“Nightingales in Baghdad” – 1920s-1950s Iraqi music, archives and live performance

Abstract

Once upon a night, I stumbled upon a blurry black and white Youtube video of Salima Murad, the greatest Iraqi singer of the 20th century. While most of musical memories from pre-revolutionary Iraq have been destroyed during the past decades, some have been preserved as of family archives. Today, they have been uploaded on the Internet and digitally recreate a past that no longer exists, yet is gaining unprecedented exposure both within the Iraqi diaspora and beyond". Hence starts the live creation I produced about the golden age of Iraqi music. It puts the question of forgotten -not to say erased -memories at the heart of its narrative while heavily relying on video, sound and image archives that I painstakingly sourced, curated and edited into a performance mixing music, storytelling and VJ (video-dj). In this paper I unveil the making of this show, focusing on the challenges to locate and obtain high definition archives. I also explain how I addressed these obstacles and played on the lack and/or lesser quality of these pieces to bring back to life as faithful and vibrant an image of bygone Baghdad as was possible. Shown at the Institut du monde arabe (2017), the Institut des Cultures d'Islam (2018) and the musée d'Art et d'Histoire du judaïsme (2020), "Nightingales in Baghdad" echoes the power of archives in arts, the enduring imbalance in archives ownership between former colonies and colonial powers as well as the pros and cons of amateur archive digitalization.