The Cairo Congress of Arab Music in 1932 brought together musicians and musicologists from across the post-Ottoman world and involved the participation of eminent Western composers, orientalists and musicologists. Its underlying aim to was to share ‘best practice’ in performance, pedagogy and research, to unify and connect.  

Its effects could be said, however, to have been more or less the opposite. In its wake, modern national traditions and performance practices fragmented. Western ethnomusicologists and their Middle Eastern counterparts never joined forces collectively again. Scholarship and popular practice went in opposite directions, and never convincingly reconnected. The 1932 Congress continues to be understood as an event marking the end of MENA musical tradition and the beginning of a deeply compromised modernity. 

The Cairo Congress of Arab Music in 1932 brought together musicians and musicologists from across the post-Ottoman world and involved the participation of eminent Western composers, orientalists and musicologists. Its underlying aim to was to share ‘best practice’ in performance, pedagogy and research, to unify and connect.  

Its effects could be said, however, to have been more or less the opposite. In its wake, modern national traditions and performance practices fragmented. Western ethnomusicologists and their Middle Eastern counterparts never joined forces collectively again. Scholarship and popular practice went in opposite directions, and never convincingly reconnected. The 1932 Congress continues to be understood as an event marking the end of MENA musical tradition and the beginning of a deeply compromised modernity.