America's Other Orchestras: Arab American Ensemble Series Episode 9

posted on: Nov 9, 2016

Historic Williamsburg, Virginia and The Ambassador of Arab Music

BY: Sami Asmar/Contributing Writer

It does not get any more American than the historical town of Williamsburg, Virginia, the scenic wooded town with rich a past closely tied to the history of our nation. In the town is an also all-American small college, the College of William and Mary, perhaps not the expected background for yet another exciting Arab American orchestra. Yet, since 1994, the College of William and Mary Middle Eastern Music Ensemble has been thriving. It explores Arab, Turkish, Persian, Armenian and Greek genres under the direction of Professor Anne Rasmussen. The ensemble has been so successful that it toured and performed in Oman and Morocco, showing the Arab World the American interest in their art and culture and extending good will among nations.

This is all due to the efforts of the Ensemble’s founder. Dr. Rasmussen graduated from UCLA and studied Arab music under Professor AJ Racy, like others we have featured here who moved on to start their own (second generation) ensembles. This dynamic scholar, performer, and teacher specialized in the music of Arab Americans for her dissertation and wrote the book about the subject: The Music of Arab Americans, A Retrospective Collection (with a CD). Her more recent book Women, the Recited Qur’an, and Islamic Music in Indonesia, received the Alan Merriam Prize Honorable Mention for 2011. She also co-authored Music of Multicultural America: Performance, Identity, and Community in the United States, now in paperback!

Anne has directed the Ensemble essentially as a forum for the study and performance of music from the Arab world. A hands-on ambassador of the arts that she brought to her American town, college, and students. She shares with this Mid-Atlantic regional community her research on music in Islam, issues of orientalism and nationalism, as well as fieldwork in Arab and Muslim nations.

The College of William & Mary Middle Eastern Music Ensemble regularly brings guest artists from Morocco and elsewhere to share the music of Al-Andalus, considered one of the most spectacular traditions of poetry set to music and an Arab historical reference to medieval Spain that produced a blend of cultures created a type of music that contains African, Western and Eastern influences.

Students in this ensemble get exposed to the language as they learn songs and practice on the traditional instruments: Ud, Nay, Qanun, Tablah/Darabukah, and Riqq, among other instruments. But members of this ensemble do not stop at learning and performing music and occasional dances.  They have release two CDs: Live in Performance (2000) and An Extraordinary Season (2013).  They have also created a digital catalog of scores, programs, and transcriptions in a Middle Eastern Music Archive that has become a virtual exhibit of the unique history of the Middle Eastern Music Ensemble at William & Mary. The ambitious group has also collaborated in projects with others such as sponsoring a 2006 workshop with the faculty ensemble of the Edward Said National Conservatory from Palestine and performed some of their works in Washington D.C. In 2007, they focused on the traditional music of Iraq and worked with Amir El-Saffar, an Iraqi American who has “devoted his career to salvaging Iraqi music in the face of cultural genocide.” The ensemble also performed in a major concert in Washington D.C. sponsored by the Embassy of Spain under the theme “Andalusia: Cultural Crossroads.”

Their list of guest artists is a Who’s Who of performers and scholars of Arab and Middle Eastern musicians in the US: from Munir Beken, George Sawa, Yousef Kassab, Nabil Azzam, AJ Racy, Scott Marcus, Dwight Reynolds, Souhail Kaspar, Hanna Khoury, Simon Shaheen, and Kinan Idnawi, just to name a few.

Anne is currently on sabbatical conducting more fieldwork around the world, leaving the ensemble in the capable hands of Phil Murphy until she returns to direct it. Being an ambassador is not easy work and one does not stay home to do it. This is peace work at its best, learning about other cultures and sharing American culture with other people, then bringing home the nuggets of Arab music to Virginia, where American history was made.