De-colonising Palestinian voices: Imagining liberated sonic-futures

In traditional music discourse in Palestine, and in many places in the colonized and post-colonized world, there is a tendency to preserve, romanticize, archive, and ‘museum-ify’ traditional music culture. In my project, I wish to research traditional Palestinian music as a living culture by exploring women’s expressions and songs using ethnography, archival research, co-creation, and experimental composition in order to develop decolonial artistic methodologies to engage with traditional music. I aim to investigate how musical methodology can address historical exclusion and marginalization by thinking through decolonial and indigenous methodologies alongside future-making. I focus on a number of interrelated questions, such as: how is Palestinian music changing despite and in response to marginalization, considering the settler-colonial regime of oppression and erasure of Palestinian life and identity? How can feminine vocal expressions and songs inform the Palestinian musical tradition and maintain it? And finally, how can we compose music that moves beyond the “museumification” of traditional culture and interacts with the present while both imagining the future and constantly considering the musical tradition. I am interested in exploring these themes through experimental composition processes based on archival, co-creative, and ethnographic research methodologies. I aim to keep traditions alive by interacting creatively with this learned and recorded traditional Palestinian music, thus offering decolonial methodologies as an antithesis to the museumification of tradition.