Syrian-born Mohamed Alsiadi’s commitment to his heritage goes beyond his position as director of Fordham’s Arabic studies program.

Alsiadi is helping to archive the musical arts of his birthplace of Aleppo, which has been under constant siege since the Syrian war began and has recently faced intense shelling.

“I want to spread this music to the children who are growing up far from their homes, so they can have a piece of their heritage,” he said.

Alsiadi is an accomplished lute player who began collecting music from Allepian radio stations in 2004, fearing even then for the city’s destruction. In 2011, he and composer/pianist Malek Jandali formed the Malek Jandali Trio, along with cellist Laura Metcalf.  With their mixture of expertise, they perform and post on Youtube authentic Allepian Waslah music that refugees can listen to wherever they are across the globe.

“Malek is the composer. I am the researcher. We have a good partnership,” he said. “The music we make is the music that Syrians grew up with and want to hear.”

Alsiadi was raised in Aleppo and received his bachelor’s degree from the Damascus Music Conservatory, specializing in lute performance and conducting. He moved to the United States in 1996 and joined the Fordham faculty in 2010.

In his six years at Fordham, the Arabic Language, Literature, & Culture program has flourished. Alsiadi created an Arabic minor studies program, adding courses such as Music & Nation in the Arab World; Arab Spring in Arabic Literature; and Arab Cinema: History & Cultural Identity.  He founded the Arabic Club, and he and a colleague helped design Fordham’s first Arabic study-abroad program to Morocco.

The Jandali trio is headlining a benefit concert series, “The Voice of the Free Syrian Children.”  The series is designed to bring comfort to Syrian children affected by the war’s atrocities.

“The children are suffering most,” he said. “They’re tortured and killed indiscriminately. Many are orphaned. Others flee and are displaced from their homeland, traumatized, afraid and uncertain of what comes next.”

The trio has taken its music all over the world, giving concerts in Norway, Qatar, England, and Austria. Alsiadi said he is amazed by the global impact the musicians have had.

“It’s unbelievable,” he said. “We never thought we’d perform on a global level because there is no political agenda behind our project.”

Alsaidi said the trio’s upcoming album, titled Jasmine, holds deep significance for him. In Arab households, jasmine trees are at the center of gatherings. While living with his Sufi family in Aleppo, all family meals and conversations took place near the jasmine tree.

The trio’s next stateside concert is scheduled for Carnegie Hall on Feb. 4.  The group’s proceeds from the albums and concerts support efforts to assist and educate Syrian refugees.

—Mary Awad

Watch the Malek Jandali Trio’s music video SoHo.

The grant will allow Lise Schreier, PhD, an associate professor of French, to devote the 2016-17 academic year to completing research on her forthcoming book, The Playthings of Empire: Child-Gifting and the Politics of French Femininity.

“A grant such as this is significant for the Department of Modern Languages and Literature because it makes us visible as strong researchers,” said Schreier, whose specializations include 19th-century French literature, French colonialism, and race and racism.

“We are a research-oriented department with a variety of courses. Teaching language is a pathway to understanding various cultures.”

Schreier, a native of Saint-Étienne, France, is studying the 18th-century phenomenon of child-gifting, the practice of purchasing or kidnapping dark-skinned children in Senegal, Algeria, India, and the Ottoman Empire as travel souvenirs and fashion accessories for upper-class French women.

Archival material about child-gifting is scant, and few scholars have undertaken research on the practice. Schreier’s own investigation has required some creative thinking as she shifted from letters to literature to artwork searching for clues of these children’s existence.

Some evidence came from mentions of the children in letters between wealthy French women. “Other information comes up in places like letters to tailors, which shows how these children were dressed, where they lived in the castles, how much money was spent on them,” she said.

Schreier is also interested in later references to child-gifting that appear in books assigned to French schoolchildren, which often involved a young character who was given a dark-skinned child as a gift. She argues that even after the abolition of slavery in France, when the actual practice of child-gifting ended, these stories served to inculcate colonial ideals in young French citizens.

The message of the books, Schreier said, was that “the French had to raise their children in such a way as to make them good, strong colonial citizens. This started in schools—particularly with girls, who were used to reading books about dolls, reading how to interact with a doll, raise a doll, educate a doll.

“These young readers, already used to being responsible for a doll, would be given a book in which an African boy was gifted to a French child in place of a doll. The inference they were expected to make was that it was normal to take care of a black child, just like a doll. When they’re older, it was hoped, they’d already be used to thinking of colonial subjects as their responsibility.”

This also points to the significant role that women played in advancing French colonialism, Schreier contends.

“From paintings of Old Regime noblewomen adorned with flattering attestations to their wealth, to 1870s moralistic novels featuring women advancing the Third Republic’s ‘civilizing mission’ with the loyal help of their dark-skinned charges, the child-gift motif articulated evolving models of femininity in a trans-national France,” she wrote in the grant narrative.

The NEH is an independent federal agency created as a result of the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act of 1965. Of the more than 1,200 applications each year, less than 7 percent of applicants receive one of the coveted grants.

Lamas, a Spaniard, expresses Spanish culture through two facets: one as a professor of literature, and the other as a musical conductor. Last year he fused the two strains together in a book titled Ecsuchar e Interpretar (Alianza, 2014), translated as Listening and Interpreting.

This Saturday, Oct. 24 at 7 p.m. at Jazz at Lincoln Center, in recognition of Hispanic Heritage month, Lamas will further explore the subject through three musical selections.

“Foreigners, such as Washington Irving, created an exotic image of the country in the 19^th century,” said Lamas, noting that Spain replaced Italy as the go-to destination for 19^th century tourists seeking exoticism.

“But by the 20^th century, the Spaniards had created their own interpretation,” he said.

The three selections will mirror the book’s central theme, beginning with “Night Music of Madrid,” written in 1780 by Luigi Boccherini, an Italian who went to Spain and incorporated Spanish motifs into his music.

“Boccherini creates an image of Spain as an outsider, which contributed in the crafting of ‘Spanish music’,” he said.

Next on the program is Catalan composer Roberto Gerhard’s “Concerto for Piano and Strings,” written in 1951. Viennese composer Arnold Schoenberg influenced Gerhard’s 12-tone technique; yet despite the Austrian composer’s sway, the Spaniard heaped his music with plenty of Spanish tropes, said Lamas.

The program concludes with a scene from contemporary composer Ricardo Llorca’s opera Las Horas Vacias, which translates as The Empty Hours. By his own account, Llorca veered from the Spanish tendency toward Germanic influence.

“I have my own language, and that has nothing to do with nations,” said Llorca.

The selection to be performed Saturday, “Vocalise,” could take place anywhere, he said. The opera focuses on a woman who spends her Fridays alone and online.

She starts drinking with her virtual lovers and chatting about her mediocre childhood, said Llorca.

“It can happen to anybody in the world, and it can take place anywhere,” he said.

Despite two decades of teaching history and music appreciation at the Juilliard School, and the borderless theme of his opera, Llorca is often referred to as a Spanish composer, said Lamas.

“Llorca’s music represents the post-modern notion of Spain, yet his music is not ‘Spanish music,’” said Lamas. “What’s the Spanish boundary today? Is it a geographical boundary? That doesn’t work in contemporary terms. So our story concludes with someone who is beyond the discourse of national identity.”

Dylan Côté , FCLC ’15, and Victoria Oliver FCLC ’15 will be featured in the production as voice actors. The event is sponsored by the Dean of Arts & Sciences Faculty, 
the Dean of Fordham College at Lincoln Center,
 the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, the Latin American and Latino Studies Institute, the Consulate General of Spain, and Acción Cultural Española.