Making Moroccan Music at the 1939 Fez Congress

Seven years earlier, the 1932 Cairo Congress of Arab Music was held in Egypt, and included delegations from multiple European and Arab countries as well as performing ensembles from Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, and Iraq. The conference’s aim was to define “Arab music,” standardize its core principles, and make recommendations for its preservation and advancement in the modern era. Commissions on technical issues such as musical scales and instrument use were comprised of both European and Arab musicologists, and engendered lively debate about the “modernizing” of Arab music.

Prosper Ricard and Alexis Chottin served as part of the French delegation to Cairo, and Ricard personally recruited the members of the Moroccan musical ensemble, including Fez musician Fakaeh Matiri. As the largest transnational musicological gathering in the 20th-century Arab world, the Cairo Congress provided the French with the initiative and inspiration for the Fez Congress.

Algiers was one of many North African cities considered to have direct links to al-Andalus, or medieval Muslim Spain. As such, it was also one of the centers of Andalusi music. A representative ensemble from Algiers performed at the Fez Congress to showcase its specific style of Andalusi music.

Algeria was also the home of many elite, educated Muslim men who would go on to become officials in the Moroccan Protectorate. These included Kaddour Ben Ghabrit and Mohamed Ben Ghabrit, who were part of the Moroccan delegation to the Cairo Congress, and Azouaou Mammeri and Mohamed Ben Smaïl, who both presented at the Fez Congress.

Tunis also sent a representative orchestra to perform at the Fez Congress as an example of the Tunisian variant of Andalusi music, called ma‘luf. The Spanish delegate Patrocinio García Barriuso was impressed with the orchestras of Tunis and Algiers and praised them for their fidelity to tradition: he noted that unlike some of the Moroccan orchestras, they had not added European instruments, and had preserved traditional instruments like the qanun.

The Cairo Congress had also influenced Tunisian musical life. In 1934, partly in response to its recommendations, a group of Tunis elites founded the Rashidiyya Institute, which according to Mustafa Sfar, its first president, was “an institution that endeavors to realize the renaissance and renovation of Tunisian Music.” Manoubi Snoussi, former assistant to Cairo Congress co-organizer Rodolphe d’Erlanger, noted that ma’luf was a product of the “Arabo-Oriental” music that came to Spain and mixed with the “Arabized Berber” elements of North Africa, while adding that current “Berber music” was “still in a state of primitive pentatonicism."

Like Algiers and Tunis, a representative Andalusi orchestra from Tlemcen performed at the Fez Congress. Tlemcen was the hometown of Mostefa Aboura and Mohamed Ben Smaïl, who in the early years of the 20th century worked on a project of transcription of the traditional Andalusi nuba, or suites, works that had been mostly transmitted orally over the centuries. Aboura died in 1935, and Ben Smaïl planned to present some of the results of this transcription project at the Fez Congress. The transcription of the nuba had also become a major musical project for officials in both the Spanish and French Protectorates in Morocco; one of Chottin’s major publications, the 1931 Corpus de musique marocaine, was the transcription of the nuba ushshaq, while García Barriuso reported with pride how the Spanish had overseen a complete compilation of the surviving nubas in Tetouan with the assistance of two Moroccan interlocutors.

Mohamed Ben Smaïl left Tlemcen to work as a schoolteacher in Oujda for the French Protectorate, where in 1925 he founded the amateur musical association L’Andaloussia, dedicated to Andalusi music. L’Andaloussia would go on to form a strong relationship with the Protectorate administration, performing at multiple major events, including Ricard and Chottin’s 1928 “Three days of Moroccan music” concert in Rabat and at the Morocco Pavilion of the 1931 Paris Colonial Exposition. L’Andaloussia performed on multiple days at the Fez Congress as well. García Barriuso commented that the ensemble was very well-received and enjoyable to listen to, but he disputed the authenticity of their music: the ensemble’s large size and the makeup of its instruments, including the introduction of Western instruments, made it something closer to a “jazz-band.”

The Kabyle mountain region south of Algiers, known as Kabylie, became a place of great symbolic importance for French colonialism in North Africa, as it was the origin of the “Kabyle myth”: the idea that the Berber-speaking peoples of this region were not just linguistically but also racially distinct from the Arabic-speaking populations of the cities. This Arab-Berber paradigm would eventually serve as France’s working model for all of North Africa, allowing them to “divide and rule” their subject populations while also countering urban Arab influence.

Protectorate Inspector of Native Arts Azouaou Mammeri came from an elite Kabyle family in this region and was educated in Algeria before coming to Morocco. A painter by trade, he gave a talk on the Andalusi orchestra at the Congress. Another Kabyle participant at the Congress was Marguerite Taos Amrouche, a writer and singer born in Tunis, who presented on Berber songs from Djurdjura; she received a scholarship to study links between Berber and Spanish songs in Madrid. There were also multiple so-called Berber performances in the Fez Congress’s concerts, betraying some assertions that the Congress was solely intended to focus on Arab and Andalusi music.

Many of the Berber performers came from southern Moroccan regions, including the Chleuh (Shilha) from the Agadir and Sous region. Their singing and dancing rituals, called “ahidous” and “ahouach,” were the common focus of French musicological publications. These studies, couched as “overviews,” were explicitly divided into Arab and Berber sections, strengthening the French narrative of absolute difference between Moroccan Arabs and Berbers. As the French continually struggled with armed resistance to French rule in Berber-speaking areas, such “Berber studies” initiatives proliferated.

No one did more to give the Arab-Berber divide an authoritative angle in the musical world than Alexis Chottin. He wrote that, even more so than Algeria or Tunisia, Morocco was defined by a “constant opposition… between two thoughts, two manners of feeling, which are the expression of two races: Arabs and Berbers.”

The Fez Congress programs that were distributed to participants included a form indicating whether they would participate in a “field trip” to Marrakech. The 500-kilometer trip from Fez to Marrakech was substantial, but would have been desirable considering the city’s status as another of Morocco’s historic capitals. It was also known for its rich artistic traditions, as well as its ties to the south of Morocco and the trans-Saharan trade. Marrakech also provided many of the performances at the Congress: the female chiakh singers of the city performed, as did a representative “Orchestra of Marrakech” and the ensemble of the Protectorate’s Conservatory of Marrakech.

Azouaou Mammeri, who also prepared a Congress talk on the chiakh, had established a successful painting career and regularly exhibited his Orientalist art in Paris. Ten years earlier, officials in the Service of Fine Arts had suggested Mammeri run a school of fine arts for Moroccans, but this plan was never realized and Mammeri was assigned to work in “native arts” instead, first in Rabat and then in Marrakech.

One of the more mysterious acts listed on the Fez Congress concert program was a group listed only as “guembri players,” part of the “popular music” concert. Without any other information, it remains uncertain but possible that this group consisted of members of the black Sufi order, the Gnawa, as the guembri was and is strongly associated with their music. The guembri is a box-shaped plucked instrument in a bass register, usually accompanied by qraqeb or castanets. The port city of Essaouira (Mogador) was one of several centers of the Gnawa, along with Fez, Marrakech, and Rabat, cities with ties to the trans-Saharan slave trade.

Today, gnawa music has become immensely popular in Morocco and on the world stage, but in the 1930s it remained on the margins of Moroccan society and associated with “Sudanese” street performers and former slaves. Such so-called gnawi performers appeared as heavily caricatured and racialized figures in European travelogues. European musicologists rarely focused on Gnawa or Black North African musical forms; Chottin devoted only one paragraph to them in his Tableau of Moroccan Music and otherwise excluded them from discussion. This attitude that Gnawa performance was not music or not truly Moroccan was shared by leading Arab musicologists, who generally dedicated little attention to non-Andalusi genres.

As the French Protectorate capital, Rabat was the headquarters of the major offices of the administration as well as the first Conservatory of Moroccan Music. Alexis Chottin was the director of the Conservatory, and in Fez served as what García Barriuso called the “soul of the Congress”: he gave multiple talks, introduced his recently published Tableau of Moroccan Music, served on the sub-committee on Andalusi music, and had his original compositions performed at the final gala concert.

Another figure from the Conservatory was the Moroccan professor of song, Moulay Idriss ben Abdelali El Idrissi, who gave two talks at the Congress on the popular aïta genre, one in Arabic and one in French. El Idrissi had recently authored a book in Arabic, Kashf al-Ghita al-Musiqa (“Uncovering the Secrets of Music”), which surveyed the state of musical life in Morocco, including its conservatories, concerts, and great musicians. El Idrissi declared that he aspired to inscribe his own name into the canon of medieval scholars of Arab and Muslim music like Al-Kindi and Ibn Sina.

The port city of Tangier, an “international zone” since 1923, was the site of the Hispano-Franciscan Mission, represented at the Fez Congress by the Spanish priest Patrocinio García Barriuso. García Barriuso, also a scholar and musicologist, described the Congress in detail in his book Ecos del Magrib (1940); as the sole Spanish delegate, however, the account was critical of French choices and favored the Spanish view of Moroccan culture and music. This view held that Andalusi music was the true Moroccan music, and furthermore that Spain and Morocco shared a “Hispano-Muslim” culture that was heavily influenced by Christian Spain. As such, García Barriuso was skeptical of the authenticity of many of the Andalusi orchestras that the French selected for the Congress, especially ones that incorporated “modernizing” touches, and was almost totally dismissive of the Berber and popular performances as being mere distractions or not real music.

Tetouan was the capital of the Spanish Protectorate, which vied with the French Protectorate for influence and power in Morocco. The Spanish similarly undertook a project of mapping and cataloging Moroccan culture and history, yet were invested in a separate set of premises: the dominance of Andalusi, or “Hispano-Muslim,” culture and identity in Morocco and the marginality of Berber and folk cultures, as opposed to the French investment in an Arab-Berber paradigm. It was the Center for Studies of Historical and Artistic Monuments in Tetouan that had in the 1920s sponsored the Spanish transcription of the Andalusi nuba. While others, like Alexis Chottin in Rabat and Mohamed Ben Smaïl in Tlemcen, had also worked towards this, the Spanish believed they held special claim to the history—this was supported by the fact that it was in Tetouan that the writer and musician Al-Haik first collected and transcribed the nuba in the late 18th century, creating the foundational songbook.

García Barriuso proclaimed that Tetouan would be the ideal place for the next Congress of Moroccan Music, and was shocked that the delegates voted on Paris instead. He was also disappointed that the excellent Andalusi orchestras of Tetouan were not present at the conference due to “political circumstances.”