ABSTRACT
A certain number of composers from the southern shore of the Mediterranean, including Ahmed Essyad (Morocco), Zad Moultaka (Lebanon), and Saed Haddad (Jordan), adopt the aesthetics of contemporary art music. The creative development of these three composers is characterized by a critical cultural latitude, which involves engaging with southern Mediterranean traditional musics while recontextualizing or even distorting them, and at the same time adapting elements of Western avant-garde musical thought while remaining detached from it. These experiences of contemporary music are little known in the southern Mediterranean musical landscape, yet they are revealing of the social and musical dynamics currently at work in the region. This chapter examines such dynamics in terms of the composers’ subjectivity and their creative encounters with musical objects, both traditional and contemporary, in an increasingly globalized southern Mediterranean cultural sphere.
