We will not exhaust the musical traditions – and new music currents – of the Middle East any time soon. Let me share a few angles, traversing time and space and genre…

From North Africa, where Amazigh (indigenous) and Arab cultures have mixed for 1500 years, Tinariwen is a collective of Tuareg musicians from the region of Azawad, where southern Algeria meets northern Mali, in the southern Sahara. Considered pioneers of desert blues, the group’s guitar-driven style combines traditional Tuareg and African music with Western rock…

From Egypt, Mahraganat, a fusion of electronic music, rap, and Arab song out of Cairo’s marginalized neighborhoods in the shadow of the Arab Spring…

Fairouz, the iconic vocalist of Lebanon, the “Bird of the East” as she is sometimes called, with a musical career spanning the 1950s to quite recently, is one of the best-selling artists of the Middle East and the world. With an Assyrian father and a Maronite Christian mother, Her background is a measure of the diversity of the region…

For a close look at the Oud, the lute that plays an important role in much of Arabic music, and a mark of the Middle Eastern diaspora, llisten to the music of Rahim AlHaj. He studied music in Baghdad, before fleeing Iraq in the 1990s…

And maybe just one more video – from a benefit concert in Berlin in the aftermath of October 7th, with the Jewish-Israeli singer, Noa, and the Arab-Israelis singer Mira Awad, popular stars and activists who have worked for peaceful coexistence in Israel and Palestine…

There is much more to explore! For contemporary music, see ArabSounds.net. For an introduction to musical traditions of the Middle East, see this short piece from Interlochen public radio or read the helpful introduction to Middle Eastern music at Wikipedia.