The Music of Morocco by Paul Bowles

Paul Bowles Library of Congress Recordings of Moroccan Music

This site is under construction.

Welcome to the site dedicated to the newly digitized recordings of Moroccan traditional music recorded by American writer and composer Paul Bowles in 1959.  Bowles, a longtime resident of Tangier, received a Rockefeller Foundation grant to collect a sample of Moroccan folk music, which has resided ever since in the archives of the American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress.  Thanks to a generous grant from the Public Affairs Office of the American Embassy in Rabat, TALIM has commissioned the digital remastering of some 70 reel-to-reel recordings.

Now the music of Morocco as it existed in the years immediately following independence will be available to Moroccans, without having to travel to Washington.  It is our intention to post podcasts from the 72 CD collection on this website.

Above, hand-drawn map by Paul Bowles on display at the American Legation museum's Paul Bowles Wing in Tangier, showing his itinerary through Morocco in 1959, aboard a VW Beetle, filled with recording equipment, supplies, and recording team (click on image to enlarge to full size).

Paul Bowles Library of Congress Recordings on Moroccan Radio

As a very nice spinoff from last week's Radio Tangier interview, tonight 9 February 2012 will feature a special two-hour Paul Bowles program, midnight - 2:00 AM (Morocco time or GMT; this would be 7:00 to 9:00 PM Eastern Standard Time in the US).

Listeners across the world can tune into Moroccan National Radio Alidaa-Watania and/or Radio Tanger (you may need to install plugins) on the internet, or through satellite radio, on Hot Bird 13^o East (10872 Vertical; Symbol Rate 27500).

We are told that this late-night program is a favorite of MREs - marocains résidant à l'étranger - overseas Moroccans in places from LA to Lisbon.

TALIM Director will be part of a panel discussing various aspects of Paul Bowles and his 52 years of residence in Tangier, during which time he became almost synomymous with the City on the Strait.  We don't know the makeup of the panel yet, though it is likely to include some Tangier literary figures.

Journalist and poet Abdellatif Ben Yahia will moderate, and a good choice he is: he knew Bowles personally, and was a close friend of Bowles' fellow writer Mohamed Choukri.  Most panelists are likely to focus on what Bowles is best known for here in Morocco, his voluminous writing on this country, including such well known works as The Sheltering Sky.

We will focus on an equally important but oft-forgotten aspect of Bowles, Renaissance Man.  His music - not only his numerous compositions, but his monumental work in 1959, criscrossing Morocco to record its traditional music for the Library of Congress, what Bowles described "as diversified a body of music as one could find in any land west of India."

Café Music of Tetuan

The following track - Café Music of Tetuan - is Number 6 of the first of 72 CDs of our digitally remastered Moroccan Music by Paul Bowles, Library of Congress American Folklife Center collection.

This site is still under construction; eventually we plan to use it to share this unique repository of Morocco's traditional music with the wider world.

 

1-06 Cafe Music of Tetuan