Visceral Musicality
Songs that give me what I would call tarab:
by Elya Kaplan
The other day I was scrolling through my Spotify, curating my playlists and brainstorming creative—if verbose—titles and descriptions, when I came across one particular playlist I hadn’t listened to in a while. A five-hour long listen, this playlist, aptly named “hey! stop squeezing my heart” (yes, I’m cringing a little, too) is a product of last year’s fall-induced ennui and melancholia and is a collection of all the songs that cause me that ineffable ache that music so singularly imparts. There are songs of all genres within this compilation, and they vary in tempo, key, emotion, and just about every other defining feature a song can have; they make me happy and sad, lonely and rapturous, and yet somehow, they each have a similar internal impact on me as a listener. The songs bring me back to the contexts in which I heard them or the people who shared them with me—like smell, music seems to evoke powerful memories and leaves me painfully nostalgic, but if I were to place the feeling viscerally it would sit smack dab in the middle of my chest. It’s a swelling in my chest, like my lungs are filled to capacity and I’ve finally caught a deep breath. It’s a deep thundering of my heart and a zinging down my arms, a classic “giving me chills” moment. So what makes music beautiful to me, to us? Stumbling upon this playlist again, I was reminded of a concept a professor of mine recently introduced to me. Knowing I’ve been studying Arabic this semester, she asked me if I knew the word for “singer.” Despite her generous appraisal of my skills, I reminded her that I’ve merely begun the learning process, so she told me that of the various words with that definition, one is رطم (mutrib), which shares its grammatical root with the word رط (tarab). Now that I’ve got you sufficiently confused, I’ll go on. Without diving too deeply into the grammatical structure of the Arabic language, the shared root of these two words indicates their intrinsic association, and along with being a word for “singer,” mutrib also translates to “one who causes tarab.” Tautological as it is, this still does not define tarab, and the word does not have a direct English translation, making it an exceptionally difficult concept to describe. Upon hearing my professor’s explanation of the term, I was so invested that I decided to do some research of my own. I found that “in Arabic, tarab refers linguistically to a state of heightened emotionality, often translated as ‘rapture,’ ‘ecstasy,’ or ‘enchantment’ but can also indicate sadness as well as joy” (74). It is also associated with certain styles of music and musical
Easy - Commodores Pink Moon - Nick Drake Volare - Gypsy Kings Suzanne - Leonard Cohen Monsoon - Amber Mark Between the Bars - Elliott Smith Layla - Acoustic - Eric Clapton What’s Up - 4 Non Blondes Kettering - The Antlers Photographs and Memories - Jim Croce Tunnel of Love - Dire Straits Brother - Bonjah Rosemary - Suzanne Vega I’ve Wanted You - First Aid Kit Aging out of the 20th Century - Trash Panda Paranoia Purple - Yebba Child in Time - Deep Purple Cold Little Heart - Michael Kiwanuka Hideaway - Jacob Collier
performance that evoke various emotional states, and it describes “a type of aesthetic bliss or rapture with respect to an art object” (74). I was floored.
Finally, not only did I have a word for what I thought was an inexplicable and immensely individual emotional reaction to certain music, but I also found that it is a wonderfully universal experience which some associate with mysticism, spirituality, and emotional rapture. Regardless of the differences in what we find beautiful, our experience of beauty in music can look and feel fascinatingly similar. While I find tarab to be impeccably applicable to my personal music-listening experience, it’s vital to recognize that the word and its connotations exist primarily within the Arab world where it serves as “an important and highly contested metaphor for what many…artists, intellectuals, and patrons understand to be a realm of cultural difference from the West–one infused with what they call ‘oriental spirit’ (rûh sharqiyya)” (74). Growing up on the periphery of Arab culture as an Ashkenazi Jew in IsraelPalestine, I was vaguely aware of Arabic music and art, but I am still only beginning to understand its breadth and magnitude. Acknowledging the origin of tarab as a cultural concept and recognizing its role in raising questions of self, community, and national identity—as we all know music, art, and culture have the power to do—is illuminating the impact and significance of tarab both within its context and as a beautiful phenomenon that many can relate to. So does Western music have tarab? Is tarab in Arabic music exclusively felt and experienced by Arab listeners? I am certainly not qualified to expand on these questions; however, I feel like the ecstasy and rapture that I personally experience when listening to Western music—though monumental and beautiful—do not have the same cultural, communal, or national significance. So perhaps what I’m feeling cannot be considered tarab, and yet if we decided to name that ineffable feeling we respectively get when we listen to music, perhaps it would lend a sense of both personal and communal significance to us. After all, music brings people closer together, and if you’ve got a moment, listen to some of the songs on my playlist and see if you get that feeling too.
Shannon, Jonathan H. “Emotion, Performance, and Temporality in Arab Music: Reflections on Tarab.” Cultural Anthropology, vol. 18, no. 1, 2003, pp. 72–98., https://doi.org/10.1525/ can.2003.18.1.72.
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