Raqs Nerd: how Egyptian baladi music is like the Odyssey 🏺

Thanks to Christopher Nolan, it's hard to escape the fact that ancient Greek epic poetry is trending this Summer...

And today I'd like to talk a little about the connecting thread that runs between the ancient epics of Homer, and the Egyptian baladi music we love to dance to: oral tradition, and arts that develop without being written down.

Most scholars agree that the Odyssey and the Iliad weren't created fully formed, and written down like present-day novels, by a single man named Homer. Instead, they were born as oral traditions, memorised, recited, and passed down, through generations and generations of ancient storyteller-poets. The poetic rhythm and repeated phrases of the stories helped in the process of memorising and recalling them - and no doubt they evolved and shifted a tiny bit with each retelling, sometimes deliberately and sometimes unknowingly - until at some point, some specific version recited by some specific storyteller, got written down.

When an oral tradition gets written down, something important changes: a part of it becomes frozen. Like a living insect, stepping one day into a blob of pine resin - and remaining trapped and perfectly preserved in amber for millennia.

When an oral tradition gets written down, and documented, it's like one specific strand of the great complex braid that makes up the full tradition, has become frozen as a snapshot in time - like our dragonfly preserved inside of its amber tomb. The rest of the tradition goes on developing, shifting, evolving - organically and fluidly, like a living thing - whilst the written or documented version remains static.

Sometimes, the living tradition dies. At some point in time, there was no longer anybody left memorising and reciting the epics of Homer - but the written versions still lived on. Like a single specimen, trapped in amber, of a whole species that once lived and evolved in multitudes. In these cases, we're grateful to have a surviving preserved example; a memory for the ages.

But sometimes, the living tradition and the documented version exist together - what then? This is where things get complicated. When a tradition is still living, evolving, developing organically and shifting as it passes from person to person - but also exists frozen in a documented and codified version.

But, more on that later.

It might feel strange for many of us to imagine it now, but for the vast majority of human history, the majority of people have not been able to read and write. Writing was a specialised professional skill that just a few people had, who needed it for their work - as something like computer programming is today.

We, right now, in societies where most people can read and write, are actually a tiny historical blip in the grand scheme of things. Most of us even now in our very text-based world, probably wouldn't need to go back more than a few generations in our own family trees to find some ancestors who were completely illiterate.

And in Egypt, that has been true even up until quite recently, in historical terms - in 1976, according to World Bank data, around 60% of Egyptian adults could not read and write (today, that figure is much lower - a little under 20%).

In other words, Egypt has, within living memory, still had a primarily oral culture in many parts of society - one where most people relied on embodied memory and word of mouth (and later, radio, films, cassette tapes, and TV) to gain and retain knowledge, rather than referring to written information.

I want to be EXTREMELY clear right now that this is not any kind of a value statement. Literacy doesn't, in and of itself, make a society, a social class, or an individual person, better or worse, more or less "advanced", or more or less intelligent or knowledgeable. It is simply a different way of processing, storing, and passing on knowledge.

Writing is a technology, and like every technology, adopting it comes with trade-offs. When we use it, we gain the ability to communicate and share stories across greater spans of distance and time, to broadcast and receive information easily, and to preserve knowledge even when the people who actually knew it are no longer here.

But we also lose things - the ability to memorise and to embody knowledge, and to truly internalise information, stories and traditions as part of ourselves - not just things that we can look up in a book when we need to.

And this is not by any means a new insight from me - it was famously expressed by the ancient Greek philosopher Plato:

So where does baladi music come into all this?

Egyptian baladi music is, fundamentally, an oral tradition. This is, in my view, one of the most important things you need to understand about it in order to make sense of it - because it shapes absolutely everything about how this music works.

Actually, if you go back only a little further in time, this was pretty much true of all Egyptian music - and Arabic music more broadly. The widespread adoption of Western-style musical notation in Arabic music, rather than passing on melodies through repetition and memorisation, is something else that's very recent in historical terms.

But it is especially true of improvised ashra baladi music, from its birth in the mid-20th century, up until today.

Like the epic poems of the ancient world, baladi music is fluid, and it exists and lives inside the minds and bodies of the actual people who carry the tradition - not on paper, and not as abstract theory, but as a whole set of themes, feelings, motifs, and musical possibilities, embodied by a whole community of traditional musicians, each bringing their own personality to the music alongside their considerable skills.

That means, like ancient epic poems (or indeed British folk ballads, another topic I can be a little nerdy on), it has many strands - many versions, many pathways, many ways of being played.

That it is constantly shifting, adapting, and interacting with or drawing from other related traditions (notably, popular Egyptian songs, and other instrumental genres like the tahmila), each time it is brought to life in a specific time and place by a specific set of musicians.

Non-egyptian bellydance teachers and music educators have made plenty of attempts to categorise, to document, to write down, to draw diagrams, of how baladi music works - of what sections are included, which order they come in, which famous songs are referenced, and so forth. And to a point this can be a very useful learning tool! I may even end up creating some diagrams myself...

But, we must take care to treat these learning tools as what they are - a rough sketch of the reality - not to let them become a trap that closes our ears to what's really happening in front of us. Because all of our documentation, no matter how excellent, is still, at best, a snapshot. A two-dimensional static picture of something shifting and and multi-dimensional that defies neat categorisation.

Another thing about being an oral tradition is, it has to be absorbed organically. Both for dancers, and for musicians who hope to play it. For music that's born from immersion in traditions, soaking into each musician's very being until they can express themselves in its grammar, the only real way to get it is immersion. Intellectualising will only get you so far. After a certain point one has to dive in, and trust the process.

Occasionally, I hear recordings of "baladi" music by non-Egyptian musicians (or, musicians who haven't had first-hand experience of playing baladi within its oral tradition) which feel... subtly off. Like, they are studiously ticking all of the boxes from somebody's flowchart of "how improvised baladi music works", but it's a bit paint by numbers somehow. Like they've worked hard to reproduce the two-dimensional snapshot faithfully, but the snapshot hasn't captured the spirit of the living thing.

And on the other hand, I've come across plenty of examples of traditional Egyptian musicians - that is, musicians immersed in the original oral tradition - playing baladi music, where a lot of the "rules" (which have never actually been rules, as far as they are concerned!) are cheerfully thrown to the wind... and yet the feeling, the vibe, the spirit, that makes it baladi music, is 100% there.

All of this can seem frustratingly vague to dancers who are used to working in an academic kind of paradigm - where everything is documented and codified. But it is essential that we accept and honour that some things cannot be forced into that kind of framework.

Some cultural treasures are like life itself, like living species - with repeating patterns that are distinctive and yet infinitely varied, "rules" that are constantly broken, borders that are regularly crossed and blurred. And that, my friends, is part of their beauty.

With Love,

PS - If you'd like to join me for a six week nerdy romp through the topic of ashra baladi, featuring music and musicality, culture and context, technique and body awareness, and inspiration from some of my favourite Egyptian dancers past and present - you can sign up for my September-October class series here 😊

PPS - there are now just 5 in-person places remaining for the Raqs Roots Intensive: Ishas el-Musiqa with Nisaa and Reda Henkesh! THE most in-depth workshops on traditional Egyptian-style musicality that you'll find anywhere, I think it is fair to say! And our early bird offer (with interest-free payment plan option) is available until the end of this month - find the full event information here​

PPPS - every part of this newsletter is written by me, a flesh and blood human being, using my own thoughts, feelings, opinions, and writing style - now and always. This is a generative AI free zone 🚫🤖

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