"The Voice of Egypt"

Umm Kulthum, Arabic Song, and Egyptian Society in the Twentieth Century

Virginia Danielson

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9780226136080
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Umm Kulthum, the "voice of Egypt, " was the most celebrated musical performer of the century in the Arab world. More than twenty years after her death, her devoted audience, drawn from all strata of Arab society, still numbers in the millions. Thanks to her skillful and pioneering use of mass media, her songs still permeate the international airwaves. In the first English-language biography of Umm Kulthum, Virginia Danielson chronicles the life of a major musical figure and the confluence of artistry, society, and creativity that characterized her remarkable career.Danielson examines the careful construction of Umm Kulthum's phenomenal popularity and success in a society that discouraged women from public performance. From childhood, her mentors honed her exceptional abilities to accord with Arab and Muslim practice, and as her stature grew, she remained attentive to her audience and the public reception of her work. Ultimately, she created from local precendents and traditions her own unique idiom and developed original song styles from both populist and neo-classical inspirations. These were enthusiastically received, heralded as crowning examples of a new, yet authentically Arab-Egyptian, culture. Danielson shows how Umm Kulthum's music and public personality helped form popular culture and contributed to the broader artistic, societal, and political forces that surrounded her.This richly descriptive account joins biography with social theory to explore the impact of the individual virtuoso on both music and society at large while telling the compelling story of one of the most famous musicians of all time."She is born again every morning in the heart of 120 million beings. In the East a day without Umm Kulthum would have no color."—Omar Sharif

One

“The Voice and Face of Egypt”

Umm Kulthūm was unquestionably the most famous singer in the twentieth-century Arab world. Her performing career lasted over fifty years, from about 1910, when she sang with her father at weddings and special occasions in villages and towns in the eastern Delta of Egypt, until her final illness in Cairo in 1973. She recorded about three hundred songs. For almost forty years her monthly, Thursday night concerts were broadcast live over the powerful Egyptian radio waves. As a result, her audience consisted of millions, reaching far beyond the concert-going public of Cairo to households all over the Middle East where people gathered to listen to the broadcasts. Many who could well afford tickets preferred sitting with friends and family in coffeehouses and homes. Part of listening to Umm Kulthūm was a long evening of tea and camaraderie. Listeners remember this entire experience along with the sound.

By way of describing the impact of her Thursday concerts, many stories circulated: “Such-and-such a military leader postponed a manoeuvre because Umm Kulthūm was singing.” “Life in the Arab world came to a stop.” Detractors complained that “You couldn’t read about anything else in the newspaper that day except the color of Umm Kulthūm’s dress and what jewelry she would wear.” On those Thursdays, “we lived in her world all day.”¹

She was a cultural leader in a general sense, as a public personality, seven-year president of the Musicians’ Union, member of governmental committees on the arts, and cultural emissary of Egypt to other Arab nations. When she died in 1975, her funeral was described as bigger than that of President Jamāl ʿAbd al-Nāṣir. She was, for many years, “the voice and face of Egypt.”² She remains today an inescapable figure in Arab musical life.

Umm Kulthūm’s story is that of a successful musician in a complex society: it is multifaceted. It is the story of a village girl who grew up to become the cultural symbol of a nation. It is also that of a competent professional woman, whose career depended negotiating a demanding and difficult path through the institutions of musical performance in Cairo. She sought and found ways to influence and even control the institutions and processes that affected her career. And her story is that of the development of a wonderfully accomplished musician whose singing was and still is viewed as a contemporary exemplar of an old and deeply valued Arab art.

In all aspects of her public life she asserted values considered to be indigenous. She helped to constitute Egyptian cultural and social life and to advance an ideology of Egyptianness. Her most powerful medium of expression was her musical style. She developed a personal idiom from antecedents considered to be Arab and Muslim. Umm Kulthūm and her repertory are widely viewed as aṣīl, authentically Egyptian and Arab. She helped to constitute several different styles, and her performances contributed to two important formations in contemporary Egyptian expressive culture—one neoclassical, the other populist. That this repertory may be justly viewed as her own, and not the result of independent creations of poets, composers, and technicians, results from her extensive involvement in the selection and composition of the poetry and music she sang, as well as the conditions of her performances.

Her thousands of performances over a long period of time were the subject of much reportage, criticism, and ordinary talk. She produced musical culture in a general sense. And, over the course of years, she herself was created by the fame she attained. Listeners evaluated her style and those of other performers and responded to changes she and others made in the musical practices they had learned. Her musical choices, and ultimately her place in Egyptian society, depended on the society’s reception of her art. She was a participant in the society that she affected with her performances; she experienced and responded to her audience and to the artistic, social, and political forces surrounding her. Her career, artistry, and dominant presence in the culture offer an impressive entrée into Arab expressive culture.

SOME QUESTIONS

Knowing a few facts about her life, I approached the study of Umm Kulthūm with the simple questions of why and how an individual could sustain such popularity for so long. Why was this individual, among many other entertainers, so important? My view, of course, was and is that of an outsider: unlike my Egyptian friends and colleagues, I did not grow up loving the voice of Umm Kulthūm, nor did I harbor the fatigue or even resentment some of them felt toward her pervasive presence. Unlike many ethnomusicologists, I did not approach Umm Kulthūm’s repertory from instinctive love of the music. In fact, like many Western listeners, I did not understand it. I came into the society of musicians in Cairo as one who had to be taught why Umm Kulthūm’s singing was good singing. I did not become, in the course of my years in Egypt, an objective observer of cultural expression: my story, and the language of my interpretation of Umm Kulthūm’s story, is that of a Western musician and academic who learned to love and value Arabic singing.

I began, in the early 1980s, with lessons and conversations with musicians. In answer to my fundamental questions about why Umm Kulthūm was so important, why audiences thought her performances were so good, and why she was so much more highly regarded than anyone else, they talked predominantly about her musical style, her vocal skills, her habits and preferences in rehearsals and performances, and her treatment of others. As my circle of acquaintances widened I spoke with critics and writers, journalists, teachers, Umm Kulthūm’s friends and family, and her associates, as well as personal friends and casual acquaintances of my own. My women friends in al-Minyā and the surrounding villages, their husbands and children and their large extended families; my acquaintances among professionals, shopkeepers, and students there; intellectuals from Alexandria; friends and neighbors in Cairo; in short, the people who constituted my experience of daily life in Cairo and provincial Egypt over the years all talked about Umm Kulthūm and vastly broadened the understanding I developed from her musicians and colleagues.

My questions about a single person quickly led to larger questions about Egyptian and Arab culture and society. What were the material circumstances of a commercial singer’s life? How did she make her way? In what respects was Umm Kulthūm’s career typical? How was she affected by the operations of institutions such as record companies and theaters? What was her effect on musical life and in what ways were her actions informed or constrained by precedents? Where were her performances situated in the larger processes of social life?

Umm Kulthūm’s career unfolded during two world wars, the Egyptian Revolutions of 1919 and 1952, the Great Depression and the momentous sociopolitical changes of the 1950s and 1960s—events that affected her as a citizen of Egypt and as a working musician, just as they commanded the attention of her listeners. She was constantly identified as a truly Egyptian artist—she was aṣīl, “authentic.” In this larger realm why did Umm Kulthūm and her emblematic authenticity, her aṣāla, become so important? Why did this category emerge in musical expression and the surrounding discourse?

Initially, I found the explanations and evaluations attached to Umm Kulthūm’s repertory redundant to the point of seeming incomprehensible: it was as though listeners had learned the talk along with the tunes. When Egyptians talked about Umm Kulthūm they often said, “She was good because she could recite the Qurʾān,” leaving me to wonder what exactly that meant. “She never sang a line the same way twice”; but they sounded remarkably similar to me at the time, especially when compared to the florid melodic invention in instrumental improvisations. “She sang naturally,” people repeated, “not like Europeans,” or “she sang naturally because she could read the Qur’ān.” And when she performed, “she depicted the state [ḥāl] of the people exactly.” “Her voice was full of our everyday life.”

“She does not just sing the ʿRubāʿiyyāt,ʾ” a violinist commented about a translation of ʿUmār Khayyam’s famous poem that Umm Kulthūm recorded, “she infuses it with meaning.” “You must understand the words. You can’t like this music if you don’t understand the words.” But, I thought, instrumental improvisation is a high art in Arab music—why can’t I hear Umm Kulthūm’s music the same way—melodically?

I was told that this well-spoken, richly bejeweled woman was “really a country woman.” “She was a daughter of the Egyptian village,” “a bint il-riif.”

“It wasn’t only her voice—her character was the reason for her success.” “Egyptians not only like her voice, we respect her… . We look at her, we see fifty years of Egypt’s history. She is not only a singer.” Then who is she? What role did musical sound play in the construction of her persona and in public perceptions of her? And is it possible that “fifty years” in Arab societies, where women appear to outsiders to be oppressed, silent, and veiled, could be represented by the life and work of a woman?

My questions multiplied. More sophisticated listeners made more extensive and complex comments, but the essential points they made were usually the same and were points that would not be relevant to many other artists.

SPEECH ABOUT MUSIC

“We have much to learn,” Stephen Blum writes,

about the ways in which people talk about the dialogues in which musicians and listeners are engaged. All of the talk relies on tropes, as Goethe recognized: “We think we are speaking in pure prose and we are already speaking in tropes; one person employs the tropes differently than another, takes them farther in a related sense, and thus the debate becomes interminable and the riddle insoluble.”³

People talked to me readily, repeating, elaborating, and embellishing their tropes. “Talking,” an anthropologist friend observed, “is a national pastime in Egypt.” All sorts of topics are subject to detailed discussion, evaluation, and comment. Radio and television broadcasts, for example, are not merely to be absorbed, they are to be discussed. They provide a starting point for argumentation of views.

I began to pay increasing attention to speech about music in its various manifestations. Clearly this talk, this evaluation, was as much a part of musical practice as performance itself.⁴ But what did the tropes mean? I tried to find ways to hear talk about music that I “neither constrained nor controlled”⁵ and to look at the terms of the published discourse surrounding Umm Kulthūm from the beginning of her career.

This task was formidable. A great deal has been written about music in twentieth-century Egypt, much of it dealing with musicians in commercial domains. Brief accounts of Umm Kulthūm’s career and commentary on her performances, as well as those of the other entertainers in commercial venues, appeared frequently in the relatively large number of periodicals and columns devoted to music and theater published in Cairo. Many magazines were given entirely to entertainment, music, and theater, and others contained regular articles on performances.⁶ Al-Rādyū al-Miṣrī (and its successors) published broadcasting schedules including names of performers, songs, and durations of performances.⁷ The autobiography became a popular genre for public figures of all sorts beginning during the 1920s. Stars of music and theater published memoirs, including actresses Rūz al-Yūsuf, Badīʿa Maṣabnī, Faṭma Rushdī, actor Najīb al-Rīḥānī, playwright Badīʿ Khayrī, and musicians Muḥammad ʿAbd al-Wahhāb and Zakariyyā Aḥmad. Umm Kulthūm’s autobiographical statements began in 1937, with a series of articles in the magazine Ākhir Sāʿa. The autobiography she published in 1971 with Maḥmūd ʿAwaḍ is similar in content to the 1937 memoir, with ancillary chapters added by ʿAwaḍ.⁸ Biographies of the most famous stars were published. Following the es...