“Umm Kalthum“
An Artist for Her Times
with Virginia Danielson
30 Days streaming access
Umm Kalthum’s career spanned a time in Egypt with major political events and two revolutions. In this talk, we’ll discover what she, as a public figure who also had a more private, personal life, had to deal with in order to advance her career in a competitive environment. We will see how her music took on the major issues of her time and come to understand the ways in which music is shaped by social values.
You will learn…
- How her music established her as a nationalist during her early years and why it mattered.
- Important changes she made in the early 1940s through a comparison of songs.
- How she almost married into the royal family of Egypt in the late 1940s.
- Her interactions with the American government in the early 1950s.
- Why she was taken off the radio after the 1952 revolution and how she got back on.
- What were her personal politics and how did they affect her career?
- How the clash between “rural values” and Cairo’s urban entertainment scene played out in her career.
Registration is $35 and provides streaming access for 30 days.
Virginia Danielson is an Associate of the Harvard Music Department. She formerly served as the Director of Libraries at New York University’s Abu Dhabi campus and as the Richard F. French Librarian of the Loeb Music Library at Harvard University and the Curator of the University’s Archive of World Music. An ethnomusicologist by training, Danielson is the author of the award-winning monograph ‘The Voice of Egypt:’ Umm Kulthum, Arabic Song and Egyptian Society in the 20th Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997) and co-editor of The Middle East, volume 6 of The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music (New York: Routledge, 2002). She has authored numerous articles on musics of the Middle East, women in Middle Eastern music, and Muslim devotional music. With Issa Boulos and Anne K. Rasmussen, she recently edited a volume entitled Music in Arabia: Perspectives on Heritage, Mobility, and Nation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2021) and is currently finishing an edited volume on music and cultural diplomacy in the Middle East with Maria Rijos Lopes da Cunha, Jonathan Shannon, and Søren M. Sørensen, forthcoming from Palgrave.