Historians of the modern Middle East and North Africa are accustomed to speaking of the late 19th and early 20th centuries as a vigorous moment of revival, whether in matters of language, religion, national consciousness, or all three.Footnote 1 At the same time that scholars have expanded the scholarly map of revival well beyond the traditional Arab centers of Cairo and Beirut,Footnote 2 for some writers the meaning of revival has likewise shifted, from a self-evident and objectively measurable phenomenon to a fuzzy-edged, subjective one rooted in discourse, at home in the constructionist firmament of invented traditions and imagined communities.Footnote 3 In both interpretations, revival is a form of social change, but in the first this change consists of the reinvigoration of an already existing phenomenon, while in the second it consists of the creation of a new phenomenon that is presented as if it had existed before.Footnote 4
The historiography of modern Algeria has been no stranger to the constructionist sensibility in recent decades,Footnote 5 and within this new tradition a particularly powerful move has been to follow the second interpretation of revival, casting it as a trope rather than a self-evident fact. For James McDougall, recognizing revival as a metaphor that masks change by positing an essential modicum of continuity is a first step toward writing a less teleologically nationalist account of Algerian society during the colonial and postcolonial eras.Footnote 6 A story of persistence and eventual triumph that has long circulated in both nationalist and academic narratives is replaced by a story of radical change emerging from a polyglot colonial society, peopled by agents who often complicate the binary of colonizers and resisting nationalists and who act as much through figures of discourse as through more conventionally recognized avenues of political practice. Central to McDougall's story are the reformist ʿulamaʾ in the first half of the 20th century, authors of a revivalist discourse that would become central to the Algerian nationalist narrative even as they found themselves somewhat marginalized from the nationalist movement and its successor state. The argument can be extrapolated beyond the circles of the reformists, and it resonates with the broad stream of scholarship on nationalism beyond Algeria as well: nationalism was a self-invention that responded to distinctly modern conditions using equally modern means even as it invoked an imagined primordial purity and continuity.
The case of Andalusi music (la musique andalouse, al-mūsīqā al-andalusiyya) offers an opportunity to engage with a social practice in early 20th-century colonial Algeria that began elaborating a trope of revival well before the heady interwar years.Footnote 7 A high-prestige, Arabic-language vocal and instrumental tradition found in various configurations in diverse Maghribi cities, associated with elite consumption, and popularly traced to migrants from medieval al-Andalus and early modern Spain, Andalusi music became a prominent object of revival and reform in Algeria at the turn of the 20th century.Footnote 8 Nadya Bouzar-Kasbadji has traced links between Andalusi music, the nascent colloquial Arabic theater, and the growth of Algerian political activism in the decades bracketing World War I.Footnote 9 In a similar vein, Omar Carlier has suggested that Andalusi music, alongside sports and literature, was among the first vehicles of Algerian self-assertion in the colonial public sphere.Footnote 10 Andalusi music offers a relatively unexplored example of Algerian revivalism, one that, although undeniably linked to the incipient critique of the colonial status quo that would eventually assume a nationalist cast, is not synonymous with it. The prominence of both Muslims and Jews in Andalusi musical revival, as well as the presence of some Europeans in and around the revivalist circles even as Andalusi music remained a primarily indigenous Algerian activity,Footnote 11 makes it an especially evocative vehicle for grasping the texture of the colonial public sphere in the old urban centers and for tracing the circulation of an idiom of revival in both indigenous and European circles. Furthermore, it offers the opportunity for a longue durée approach that bridges the conventional periodizations of modern Algerian history, because something recognizable as Andalusi music has existed in various forms stretching from at least the decades preceding the French invasion of 1830 to today.
In thinking about Andalusi musical revival, the aim of this article is not only to look at the socially efficacious practices in play behind this particular instantiation of the revivalist metaphor but also to think about exactly how this metaphor was entangled with these specific practices.Footnote 12 The work of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson on the central role in everyday life of largely unconscious metaphor is one source of inspiration here.Footnote 13 Another is the scholarly literature that inquires into the notion of musical revival in other geographic and temporal contexts.Footnote 14 Like scholars of nationalism, ethnomusicologists and folklorists have long been aware that musical revival is far from a straightforward phenomenon: instead, it is a way of talking about musical and social transformations that are fraught with ambiguities and contradictions. In this view, musical revival is not simply the resurrection of dead or dying practices but rather a fairly subtle shift in the mode and networks of musical production and consumption.Footnote 15 Beyond adding a case from a colonial context to a musical revival literature that has focused largely on the 20th-century United States and Britain, studying Andalusi music allows us to explore how the trope of revival that had wide currency in early 20th-century Algeria played out within a specific sector of Algerian society. It also raises some doubts about treating revival wholly as a trope.
While the beginning of the project of Andalusi musical revival cannot be traced to any single individual, there is one figure whose centrality and complexity provide a portal into the topic at hand. A performer, composer, transcriber, editor, recording agent, teacher, and impresario,Footnote 16 Edmond Nathan Yafil (Yadmun Natan Yafil, 1874–1928) deeply imprinted the way in which Andalusi music has been produced, circulated, and consumed in his native Algiers and beyond, both during his lifetime and since. Yafil was a disciple of Muhammad bin ʿAli Sfindja (Sfinja) (1844–1908), the leading performer of Andalusi music in Algiers at the turn of the 20th century who was widely viewed as the last in a long line of masters of the form; in turn, Yafil was the teacher of Mahieddine Bachetarzi (Muhyi al-Din Bashtarzi, 1897–1986), a pioneering singer, actor, recording agent, and media star whose career took off during the interwar period. Along the way, Yafil was connected to several landmarks in the Andalusi musical revival that practitioners understood—and still understand—to have been occurring at the time. His 1904 printed compilation brought a vast corpus of Andalusi manuscript song texts to a mass audience for the first time while articulating a robust discourse around the endangerment and protection of the musical patrimony; this compilation continues to be esteemed as an authoritative source among practitioners today.Footnote 17 Société El Moutribia, the amateur association that Yafil registered with the colonial authorities in 1912, offered an institutional form for the transmission and performance of Andalusi music that contrasted with the prior system of professional ensembles and private patronage; it constituted the source and model for the vast network of amateur associations that grew during the interwar period and that continues to expand a century later.Footnote 18 And Yafil's appointment as the first chair of Arab music at the Algiers municipal conservatory in 1922 helped to solidify the Andalusi repertoire's status as a classical form en par with the western European tradition,Footnote 19 heralding a close, complicated relationship between Andalusi music and the state that would handily survive the transition from colonial rule.
While his importance has been widely acknowledged, Yafil is an ambiguous figure whose enigmatic status is compounded by a dearth of relevant source materials. At the time of its publication and afterward, his 1904 compilation was criticized for its many solecisms.Footnote 20 Although passionately eulogized on numerous occasions by his famous student Mahieddine, Yafil was not integrated into the chains of master musicians by which Andalusi musical practitioners have typically authenticated their musical knowledge.Footnote 21 Yafil has also been only fleetingly addressed in the main encyclopedias devoted to Algerian and Maghribi music,Footnote 22 and in some of the few texts that do address his work, he has been partly conflated with the Europeans with whom he rubbed shoulders.Footnote 23 Finally, often described as a leading figure in the early 20th-century world of traditional Andalusi music, he has also been painted as an agent of commercialization and inauthenticity.Footnote 24 In this connection, both during his lifetime and posthumously, Yafil was accused of copyrighting parts of the Andalusi repertoire as his own compositions.Footnote 25
It is tempting, and largely justified, to link Yafil's ambiguity to the wider structural ambiguities of his time and place. Indeed, scholarly treatments of Yafil often emphasize his status as a mediator between contrasting social worlds, with varied stress on his Jewish status. For Nadya Bouzar-Kasbadji, Yafil was “a key link between the generation of musicians represented by Sfindja and that represented by Mahieddine Bachetarzi”Footnote 26—between, on the one hand, the old-style shaykh rooted in live performance and genealogical transmission of a fixed repertoire and, on the other hand, the new mass-media star geared toward public performance, engaged in genre experimentation including composition, and assimilable to a nationalist narrative of cultural renaissance. While Fawzi Saʿdallah (Saadallah) similarly presents Yafil as a linking figure between Sfindja and the interwar scene, he replaces a narrative of nationalist awakening with one of modernity's onslaught, which Yafil helped tame through a partial embrace of commercialism and the new recording media.Footnote 27 For Saʿdallah, Yafil built on an existing Andalusi musical revival in which Sfindja had already been activeFootnote 28 and on increasing Algerian Jewish participation in the capitalist economy and high-prestige musical performance in late 19th-century Algiers. For Edwin Seroussi, Yafil fits into a wider pattern of Jewish musical mediators in modern North Africa and the Middle East who helped to preserve the art-music repertoire as it moved into “concert halls and radio studios.”Footnote 29 He suggests that in their novel forms of engagement with the classical Middle Eastern and North African repertoires, Yafil and other Jewish musical mediators built upon already existing Jewish musical practices and subjectivities; for Seroussi, even the modern tensions arising from the Jewish role in musical commercialization echo earlier disputes over ethnoreligious “ownership” of classical repertoires in Algeria and beyond.Footnote 30 Finally, for Hadj Miliani, Yafil exemplifies the Algerian Jewish “cultural entrepreneurs” in the musical domain of the era who undertook a “dual program of conservation and innovation.”Footnote 31 Precocious moderns due in part to their integration into French political and legal structures after 1870, Algerian Jews were natural mediators between European and Algerian Muslim circles. Yafil, then, mediated between traditional and modernist musical milieux, as well as between Jewish, Muslim, and European ones, even if he ultimately fell between the cracks dividing what Miliani treats as three discrete communities.Footnote 32
In considering Yafil's ambiguity, it would be foolhardy to ignore the structural ambiguity of Jews in colonial Algeria, the momentous political transitions in which Yafil lived and worked, or the changes in technology and performance venues during the early 20th century. What follows attempts to further situate Yafil and his milieu precisely within such patterns by revisiting the handful of known sources that speak of him and by introducing several hitherto unexamined ones.Footnote 33 But the following treatment of Yafil attempts to think equally seriously about the way mediation is built into the notion of revival itself, and in turn into the notions of practice and tradition, and to explore how Yafil as a historical personage partakes of these broader conceptual ambiguities.Footnote 34
RECONSTRUCTING A LATE 19TH-CENTURY MUSICAL ECONOMY
The year 1904 is a convenient date to mark the beginning of the Algerian Andalusi musical revival, largely because it is when Yafil published Algeria's first printed collection of song texts from the nūba, the five-movement vocal and instrumental suite form at the center of the Andalusi tradition of Algiers, Tlemcen, and their musical satellites.Footnote 35 Titled in Arabic Majmuʿ al-Aghani wa-l-Alhan min Kalam al-Andalus (The Collections of Songs and Melodies from the Words of al-Andalus) and in Judeo-Arabic Diwan al-Aghani min Kalam al-Andalus (Treasury of Songs from the Words of al-Andalus), the collection gathered nearly 400 pages of anonymous song texts. These texts were organized according to musical mode and within each mode according to movement, ranging from the first three movements (which are socially marked as slower, heavier, and more serious) to the last two (which are marked as faster, lighter, and more popular); in addition, the compilation included an annex featuring the inqilābāt, a “lighter” song form that is modeled poetically and musically on the nūba songs and that in some instances can be performed as part of the nūba.Footnote 36 The Diwan's publication is a convenient marker of the beginning of revival not only because it offers tangible, citeable evidence of larger, extra-textual activities. As will be shown, the Diwan also provided a model for later Andalusi musical reformers; was among the first texts to elaborate a discourse of musical salvage, revival, and publicization; and inaugurated a string of public revivalist actions by Yafil and his disciples.
Algerian music, including the nūba, had received passing attention in print for centuries in the travel writings of Europeans,Footnote 37 as had other Middle Eastern and North African musical practices, but it was not until the 1860s that sustained studies began to be published.Footnote 38 Most of these emerged from the circles of Saint-Simonian military officers in the Arab Offices, the mid-century colonial military administration for indigenous affairs, and those of their post-1870 ideological successors in the military and in the Franco-Arab educational system aimed at Muslim elites. These were men who heard their own hopes articulated in Napoleon III's 1863 plea that Algeria be thought of not as a French colony but as an Arab kingdom; for some of them, high-prestige musical forms like the nūba may have constituted a potential space of communion between members of the North African and European elites. Several of the French-language musicological works that emerged from “the Saint-Simonian family”Footnote 39 included transcribed and translated texts from the nūba as well as musical transcriptions and harmonizations for pianoFootnote 40 that catered to a wider European interest in “oriental music.”Footnote 41
Algerian music had likewise received attention from indigenous practitioners over the centuries, and there are some surviving Arabic-language sources for Andalusi music in 19th-century Algeria, all of them manuscript collections of nūba song texts.Footnote 42 The practitioners who produced and used these manuscripts came from several social positions. On the one hand, there were the small circles of paid performers specializing in the nūba; while professionals in the sense that they were paid for their work, these performers often had sources of livelihood outside of music and thereby avoided the low status associated with a sole reliance on musical performance.Footnote 43 On the other hand, their patrons were musical practitioners in a dual sense. First, they were literate connoisseurs of the nūba poetry who found pleasure and social capital in collecting the texts in written form. Second, some patrons were themselves amateur musicians who could use such manuscripts for their own performance purposes.Footnote 44 In some cases, such amateur musicians may have attained a degree of musical competence to rival that of the performers they hired; it is also likely that some patrons acted as students of those they hired.
The manuscript collections of song texts were usually organized by musical mode and movement, and while some were likely copied directly from other manuscripts, they could also be built up through face to face contact: a listener could transcribe the words of a song or have the singer copy them and thereby enlarge his repository of written knowledge.Footnote 45 Unlike in Morocco, where the dominant Andalusi musical practice had a nūba manuscript tradition named after its storied 18th-century compiler, Muhammad al-Haʾik, the 19th-century Algerian collections do not appear to have been attributed to a single authoritative compiler. This does not preclude, however, a notion of authoritative transmission undergirding Algerian musical practice.Footnote 46 The 19th-century scene was home to a handful of nūba masters whose authority was derived in good part genealogicallyFootnote 47 and exercised not only in the domain of written poetic texts but also in that of unwritten melodies and techniques. In Algiers, the Andalusi musical milieu of the second half of the 19th century centered on a small circle of nūba masters who reached back, disciple to master, to one Ahmad bin Hajj Brahim, the favorite singer of Husayn Dey, the last Ottoman ruler of Algiers.Footnote 48
Live performance outside an explicitly pedagogical setting was another avenue for the transmission of words and melodies. A good listener could recall a song text and a melody and, if literate, write the words down. But at least as pertains to the nūba repertoire, this was easier said than done. Several sources suggest that the nūba repertoire as a whole, and particularly the “heavier” parts of it, were coveted knowledge.Footnote 49 This points to the interrelation of genre, performance venue, value, and socio-musical status in the larger urban musical market of the time. While a variety of musical forms, including some of the lighter movements of the nūba, were played by the largely Jewish ranks of professional musicians in the cafés maures of cities such as Algiers and Oran (as well as in concerts in private homes), the maximal nūba, with all five of its movements, was rarely heard in the cafés or in other public venues.Footnote 50 Rather, its live performance was associated with private settings and was limited to a restrained circle of initiates, some of them accomplished amateur performers who mirrored the somewhat elevated status of the professionals they hired.Footnote 51 In this sense, nūba practice carried a marked tendency toward the amateur and thus toward relations of musical production that brought together people who, if not social equals, at least shared a high status within their respective spheres.Footnote 52
If the nūba's symbolic and material value rested on limited circulation, then it is not surprising that it was a site of competition. Performers were known to deform words and melodies upon spotting a competitor in the audience.Footnote 53 Consider, too, a long-term Russian observer's 1863 account of a conversation with Hammud bin Mustafa, a nūba enthusiast from a well-off Algiers family who learned the Andalusi repertoire from his father's friend, the dey's old favorite, Hajj Brahim:Footnote 54
I asked him if he would like to give me a few notions concerning the old Arab music that so interested me. “I would very much like to,” he said to me, “but this is quite difficult; the old song is not what you hear sung in the streets. Every urchin knows the Kadria [qādriyya], but the old song is something totally different. To know it, one must study.” And when he learned that I had gone to imbibe this melodiousness in the singing cafés, he smiled in disdain and responded to me in a scornful tone: “In the cafés, you will never hear the old song: it is the Jew who sings there!” But why would the Jew, who was born among you, not know the old song? “The Jew!” he replied, “Who will give it to him? No, the Jew will never know it.” And then, growing visibly angry, he continued: “Look, did you know that the Jew who sings at the café of the Casbah came to me ten times asking for the Insiraf Mendjenneba? And never have I been willing to sing it for him.”Footnote 55
Bin Mustafa's reported words vividly portray the nūba as an elite, somewhat de-professionalized genre set up against the world of lower-status, mainly Jewish, professionals. Three caveats are necessary. First, Bin Mustafa's alleged statement does not preclude the existence of Jewish patrons and amateurs in Algiers. Second, evidence from Tlemcen, where in the second half of the 19th century Jews numbered among the leading nūba professional performers, suggests that Bin Mustafa's statement, if accurate at all, was limited to the local scene in Algiers.Footnote 56 And third, Bin Mustafa is only speaking about nūba performers’ and aficionados’ competition with low-status professionals who were seeking inroads into the high-prestige repertoire, when in fact competition likely entered into the Andalusi musical scene's inner circle: paid performers could compete over control of repertoire, elite amateur performers could compete with one another as well, and likewise there could be struggle between the high-status paid performer and the dilettante high-status patron. Despite these easily overlooked gaps, Bin Mustafa vividly evokes a stratified musical landscape, with the nūba a rarefied repertoire circulating among a restrained, enduring circle of performers and listeners linking back genealogically to the eve of the French conquest.
EDMOND YAFIL AND THE PRINT PROJECTS OF 1904
Arabic and Judeo-Arabic print were among the new technologies—which also included photography and lithography—that helped make Algiers a center of social change in 19th-century Algeria.Footnote 57 The forgoing description of the manuscript-based Andalusi musical economy in the second half of the 19th century indicates why the printing of nūba texts was a potentially revolutionary move. Yafil's Diwan was the last of three works dealing with the poetic content of the Andalusi repertoire to be printed in 1904, suggesting that such a shift in the mode of textual circulation was in the air. The diversity of the works’ social origins shows the folly of connecting musical revivalist agency exclusively to Muslims, Jews, or Europeans or of treating these social sectors as wholly disconnected.Footnote 58 The first of the three works was a series, starting in February, of eight installments of untranslated Arabic poetic texts from the nūba, in the mode called dhīl, that appeared in the French-language Le Tell, a self-described “newspaper of politics and colonial interests” printed in Blida, southwest of Algiers. The texts were edited by the Arabist and lycée teacher Joseph DesparmetFootnote 59 and by M. Féliu, the local court interpreter, and they were procured from the young Mahmud Ould Sidi Saʿid, Blida's leading professional performer of the Andalusi repertoire.Footnote 60 Although the columns were published with minimal framing, Desparmet would have ample opportunity to explain his own scholarly interest in the poems during his lecture on the Arabic poetry of Blida at the 1905 Orientalist Congress in Algiers;Footnote 61 unfortunately, we can only guess at Mahmud Ould Sidi Saʿid's stake in their publication.
The second work of 1904 was a 150-page treatise on music, including the nūba, titled Kitab Kashf al-Qinaʿ ʿan Alat al-Samaʿ (The Book of Unveiling the Arts of Listening), by Ghawthi Abu ʿAli (Ghouti Bouali), a Tlemcani schoolteacher in the recently revived Franco-Arab school system. Printed by the new Office of Indigenous Affairs, it was dedicated to Algeria's recently appointed governor general, Charles Jonnart, and included extensive discussion of the need for notation in order to stem the increasingly rapid loss of the Andalusi repertoire.Footnote 62 In addition to its emphasis on musical preservation and revival, Abu ʿAli's text contains some images contrasting the light of the sciences with the darkness of the Sufi shrines that connect it to Islamic reformist thought of the day, as well as to French Orientalist discourse.Footnote 63 Abu ʿAli also drew extensively on one of the key Second Empire musicological studies, Francisco Salvador Daniel's La musique arabe.Footnote 64 Thus in terms of both intertextual references and social milieux, the first two nūba publications of 1904 were closely linked to their 19th-century French-language predecessors, even if Algerians were now taking on a more visible role.
The coincidence of the three interventions in a single year, as well as Desparmet's later insistence on his own intervention's chronological precedence,Footnote 65 suggests an element of competition and a build-up to this point. There was a flurry of publication of Algerian song and proverb collections at the turn of the century,Footnote 66 and this interest in saving purportedly threatened folk traditions through scientific collection resonated with contemporary efforts in France, Britain, and India.Footnote 67 In Algeria, the newly instated Governor General Jonnart was a strong proponent of scholarly attention to indigenous arts, including handicrafts, which helped earn him high regard in Muslim intellectual circles and seemed to recall the earlier royaume arabe ideology.Footnote 68 At the same time, one can read Jonnart's revivalism as an expression of French power. His enthusiasm for Algerian arts was an extension of his commitment to French regionalism,Footnote 69 and much of the language of his administration speaks of a colonial revivification of a moribund Algerian spirit.Footnote 70
Nevertheless, the printing of Maghribi musical materials at this time was not only a manifestation of European imperial agendas. The nūba repertoire of Tunis also had entered Judeo-Arabic print in the late 1880s,Footnote 71 and the late 1890s saw the publication of an important biographical dictionary of poets and musicians in Fes; in fact, Abu ʿAli cited the latter publication in Kashf al-Qinaʿ, suggesting a lateral, trans-Maghribi circulation of printed texts that was partly independent of the metropole–colony axis.Footnote 72 Desparmet could not have printed the texts from nūbat al-dhīl without Mahmud Ould Sidi Saʿid's cooperation, and Abu ʿAli's text would not have seen the light of day in that form without his contacts in the Office of Indigenous Affairs via his work in the Franco-Arab school system. It is impossible to entirely disentangle European and indigenous Algerian participation in the movement toward printed texts, just as it is important to recall that not all participants in this movement had in mind the same agendas or audiences.Footnote 73
Yafil's print interventions of 1904 richly illustrate the entanglement of European and indigenous discourses, audiences, and forms of agency hinted at in the works of Abu ʿAli and Desparmet. Son of a tobacco cutter turned restaurateurFootnote 74 who ran a modest but successful establishment near the Place du Gouvernement in central Algiers, Yafil was a young aficionado of Andalusi music associated with the circle of Sfindja, the leading nūba performer in Algiers at the time who regularly sang a varied repertoire at a café in the lower Casbah near the elder Yafil's restaurant.Footnote 75 It does not appear that Yafil played in Sfindja's ensemble. Rather, like Hammud bin Mustafa in the 1860s, Yafil seems to have been an aficionado who was attempting to become an accomplished performer of the repertoire. In the late 1890s, while still in his twenties, Yafil encountered the French journalist Jules Rouanet. Having already written of the need to revive traditional Algerian textile crafts,Footnote 76 Rouanet was turning to Andalusi music, and he wanted to transcribe Sfindja's performances. Yafil acted as an intermediary, and by 1904, as Rouanet began to prepare articles that would soon appear in the leading Paris musicological journals,Footnote 77 he and Yafil became co-authors, publishing a lavish set of twenty-two piano transcriptions drawn from the generic periphery of the nūba complex.Footnote 78
For subsequent generations of the Andalusi musical community (including today's), however, the piano transcriptions were not Yafil's most significant publication in 1904. The transcriptions were addressed to notation-literate outsiders of the Andalusi scene who did not differentiate framing material from the value-laden core; in contrast, the massive Diwan was a comprehensive collection of nūba texts covering all five central movements. While parts of Yafil's French-language preface addressed European Arabists interested in rescuing Arabic poetry from the wear of time, the work itself mainly addressed native Algerian aficionados and amateur performers of Andalusi music who were interested in procuring rare parts of the repertoire. In the French preface he wrote:
These poems were not yet collected or classified in books. There . . . exist, in the hands of certain Moors, manuscripts of ghernata [Granada, a synonym for the nūba repertoire] more or less complete. But each owner is excessively jealous of his property; he refuses to share it and is satisfied to enrich it when he may with some new piece that he heard or that he obtained for a great sum from a native musician. In these circumstances, the Arab public cannot procure the texts of the songs which it passionately loves and which remain the monopoly of the privileged few.Footnote 79
And in the somewhat colloquial Arabic preface that immediately followed he wrote:
We have printed this collection because we were seeing this art of song and the words of al-Andalus diminish each day and vanish. Every musician who passes away fails to appoint a successor equal to him in this art and goes to the grave with words and melodies which those who remain do not know and do not conserve. It is no secret . . . that every lover of melodies and songs who wants to learn a melody he cannot find goes off to request it from a musician who possesses it; but the musician will not give it to him, for money or supplications, so these melodies remain their captive, and their selfishness becomes plain to all. For this reason we gathered fourteen nūba that remained from the words of al-Andalus, and we printed them . . . so that those who love this art can enjoy the treasure collected in this valuable and unprecedented book.Footnote 80
These are classic Enlightenment and republican values: through the leveling technology of print, Yafil is heroically combating the secrecy and monopoly of the manuscript economy and in the process rescuing an allegedly endangered art. He is also an amateur writing to fellow amateurs and in a sense against the “professionals” and those other amateurs known for hoarding their textual wealth. We know little of how Sfindja viewed this line of thought, and the available information presents the old master in contradictory light. On the one hand, he had clearly cooperated with Rouanet and Yafil over the years, regularly sung in the café setting, actively composed and performed new melodies for texts whose original melodies were no longer known,Footnote 81 and agreed to perform at Rouanet's lecture demonstration at the 1905 Orientalist Congress in Algiers alongside other leading performers whom Yafil had helped assemble.Footnote 82 On the other hand, it is reported that at the conference, Sfindja refused to sing certain songs, cryptically asserting that “[this] music is ours . . . it must die with us.”Footnote 83 Sfindja's ambiguity in some ways anticipates the ambiguity later associated with Yafil and suggests a blurry conceptual boundary between hoarding master and modernizing revivalist. Even more obscure is the reaction of the other amateurs against whom Yafil was writing.
Just as it is difficult to say whether Sfindja was the musical equivalent of a jeune algérien or of a vieux turban, it is difficult to judge whether the Andalusi repertoire was in fact disappearing any more than had been the case forty years earlier.Footnote 84 What is clear is that there was a new revivalist discourse that helped stimulate a perception of obsolescence and a relatively new technology—print—through which to combat that perceived threat. For musical practitioners and listeners in this period, print and its allies in textual criticism and sound recording may themselves have recast genealogically authorized oral transmission as hopelessly ephemeral, thus creating, in one stroke, the appearance of both loss and rescue.Footnote 85 It is also possible that the ranks of aficionados eager to play and patronize Andalusi music were growing, particularly among the rising urban Jewish middle class in Algiers, all while the circle of “professionals” like Sfindja remained restrained, thereby augmenting the sense that the repertoire was endangered. Whatever its proximate sources, print, alongside other tools of musical revival, would help to elaborate new patterns and possibilities of musical production and circulation.
YAFIL BEYOND THE PRINT SPHERE
Yafil's work in subsequent years elaborated the Diwan's publicizing, modernist rationale and was intertwined with a broader, extra-musical revivalist impulse in early 20th-century Algerian cities. For a while Yafil continued to collaborate closely with Rouanet. Following the 1905 lecture-demonstration at the Orientalist Congress, the two of them arranged the first concerts of Andalusi music in the public squares of downtown Algiers, featuring a new ensemble called Orchestre Moutribia that was under their joint directionFootnote 86 and seems to have been connected to a school that they established for Andalusi musical instruction. By 1912, Orchestre Moutribia and its associated school had become Société El Moutribia, the first amateur association in North Africa dedicated to preserving Andalusi music through formal pedagogy and public performance.Footnote 87 Its founding drew on the French Law of Associations of 1901, a novel piece of legislation celebrating the virtues of modern, enlightened, noncommercial publicity over the despotic secrecy, monopoly, and commercialism ostensibly embodied in the medieval guild.Footnote 88 Although Rouanet would distance himself from Yafil in later years, El Moutribia continued to grow after World War I and became a model for dozens of other Andalusi music associations that sprouted up in Algiers, Constantine, Tlemcen, and the Moroccan frontier city of Oujda during the interwar period. Throughout its life, El Moutribia's members were predominantly Jewish and included both adolescent and adult men as well as some women.Footnote 89
The amateur association as a new institutional form developed alongside and in interaction with new recording technologies. Yafil was instrumental in cultivating Algeria's nascent recording industry, again collaborating closely with Rouanet at its moment of birth. Rouanet acted as advisor to the early recording giant Gramophone, and Yafil was linked to both Pathé Records and Gramophone as agent and performer.Footnote 90 The recordings that Yafil and Rouanet oversaw covered an array of genres, only a fraction of which belonged to the nūba repertoire's core; in 1907, some of the lighter recordings formed the basis for Yafil's second printed collection of song texts, titled Majmuʿ Zahw al-Anis al-Mukhtass bi-l-Tabasi wa-l-Qawadis (The Collection of the Companion's Splendor Specializing in Discs and Cylinders).Footnote 91 In the period before World War I, the artists and groups they helped record included Yamina bint al-Hajj al-Mahdi (the leading female performer in Algiers and Mahmud Ould Sidi Saʿid's teacherFootnote 92); Yafil's associate Laho Seror; Orchestre El Moutribia both before and after the founding of the association; and Sfindja in the last year of his life. Some of the discs were no doubt sold to scholarly minded Europeans, others to members of the indigenous elite, and still others wound up in those cafés whose owners could afford to replace live performance with a phonograph.Footnote 93
Although the early recordings in which Yafil had a hand featured some singers who were not tied to El Moutribia, the bulk were Yafil's close associates.Footnote 94 Like El Moutribia, the recording activities appear to have ceased during the war years and were revived during the 1920s. In the second wave of recordings, the performers began to extend beyond the Algiers region to include artists from Oran and Tlemcen.Footnote 95 They also tended to belong to a younger generation. The leading light in this cohort was Mahieddine Bachetarzi, who recorded hundreds of discs beginning in the 1920s. Mahieddine's career was closely linked to Yafil, who had discovered the young man reciting the Qurʾan at the Jamiʿ Jadid (the New Mosque, also known as Mosquée de la Pêcherie, just across from the café where Sfindja used to sing and close to Makhlouf Loubia, Yafil's father's restaurant).Footnote 96 This son of Algerois shopkeepers was gifted with a powerful, supple voice that Yafil quickly sought to record. He began to perform in events organized by Yafil, and his recording career was launched in 1921, after a two-year delay brokered by the Hanafi mufti Abu Qandura (Boukandoura), his employer and mentor at the mosque.Footnote 97
In those same years, Yafil brought his new and old students together to revive Société El Moutribia. Mahieddine—whom Yafil plainly viewed as the rising star of the new Algerian musical scene—quickly assumed a leading role in the association. Mahieddine was one of its very few Muslim members, although he hailed from the same middle-class milieu as most of the other members, whether Jewish or Muslim.Footnote 98 In contrast to its prewar manifestation, the new El Moutribia was part of an efflorescence of associative life in Algiers spanning the musical, athletic, and literary domains. Both its activities and its audience continued to expand throughout the 1920s. The listeners who flocked to its concerts were mostly Muslim, although there was always a Jewish audience, and it had a small following among Europeans.Footnote 99 Jews continued to constitute the bulk of the association's actual membership despite Mahieddine's efforts to recruit more Muslims, and it was only in 1930, with the founding of Société El Djazaïria, that a predominantly Muslim association for the performance of Andalusi music emerged.Footnote 100
During the 1920s, Mahieddine added his voice to the growing chorus of indigenous political critiques of the colonial status quo in Algiers. The sharp increase in Algerian Muslims’ participation in municipal legislative politics, particularly in the capital, was in part due to the limited enfranchisement afforded by the new Jonnart laws, named for the recently returned governor general.Footnote 101 Yafil himself was soon drawn into the tumultuous world of municipal political contestation, which in the immediate aftermath of World War I was dominated by Amir Khalid, grandson of the 19th-century resistance leader Amir ʿAbd al-Qadir. It was under pressure from Amir Khalid—soon to be exiled, as his grandfather had been—and other reformists in Algiers municipal politics that, in 1922, a chair of Arab music was created at the municipal conservatory. Yafil was the obvious choice to fill the post because of his public prominence and, according to Bouzar-Kasbadji, the fact that as a Jew he enjoyed French citizenship.Footnote 102 By the end of 1923, Yafil had relinquished the direction of day to day affairs at El Moutribia to Mahieddine while retaining an advisory capacity.Footnote 103
El Moutribia's activities expanded under Mahieddine's initiative. The repertoire became highly mixed in terms of genre and register, with Mahieddine performing songs from the nūba tradition alongside arias from Italian opera, original compositions combining Arabic and French, and popular songs from Tin Pan Alley translated into colloquial Arabic.Footnote 104 This stylistic expansion reflected a soundscape widened by the proliferation of foreign audio recordings and the advent of radio. In the 1920s, El Moutribia's concert-hall events began to integrate skits into the musical program, soon followed by full-fledged plays, with Mahieddine's theatrical activities at times even eclipsing his strictly musical ones. He had been involved in the founding of the nationalist-leaning Amicale des Étudiants Musulmans,Footnote 105 and his sympathy for social critique was expressed in his popular Arabic-language theatrical programs. With increasing boldness over the interwar period, Mahieddine's melodramas tackled politically resonant issues such as alcoholism, women's status, and native collaboration with the colonial regime. Champions of the Algerian Muslim cause viewed the emergence of a public for popular Arabic theater as a worthy endeavor even beyond the dramatic content of the plays. Amir Khalid, for example, was active in drumming up an audience for the early theatrical experiments, none of which were explicitly political.Footnote 106 Even in its embryonic stage, theater promised to be a powerful force for the articulation of anticolonial sentiments. At the same time, the Andalusi repertoire, which in terms of lyric content was considered safely apolitical by the colonial authorities,Footnote 107 remained central to El Moutribia's activities.
Yafil still loomed large in El Moutribia, and there was considerable overlap between the municipal conservatory, the association, and the recording activities. Mahieddine, along with other members of El Moutribia, was enrolled in Yafil's Arab music class at the municipal conservatory,Footnote 108 and he and Yafil performed together during their visits to Paris in 1924 and 1926, where they attracted both bourgeois French and working-class Algerian immigrant audiences. At the newly constructed Paris Mosque—where Mahieddine performed the first call to prayer at its lavish inauguration in 1926—the café maure that was part of the complex drew a fashionable, international crowd attracted by the exotic décor and varied musical acts, which on occasion included Mahieddine.Footnote 109 The connections that Yafil and Mahieddine established during their visits to Paris also led to a joint concert tour of Algeria with the violinist Jean de la Casa Nocetti. These concerts—combining songs from the nūba repertoire performed by Mahieddine with pieces from the European classical tradition performed by Nocetti—drew large crowds of both indigenous Algerians and Europeans in the provincial cities.Footnote 110 In a similar vein, Yafil used his position at the conservatory to craft new compositions that combined elements of the Andalusi repertoire with elements of the western European classical tradition, culminating in a lavish 1927 collaboration between members of El Moutribia and the Algiers municipal orchestra.Footnote 111
Yafil died a little over a year after this collaboration, at the age of fifty-four, and his public mourners included prominent Muslim politicians and colonial officials. In his short career, Yafil had used diverse technological, discursive, and institutional forms to challenge the existing mode of producing and consuming Andalusi music. But the final challenge he posed seemed to aim at the practice's very heart: the notion of genealogical authority and the primacy of the concept of patrimony as a sort of collective, anonymous author. At the time of the 1927 performance, Rouanet publicly accused his erstwhile collaborator of having claimed author's rights over large parts of the Andalusi repertoire:
For several years now, I have formally requested that my person be in no ways implicated in a commercial enterprise that would aim to monopolize, for material ends, a domain that constitutes part of the Muslim folklore. I could not allow people to be left thinking that I approve of certain admittedly skillful exploitations of music that belongs to everyone due to its anonymity and great age. I did not wish to shout from the rooftops that I had composed Andalusi songs from the 9th century or other distant epochs. I did not agree to call myself a great and illustrious composer in order to secure rights to melodies that are older than our “Au Claire de la Lune” or tunes that Mohammed Ben Ali Sfindja, Ben Farachou, and other masters of genuine fame had dictated to their students just as they had received them from their predecessors.Footnote 112
This was not the first time that Yafil had been criticized in public—at the 1905 Orientalist Congress, Desparmet had dismissed the Diwan for allegedly duplicating all the errors found in the manuscripts on which it was based.Footnote 113 But while Desparmet criticized Yafil for being too traditional and unscientific, Rouanet was criticizing him for being a traitor to tradition.
Although Mahieddine would later vigorously deny Rouanet's charges against his teacher, the colonial records show that Yafil did indeed quietly register himself as composer with the French copyright agency Société des Auteurs, Compositeurs et Éditeurs de la Musique for many of the nūba recordings that he had made.Footnote 114 Yafil's action was within the letter of French copyright law, which allows for works that have not been declared as public domain to be registered as its first declarer's original composition—that is, until the claim is successfully contested, at which point the declaration transfers to public domain.Footnote 115 In Yafil's case, the contestation was swift and unanimous and thanks to Rouanet's letter took place in the informal court of public opinion. Having pioneered revival's path, Yafil had hit upon one of its limits.
CONTINUITY IN RUPTURE
Thus far, this has largely been a story about rupture or attempted rupture. Print challenged the manuscript economy, the amateur association geared toward public performance challenged the private coteries of high-end professionals and their dilettante patrons, recordings challenged the primacy of live performance, and Yafil's compositional and authorial experiments challenged the routes of authoritative transmission and the largely anonymous, collective nature of the patrimony. Yet by Yafil's death in 1928, despite the changes he had helped to introduce, much of the 19th-century relations of musical production remained intact. The genre structure that constituted the Andalusi repertoire persisted, with the five-movement nūba at the center, ringed by a variety of lighter genres popularly presented as derivative from the core. The Diwan and its imitators, along with Yafil's 1907 wax cylinder text, Majmuʿ Zahw al-Anis, followed the formal conventions of the manuscript tradition.Footnote 116 The professional shaykh with his penchant for withholding knowledge lived on into the interwar period and beyond—sometimes, like the famous Shaykh Larbi Ben Sari of Tlemcen, remaining somewhat aloof from the amateur associations and at other times sitting at the associations’ very heart as their musical directors.Footnote 117 The associations themselves embraced the genealogical form, commemorating the memories of the past masters through ceremonies and photographs, and many of the post-1962 associations are named after particular local masters. The nonperforming elite patrons came to be integrated into the association structure, where they often occupied the central administrative posts as well as the colonial-era and postindependence governmental positions in charge of promoting Andalusi musical reform. Even the physical location of the interwar association headquarters, including that of El Moutribia, remained close to the café where Sfindja performed and to the mosque where Yafil discovered Mahieddine, even if some of these locations indexed an increasingly confident critique of the colonial power structure.Footnote 118
Such elements of persistence were as true for Yafil and El Moutribia as for those who followed. El Moutribia's publicity in the 1920s presented Yafil as the privileged disciple of the late Sfindja, someone “who had been specially instructed by the old master, understood the danger, and undertook the renovation of Arab music.”Footnote 119 And after Yafil's death, Mahieddine, who had taken over leadership of El Moutribia and then Yafil's vacated chair at the municipal conservatory, recorded a new song in his teacher's honor titled Ya Maʿallim Yafil (O Master Yafil, maʿallim being a synonym for shaykh in the Maghribi musical context). Even Yafil's flirtation with author's rights was not categorically opposed to the pre-existing forms of genealogical authority. Note, for example, the resonance between the contestation of author's rights for the sake of public domain and the noncentralized yet tightly controlled routes of authoritative transmission dominant in the 19th century. Yafil's claim of author rights suggests the instability of the notion of authorship in a context where copyright law and new modes of circulation were interacting with alternative structures of textual authority. The claim was shunned, but Yafil's attempt kept neither him nor his students from imagining their authority along genealogical lines.
But perhaps the most dramatic and solid testament to continuity and the older structure's ability to absorb and domesticate new forms comes from the fate of the Diwan. Despite accusations from Desparmet and others that it was riddled with errors,Footnote 120 the Diwan was widely adopted by amateurs and professionals and came to be used as the basis for new generations of manuscript compilations. The Diwan was frequently gifted from master to disciple and eventually became the object of hoarding. Yafil the historical personage was largely forgotten: unlike Mahieddine, whose name now graces an amateur association from Koléa, there is no association named for Yafil, although the leading website dedicated to analyzing the Algiers repertoire on the basis of archival recordings is called Groupe Yafil.Footnote 121 Nevertheless, Yafil survived as a coveted textual personage that has outlived the several attempts to supplant it, and the Diwan is often called Diwan Yafil or simply Yafil.Footnote 122 Edmond Yafil may not have succeeded in becoming an author, but he did succeed in becoming a book.
CONCLUSION
The constructionist paradigm that has reigned in the social sciences and humanities over the past few decades has permitted a wide-ranging critique of received essentialisms, particularly through the study of nations and nationalism. Scholarship on North Africa and the Middle East is no exception. Treating Algerian national revival as a metaphor, for example, raises new questions about the processes of invention that the metaphor hides and thereby facilitates, evoking a messier, less ineluctably nationalist narrative of modern Algerian history. As the Andalusi musical case suggests, these processes of invention included a deployment of the metaphor of revival in diverse contexts that cannot be easily assimilated to the nationalist telos and that appealed to a wide swath of colonial society.
At the same time, the Andalusi musical case suggests how in some cases the preconstructionist analysis of revival as objective reinvigoration and the constructionist analysis of revival as subjective invention may complement rather than contradict one another. In this particular instance, such complementarity is both possible and necessary due to three interconnected kinds of ambiguities that are of great consequence to Yafil's reception and of varying applicability to other instances of revival. The first ambiguity is one that the Andalusi case shares with many other documented cases of musical revival, wherein revival is a gloss for the widening or shifting of the networks of musical production and circulation. Yafil's ambiguous position between musical modernizer and inheritor of Sfindja rests in part upon his role in the real but incomplete shift in Andalusi music's social location. Here, the distinction between reinvigoration and invention depends upon where in the network the analyst places herself.
The ambiguity that seems to be a hallmark of musical revivals leads directly into a second kind of ambiguity specific to the Andalusi musical context treated here. Musical revivalists like Yafil built their projects on and directed them toward a musical economy that featured a structural ambiguity with regard to professional musicians and their amateur patrons. If the Andalusi case shares with other musical revivals a shift in the networks of musical production and circulation, what distinguishes it from, say, the U.S. folk revival (with its typical flow from the rural to the urban) is the way in which the shift or attempted shift occurred with regard to the relative emphasis on the professional or the amateur subject position within the preexisting relations of musical production. These particularities help account for the way in which revivalist moves in the sphere of print, recordings, and associations were assimilated into the existing structures that the revival was acting upon. Thus the repertoire that Yafil helped to redistribute had already been a distributed genre or complex of genres before a self-conscious project of revival had been undertaken, suggesting that the ambiguity of revival may in this case be a heightening of an in-built ambiguity of genre.Footnote 123
The third kind of ambiguity lies in the notion of revival in its broadest, most ecumenical sense. Although the aforementioned particularities of the Andalusi case counsel caution against making overarching comparisons regarding phenomena that receive the revival label, one thing that all revivals share is a name that, by way of an organic analogy, implies a mixture of continuity (the object of revival must have existed, even if only in the distant past, in order to be revived) and change (there is at minimum the infusion of new life into the object of revival). The concept of revival thus points to the capacity for dynamism and paradox inherent in social practice and, by extension, in its agents—a capacity that may be particularly abundant in evanescent, embodied practices such as music. To the degree that such matters bring us into dialogue with the growing body of work that thinks about tradition not as a mute foil to a Weberian vision of modernity but rather as a historically instituted performative practice, scholars of the Middle East and North Africa are well poised to take the lead in reconsidering the notion of revival in a newly expansive fashion.
