The Music of Morocco by Paul Bowles

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

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).