MAKAM – Jewish Musicians of Arab Music

MAKAM – Jewish Musicians of Arab Music

Makam – a word in Arabic meaning a musical scale or a site – is the name chosen for photographer Micha Simhon’s homage to a group of musicians and performers in their seventies and eighties, who dedicated their life and career to a musical style silenced in the Israeli context: classical Arab music. Formerly, they used to play in the Israel Broadcasting Authority’s Arab Orchestra (1951-1994), which enabled them to retain musical traditions imported from their countries of origin, mainly Iraq and Egypt… (Tali Tamir) accompanied
Simhon chose to portray them using meticulously stylized studio photography, as they play their instruments: oud, kanun, violin, ney (bamboo flute) and darbouka (goblet drum). The photographic space is dark, with only the figure lit by a bright halo. The musician and his instrument are free of any temporal, local or cultural context.
Simhon’s choice of frontal portrait photography, with dramatic lighting, echoes another classic genre – Western portrait painting, traditionally representative of the higher social classes, those whom society deems worthy of commemoration. In other words, the artist seeks to present his subjects as people relocated from their marginal position in the new Israeli culture to canonical status, to the iconic status of classicists.
It is precisely thanks to the voiceless nature of his medium that Simhon’s photography raises Arab music’s world of sounds to the conceptual level: these are the guardians of a glorious musical culture excluded by the Zionist selection mechanism in its persistent demand to sire a “new Jew” who denies his Diasporic origins. These performers and musicians are dedicated markers of attention, listening, excitement and experience, who refused any stylistic compromise. They rejected the so-called Oriental-Israeli music, which adapted itself to the new environment, remaining loyal to Arab classical music at its finest.
The Makam series of photographs is a monument to Arab music and its performers in Israel, as well as a warning sign against attempts to homogenize and trivialize. Today, when this mechanism is no longer able to blur identities and silence voices, these musicians from the past rise again, shrouded in a halo of knowledge and culture.
Tali Tamir