Midwest Mahjar: The Recorded Sounds of the Arabic-Speaking Diaspora in the United States at 78 RPM

  Anis Fuleihan: A Lebanese-Cypriot  American Composer, Pianist, and Scholar Rooted in Eastern and Western Musical Traditions Anis Fukeihan, photo from original 1919 document. Courtesy of Richard M. Breaux collection. Perhaps the best-known musician, pianist, composer, record manufacturer, in early twentieth-century Arab America was Alexander Maloof . Born in 1884, a composer of sheet music by 1900, and contributor to the idea of submitting a potential U.S. national anthem.  We’ve featured both Maloof and the composer Leon S. Nahmee on Midwest Mahjar. While going through stories the name of composer, musician, and pianist - Anis Fuleihan.     Born to Lebanese parents, Yasmine Nassif and Milheim Fuleihan, on 2 April 1900 near Kyrenia, Cyprus, Anis T. Fuleihan began playing piano at the age of four. Fuleihan claimed there had been no other musicians in his family except a “amateur lute player of some distinction” on his mother’s line of the family tree. An unknow...

  Joe Catton: A Kanun and Oud Player Links Two Worlds –  The Arabic-language Hafla Scene and Sephardic Jewish life in Brooklyn Joseph Catton, 1958.   A few of our most recent blog posts have explored the lives of Arabic and Hebrew-speaking Jewish immigrants who left Aleppo, Damascus, and/or Alexandria and immigrated to the United States in the early twentieth century. We have included Moses Cohen , Mayer Murad , and Nessim Murad among those musicians we have written profiles for, and Hakki Obadia and Shehadi Ashear as musicians we’ve yet to write about in any biographical detail. Arabic-speaking Jews in Brooklyn lived as a minority within a minority. The vast majority of Syrians immigrants to the United States in the first half of the twentieth century identified as Christian - Orthodox, Melkite, or Maronite. Some were even Presbyterian. Small numbers identified as Muslims and still others were Jews. Depending on the sources one consults, Syrian Jewish immigrants began c...