On Howls and Pitches” and the Rural Voice

The Rose Main Reading Room of the New York Public Library is always quiet. It stands as a shrine to a particular kind of silence. Only the sounds of scholars’ devotions hallow this sanctuary: the low litany of typing and page-turning, the scuff of wooden armchairs across the floor, the footfall of guards in watchful procession along the aisles. The photocopier is strategically placed at the rear of this grand room; it was there that I first encountered the “Bogas from the Magdalena River.” At the time, I had no idea what the picture stood for, unable to listen to “howls and pitches.” I was only there to help photocopy material for Ana María Ochoa's new book. And it was there that I first heard about it—or, better yet, its fragments—even before reading it.Aurality's insightful historiographical reconsideration of the differences between vocalizing and listening has compelled us to reassess foundational tenets of ethnomusicology. Much has been written about this seminal book and the ways in which it has profoundly influenced academic fields beyond ethnomusicology. Here, however, I am interested in looking forward rather than backward. That is to say I am interested in the possibilities that Aurality offers for writing about voice in the Arab world particularly with respect to colonial-era descriptions concerning voice. I will consider my own writing as a case study, interwoven with core concepts and ideas from Aurality, to illustrate how Ochoa's scholarship aids in theorizing a particular notion of the rural voice in colonial and postcolonial Morocco (and among migrant Moroccan men in Italy).Methodologically, Ochoa's work examining the relationship between listening and voice (as part of the history of the relationship between the colonial and the modern) offers new perspectives on grounding decolonization in music. I attend to the negative consequences that “the contrasting perception of those who produced the sounds and those who listened to them, as mediated by potentially radically different interpretations of the same sounds,”1 have had on the voices I write about. Aurality allows us to profoundly question new paradigms for the “co-production” of musical knowledge2 in colonial Morocco, within the context of a drastic power imbalance where the question of how to distinguish between human and nonhuman sounds became particularly important,3 with voice playing a fundamental role. Aurality also allows us to make sense of Moroccan migrants’ responses to how they are able to reorient themselves in the world through the auditory experiences of a meaningful voice—a meaningful sound in new locations marked by other forms of power imbalance.In The Voice of the Rural: Music, Poetry, and Masculinity among Migrant Moroccan Men in Umbria (2022), I explore the significance and durability of a specific notion of the rural (l-ʿarubiya)4 in music, poetry, and the voice among male Moroccan migrants. I investigate how the idea of l-ʿarubiya—which is entangled with a sense of place, longing, and belonging—is particularly meaningful in Italy, where it articulates a personhood rooted in a masculinity that is denied to these Moroccan men because of their labor and migration status. I posit that these migrants are able to recover such personhood through what they commonly call ṣawt l-ʿarubiya (the voice of the rural), and I investigate the concept of ṣawt l-ʿarubiya as a means for these migrants to reclaim a way of being in the world through music, poetry, and the voice. Central to the book is a consideration of how Moroccans conceive of the voice as a sonic phenomenon that privileges timbre for its powerful association with the immediately surrounding natural environment. Voices described as rough or coarse (ḥərsh) invoke a particular notion of the rural (along with a local aesthetics that disrupts the French colonial “acoustic regime,” which did not perceive ḥərsh in the same way). I reflect on the marginalization and silencing of the countryside under the French protectorate and even in postcolonial Morocco, elucidating the construction of the ʿarubi (a male peasant, rural person, or someone whose origin can be traced to l-ʿarubiya) and how historical negative connotations surrounding the ʿarubi emerged sonically.My inquiry into the “sonic difference” of the ʿarubi began with a passage from Ochoa, in which she argues that “when sonic perceptions are troubling or perceived as unwanted, then sound becomes unbearable,” making it difficult to overcome an “acoustic disgust in order to undertake the project of epistemologically mapping sonic difference as scientific observation.”5 Using this idea of “acoustic disgust,” I began to analyze one of the many colonial documents in which the sonic difference of the Arab Bedouin stereotype (morphing later on into the sonic difference of the ʿarubi) is described as a voice embodying excess, deeply entangled with nonhumans.The description and inscription of a voice perceived as rough, coarse, loud, violent, and disturbing became a discursive formation with the potential for what Ochoa describes as “creating and mobilizing an acoustic regime of truths, a power-knowledge nexus in which some modes of perception, description and inscription of sound are more valid than others in the context of unequal power relations.”7 This process was particularly evident in the writings of Alexis Chottin, whose publications on the music of Morocco under the aegis of the colonial administration's Service des Arts Indigènes exerted a profound influence upon colonial writings concerning ṣawt l-ʿarubiya. The “audible representation”8 of colonial differences had, after all, played an important role in colonial Morocco's artistic agendas.9Invited to Morocco to direct the Conservatory of Moroccan Music in Rabat, Chottin organized his research on Moroccan music according to two categories, emphasizing the contrast between two civilizations, through what can be understood as a colonial sonic interpretation of “Khaldunism”:10 rhythm—sounding the nomadic, the rural, the uncivilized; and melody—the sedentary, the urban, . . . the civilized. Melody, the supposed product of a “civilized” culture, was “mapped onto the aesthetic ideal of civilized beauty”; rhythm (implicitly the product of the uncivilized) was “differently mapped onto [the] sensorial.”11Rather than focusing on such a division, I directed my interest toward exploring ways in which the perception of acoustic difference “was made sense of and mapped onto practices of acoustic knowledge-making by Europeans.”12 I delved into how the colonial ear perceived and described a musico-poetic genre, ʿaiṭa, in which ṣawt l-ʿarubiya is central.Vocal qualities such as roughness or coarseness are part of a well-documented tradition in Arabic writings (adab), in which musicians discuss and evaluate perceived sound qualities—sometimes phonemes imitating musical sounds, or even suggesting qualities of vision or touch.13 Ethnomusicology and its related disciplines continue to marginalize these writings, with their rich displays of indigenous knowledge forms through debate, when theorizing about voice and sound;14 indeed, Alexis Chottin's discussions concerning voice were either divorced from these texts or problematically translated when cited.15 In this colonial context, voice became a crucial arena where European taste and morality converged. Articulation and timbre (along with the relation between them) having become constituent to the notion of a proper voice,16 Chottin viewed the folk (populaire) category—using vulgar or street language, syllabic verse, irregularities, and supposed barbarism—as representing a decline from the Andalusian arts.17In the relatively few pages he devotes to folk music, Chottin emphasizes two modes of listening and writing about ʿaiṭa. On the one hand, he focuses on vocality, describing ʿaiṭa as a cry, a voice with no identifiable pitch associated with the Arab Bedouin tribes, their vernacular, and (implicitly) their rough or coarse vocal timbre.18 On the other hand, Chottin focuses on the association between ʿaiṭa and professional female singer-dancers (shikhat), describing and inscribing this musico-poetic genre with the sensual excess characteristic of colonial writings. In discussing the performance of a group of shikhat, Chottin's perception of sound becomes enmeshed in Orientalist tropes; attraction and desire are juxtaposed with fear and disgust when reacting to a phantasmagorical Oriental woman whose sonic difference is taxonomized through pseudoscientific observation.Chottin's ethnographic ear had also been shaped by the diaries of European travelers associated, directly or indirectly, with the French administration even before the protectorate was established in Morocco. This was the case for Eugène Aubin, a member of the French foreign service, appointed First Secretary of the French Legation in Tangier, who, while spending six months on an official mission in Fez, wrote about his travels in pre-protectorate Morocco. The following passage illuminates similarities between Aubin's and Chottin's acoustic perception and description, in which vocality is linked to morality, and listening is inevitably entangled with the personal and the biographical: This music is of two kinds—the lighter music, griha, composed of easier airs and popular ballads with a vague sort of instrumental accompaniment; and serious music, ala, in which the airs are complicated, the song artistic, and the performance of real musicians on difficult instruments is required. . . . The other [music] is regarded as a frivolous pastime, suitable for foolish women or a man's debauch. . . . Today [Shikha Brika] is the darling of the city, although she is very coarse, and has a grating voice.20The untamed rural voice of ʿaiṭa needed to be, drawing from Ochoa's discussion about a zoopolitics of the voice, “regulated in order for that human to become a proper person, and the passions needed to be tempered in the moral alignment of the physiological body.”21 It is in this sense that a music genre such as ‘aiṭa, understood first and foremost as immoral, could eventually be interpreted as a sign of moral decadence in its practitioners, in its listeners, and in those who embodied l-ʿarubiya.My interest in investigating a specific, enduring notion of the rural in the male Moroccan migrant's music, poetry, and voice—while also considering what l-ʿarubiya “is supposed to invoke, provoke, and incarnate” (as well as how these migrants “acoustically embody”22 l-ʿarubiya)—led me to examine how roughness or coarseness is not perceived in the same way by those who actually inhabit the rural (in reality or memory). It was then possible to recognize how the connection among a rough or coarse vocal quality, the land, and agrarian life allowed for ḥərsh to become meaningful, to have an emotional affect, to express particular experiences in the voice of l-ʿarubiya, and, in turn, for ḥərsh to have been reclaimed as central to listening, as well as to a multisensory counteraesthetics.Frantz Fanon notes that the colonizers used “zoological language” when speaking about the colonized;23 that is, a language that reduced the colonized subject to an animal, a language present in most, if not all, colonial descriptions of the “rural voice.” In Aurality, however, Ochoa explores a different aspect of the “zoopolitics of the voice,” providing a useful structure for thinking about how “envoicing animal sounds is not a ‘lowly condition of animality’ but rather is due to the shared capacity of humans and animals to have a voice, sing, and speak.”24Instead of a problem, incorporating nonhuman sounds into human speech and singing becomes a positive objective and, in turn, a counteraesthetics associated with another musico-poetic genre, ʿabidat r-rma (literally, servants or slaves of the hunters), in which the voice of the rural is also central. Ochoa's statement is quite pertinent in the discussion of this genre, associated with an all-male ensemble that traditionally performed for male patrons during hunting expeditions. The men of these ensembles played a double role: during the day, they drove prey toward the hunters while shouting, “ḥay, ḥay”; at night, they became entertainers. Imitation of the animal voices that acoustically reenact the hunting scene is sonically embedded into ʿabidat r-rma. The following colonial account of a hunting scene differs strikingly from the ways in which those accustomed to the tradition would have perceived the same soundscape. In this account, descriptions of “tremendous noise,” “strange cries,” animal vocalizations, and human-to-animal communication plainly debase the voice of the indigenous population: The beaters made tremendous noise, filling the air with strange cries as they commenced the drive towards us. It was amusing to listen to them. A Moor always talks to an animal as he would to a human being. He firmly believes that they all speak “Moorish.” So I was not surprised to hear Salem shouting with his huge, resounding voice, “Now come out and show yourself, great Abou Snau (father of tusks).”25An ability to “move between the world of the human and the nonhuman”26 could be partly explained by the fact that, unlike in the city, where the general term ṣiḥ (bellow, shout) is employed, in the countryside, ubiquitous animal vocalizations (along with onomatopoeic terms for those vocalizations) comprised an animal lexicon invading the vernacular, forming a sonic background for ʿabidat r-rma. When considering, much as Ochoa does in reference to the bogas, how performers of ʿabidat r-rma deliberately imitate animal sounds in their vocalizations, it is necessary to take into account that (1) in medieval Arab treatises, the notion of ṣawt (literally, voice and sound) already indicated the communicative mediums for both humans and nonhumans,27 and that (2) although animals figure significantly in Islamic thought and culture, a zoology per se would have been rather anachronistic because animals were always regarded in relation to humankind.28 Thus, ʿabidat r-rma requires a “vocalization that is conceived as a multiplicity rather than embodying a sound that represents an entity.”29 This is the vocal competence that, in the case of the Moroccan migrants I have worked with, allows them to reconstitute the sorts of human and nonhuman relations they describe, and which they recognize as entangled with their own experience of l-ʿarubiya.Aurality encourages us to hear the voice of the rural—ṣawt l-ʿarubiya—as “a force that constitutes the world and a medium for constructing knowledge about it.”30 It is a book that resonates across disciplinary boundaries and thresholds as it continues to challenge the canon and inspire radical rethinking. Aurality weaves questions and thought across continents, countries, experiences, and peoples; it is a book that cannot be contained, and through which I learned to hear what was, for me, at first inaudible. Just as importantly, Aurality invites us to reflect upon the knottings and twistings of different modes by which knowledge is generated, and thereby to consider whom we allow to participate in ethnomusicology's future; to be part of a historiography in which an indigenous perspective about voice in the Arab world should no longer remain marginal

Art · Rural development and sustainability