“Musician Beckles Willson (Orientalism and Musical Mission) scrupulously traces the history of the oud—a short-necked, fretless stringed musical instrument—from its first written mention in ancient Persia to the present day. An instrument long associated with bereavement (an early fable holds that a grieving father constructed it from his deceased son’s Read more…
The London launch of the long-awaited English translation of Wasif Jawhariyyeh’s memoirs was held at London’s Mosaic Rooms in February 2014. Jawhariyyeh’s account of Palestine in the late Ottoman and British Mandate eras is an indispensible document for historians, and also provides fantastic insights into music-making of the period. It Read more…
In 2004 the English press—specifically newspapers that are usually rather critical, The Guardian and The Observer—covered some western classical music initiatives in Ramallah led by the celebrated conductor Daniel Barenboim. They were wildly admiring, while also reproducing imperialistic discourses about Arabs and Europe (the former in need of the latter’s civilizing missions). I Read more…
Ligeti was at the heart of progressive movements in classical composition in Europe from the 1960s onwards, but in this book I examined his work through the frame of his earlier Hungarian influences. I dug out numerous sources from communist-era archives, demonstrating the machinery of artistic censorship and Ligeti’s enmeshed Read more…
My first book was commissioned for Ashgates ‘Landmarks in Music Since 1950’ series. It focuses on a piece of music composed in 1960s Hungary, still today uncompromisingly tough to listen to, even while it was rejected as ‘too 19th-century’ when it was premiered, in 1968, at the hothouse of progressive Read more…