Hearing Global Modernity: The Case of the Travelling Oud

Abstract

Musical instruments are integrated into the fabric of societies throughout the world and, like any number of objects, are adapted as they travel. In this article I place the oud (the eastern lute) in the context of a transformation that the late Arif Dirlik identified as ‘global modernity’, and analyze the career of the remarkable and hugely influential Iraqi musician Munir Bashir (1930–1997). I also use Bashir and his oud to nuance and extend aspects of the model set out by Dirlik which, for all its strengths, is geographically partial, and focuses strongly on the productive side of global competition and diversification. As I will demonstrate, Bashir’s oud was a part of the global modernity being negotiated by actors in the Iraqi, European and American culture-political spheres. But its success reveals the partiality of those negotiations, the precariousness of globally shared power, and the divisions between cultural, political and socio-economic spheres of ‘hearing’.