This article was triggered by a conversation with Jan Fairley, some years back, when she first put to me her idea for a special Middle East issue of Popular Music. My natural enthusiasm was tempered with some quite fundamental reservations. Was there such a phenomenon as ‘popular music’, in any generally accepted sense of the word, in Middle Eastern society? And if so, how were we to identify its repertoires, musicians and contexts? Could a useful distinction be made between ‘popular’ and ‘non-popular’ (or specifically, ‘art’ music) genres? And who, among my Middle Eastern music colleagues, would consider themselves scholars of ‘popular music’? As we discussed these and other such questions, Jan homed in on the truism that, for me, drawing from my experiences in Tunisian music, hit the nub of the problem: ‘of course, “popular” is different from “traditional”’.

In the final scene of Harold Pinter's play Mountain Language (1988), a guard informs the prisoners that they are now permitted to speak in their own language, at least ‘until further notice’. The guard is an agent of an unnamed state that pursues a policy of linguicide, summarised in an earlier scene by an officer who tells prisoners that ‘Your language no longer exists’. In 1993 the Kurdish Tiyatora Botan (based in Cologne) began to present Pinter's play to audiences of immigrants from Turkey, where Kurds were long called ‘mountain Turks’ (daǧli Türkler) by the government.

The synthesizer is ubiquitous on the Arab–American musical scene. Heard at every party, and on every recording, the synthesizer sings the lingua franca of international popular music. While the facade and the body of the synthesizer consist of neutral, slick, black plastic and metal technology, the soul of the instrument, when played by Arab–American musicians, is capable of a completely indigenous, if synthetic, musical idiom. In this article I draw on my experience of six performers of the Arabic ‘org’, commonly known today as ‘keyboards’, to present a sketch of a modern musical tradition.