This paper examines the adoption of new musical instruments in al-mūsīqā al-‘arabiyya (traditional Arab music) ensembles, from the violin family to the electric guitar. Building on the theoretical assertion that musical instruments are “tools” (adawāt) rather than “instruments” (alāt) (Zakariyya 1964), this paper argues that musical instruments are tools whose function extends beyond sound-making to the manufacturing of emotional states, national sentiment, and national character. Ethnomusicologists have grouped perspectives about traditional Arab music in the mid-twentieth century in two categories: preservation vs. reform. Whereas preservationists treated new instruments with skepticism, reformists welcomed them as new tools in the expressive toolkit. One advocate equated nontraditional musical instruments to typewriters. Just as typewriters change form but preserve content, he argued, nontraditional musical instruments would change the musical medium without necessarily changing the music itself (Fathi 1932). Interviews with musicians and aficionados in Cairo’s contemporary Arab music scene, however, reveal the prevailing belief that new instruments have significantly reshaped Arab music. By constructing new emotional temperaments and “fixing” Arab music in a rigid tonal system of equal temperament, they have dramatically impacted Arab music, musically and socio-culturally. This research uses a mixed-methods approach, combining archival research with two years of ethnographic fieldwork in Cairo (2022–present). Examining the crucial role of musical instruments in manufacturing musical and emotional temperaments as well as national sentiment(ality), this paper seeks to contribute to literature on the social life of musical instruments (Bates 2012), emotion, and nationalism.

One-string fiddles are found in many cultures across large areas of the African continent, and are hugely diverse in terms of their shape, size and musical and cultural meanings. However, despite its widespread distribution, this instrument archetype has never gained the emblematic status of similarly diverse instrument groups such as the xylophone or lamellophone, and less even than some culturally specific instruments such as the Mandé djembe and kora, where the musical object is seen as a recognisable representation of African music from a European perspective. In this paper, I examine two arenas in which African music and musical instruments are emblemised in Europe: museums and the commercial world music sphere. By comparing how the one-string fiddle performs and is performed upon (literally and figuratively) in both of these arenas, I investigate the ways in which the instrument represents notions of Africa, Africans and African music to a majority European audience, and argue that museums and world music represent music in a similar manner through exoticisation and juxtaposition. Influenced by the critical organology of scholars such as Sonevytsky (2008), Bates (2012) and Roda (2014; 2015), and the established areas of musical-museology and world music scholarship, this paper furthers the study of the emblematic and symbolic potential of musical instruments from a new direction and a novel unification of two previously separate fields, while also serving to advance the knowledge of the African one-string fiddle as a cross-cultural phenomenon.