Music and Dance Culture

Baladi Women of Cairo: Playing With an Egg and a Stone by Evelyn A. Early. "Baladi women are the hearts and souls of Egypt. The title of the book itself ("playing with an egg and a stone"), shows how well the author defined the Baladi women, in a nutshell. If you want to understand the essence of the true Egypt (present and ancient), you must read this book."

Canadian funds: Baladi Women of Cairo: Playing With an Egg and a Stone

Colors of Enchantment: Theater, Dance, Music, and the Visual Arts of the Middle East by Sherifa Zuhur. "In this companion volume to Images of Enchantment, the editor has gathered authoritative papers from note-worthy scholars from around the globe that explore the visual and performing arts in the Middle East. The book has an emphasis on Arab theatre from the early modern period to the present."

Canadian funds: Colors of Enchantment: Theater, Dance, Music, and the Visual Arts of the Middle East

Ear Training for the Body: A Dancer's Guide to Music by Katherine Teck. "An accessible approach to learning about music, does not get too bogged down with music theory, and addresses issues particular to dancers."

Canadian funds: Ear Training for the Body: A Dancer's Guide to Music

Images of Enchantment: Visual and Performing Arts of the Middle East by Sherifa Zuhur. "This book brings a new approach to the study of the arts of the Middle East. By dealing in one volume with dance, music, painting, and cinema, as experienced and practiced not only within the Middle East but also abroad, Images of Enchantment breaks down the artificial distinctions - of form, geography, 'high' and 'low' art, performer and artist - that are so often used to delineate the subjects and processes of Middle Eastern artistic culture."

Canadian funds: Images of Enchantment: Visual and Performing Arts of the Middle East

The Music of the Arabs by Habib Hassan Toouma. "Composer and musicologist Touma provides an overview of Arabic music through history to contemporary production, and elucidates typical musical structures for secular and sacred, instrumental and vocal, improvised and composed music. He also explains the unique modal system and improvisation style."

Canadian funds: The Music of the Arabs

Serpent of the Nile: Women and Dance in the Arab World by Wendy Buonaventura and Ibrahim Farrah. "a fascinating study of the uneasy relationship between East and West. The influence has been mutual: Westerners have become obsessed with the seductive East, while Hollywood has had no small influence on Middle Eastern concepts of entertainment.... The illustrations range from the gorgeous (Gerome's beladi dancer entertaining Turkish mercenaries) to the dutiful (stiff studio photographs of early dancers) to the unintentionally hilarious (Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn are a hoot), and the printer renders them well."

'A Trade Like Any Other': Female Singers and Dancers in Egypt by Kathy Van Nieuwkerk. "In Egypt, singing and dancing are considered essential on happy occasions. Professional entertainers often perform at weddings and other celebrations, and a host family's prestige rises with the number, expense, and fame of the entertainers they hire. Paradoxically, however, the entertainers themselves are often viewed as disreputable people and are accorded little prestige in Egyptian society."

'The Voice of Egypt: Umm Kulthum, Arabic Song, and Egyptian Society in the Twentieth Century (Chicago Studies in Ethnomusicology) by Virginia Danielson. Umm Kulthum, the "voice of Egypt," was the most celebrated musical performer of the century in the Arab world. More than twenty years after her death, her devoted audience, drawn from all strata of Arab society, still numbers in the millions. Thanks to her skillful and pioneering use of mass media, her songs still permeate the international airwaves. In the first English-language biography of Umm Kulthum, Virginia Danielson chronicles the life of a major musical figure and the confluence of artistry, society, and creativity that characterized her remarkable career."

Western Representations of the Muslim Woman: From Termagant to Odalisque by Mohja Kahf. "Veiled, secluded, submissive, oppressed-the "odalisque" image has held sway over Western representations of Muslim women since the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century. Yet during medieval and Renaissance times, European writers portrayed Muslim women in exactly the opposite way, as forceful queens of wanton and intimidating sexuality."

When the Drummers Were Women: A Spiritual History of Rhythm by Layne Redmond. "Women's spirituality circles have taken to drumming in a big way. Redmond has been a leader in reintroducing the frame drum, which, she persuasively argues, has been an instrument of spiritual transformation for millennia. Her marvelous book brings together mythology, history and prehistory, personal experience, musical lore, and scientific information on the healthful effects of drumming. Scores of illustrations show stately goddesses holding frame drums, wild maenads tossing their heads as they pound, and priestesses sanctifying space with the rhythms they beat. Redmond's own story of learning drumming in a society in which women are still actively discouraged from taking up the drums is a paradigm of female experience. Wise and passionate, Redmond's book will find a ready audience, made up not only of those who have attended her popular workshops but also of other women drawn to the ecstatic pulse of the drum."