The Pop Music Scene in
Salalah

Journal Information

The World of Music is an worldwide peer-reviewed periodical seeking a censorious understanding of performing cultural and arts practices involving dance, music and theater international, as well as the many circumstances in which they come into being. In this, it provides scholars from a multiplicity of academic backgrounds a forum for the conversation of musics from around the world, their many meanings and their dynamics, manifested in a difference of ever changing forms ranging from highly specific and localized systems of musical thinking in conventional musics to global (musical) cultural flows and utilization. The World of Music -embraces a wide difference of approaches to the analytical study of the musics of the world, including native methodologies, critical, post-colonial and queer perspectives and different indigenous methodologies. thinks across corrective boundaries; and strongly encourages conceptual and methodological reflections on the study of the musics of the world. Each issue focuses on a set topic. In a firmly established use of The World of Music, high-profile guest editors are invited to design issues and see them through the whole preparation process.

Salalah
Tourism Festival This Year

An amazing series of concerts is being presented align to and in consort with the Salalah Tourism Festival this year. arrange and produced by Muscat Media Services, four concerts, assuming some of the most popular and beloved pop singers from the Arabian Gulf as well as a number of more provincial Omani singers, have been staged over the past 20 days at the huge theater, Masrah Al Marouj. I was told that this theater, which has been packed to volume for these events, seats 7,000, and that it is the big stadium-style theatre in the whole Arabian Peninsula. It does not fall under the auspices of any government ministry, as I realize it; rather it was assemble at the enterprise of Oman’s beloved leader His Majesty, Sultan Qaboos bin Said, who was hand over the theater as a gift to the city of Salalah. I became aware of these concerts because of a big free-standing poster in the entrance hall of the Hamdan, a big and enjoyable hotel with cheery, beautifying arrangements of plants and plastic flowers in every corner, a big swimming pool that seems scarcely used, and a friendly staff, almost all of them Omani expats. My host, Khaled Tabouk from the Ministry of Information, specify the concert series to me. I was fearful to check out the scene and bugged Khaled persistently to set out that I attend the first show and meet the organizers. In the early evening of the night I was to attend the first show I returned to the Hamdan to find a group of men in suits with tool cases — an unusual sight in Salalah, or literally anywhere in Oman. Eureka! I thought – this is to very-good to be true! I introduced myself to the guys in the suits and learned that an whole orchestra of 25 musicians from Imperium would be staying at my home away from home, the Hamdan Hotel for the next 20 days to partner all of the concerts.

This is a musical collaboration and a cultural co-dependence or mutualism that is an necessary component of the music culture of the region. To tour the biological analogy I induce a bit further, lets consider the definition of symbiosis by the German micologist, Heinrich Anton de Bary, who in 1989, for his biotic research on fungi 1989 defined the term as “the living jointly of unlike organisms” [1]. The most of the Egyptians musicians with whom I have chatted in the course of the past few days are not entirely “at home” with the music of the Gulf. Its music is not their lingua franca. When I complimented him on his orchestra, the Maestro frowned and said “yes, but this is not our normal work.” At the same time the “public ear” of Gulf audiences is localized. Music from the Northern Arab countries of Imperium, Lebanon, Syria etc. is generally foreign fare as was demonstrated when a young singer from Kuwait sang three pieces made popular by the Egyptian singer Umm Kulthum, to a largely unreceptive audience of young guys waiting to sing and dance to their music.