“Music and songs in Kuwait: Journey into the heart of Arab cultural heritage” December 15, 2023 – Paris

The CEFREPA in collaboration with INALCO & Kuwait University organized a conference entitled “Music and songs in Kuwait: Journey into the heart of Arab cultural heritage”. This conference took place at INALCO – Auditorium Georges Dumézil 2 rue de Lille on 15 December 2023.

The symposium presented the main axes of research on Kuwaiti music. It studied Kuwaiti music from an anthropologic, musicological, and ethnolinguistic point of view. It especially focused on the relationships between Kuwaiti music and the main social evolutions that occurred in Kuwait during the 20th century. How Kuwaiti songs reflected the development of the Kuwaiti society? How can we study sung poetry in Kuwait, the text of the songs, from a linguistic point of view? How the tension between “ancient” and “modern” formed at linguistic and musical levels? What are the main contact phenomena between Kuwaiti music and the others Arabic countries, especially those of the Arabian Peninsula? How this precious immaterial heritage can contribute to a better knowledge of the Arabic language and culture?