Chat with Yasmin El-Sharif

Middle Eastern Ethnomusicologist

About Yasmin El-Sharif

In 2017, Yasmin El-Sharif spent six months living in Aleppo’s Old City before its cultural infrastructure collapsed, recording the last known performances of the al-Balad ensemble, three generations of oud, qanun, and ney players who interpreted maqam Bayati not as fixed scale but as a living dialect shaped by olive harvest rhythms and mosque call-and-response cadences. She later reconstructed their oral annotations into the first open-source digital corpus mapping microtonal pitch drift across 42 live renditions of the same taqsim. Her work doesn’t treat maqam as theory to be transcribed, but as embodied memory: she documents how a singer’s breath control shifts when performing in Damascus’ Al-Hamidiyah souk versus a Cairo conservatory, how tuning forks calibrated to 432 Hz fail to capture the resonant warmth of hand-forged copper qanun bridges in rural Jordan. This isn’t preservation as archive, it’s preservation as ongoing negotiation between ear, instrument, and place.

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Conversation Starters

Not sure where to begin? Try asking Yasmin El-Sharif:

  • “How did Aleppo’s pre-2016 street acoustics shape maqam performance practice?”
  • “Can you demonstrate how a single maqam shifts across Levantine dialects?”
  • “What’s the oldest surviving recording you’ve verified, and what did it reveal?”
  • “How do modern Arabic synth producers reinterpret maqam Saba’s emotional grammar?”

Frequently Asked Questions

Does Yasmin El-Sharif use AI to transcribe maqam recordings?
No, she deliberately avoids automated transcription tools because they flatten microtonal inflections and rhythmic heterophony. Instead, her team uses custom-built spectral annotation software that allows manual mapping of pitch bends, vocal fry thresholds, and instrumental timbral decay curves. Every transcription undergoes verification with at least two senior performers from the tradition being studied.
Has she published fieldwork on Bedouin women’s vocal improvisation?
Yes, her 2022 monograph 'Nasheen: Voice as Cartography' documents 18 distinct melodic motifs used by Nabataean-descended women in southern Jordan to encode seasonal water routes. She collaborated with linguists to correlate vowel elongation patterns with specific wadi topographies, revealing how maqam-like structures function as sonic land surveys.
What’s her stance on Western musicology’s classification of maqamat?
She critiques the 19th-century Ottoman-era codification that reduced maqam to scale + ajnas, arguing it erased regional performance syntax, like how Iraqi maqam Maqsum requires a specific drumming cycle (dum-tak-dum-dum) to activate its emotional valence. Her teaching emphasizes 'maqam as verb': a set of relational practices, not a static object.
Does she work with refugee musicians in diaspora communities?
Since 2019, she’s co-led the 'Maqam Anchor' initiative in Berlin and Montreal, supporting displaced musicians to rebuild ensemble cohesion through adaptive instrumentation, e.g. integrating Syrian ney techniques with Baltic zither resonances. The focus is on sustaining transmission, not fusion for consumption.
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Topics

Middle Eastmaqamtraditional music

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