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Revolution in the Key of C: One Year Later, Tunisia Celebrates Victory at the Kennedy Center

Last week, Washington DC's Kennedy Center hosted the US premiere of “Hannibal Barca,” a symphony by Jaloul Ayed that pays homage to the famed, eponymous military figure of yore. This reference to an epic past marked the one year anniversary of the successful Tunisian revolution, which continues to have repercussions in the Mideast region; as such, the event was more than just a musical recital.

And, Ayed is an unlikely composer, better known around the world as the former Finance Minister for Tunisia's post-Ben Ali interim government. And while he characterized himself as a "humble, modest, and amateur" composer, the stunning performance of “Hannibal Barca” on January 9 belied any notion that the work of a novice was on display. Aslan Media attended the event, where the symphony, performed by 25 Tunisian musicians and the Kennedy Center's house orchestra, did not disappoint.

Throughout the three movements of “Hannibal Barca”, titled The Pride of Carthage, The Long Crossing, and The Glorious March, Ayed’s compositional skills not only enchanted audiences with the story of Barca himself, but also with the story of Tunisian renewal. Planning the evening around a symphonic piece that retraces the victories of Carthaginian military commander Hannibal Barca was no diplomatic accident. Barca, who was born in modern-day Tunisia, and often regarded as the greatest military strategist and negotiator in European history, not only fought numerous successful battles against the Roman Empire, but his tactics against Roman occupation have been carried forward by numerous military commanders in the modern era. To present this symphony in his name also sends a message about the impact of the Tunisian revolution as well as its rippling effects on surrounding countries.

“Hannibal Barca’s” presentation as an act of cultural diplomacy was cemented with remarks by both Ayed as well as the Tunisian Ambassador to the United States, Mohamed Saleh Tekaya, before the start of the performance. Tekaya mentioned that presenting ”Hannibal Barca” in D.C. was no accident, but a deliberate expression of friendship by Tunisia to the US. The composer himself also spoke to this point when he reminded the crowd of roughly 2,000 that the amicable relationship between Tunisia and the US has been sustained for over two centuries [with a brief interruption during 1980s and '90s over PLO and Gulf War-related issues]. Indeed, the American Friendship Treaty with Tunisia was signed in 1799.

The night was also filled with references to the Arab Spring and the Jasmine Revolution. Ayed described the joy he (and other Tunisians, by his account) felt when President Obama, in a speech delivered last year to the State Department, compared the Tunisia's revolution to America's own revolution more than 200 years ago:

#Jan25 Through 25 Music Videos that Gave it Voice (Part 2)

Last week, we released part one of our three-part series The Soundtrack of Revolution: Celebrating #Jan25 Through 25 Music Videos that Gave it Voice. While most of the eight songs featured in our first installment focused on the contagious Hope that permeated around Egypt’s overthrow of dictator Hosni Mubarak, this week’s set focuses instead on the rage that blew his 30-year grip.

The following 9 songs, some set against graphic footage, represent the spectrum of anger that simmered in the years leading up to Egypt’s historic 2011 protests. Their varied messages are just as much about mindfulness as they are about support. With forceful, even uncomfortable lyrics, each one reminds viewers that the only way forward past the end of the revolution is to stay united as a people.

“Egyptian Revolution” – Kareem Abd El-Wahab

“Egyptian Revolution,” by Cairo-based music arranger/graphic designer/visual effects supervisor Kareem Abd El-Wahab, is a strong fusion of his original electronic music and protestors chants, accompanied by stop-motion video of lesser-viewed scenes and footage from the revolt.

The Soundtrack of Revolution: Celebrating #Jan25 Through 25 Music Videos that Gave it Voice (Part 1)

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a song is worth a million, and a video gone viral is worth even more.

Since protests ran aflame in Egypt’s Tahrir Square, taking down the 30-year dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak, we’ve all be witness to the country’s triumphs, its setbacks, its challenges, and most importantly its contagious hope for freedom through peaceful protest.

Over the next several weeks, as we approach the anniversary of Jan 25th, our three-part Music series will highlight the grassroots role music played alongside the organic movement of defiant idealism that had nothing to lose but its own voice.

“We are Egyptians” - Hannah Magar, featuring The Brothahood

Hannah Magar, an Egyptian Muslim student in Australia who describes herself as “not a professional,” felt compelled to contribute to the movement through her music after watching the media coverage of Tahrir Square demonstrations. “Watching the brave people of Egypt in awe these last couple weeks, I feel they certainly deserved a song,” she wrote on YouTube. “It was the absolute least I could do.”

Five Arab Music Artist Worth Watching in 2012

2011 not only brought unprecedented social and political changes to the Middle East, it also created a wellspring of creative expression in the region. As censorship fears began to dissolve along with the governments that enforced them, new voices began to emerge in the arts.

These are not overnight artists; years, even decades, of repression forced them underground. But in the wake of last year’s historic changes, unknown names became instant celebrities, and unlike dictatorships, which put words into peoples' mouths, these artists and songwriters used the power of Arabic poetry to bring the outside world in, to invite the rest of us to hear their struggles, their triumphs, their dreams, and their unity.

To call the artistic reverberations of the Arab world a renaissance may be a bit of a misnomer, because the cultural movement is not powered by enlightenment, but by affirmation. Many of these artists show no signs of stopping. While certainly not all inclusive, here is a list of six artists worth paying attention to in 2012:

Bringing the Middle East to New York, One Jewish Song at a Time

To many New Yorkers, and others across the country, "Jewish music" typically encompasses one style: Ashkenazi, a style of music from Eastern Europe. Think klezmer, Fiddler on the Roof, even the Driedel song. That is the dominant face of Jewish music.

The trend has slowly been changing, thanks mostly to the New York and Los Angeles- based Sephardic Music Festival, presented by Erez Safar (Yemeni descent) and his Jewish music record label Shemspeed. Now in its seventh year, the festival celebrates Hanukkah by bringing New Yorkers closer to the wide range and cultural diversity of Sephardic and lesser-known Jewish communities: Judeo-Spanish Ladino, Mizrahi from the Middle East and North Africa, Yeminite and Judeo-Arabic. Its artists are multi-generational. Some are not Sephardic or even Jewish. Many of the musicians blend traditional tunes with modern-day styles such as Electro, Hip Hop, Funk and Dance.

Loosely defined as "Jewish Middle Eastern music," Sephardic styles encompass a wealth of songs and stylings dating back to the original settlements of Sephardi Jews in modern-day Spain and Portugal and extending to surrounding countries Turkey, Greece, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia and others in the Middle East and North Africa, where many Sephardis settled after exile in 1492. What makes the music of this specific sect so unique is that it seamlessly blends traditional Jewish songs with musical styles of the lands they settled in, a living representation of what it means to embody multiculturalism, assimilating heritage's past with the sounds of where you are. It’s an integration that “is actually quite symbolic of the Jewish people,” Nuriya told The New York Times. “We started in one place and had to move and go to other places, picking things up along the way.”

The same can be said as a parallel with other communities and their Diaspora groups, as a melding of cultures has only gotten more pronounced with the expanse of globalization. It’s what makes the Sephardic Music Festival one to follow not just for Jews, but for all cultures. The language may sometimes be Hebrew, but Sephardic music is as much about the Middle East and Arabic culture as it is about the Jews who settled there. Rather than wailing about exile, Sephardic music looks forward, celebrating where Diaspora are now with the same importance as where they came from.

East of Ellington, West of Isfahan

For all the attention paid to groundbreaking performers who use their words and melodies to fight censorship and cultivate new voices, it's easy to forget sometimes the other side of music artistry: the music writers who keep these songs' legacies alive.

Ehsan Khoshbakht, recently profiled in The Wall Street Journal, is just such a writer. Until he moved to London several months ago, he diligently wrote about his love of jazz from northeastern Iran, where Western music is experienced only behind closed doors. Born three years after the Islamic Revolution, he knows Iran in no other way. In 1998, a 16-year-old Khoshbakht found a compilation tape and was immediately hooked; in Iran's dominating world of censorship, jazz became his concept of freedom and expression.

In 2009, Khoshbakht began writing Take the A Train, named after the Duke Ellington Orchestra’s signature tune. The blog is a progressive documentation of American jazz music as both history and as universal creative freedom. Repression has a way of stalling epiphanies, but to extinguish them is a nearly impossible feat. "There is this Lauren Bacall line," Khoshbakht recalled last August, "in her interview with my friend Mark Cousins, when she said about the cinema: 'The industry is shit. It's the medium that's great.' We can second that and expand it to the world of jazz, in which the industry is shit and it's the music itself that is so great."

This insight, like many others in his blog, has its power in the subliminal; his criticism of a certain establishment's regulation, in this case the jazz industry, stands in for others: government censors. At face value the anecdote reads like commentary about commercialism, but between the lines, “industry” becomes a stand-in for thought control.