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Scholars of the Middle East and North Africa in all disciplines can learn much about their favored topics of interest through the study of music and related cultural practices. However, professional and often personal limitations have precluded awareness of the rich potential that music offers for analyses of Middle Eastern and North African societies. Typically music and the performing arts have been the purview of specialists in ethnomusicology, anthropology of music, and performance studies. Music and other sonic phenomena have been routinely marginalized if not ignored by scholars in Middle East studies, who, to a surprising extent, have reproduced conservative Muslim opinion regarding music by leaving it out of their analyses. Even the majority of ethnographic texts on the region depict Middle Easterners as living in near silence. When scholars have explored the ways in which music and expressive culture might shed light on their areas of expertise, they have tended to apply the conceptual tools of their home disciplines to the study of music: hence we have the sociology and anthropology of music, the history and politics of music and performance, and so on. Music in these studies remains a (usually passive) expression of more fundamental forces, reproducing the marginal position that music, and the arts in general, typically enjoy in Western societies—at best serving as an analytic tool but too seldom understood as an agent itself.

It has become something of a commonplace to argue that music played an important role in the revolutionary upheavals that overthrew the Bin ʿAli regime in Tunisia and forced Husni Mubarak from power in Egypt. This recognition let the larger scholarly community—indeed, the world—in on a secret that a small group of MENA scholars have for decades been trying to share: it's not merely that music is society, as Jonathan Shannon argues in his contribution to this roundtable; it's society in “Real 3D,” at once a microcosm, mirror, and prism of “all the social forces and contradictions of culture, politics, and history.” As a mirror, music reflects society's contending forces back onto itself. Under the right conditions it also refracts them prismatically, acting as a filter and an amplifier that brings (and sometimes forces) subaltern sentiments into the public consciousness. Music, like other art forms, can help foster and sustain social and political change.

The 1987 publication of Women and Music in Cross-Cultural Perspectives, the first anthology on the topic of women and music in the field of ethnomusicology, marked a critical turn in the scholarship. The ethnographic-focused essays on women's genres and roles in music in diverse societies around the world, including the Middle East, presented new analytical frameworks and research on authority, gender and access, and notions of power and performance. Today, research on the musical practices of women continues to expand in ethnomusicology and in fields such as anthropology. Many scholars now acknowledge the centrality of gender for locating “how society is in music and music is in society.” This is a particularly important approach for the Middle East and North Africa, where the undervaluing or silencing of women's musical practices and abilities had continued to dominate ethnomusicology. An important study to break from the paradigm was Virginia Danielson's 1997 monograph on Umm Kulthum. Danielson analyzes the development and the construction of a musical and a social “voice,” looking at what it means for this particular artist to both be the voice of and have a voice in colonial and postcolonial Egypt. In the discussion that follows I outline the academic trajectory of writings on women and music in Morocco, which I have divided into three distinct historical moments, each exemplifying different approaches to the subject matter: work by 20th-century French colonial scholars, by contemporary European and American scholars, and by contemporary Moroccan scholars.

Music is not only an art form defined by certain formal elements, such as rhythmic and melodic modes. It is also a cultural form that implies significant social interaction. Music naturally evokes deeply felt emotions and can touch upon important social identities, because it helps people to experience feelings and express insights into their own lives. Moreover, the fact that it is performed situates any given musical genre within a specific set of sociocultural frames. Unpacking the social, economic, and political contexts surrounding musical genres can deepen our understanding of larger processes at work. An obvious North African example is Rai music, whose explosion in popularity in the 1980s underscored very important social and economic transformations taking place in Algeria and among migrant Algerian communities in France.

In the present climate of political and social change in North Africa, studying music offers exciting new possibilities for enhancing our understanding of the region. Scholars in ethnomusicology and related disciplines are conducting archival and ethnographic research on music, often integrating sound and video recordings, transcriptions, and musical and textual analysis into their studies. Their work highlights how music not only reflects cultural change but also predicts and creates it.

Music, as sound, physically and figuratively transcends previously erected or conceptualized boundaries. Artists and listeners each have the ability to aurally extend their values into new spaces, where others hear them. Passions and ideas gain traction through a constant aural negotiation that exists within the music that individuals use to soundtrack their public and private lives. As argued by the contributors to this roundtable, music both resides within the larger societal and cultural constellations that surround it and helps to shape those dynamics in active ways. Music, as a loosely defined social practice, plays an important role in self-identification. Musical aesthetics provide an avenue through which listeners and performers place themselves within specific social groups. Al-āla and Andalusian genres typically associated with North African elite classes constitute one prominent example that is threaded throughout this roundtable. These social groups are rarely exclusive, however, and musical aesthetics provide a significant set of data through which scholars might read (or, perhaps better put, listen to) the dynamic nature of social institutions and the cultural formations that mold them.

The proliferation of technologies in use for popular music in Morocco points to cultural interactions beyond the most local or national influences that inform musical practices there. Examining the integration of technologies from outside Morocco—including musical instruments, recording media, and distribution systems—sheds light on negotiations of novelty and difference in contemporary Moroccan social and political life and thus on multiple facets of how late modernity has played out there. Among other broad areas of significance that musical practices help illuminate are the social and economic effects of colonial and postcolonial interactions, including the development of cash economies, globalized exchange, and cultural tourism; nationalist initiatives to define culture; and large-scale migration to Europe and elsewhere in recent decades, following a longer population shift in 20th-century Morocco from primarily rural locales to burgeoning urban centers.