Middle Eastern (Belly Dance) Music

Musically, the "Orient" ranges from Greece to Northern Africa to Northern India. Egypt, Turkey, "Araby," Armenia, Greece, and neighboring areas all have vital belly-dancing traditions whose origins (and specific reasons for being) are lost in antiquity. Fortunately the music and cultures of the Middle East are not prone to change. Oriental exoticism, from the trance-inducing rhythms of the music, to the plaintive wails of the devout, to the sinuous writhing of houris dancing before potentates in opulent settings, is timeless and universal in appeal.

Belly dancing has a sweet-and-sour reputation. Westerners, forever clinging to medieval notions of morality and the divine, have difficulty reconciling what is probably the world's most sensuous form of dance with Islam, a culture of veils and sharply ruled behavior. How can "Allah!" be an expression of acclaim for musicians and scantily-clad dancers, equivalent to "bravo" in western countries? But so it is. The earthly meets the divine only in its ability to please.

Oriental music has its own tunings, scales, and so forth, all to bring forth the simple beauty of traditional instruments. Before the modern dulcimer and zither (or koto), there was the 78-stringed invention of the 9th century, the kanun. The oud, or Arabian lute, is father of the guitar. The nay is a bamboo flute. And the derbeke is the celebrated Arabic drum, a clay or copper tom-tom traditionally covered by a dried fish's skin. Despite technical limitations and obstinate traditionalism, however, embellishment and improvisation are the rule.

Turkish music in particular has greatly influenced western music, not solely because of the spread of Turks through Russia, Asia, and Europe. After armies of the Ottoman Empire advanced on Vienna and Russia, German and Russian composers adapted Turkish military marching music, most famously in the ending of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. In the "Partly Oriental" section below, several LPs are brave hybrids (oriental rock, jazz, pop, orchestral, gypsy, or other music). Others have at least one tune fitting the idiom.

Buying: The U.S. mecca for Mid-East records is New England, particularly the old factory towns of Massachusetts. The leading label Standard-Colonial provides typical, authentic music recorded in the 1950s and 1960s. Imports (mainly Voice of Lebanon) have the edge in strange, funky 1970s records.

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