The responsibility of creating and programming
Around 2011, when mahraganat music began reaching a much wider audience in Egypt, I found myself deeply concerned. As a young cultural programmer, I felt that my work carried a responsibility towards the development of public taste. I was also thinking about the future, trying to imagine the relationship between what we were creating then and what future generations might inherit.
Young people were drawn to its electronic sounds, strong beats and energy. It was becoming part of the sound of everyday life. I wanted to understand that attraction, while also considering the words carried by the music, the ideas people were hearing repeatedly and the place these songs might eventually occupy in our cultural memory.
Mahraganat had emerged during the mid-2000s in underserved neighbourhoods, particularly Madinat al-Salam on the outskirts of Cairo. Local DJs and performers used electronic production tools to create music that circulated through street weddings and neighbourhood networks, opening a route into music-making outside established institutions.[1][2]
This connected with something I have explored throughout this series: the human need to express and to feel heard. When people have limited opportunities to bring their experiences into public conversation, they find other ways to share them. In mahraganat, I could recognise an outlet for frustration, humour, ambition and the desire to be acknowledged, even when some of the words used concerned me.
That distinction mattered. I could question particular lyrics while recognising the need for expression behind them. The music offered a form through which people could speak about their lives in language familiar to their communities. Its growing circulation also gave others an accessible example of how they might create and share something of their own. Research describes young people learning production software from one another and drawing on neighbourhood skills and resources to make their music.
For me, this made the question more demanding. If I believed in the human need to express, I also needed to consider what opportunities we were creating for that expression, and how we could support work that combined the energy people enjoyed with greater care for the words and ideas being passed forward.
Asking young people to imagine the future
At the time, AGORA for Arts and Culture was a partner in Young Arab Voices, a programme developed by the British Council and the Anna Lindh Foundation. Launched in October 2011, the programme aimed to develop young people’s debating skills and create opportunities for them to express their ideas.[3]
My role was to deliver the debating skills training, organise the public debates and identify topics that would engage young people and encourage them to think critically about the world around them. The process mattered. A participant had to move beyond an immediate opinion and think about how to explain it. They also had to listen to someone approaching the same question differently.
One of the topics I put forward asked:
In a hundred years, will mahraganat music be part of our intangible cultural heritage? Is this what we want our great-grandchildren to inherit?
As part of exploring this question, we went around the Bibliotheca Alexandrina interviewing young people, asking what they thought our musical heritage would be a hundred years on from 2011. Now, fifteen years later, I still find their responses powerful.
They reminded us that we still listen to Umm Kulthum and Abdel Halim Hafez, and expressed confidence that our great-grandchildren would continue listening to them too. They also saw Mohamed Mounir’s music becoming part of that inherited legacy. When they spoke about mahraganat, they imagined it would evolve and fuse with other musical forms, rather than remain a distinct sound representing Egypt’s musical legacy.
They also mentioned young underground bands of the time, including Massar Egbari, as musicians who were creating the heritage of the future. Fifteen years later, seeing how far Massar Egbari has travelled from that underground scene gives those observations particular meaning for me.
What struck me about their choices was the relationship they could develop with the music. These bands sang about everyday struggles, relationships and the deeper feelings that accompany life. Their songs gave expression to experiences young listeners recognised but might not easily put into words themselves.
This connects with something I have returned to in earlier articles: the way music allows us to recognise our own feelings in someone else’s expression. A song can become meaningful because it seems to understand something we are living through. We return to it, share it and attach memories to it. Through those relationships, it may gradually find a place in what we pass forward.
These were the young people’s expectations of the future, shaped by the music they already felt would endure. What stayed with me was their distinction between something becoming widely popular and something developing a lasting place in people’s lives.
Their responses also revealed how strongly they felt connected to voices from before their own time, while recognising the musicians beginning to express their own.
In Part IX, What We Keep Alive, I reflected on how these relationships allow cultural practices to continue. That brings me to another question: what responsibility do we carry when we help create the things that may be passed forward?
Listening to the words
Alongside the debate about future heritage, I was thinking about the relationship between musical appeal and lyrical content.
At the same time, I was thinking about the relationship between musical appeal and lyrical content. Enjoying a rhythm does not mean that every listener has made a conscious choice about the ideas accompanying it. Sometimes we learn the words because the song is everywhere. We repeat them before we have stopped to consider them.
This is a question I believe we can ask of any genre. What are the words doing? What ideas do they make familiar? What do they invite us to feel about ourselves and one another?
I wanted us to consider that culture is being shaped while we are living it. The songs we produce, share and programme may become part of how another generation understands our time.
That possibility makes our choices worth discussing. It also asks something of us beyond expressing concern.
Creating another route into the music
My response also became a project.
With funding from the British Council through a grant for social change, I developed an initiative bringing classical Arabic poetry into electronic music.
I could hear the attraction of the electronic sound and upbeat rhythms. I wanted to work with that interest and create a parallel channel through which young people could encounter the richness of Arabic poetry.
Our poetic legacy holds an extraordinary range of language, imagery, thought and feeling. Yet a young person may know a poet’s name without having developed a relationship with their words. They may have encountered a poem at school, learned it for an examination and left it there.
I wanted to give those words another occasion to be heard.
By placing poetry within an electronic musical experience, we could invite people through a sound they already enjoyed. The rhythm might draw them in first. Then a phrase, an image or a thought might hold their attention.
The ambition was to create music people wanted to listen to while offering language with depth: words they could enjoy, think about and perhaps return to.
For me, this was a practical programming response. I had identified something that concerned me, but I also recognised an interest that could become the starting point for a creative encounter. This approach has continued to shape my practice: listening to what interests people and using it as a starting point for a meaningful experience.
Finding a relationship with what we inherit
In Part IX, I wrote about a melody that connected my experience in Alexandria with Turkish and Greek interpretations. Hearing those relationships made me curious and led me to bring artists together.
The poetry project began with a similar attention to the possibilities within an encounter. Here, the connection was between inherited words and a contemporary musical form.
I wanted young people to experience Arabic poetry as something available to them in the present. They could hear it through their own interests and bring their own feelings to it.
UNESCO’s understanding of intangible cultural heritage recognises this relationship between continuity and change. Heritage is transmitted across generations and continually recreated by communities in response to their circumstances. Keeping it alive involves giving it a place in contemporary life.[4]
That does not mean every adaptation will work. Bringing a poem into music requires attention to its meaning, pronunciation, phrasing and emotional character. The musical treatment needs to give the words room to be heard.
These are creative decisions, and they are also part of our responsibility. If we draw on inherited work, we need to understand what we are working with and take care in how we introduce it to others.
The choices inside a programme
Working in cultural programming has made me increasingly aware that we influence what people have the opportunity to encounter. That influence carries a considerable responsibility.
We select artists, commission work, allocate resources and decide which experiences receive attention. We write the descriptions through which audiences first understand a performance. We choose whether to give an unfamiliar idea enough support to find its audience.
Popularity belongs within these considerations. It helps us understand what people are responding to. But I do not believe it can carry the whole decision.
We also need to consider the work itself: its artistic quality, the ideas it communicates, the audience we are inviting and the context in which it will be presented.
This requires judgment. It also requires us to be specific and fair. A concern about a particular lyric should be examined as a concern about that lyric. The background of an artist does not determine the value of their work, and a genre contains more variation than any single example can represent.
Research on mahraganat has shown how closely debates about the music can become entangled with social class and cultural authority. That is a reminder to examine our own assumptions while exercising our professional judgment.[5]
We should be able to explain what we are choosing, why we believe it matters and what relationship we hope audiences might develop with it.
We also need to act on what we believe is missing.
If we want people to encounter a wider range of artistic expression, someone needs to help make that possible. Artists need opportunities to develop ideas. New work needs resources, rehearsal time and a platform. Audiences need to know that it exists and have a way to enter it.
The poetry project was one attempt to do that. It offered another possibility within a musical language young people already enjoyed.
I could have remained concerned about what was becoming popular. Instead, I wanted to contribute something to the choices available.
We cannot decide in advance what people will love. We can give thoughtful work a fair opportunity to be experienced.
What might remain
I still think about the question we brought into that debate.
In a hundred years, some of the music being made today may have disappeared from everyday listening. Other songs may remain familiar. Their meanings may change as people bring new experiences to them.
Whether a practice becomes living heritage depends on the communities who recognise it, continue it and pass it forward. A programmer cannot make that decision on their behalf.[6] But we can take responsibility for our part in what becomes available to them.
Fifteen years later, I return to the young people’s responses because they remind me that audiences are already thinking about these relationships. They recognised the voices they had inherited and were listening for the musicians who might accompany their own lives.
Our work enters that process. We create occasions for people to listen, become curious and discover something they may wish to return to. We cannot determine what they will carry with them, but we can take care with what we invite them to encounter.
What we choose to pass forward begins with what we make possible for people to encounter today.
Notes and references
[4] UNESCO, Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, 2003, Article 2.