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Writers like Elmessiri, Abdel Fattah, Al-Barghouti, and Abdel-Latif have been disseminated through more popular Arab media. Their critical opinion pieces which are diffused within the contemporary Arab discourse have already affected the perceptions and attitudes of the Arab public including Arab musicians, and this may even have an impact on the industry of Arab music. Music itself is rapidly changing as a result of mass disseminations. Since the twentieth century, the change has been tightly connected to developments in the nature and extent of media in the Arab world. Even the centrality of music within audiovisual media has shaped the production formats and pushed technological adoption, and radio broadcasts of Arab popular music also began to colonize the unmediated traditions of folk music production. Since the onset of media technologies, Arab scholars, music connoisseurs, and trained musicians have frequently criticized the emerging mediated music as aesthetically inferior and dissolute.

Headlines regarding the maliciousness of music video clips became a familiar sight in the Egyptian and Arab press. The source of all the commotion over music television in Egypt is the launching of the Egyptian and Arabic private satellite channels which are devoted to the broadcast of foreign and Arabic language music videos. This chapter contextualizes the gender, class, and moral anxieties articulated by Egyptian critics of the flourishing genre of Arab music videos and satellite music television channels, and demonstrates that the present-day uproar over the Arab music video has a clear genealogy in the history of Egyptian mass-mediated culture.

This chapter opens with a discussion of dual discourse in Arab music pedagogy in an interview with Ali Jihad Racy. It also presents the early background and career trajectory of Ali Jihad Racy's versatility as a performer-researcher which was found highly desirable when he joined UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles). For the last twenty years or so, the UCLA Near East Ensemble has been a prime context for teaching performance of Arab music. Certainly, Ali Jihad Racy's dual role, as a university professor and as a performer, did pose certain challenges. Situations that pulled him in different directions were always tense, but at the same time the duality provided a sense of fulfillment. However, both individuality and representation were manifested in the musical repertoires Ali Jihad chose to teach and in the methods of pedagogy that is preferred now. Another issue was teaching music as an experience, or as feeling. This chapter highlights the fact that at least two models have been followed in institutions. Each has its own validity. One is that you take a wide variety of classes and get exposed to many different ways of making music. Second is to also have room for the in-depth approach. According to Ali Jihad Racy it is an amazing feeling when the audience responds in culturally appropriate ways, because he feels such interactive behavior indirectly gives the performers a sense of the music's ecstatic or evocative nature.

This chapter provides an overview of insiders, outsiders, and the real version in Middle Eastern music performance. It claims that learning about music through lessons and informal apprenticeships as well as performing have been important components of the author's fieldwork experience. Politically, the mere presence of such an ensemble from the Middle East is a powerful and affirmative statement for multiculturalism. The William and Mary Middle Eastern Music Ensemble, for example, play ambassadorial roles on several levels. Following the leader or the musician who has the most convincing idea at the moment is one of the aesthetic trademarks of music, for example, in Arab music, one has to follow the singer or, alternatively, the strongest musician. Whether or not one is born and bred in a musical tradition, one's musicality is the result of a patchwork of experiences. A culturally specific sense of musicality may certainly be developed through the process of being native to that culture, but musicians' musicalities are also collections of encounters and choices.

This chapter presents the details behind the creation of this book, which focuses on the culture of the recited Qur'an, the Islamic music heard in contexts where the Qur'an was performed, and the ways in which a variety of participants, especially girls and women, are involved in this performance complex. It discusses music in Muslim Indonesia, the separate worlds of Indonesian and Arab music, women in Muslim Indonesia, and the global politics of Islam. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.

Enormous changes have taken place in the field of Arab music due to the phenomenal developments brought about by satellite channels and new modes of recording and telecommunications media. In the past, state radio and television were responsible for most musical production in Egypt, and remained so until the end of the 1970s. Transformations to song production resulted from changes in studio technology. With such technology, the relation between the singer and the band started to be severed, because each performer recorded his or her part separately, synchronized by a “click track.” Furthermore, the new visual interpretation of Arab songs contains many undesirable and dubious elements and there is an ongoing struggle regarding nudity and lewd dancing in most Arab video clips.