Making ‘Home’ on the Diasporic Dancefloor: Taqsim as Storytelling in Arab-influenced Underground Dance Music

Jillian S. Fulton-Melanson, York University

Abstract for the 13th Symposium of the ICTM Mediterranean Music Studies Group:
Music, Power, and Space: A Mediterranean Perspective

Melodies evoke nostalgia and emotions, taking performers and listeners to different temporal locations. Taqsim, the Arabic word for musical improvisation, is a melodic exploration that, depending on the performer, can tell a story of a personal memory or emotion, or a collective memory never personally experienced. This paper outlines the phenomenological experiences of Arab ‘becomings’ in Underground Dance Music (UDM) spaces. Within the structure of UDM spaces, societal boundaries are suspended and identities are written and rewritten continuously, locating these experiences of ‘becoming’ in the concept of tarab, or musical rapture, which emerges during taqsim. Mobilizing the concept of taqsim, I attempt to understand the stories and memories of my interlocutors that speak to their experiences of living in the diaspora, migration, queerness, nationalism, ethnicity, and their musical processes through tarab’s ecstatic qualities. Using Deleuzian ‘becomings’ (1969) and ‘plateaus’ (1980), where agency and trance take place within a structure, I describe the way UDM events are co-produced between performers and participants, as well as the way the music itself is produced to evoke states of trance, writing the stories of my interlocutors into this structure in the same way taqsim is written into UDM genres and Arabic music genres alike.