Beyond 1932 is an ERC/UKRI-funded project based at King’s College London, for which Counterpoints is one of the supporting partners, considering the sonic legacies of the 1932 Cairo Congress of Arab Music.
The Cairo Congress of Arab Music in 1932 brought together musicians and musicologists from across the post-Ottoman world and involved the participation of eminent Western composers, orientalists and musicologists. Its underlying aim to was to share ‘best practice’ in performance, pedagogy and research, to unify and connect.
Its effects could be said, however, to have been more or less the opposite. In its wake, modern national traditions and performance practices fragmented. Western ethnomusicologists and their Middle Eastern counterparts never joined forces collectively again. Scholarship and popular practice went in opposite directions, and never convincingly reconnected. The 1932 Congress continues to be understood as an event marking the end of MENA musical tradition and the beginning of a deeply compromised modernity.
The Beyond 1932 project, which runs until 2027, includes sharing the 1932 recordings, a series of podcasts, live events and an extensive residency programme.
The six residencies will reflect on issues around music pedagogy, contemporary archival practices, notation and tuning, and multidisciplinary performance practices. The residency series provides a platform for artist-led approaches to archiving and sonic interventions that address the issues around control and power of institutional archives and politics of cultural representation and intersectional counter-archives in the region.
