(Initially scheduled 2019-2020; extended to 2020-2021)

Funding: NYUAD Research Enhancement Fund ($21,883.00).

Principal Investigator: Andrew Eisenberg (NYUAD).

Co-Investigators: Clarissa Vierke (University of Bayreuth), Carlos Guedes (NYUAD), Robert Rowe (NYUNY).

Other Investigators: Kaustuv Kanti Ganguli (NYUAD), Duncan Tarrant (University of Bayreuth), Beth Russell (NYUAD), Virginia Danielson (Independent researcher).

This project is a multi-method study of the Swahili taarab songs of twentieth-century Zanzibari poet and composer Ally Salim Basalama, focusing on how the artist’s works combine aesthetic approaches and formal systems from different parts of the Middle East and western Indian Ocean. Swahili music, like the Swahili language, has been shaped by historical interactions between the Swahili coast and other societies to which it has been connected through trade, migration, projects of empire, and flows of media. Despite a century of scholarship on Swahili expressive culture, there has been little investigation of how Swahili music incorporates elements of the other musical “languages” that have clearly shaped it, such as the Arab and Indian systems of melodic modes. This project takes up this task, by bringing together a diverse set of approaches to examine intercultural style in Swahili song composition.