World and traditional music: Middle East

The Sound Archive's world and traditional music collections include music from the Middle East.

Collection overview

The Sound Archive holds 16 separate ethnographic collections of unpublished Middle Eastern recordings. Published material include early recordings on 78rpm discs by the large international companies (Gramophone, Odeon and Parlophone in particular) in addition to releases by regional companies such as Baidophon and Mechian. Recordings on CD are primarily on western labels such as Ocora and Institut du Monde Arabe, and regional labels such as the Turkish Kalan Müzik.

Published recordings

The Middle East is fairly well represented in terms of ethnographic collections and most recordings come from Turkey, Iran, and Yemen. However recordings also come from Oman, Syria, Iraq, Jordan and Saudi Arabia. The World of Islam festival in 1976 was the focus for a great deal of music and our collection of concerts recorded at the South Bank Centre during the festival (C26), donated by recordist Bob Woolford, are a useful record of events.

Jean Jenkins' collection (C699), however, features recordings made on location in various Middle Eastern countries as she was commissioned to compile music to accompany the exhibition of musical instruments from the Islamic world at the Horniman Museum as part of the festival.

Iran is represented by an early collection, recorded in 1969 by members if the Cambridge Iran Expedition. An even earlier collection was made by C. S. Mundy in Turkey in 1964. More recently, British-based Iranian ethnomusicologist, Laudan Nooshin, donated a large collection of Iranian radio broadcasts largely comprising recordings of Persian classical traditions (C267). Other radio material in our collections comes from the Yemen, and is to be found in the Hugh Goodacre (C272) and Dr Abudu (C273) collections. Anderson Bakewell's recordings (C44) from the Tihama (Yemen) have been issued as part of our series of CDs with Topic Records. Thomas Muir Johnstone's (formerly Professor of Arabic at the University of London) collection (C733) of Middle Eastern language recordings, predominantly Harusi, Jibbali, Mehri and Socotri recorded between 1955 and 1975 were deposited at the Sound Archive in collaboration with the University of Durham in 1995. They represent some of the only recordings of a number of these languages, in certain cases now extinct.

Unpublished recordings

The very earliest ethnographic recordings in the Sound Archive come from this region. These were wax cylinder recordings (C80) made by the first anthropological expedition, led by A.C. Haddon, that set out from Cambridge for the Torres Strait in 1898. The expedition resulted in some 100 recordings recorded among a number of communities on Murray, Saibai, Mabuiag (Jervis) and Yam islands. In fact the Oceanic region is well represented in the rest of our wax cylinder holdings, with recordings made in Australia, Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu, Solomon Islands and New Caledonia.

The remaining ethnographic collections date from the early 1950s to the late 1980s and cover Fiji, Kiribati, the Solomon Islands, Australia, New Britain, Papua New Guinea and New Zealand. The collections are briefly described below.