Voices and Music from Palestine
Kamilya Jubran vocals and oud
in collaboration with Festival delle Culture
Music has always played a crucial role in the almost eighty-year-long tragedy of the Palestinian people: whether traditional, hip-hop or electronic, music has contributed greatly to the defence and development of a collective identity. If the dramatic history of the Palestinian exodus, conflict, occupation and exile has strengthened rather than weakened the people’s sense of belonging to a land and a history, the pre-1948 upheavals and the current diaspora have allowed the Palestinian world to develop a capacity for resilience and to forge links with other cultures. It is an experience that aligns Palestinian music with the typical features of contemporaneity, such as the hybridisation of languages, cultural ubiquity, and the constant tension between tradition and innovation, between the local and the global.
An inescapable point of reference for anyone who wants to understand where new contemporary music is heading, and how far it can reach through the hybridisation of genres, from the classical Middle Eastern tradition to Palestinian popular music and radical improvisation. Jubran’s story is an intense and passionate one.
