{"id":107982,"date":"2022-06-03T14:16:32","date_gmt":"2022-06-03T12:16:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pan-african-music.com\/?p=107982"},"modified":"2022-06-03T14:16:43","modified_gmt":"2022-06-03T12:16:43","slug":"nozhet-el-nofous-nancy-mounir","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pan-african-music.com\/en\/nozhet-el-nofous-nancy-mounir\/","title":{"rendered":"Nozhet El Nofous (Those Who Were Not Invited)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Nancy Mounir\u2019s studio is where music comes alive in Cairo. Floating over rooftops in the heart of the city in unusual tranquillity for this part of town, its high ceiling walls adorned with violins, guitars and other string instruments that look foreign to a western eye. Mounir sits in between two pianos and her cat TamTam\u00e0, custodian of the studio. \u201cDon\u2019t pet her<\/em>\u201d, she warns with a smile as she turns towards her computer screen\u2019s labyrinth of audio files. Mounir is an Alexandria born, Cairo based violinist, producer and composer. She lives amongst a plethora of instruments and plays them all. Her musical practice traverses genres from metal to classical; she composes and arranges scores and theatre plays, with her latest music production featured on Netflix\u2019s short film \u2018National Day of Mourning in Mexico\u2019, directed by Khairy Beshara. In her studio, a carefully curated escape from Cairo\u2019s overwhelming soundscape, she travels around the globe in discovery of alternative music scales and century old wisdom. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mounir<\/a> has spent six years researching Egyptian singers from the 1920s, tracing their musical lives and learning about tuning systems outside of the dominant scales in the Arabic mainstream. She composed Nozhet El Nofous<\/em> (\u0646\u0632\u0647\u0629 \u0627\u0644\u0646\u0641\u0648\u0633 – Promenade of the Souls), her debut album which takes listeners on a journey through near forgotten worlds, guided by recordings of Abdel-Hay\u2019s \u2018Khafif Khafif\u2019, El-Banna\u2019s \u2018Matkhafsh Alayya\u2019, El-Mahdeya\u2019s \u2018Baad El Esha\u2019, Sabri\u2019s \u2018Wallah Testahel Ya Albi\u2019 and Serry\u2019s \u2018Ana Bas Saktalak\u2019. Nozhet El Nofous<\/em> revives the glorious years of eccentric Egyptian singers at the turn of the 20th century in an exploration of musical practice before the Umm Kulthum era. \u201cI first started researching their music, because I deeply connected with what these artists were singing about<\/em>\u201d, says Mounir. \u201cI believe them.<\/em>\u201d The icons she brings to life in her album make up the ancestral canon of musical rebels, tracing their passions, desires and afterlives in contemporary Egyptian society. Their education did not take place in schools, but with mentors whose knowledge was usually cultivated through reciting the Qur\u2019an. The microtonal scales they worked with, called maqamat<\/em>, are a mainly melodic system of tonal-spatial, rather than rhythmic, organisation. They are not based on a twelve-tone equal-tempered musical tuning system, as is the case in modern Western music. Instead, they include a perfect fifth or a perfect fourth (or both) and all octaves are perfect. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Eslam Abd El Salam<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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The Congress of Arab music <\/h5>\n\n\n\n

Microtonal unpredictability invites an existence beyond categories and genres. Studying this artistic tradition used to be a lengthy and deeply personalised process, mostly taught orally and through listening rather than through exact notation. \u201cMicrotones are used in rituals all over the world<\/em>\u201d, explains Mounir. \u201cI believe that we were born to sing in microtones. Every ethnicity develops them in their own logic and through different trajectories.<\/em>\u201d She describes discovering microtonal scales as \u201cif somebody entered my head and put their finger in places that haven\u2019t been touched before<\/em>\u201d. It used to be common for musicians in different parts of Egypt to adopt their own unique tuning systems for their instruments. This practice was abandoned in 1932, after the Congress of Arab music was held in Cairo. In an effort to make Arab music more palatable to mainstream and western ears, and to simplify the difficult process of learning microtonal tuning, it aimed to document and standardise Arab music. In the newly adopted western-style notation system, microtones were rounded into their nearest quarter tone. As a result, a rich tapestry of microtonality was erased from Egyptian music, effectively putting limits on what was creatively possible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Archiving those who were not invited<\/h5>\n\n\n\n

The artists that feature on Mounir\u2019s album were not invited to this Congress, due to their self-expression and artistic choices that did not fit into the clean, nationalistic rhetoric being pushed at the time. The aftermath of this decision echoes through time as contemporary art worlds continue to debate the hierarchies of so-called high and low art. Pushed to the margins of the respectable performance industry, the artistry and impact of Mounir\u2019s research subjects slowly faded from public consciousness. For her album, she recovered archival materials and recordings of several singers and composed her own music to reconstruct a non-existent memory. Nozhet El Nofous<\/em> is a musical dialogue between Mounir\u2019s own arrangements and who she calls \u201cthe ghosts\u201d<\/em>, exploring their legacies a century onwards. The project culminated in a performance<\/a> at the very place where the Congress was held, the Institute of Arab Music, thus reviving these singers\u2019 voices where they were once excluded and erased. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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