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Yara Salahiddeen performs song forms of the wasla on a wax cylinder (left) and the untreated outcome (right)
Yara is a postdoctoral researcher at King's College London Music Department. She works on an ERC/UKRI-funded project led by Prof Martin Stokes, entitled 'Beyond 1932: Rethinking Musical Modernity in the Middle East and North Africa'. She is also completing her doctoral research under the supervision of Professors Marilyn Booth and Walter Armbrust at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Oxford. She is a recipient of the doctoral Ertegun Scholarship.
Current Research
During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a vibrant cultural and intellectual movement developed across the Arab world known as the Nahda, often translated as the renaissance. Yara's project examines the musical Nahda that transformed the soundscape of Egypt from the 1860s to the 1920s, and its connections with the period’s intense socio-political transformations. Her work investigates the affective and political impact of various musical forms on modern subjectivities of the time, as well as on wider discourses around the role of culture. Crucial to this soundscape was the social and musical phenomenon of tarab, which is often described as musical ecstasy. Yara's work contributes to a clarification of the aesthetics and societal role of tarab in a specific time and place. Her work explores the cultural semiotics that formed its practice, and how these were encoded and decoded, both through the sung taqtuqa and compound form of wasla.
Yara is also interested in the soundworld of Egyptian cinema over the past century, with a co-authored chapter on the subject with Martin Stokes forthcoming this year.
Current Research
During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a vibrant cultural and intellectual movement developed across the Arab world known as the Nahda, often translated as the renaissance. Yara's project examines the musical Nahda that transformed the soundscape of Egypt from the 1860s to the 1920s, and its connections with the period’s intense socio-political transformations. Her work investigates the affective and political impact of various musical forms on modern subjectivities of the time, as well as on wider discourses around the role of culture. Crucial to this soundscape was the social and musical phenomenon of tarab, which is often described as musical ecstasy. Yara's work contributes to a clarification of the aesthetics and societal role of tarab in a specific time and place. Her work explores the cultural semiotics that formed its practice, and how these were encoded and decoded, both through the sung taqtuqa and compound form of wasla.
Yara is also interested in the soundworld of Egyptian cinema over the past century, with a co-authored chapter on the subject with Martin Stokes forthcoming this year.
