Philip Ciantar – Författare

This book examines the diverse facets of popular music in Malta, paying special attention to għana (Malta’s folk song), the wind band tradition, and modern popular music. Ciantar provides intriguing discussions and examples of how popular music on this small Mediterranean island country interacts with other aspects of the island’s life and culture such as language, religion, history, customs, and politics. Through a series of ethnographic vignettes, the book explores the music as it takes place in bars, at festivals, and during village celebrations, and considers how it is talked about in the local press, at group gatherings, and on social media. The ethnography adopted here is that of a native musician and ethnomusicologist and therefore marries the author’s memories with ongoing observations and their evaluation.

This book examines the diverse facets of popular music in Malta, paying special attention to għana (Malta’s folk song), the wind band tradition, and modern popular music. Ciantar provides intriguing discussions and examples of how popular music on this small Mediterranean island country interacts with other aspects of the island’s life and culture such as language, religion, history, customs, and politics. Through a series of ethnographic vignettes, the book explores the music as it takes place in bars, at festivals, and during village celebrations, and considers how it is talked about in the local press, at group gatherings, and on social media. The ethnography adopted here is that of a native musician and ethnomusicologist and therefore marries the author’s memories with ongoing observations and their evaluation.

The musical tradition of Ma'luf is believed to have come to North Africa with Muslim and Jewish refugees escaping the Christian reconquista of Spain between the tenth and seventeenth centuries. Although this Arab Andalusian music tradition has been studied in other parts of the region, until now, the Libyan version has not received Western scholarly attention. This book investigates the place of this orally-transmitted music tradition in contemporary Libyan life and culture. It investigates the people that make it and the institutions that nurture it as much as the tradition itself. Patronage, music making, discourse both about life and music, history, and ideology all unite in a music tradition which looks innocent from the outside but appears quite intriguing and intricate the more one explores it.