more religious than the Galilee population, especially after the Islamic Revival from the 1980s onwards.

These social and musical distinctions between the Galilee and Triangle regions can also be traced to older patterns of geographical distinction, reaching back beyond the events of 1948 that accompanied the founding of the state of Israel to the rapid demographic and administrative changes that shaped regional geographies within the Levantine (al-Sham) region from the late nineteenth century onwards. The connection of cities in the northern part of historic Palestine to their northern geographical neighbours was cemented by administrative changes in the Ottoman Empire that realigned the northern region of historic Palestine; in 1888, the area north of Jaffa, including the Galilee cities of Haifa, Nazareth, and Acre, was joined into the Ottoman vilayet of Beirut, which stretched north as far as Latakia, separating this region administratively from inland cities, including Jerusalem, Aleppo, and Damascus. Regional ties continued to flourish in the early twentieth century and reinforced connections between Lebanon, Beirut, and the Galilee, including an influx of both workers and wealthy Damascene and Beiruti families to Haifa, drawn by economic growth in the region, and the purchase of large tracts of land in the Galilee region by wealthy Lebanese and Syrians (Seikaly Reference Seikaly1995:31; Abbasi Reference Abbasi2014:4). Meanwhile, a process of modernisation tended to distinguish coastal cities in the Eastern Mediterranean towns from their inland counterparts. During the late nineteenth century, Beirut, Haifa, and Jaffa experienced rapid demographic and economic growth, gaining a cosmopolitan character as a new social class of urban notables emerged (Tamari Reference Tamari2009:23–26; Abbasi Reference Abbasi2014:4). As Manna’ and Haj-Yehia observe, these social changes influenced the surrounding villages, which was not the case for the West Bank cities of Tulkarem, Nablus, and Qalqilya, and the surrounding villages in the Triangle region (Reference Manna’ and Haj-Yehia1995:112–114).

These geographies are regional and relational. In describing today’s musical tastes and practice, musicians emphasised the relationship of the Galilee region to a transnational Arab musical mainstream, and more particularly to Lebanese and Syrian music, downplaying the importance of hard political borders. At the same time, they emphasised social and musical distinction from the Triangle region, asserting the presence of a firm cultural border despite there being no obvious topographical distinction between the regions. While differences in wedding music and customs marked a sharp distinction between the Galilee and Palestinian regions further south, musicians emphasised that a core repertory was common to all parts of the Galilee, based primarily on Lebanese and Syrian music with some Egyptian repertory, and including twenty minutes of northern-style dabkeh (dabkeh shmaliyeh) at the end of the evening, during which a dancer leads a dabkeh line; at parties for the bride, where the primary audience is women and girls, a more contemporary Arab pop repertory would generally be expected.

Microgeographies: Musical Mapping within the Galilee

As part of the regional framework of musical taste described above, musicians described a second layer of relational geographies relating to musical preferences within the Galilee region itself. Musical practices—selecting, listening, performing, and dancing—have inscribed local aesthetic norms across the physical topography of the region. Knowing local audiences and distinguishing between the tastes of different villages is part of the professional toolkit of musicians, and specific musical differences were articulated remarkably consistently among musicians of different generations, reflecting understandings gained as they traverse this topography on a nearly daily basis to play at weddings across the region. The six primary areas of musical taste within the Galilee identified by musicians roughly correspond to a common-sense sociological division of the Galilee region: villages, the Galilee’s three primary cities with a significant Palestinian population, each of which has a different character, and two ethnocultural “others”—Bedouins and Golan Heights Druze—but also draw upon local discourses that use music as a metaphor to reinforce anecdotal or remembered social relations.

According to musicians, residents of Galilee villages, from Mount Carmel to the Lebanese border, were particularly drawn to the jabali (“mountain”) style, a throaty, Lebanese vocal style particularly associated with the iconic Lebanese singer Wadih el-Safi. Hence, synthesiser player Ahmed ’Abd al-Ghani wryly noted that, “if you were to measure the music played at weddings [in the Galilee], you’d find that 70–75% is Wadih el-Safi. If Wadih el-Safi would keep track of his intellectual property rights, he would be a millionaire!” This preference was particularly pronounced in the northern villages near the Lebanese border, such as Fassuta, Mi’ilya and Tarshiha. In those three villages, he noted, “Wadih el-Safi rules, and that’s it!” Within this general characteristic, musicians recognised specific idiosyncrasies of villages with whose customs they were particularly familiar: in Deir al-Asad, audiences were fond of poetic idioms; in Kufr Yasif, parties started particularly late at night.

By contrast, musicians described wedding music in Haifa as “classy” and urbane; while some musicians described musical taste in the city as lacking a particular direction, there was general agreement that listeners generally preferred a younger, contemporary style of music. Audiences expected singers’ stage presence to mirror that of successful pop singers from the region, and appreciated musical innovations, including syncopations. Outside this repertory, musicians noted that “everything goes”: Haifa audiences appreciated Western-style “slow” songs as well as faster music, older listeners in particular enjoyed tarab music, but half a song by Umm Kulthum at the end of the evening was enough: hearing Umm Kulthum was a tacit signal to the audience that it was time to go home.

Acre, by contrast, was frequently described as “Egyptian” in character, both in terms of musical preference and in terms of dancing style. A more limited Lebanese repertory was performed there, but two or three songs by Umm Kulthum were a requisite, together with new songs in popular Egyptian styles that had emerged since the mid-1980s. Violinist Bashir al-Asadi noted that within the Galilee region, the music of some artists, like Warda al-Jazairia an Algerian singer known for performing in an Egyptian style, was played exclusively in Acre. He reflected, “There’s even something Egyptian in their dancing. All along the coast they prefer Egyptian music, even in Gaza.” Al-Asadi’s coastal observation seemed correct, at least locally: al-Mazra’a, a coastal village just to the north of Acre, had similar tastes to Acre, whereas nearby villages further inland, like Kufr Yasif, preferred the Lebanese style.

Nazareth, however, was strongly identified with a specific repertory of songs, designated locally as nasrawiyat (lit. “Nazareth songs”). Named for the city of Nazareth, one might expect the repertory to be of local origin, but, in fact, the nasrawiyat are Syrian in origin: qudud halabiya, a popular song genre associated with the city of Aleppo, and based on a mixed repertory of folk, religious, and secular songs.Footnote ¹⁵ Despite these “outside” origins, musicians noted that the waslah (suite) of nasrawiyat was a highlight of wedding performances in Nazareth, eagerly awaited by audiences, who would participate in the performance. The audience would sing along so enthusiastically that the singer could stop and allow them to continue, or dance on their chairs; singer Bishara Deeb, known for his performance of this repertory, noted that the cycle of nasrawiyat could last for an hour or longer. Regarding the name nasrawiyat, nay player Alfred Hajjar reflected:

Outside the nasrawiyat, Nazareth audiences appreciated the Syrian singer Sabah Fakhri, and were recognised as sami’ah, receptive to tarab music and expecting to hear taqasim (extended improvisations) during the evening.

While the above designations covered most of the Galilee region, some musicians noted two other distinct audiences within their “home” region. Bedouins, who form a culturally distinct part of the Muslim population in the Galilee, had different wedding customs and were particularly associated with dabkeh and its Bedouin variant dehiyyeh. The musicians we interviewed did not usually perform for Bedouin communities (one noted that he “didn’t dare” to do so, implying that he was not sufficiently familiar with the required repertory), but percussionist Alaa Sirhan, who had worked with a singer from the northern Bedouin village Tuba, noted, “We used to play a dabkeh song that lasted a whole hour, and not just one dabkeh song during the evening, but many of them: three quarters of the evening was dabkeh, and that’s how people liked it there, that was their musical atmosphere” (interview, 2019). Nevertheless, customs were widely recognised to be changing. Singer Amin Kayouf noted:

Finally, many musicians also performed regularly in the Golan Heights. Previously belonging to Syria, this area on the slopes of Mount Hermon was occupied by Israel in 1967. While Israel annexed the Golan Heights in 1981, this status was not accepted by the international community or by Druze residents of the area, most of whom consider themselves Syrian. Musicians noted that residents of the Golan Heights were an easygoing audience who accepted most styles of music, particularly tarab and franco-arabe, and wanted to have fun, dancing in a mixed-gender, mixed-age circle for most of the evening. They enjoyed Syrian folk music and nationalist songs—but not to an extent that the latter would take over the atmosphere of the party. Singer Amin Kayouf noted, “The Golan is occupied territory: they will enthusiastically receive songs with narratives about the homeland, but not all evening, and not with the atmosphere of a demonstration. You can sing ten nationalist songs, but not all at once, you should spread them out during the evening” (interview, 2019).

Musicians agreed remarkably consistently about these geographical divisions, shedding light on local practices of distinction that are barely perceptible to outsiders and which do not directly echo any conventional parameter of social distinction addressed by previous researchers, including accent or sectarian identity. Rather, the discourses in which musicians embedded their own explanations for the particular nature of these local differences draw upon a range of parameters, which reveal interlocking social and topographical understandings of the region. Several explanations focused on physical proximity, both present and historical. Musicians noted the physical closeness of the Galilee to Lebanon and Syria, and the closeness of the accent, food, and even physical appearance of residents in the two regions. Physical proximity was also reflected in radio reception: singer Nasri al-Qot observed that Syrian music had entered the Galilee through the radio; listeners had been exposed to the singer Sabah Fakhri on Radio Tartous. Other explanations drew upon geographical narratives rooted in local histories: in speculating how Syrian music had become known as nasrawiyat, nay player Alfred Hajjar recalled that during Ottoman times the Galilee was considered a “neighbourhood” of Syria, and travel through the region was freely possible. Likewise, reflecting on the “Egyptian” nature of Acre, synthesiser player Ahmed ’Abd al-Ghani noted that, historically, families had migrated from Egypt to Acre and were still identified locally as such.

Other musicians offered sociological explanations for repertory choice. Qanun player Safi Sweid, from Eilaboun, himself named after Wadih el-Safi, suggested that musicians themselves had played a large role in establishing local repertories. The first tarab singer in his own village, Atallah Shoufani, had learned the songs of Wadih el-Safi from the radio and introduced them to the village along with his own original songs: many people had simply assumed that all the songs were Shoufani’s own. At that time, weddings might go on for a whole week, with performances every night, so audiences would get to know the music well. Sweid reflected how, “As a listener, you hear the singer sing all of those songs, and it has an influence. You grow up on those songs, and then you pass them on to your children and grandchildren, and that’s how it happens” (interview, 2018).

Most strikingly, though, singer Amin Kayouf suggested that the musical preferences in regions of the Galilee—including in his own village, Issafiya, located on Mount Carmel—lay not just in physical proximity, but in the Galilee topography itself. He explained:

In this explanation, songs themselves become agents of cross-border connection, overlaying the inaccessible topographies of places located beyond political borders directly onto similar local landscapes, enabling an intimate connection between audiences and the music that they hear as the two places briefly merge into one.

Galilee Musicians and the Region

The previous sections have illustrated some of the complex ways in which, via musical practice, consumption, and discourse, transborder geographies are mapped by local musicians and audiences onto local places. This mapping articulates borders invisible to conventional methods of mapping, and points to historical or imagined connections between physical locations currently separated by hard political borders. While these practices point to a more or less static, consensual map of musical identity in the Galilee region, musicians themselves make this map dynamic. By inhabiting familiar songs made famous by well-known artists, musicians themselves come to embody the sounds of well-known Lebanese and Syrian singers whose voices are accessible via recorded and broadcast media, yet who are not directly accessible to Galilee audiences, because of hard political borders.

While direct contact between Galilee musicians and their counterparts from elsewhere in the Middle East is limited, many have experienced opportunities to meet or work with musicians from neighbouring countries via third spaces. For musicians of earlier generations, this contact often came through working in Arab diaspora communities in Europe or the United States. One of the only female singers somewhat active in the wedding scene, Violet Salameh, lived in the United States for thirty-five years, from the age of sixteen. She recounts:

While the meeting was in some ways a dream come true, there is also a sense of ambivalence in Violet’s story, perhaps reflecting the fleeting nature of her encounters with Wadih el-Safi: a brief contact with a wider musical world that was ultimately difficult to sustain. Khalil Abu Nikola recounted a similarly ambivalent story about an encounter, via a third party in the Arab diaspora, with Wadih el-Safi:

Whereas these encounters took place via distant third spaces, during and after the Oslo peace process (1993–1995), regional spaces in Middle Eastern countries officially at peace with Israel opened up to Palestinian-Israeli musicians, enabling more substantial creative contact with the wider Arab world. Some Galilee musicians were invited to perform in a series of concerts at the Cairo Opera House in 1994 alongside major figures, including Sabah Fakhri and Wadih el-Safi. This enabled more intimate—and more importantly, sustained—contact with major figures in Middle Eastern music. Qanun player Safi Sweid recalled:

For today’s older generation of Galilee musicians, opportunities to meet and sometimes perform alongside stars like Wadih el-Safi were high points of their career, recalled in conversation and immortalised in prominently displayed photographs. For younger musicians, playing in transborder concerts enables new perspectives on their working lives. Percussionist Haiman Suleiman, who accompanied the Syrian singer Shadi Jamil at Taba, reflected:

More recently, the Internet has changed patterns of musical production and consumption, breaking down aesthetic boundaries between Arab populations in an unprecedented way, and remapping musical tastes as audiences access music from across the Arabic-speaking world. Singer Elias Glyanos noted:

The internet is not only a source of new material: it is also a potential vehicle for a singer’s voice to travel more widely in the Arab world, opening up the opportunity to imagine success beyond the wedding stage, and beyond geopolitical horizons. Glyanos continued:

Nevertheless, in reality, even in the relatively unrestricted space of the Internet, breaking through geopolitical borders can be challenging. Glyanos’s 2014 song and music video “Sahirna kul al-leyl” shows an ambivalent attitude towards place.Footnote ¹⁷ The song is Lebanese in style, beginning with a mawwal by Wadih el-Safi and continuing in Lebanese dialect. The video, however, is more ambiguous: shot in various locations around Haifa, at first glance the visual language seems to call up a generic Eastern Mediterranean location, focusing on generic Arab architecture, market, restaurant, and beach scenes. Active attempts to play down the Haifa location are clear from the deliberate fuzzing out of Hebrew text from some signs and labels in the opening scenes, yet a later shot of the Bahai Shrine firmly locates the protagonists in Haifa, and viewer numbers on YouTube suggest that the audience primarily remained local.