Terrible Sounds - A triptych

by Philip Rizk 

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w/ Nadah El Shazly, Hartmut Geerken, Maurice Louca, Ayman Asfour, Sharif Sehnaoui 

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How would I move to the sounds of colonialism?

For that matter, how would I move to the sounds of neo-colonialism?

But most important of all, how would I move to the sounds of neither? 

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1

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On November 26 1922, the British archeologist Howard Carter opened up the tomb of boy-king Tutankhamun in the valley of the Kings of Egypt for the first time since its closing some 3000 years earlier. In it, he exclaimed to international media attention to have discovered “wonderful things,” so wonderful he said, they left him speechless. 

The Metropolitan Museum of New York sent the photographer Harry Burton to document the excavations. 

The discovery fed a fascination with the ancients and unleashed a movement called “Egyptomania” that revealed the occidental’s inflated fantasy life. Only weeks after the tomb’s discovery, German director Ernst Lubitsch celebrated the New York premiere of his film “Loves of a Pharaoh,” as if by premonition of the tidal wave exploding across the globe caused by the tomb’s opening. Some consider the rising tendency of fascism in Europe at the time, to have taken inspiration by the sudden explosion in cultural production around things Pharaonic, the grandeur, the glory, the power. 

The following year the funder of the Tutankhamun excavation Lord Carnarvon was found dead. This incident spread rumors of “the mummy’s curse” and further stoked the flames of fantasy around the mysteries of the ancient Egyptians. 

But the opening of the tomb also went beyond the realm of imagination and deeply impacted the political realities in contemporary Egypt. After disagreements with increasingly influential Egyptian elites over the ownership of the Tutankhamun tomb findings, Howard Carter seals the tomb and leaves the country. The Golden Age of unbridled taking of the things of the colonized - like the bust of Nefertiti brought quietly to Berlin - had come to an end. 

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2

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A rural uprising in the summer of 1918 and spilling into the cities the following year forced the colonizing British to feign Egypt’s independence in February 1922, while maintaining political dominance over it. A key player in this spectacle was Fouad, the Sultan of Egypt. The act did not succeed at quieting Egyptian calls for an end to British rule. The Egyptian elite had used the global phenomenon of the unearthing of the Pharaonic boy-king to claim their legitimacy to nationhood. After having exiled Egyptian political hero Saad Zaghloul, again the British relented a little by allowing him to return in November of 1923. 

 With these first echoes of independence in Egypt, a national cinema is born, its first film Mohamed Bayoumi’s “The Return of Saad Zaghloul.”

On March 7 1924, Saad Zaghloul convened the “official” opening of the tomb of Tutankhamun and Bayoumi was on site to film the national event. The treasures of Tutankhamun’s tomb became a battle ground - not unlike Egypt itself - with the Egyptian elite claiming they belonged to the Egyptians. 

Sultan Fouad uses this moment of national celebration of re-opening of the Pharaonic king’s tomb to crown himself the King of Egypt. 

Ten years later, in 1932 that king of Egypt called for the Conference of Arab Music, in which the royal sought to reform the practice of music in the Arab world by emulating the civilized sounds of Europe. In parallel with a much wider state-making trend that looked to Europe, non-European elites sought to emulate the Occident in order to receive their own status as fully fledged nation-states. This meant the establishment of militaries and ministries, police forces and agricultural policies but it also meant that music, so central to the state-building process, needed to be re-thought. In the 1932 conference, the participants put the “music of the Orient” on trial, seeking to organize what they deemed to be in disorder, calling for European instruments to replace the ones in use in the Arab world, and creating a program to bring the free flowing music-making of the street under the roof of centralized state institutions where music would be written, taught and performed. The national elites believed that only organized music would allow a society like Egypt to join the tune of modernity. Systemization meant reason, the ordering of sound would bring about the order of the nation-state. Towards these ends a process of Colonization of the Ear was required.

On April 3 2021 the Egyptian military junta held the “Golden Parade” during which they transported 21 mummified queens and kings to their new home in the National Museum of Egyptian Civilization with a spectacle of unprecedented grandeur, featuring an mesmerising light show, dancers in pharaonic garb, the firing of military canons, and a composition written for the occasion performed by a live classical orchestra. 

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3

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In the year 1827, awakened by a band of musicians in the streets of a Cairene neighborhood, the traveler Wolfhardine von Minutoli noted in her diary, “I ran to my window, fearing at first that some insurrection had broken out, and that they had come to besiege us in our European quarter; an event by no means surprising in the East, where people’s minds are so fickle, and fanaticism so easily excited. What was my surprise, at beholding a band of a dozen Arab musicians sitting before the door of the Okel, and straining, with all their might to execute this truly infernal music... It appears from this, that the Orientals entertain notions very different from ours on this subject. With them noise takes the place of harmony.” 

These terrible sounds of independence were heard once again in the summer of 1918, when a movement of another kind had arisen. 

That summer farmers across Egypt opposed the foreign occupier, opposing the forced conscription by the British as well as their incessant taxation of agricultural land. The farmers reacted by sabotaging train tracks, cutting phone lines and burning police stations. Many of these farmers also foresaw the threat of the local elite, a local pharaoh, taking the place of the foreign lords. These freedom fighters were not interested in the sounds of Europe, they wanted to move to a different tune. 

Was the mummy’s curse a sound? 

No images of the farmer’s revolt exist. Yet, in the year 1878 a Jewish Egyptian by the name of Yaqoub Sanu’ released the first issue of his satirical newspaper, Abou Naddara Al-zarqa, the man with the blue glasses. He was quick to point his finger at the colonial behavior of the local elite - these he caricatured wearing the Ottoman top hat - who were vying for power in Egypt while exploiting working people, the farmer, who appear in traditional Egyptian long robes in his drawings. The king of Egypt quickly exiled Sanu’ and banned the newspaper, yet the critic managed to keep inundating the country with his satirical criticisms for years to come. By the time a farmer uprising in the year 1918 targeted British colonial infrastructure, Sanu’ had died, but his writings and drawings had predicted these events for decades. 

“In another world, harmony would sound incomprehensible,” Judith Jack Halberstam writes in the introduction to “The Undercommons”, a book one reviewer describes as “a powerful and necessary intervention that invites us to imagine and realise social life otherwise.” 

In the turbulent year of 1967, a young German musician by the name of Hartmut Geerken, who had been moved by the sounds of Sun Ra as they were first being channeled across the Atlantic, took on a job in Cairo, Egypt. There destiny would bring him together with the drummer Salah Ragab, an Egyptian army General who was head of the military’s music department. Following nights of listening to records, and playing music, the two formed Egypt’s first jazz band, and soon thereafter the The Cairo Free Jazz Ensemble. 

On February 17, 1971, the pair were joined by an eclectic group of musicians for a night of improvised music. That day, improvised sounds were once again heard in the streets of Cairo. “For 16 hours there was always someone playing,” Hartmut reminisces. The recording was released in the revolutionary year of 2011 under the title Muharram 1392. De-(neo)colonization of the Ear. 

In 2021, 50 years after that gathering, and years after post-colonialism has comfortably settled into a neo-colonial state in Egypt, Nadah El Shazly, Maurice Louca, Ayman Asfour and Sharif Sehnaoui join Harmut Geerken - the only active musician remaining from that recording - for a tribute recording of that 1971 musical encounter. 

How does one move to the sound of colonialism?

For that matter, how does one move to the sound of neo-colonialism?

But most important of all, how does one move to the sounds of neither? 

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