The Culture of Forgetting

In The Culture of Forgetting, Wisam Gibran opens a bold epistemological pathway toward the philosophical foundations of Arab musical thought.
Through a series of interwoven studies, the book dismantles the very concept of “Arab music,” exposing the gaps, paradoxes, and inherited assumptions that shape our understanding of sound, memory, improvisation, and musical consciousness in Arab cultures.

Gibran moves fluidly between aesthetics, anthropology, history, and philosophy to examine how music emerges from the tension between memory and forgetting—between what is preserved, what is erased, and what is continuously re-invented in the moment of performance. He delves into the ontology of improvisation, the architecture of ṭarab, the dynamics of listening, and the cultural processes through which musical identities are formed, transformed, and contested.

The Culture of Forgetting invites readers to rethink familiar narratives and to approach Arab musical modernity through a new critical lens. It is a book addressed to musicians, scholars, and philosophers of art, as well as to anyone seeking a deeper understanding of how cultures listen to themselves—and how they imagine what they have forgotten.