Abstract

What can be achieved through the present-day remediation of the remaining media traces of early twentieth century Iraqi Jewish musicking? As a result of Iraqi Jewry’s emigration-deportation from Iraq in 1951, much of its material culture was lost; this also resulted in a sudden truncation of the various threads of the transmission of intangible culture. The emergence of sound recording technologies in the early twentieth century suddenly enabled the creation of sonic cultural objectivations of Iraqi Jewry’s musical life in the Islamic world, a musical life that lost its cultural context, and, with later generations, intelligibility, without Iraq. Two artists of Iraqi Jewish descent, Regine Basha and Dudu Tassa, remediated these sound recordings in projects of cultural discovery that are readily accessible online in the English-speaking world. The results—the album Dudu Tassa and the Al-Kuwaitys (2011) and the project Tuning Baghdad—are personal creative explorations that are accessible to audiences without existing familiarity with Arab or Iraqi musicking, but they have no pretense of establishing a monolithic sense of what Iraqi Jewish musicking has been or will be. Further, both centre the joy of musicking in their explorations, which resists a “lachrymose historiography” of Iraqi Jewish history and experience.