How an archival project is keeping traditional Syrian music alive for a new generation

Fractured industry is slowly being rebuilt as cassette tapes are discovered, collected and digitised

Iraqi-American musician and researcher Mark Gergis, who co-founded Syrian Cassette Archives, began collecting cassette tapes during visits to Syria in the 1990s. Photo: Syrian Cassette Archive

At a wedding in the late 1990s in southern Syria, two well-known Hourani singers tried their hand at zajal, a traditional musical form where two guests trade lines of riposte about an imaginary love interest, the landscape, or the weather outside.

“It is customary for both singers to come up with a line and then return them to each other in a playful manner to create some joy,” recalls Syrian singer Mohammed Al Koseem, who performed the duet in question with Abu Sultan. “It was a beautiful thing.”

Zajal is traditional in the mountainous region of southern Syria and Lebanon. “One singer might choose to sing about the plains, and the other would choose the mountains,” adds Al Koseem. “One would choose the land, and another would choose the sea.”

The zajal performed by Al Koseem and Sultan at that wedding happened to be recorded. It ended up circulating on copied cassette tapes around Syria – not a hit in the typical sense of the word, but a popular recording that travelled from interested party to interested party. Proto-viral, you might say.

Now, in a twist of fate, that recording is back in public circulation – digitised and put online by the indefatigable Syrian Cassette Archives, a project launched three years ago by two musicians and producers to document and celebrate the threatened musical heritage of Syria.

“The demographic shifts that happen as a result of war and crisis can culturally tear things apart,” says Iraqi-American musician and researcher Mark Gergis, who cofounded Syrian Cassette Archives with Yamen Mekdad in 2018 before launching the project publicly in 2021. “It can change the musical landscape. This has happened in Syria. Regardless of certain aspects of life returning to some relative form of normality, the loss of culture is devastating.”

Many singers still perform zajal but it is as likely to be heard in Dubai and Jordan as it is in the Hourani region. The first protest in the Syrian Civil War began in the Hourani city of Daraa and led to heavy fighting. Many of its inhabitants are currently displaced.

Cassette tapes were the main mode of recording and listening to music from the late 1970s to the 2000s. They captured an incredible moment in the history of Arab music and, because of the low cost of producing and copying them, they were able to record famous artists and the kind of shaabi subgenres and folk music that might otherwise be forgotten.

“Cassettes record music that is not played on state radio – they are the ultimate communicator,” says Gergis. “This is the way that shaabi wedding music from Latakia would have been heard in northern Syria. It is only through cassettes.”

Gergis began picking up tapes at flea markets and music stores via trips to Syria in the 1990s and 2000s. He was impressed not only by the music they contained, some which he re-sampled in his own practice as the artist Porest, but also the aesthetic and variety of the sounds.

Now, three years on from launch, Gergis and Mekdad have grown the collection from the 600 tapes they started with to 2,000 records. The knowledge they have gained in the meantime has made them able to outline the contours of an important Arab musical era.

A string of donations from other committed collectors and institutions has also allowed them to vastly broaden their scope. This means going deeper into the manifold musical traditions that exist even in such a small territory as Syria, which encompasses Assyrians, Armenians, Kurdish, Circassian traditions as well as Arabic music.

“We have received an amazing array of radio recordings from Radio Damascus, specially curated cassettes made from older tapes, and also an incredible focus on rural Hama,” says Gergis.

The recordings have a particular focus on the music on the eastern side of the city – not the western side, explains Mekdad. He travelled to Syria last year with researcher Zeina Shahla to investigate the connections between ataaba music from eastern Hama and Salamiyah and its surrounding villages.

“In Hama they have ataaba, which is a type of folk singing in Syria and the Levant,” says Mekdad. “But there's two types of ataaba: eastern and western. The original ataaba originates from the Bedouin, and then there’s western ataaba, the mountainous one, where the dialects and rhythms and melodies are different.”

Grants, including those from the British Council via the UK government’s Department for Media, Culture and Sport, are also allowing the project to adopt a more permanent role. Mekdad and Gergis are working with researchers to find and interview the musicians who were recorded, and have run technical workshops in Amman. Perhaps most importantly they have set up new digitisation suites in Alleppo and Damascus, both in studios and in people's homes.

The studios provide a rare employment opportunity to young graduates in Syria, many of whom are now leaving – a large number to the UAE – to pursue cultural careers. The funding from the archives has enabled their colleagues to purchase digitisation equipment and to receive steady salaries and work experience in the field.

And due to the research over the past two years, Gergis and Mekdad are beginning to understand the infrastructure of the music industry at the time. Although the cassettes are important as a means of documenting the sounds, for many they were an after-thought – a marketing investment that they would make in order to secure their real aim: bookings at weddings.

Chance, they have also learnt, played a huge role in the dissemination of the sounds. One producer from Aleppo became a key exporter of Assyrian music simply because he happened to have set up shop in a bus terminal. The station serviced the major route to the north of the country, and he became the lead exporter for music from Kurds, Assyrians, and Armenians.

Other stories have been harder to track down. The archive contains a number of musicians that seemingly only produced one recording, or whose style of song is completely different and unexpected.

Copyright, similarly, was only sporadically applied. In the early 2000s, Syria tried to enforce a copyright regime – but it failed after only a few years. The idea of copyright, many of the artists say, was antithetical to how they thought about music.

“For them, they were carrying melodies and songs from their tradition, and re-sharing it in their own take,” says Mekdad. “The more people would sing their songs, the happier they would be, and the more successful they felt.”