Introduction
Why ECCA – Makan
Because the value of cultural diversity to the human community, like that of biological diversity to the continued life of this planet, cannot be underestimated. As the world shrinks, dominant ideologies, religions and cultural expressions overwhelm the margins, and we lose essential elements of the creative process: our appreciation of difference, our freedom to choose, to experiment and to dream of alternatives.
The Egyptian Center for Culture and Arts – Makan aims to record and present traditional music and musicians in Egypt as vibrant and renewable cultural resources that bridge Mediterranean and sub-Saharan African cultures. The Egyptian Center for Culture and Arts – Makan also encourages efforts to reawaken the multi-layered complexity of Egyptian music and arts, to restore music to the critical role it has played in the daily life and imagination of the Egyptian people, to counter the trend of isolating it from its original communities, to share this rich resource with the world community and, by presenting it in new contexts, to encourage an appreciation of this music as a resource for creativity.
Our Core Mission
Makan’s Goals
Preserving People’s Memory
Recording and documenting Egypt’s musical heritage at risk of loss and disappearance, and contributing to the preservation of the people’s memory.
“If we continue to allow the erosion of our cultural forms, soon there will be no place to visit and no place to truly call home.”
— Alan Lomax
Tradition Bearers & Living Ensembles
Re-forming musical groups and ensembles from tradition bearers, presenting them to the public, and contributing to keeping this heritage alive and active in the present.
Renewal Through Assimilation
Renewing heritage through understanding and fully absorbing the old, reworking its elements into new musical experiences, while keeping it alive and connected to its contexts and natural environments.
“The first step in a renewal is to contain and totally assimilate the old.”
— Amin El-Kholy
Cross-Cultural Living Bridges
Opening up to the new, the different and the diverse in other musical cultures, and building living bridges between cultures through musical encounters, dialogue and exchange.
Transmission to New Generations
Contributing to educating new generations and passing this heritage on to them, so that they may discover it, draw from it, and carry it forward.
Detailed Ethos & History
More
The Egyptian Center for Culture & Art (ECCA) — Makan was founded in 2002, with the initial aim of contributing to the recording, documentation and promotion of Egypt’s traditional and popular music at a time when this music was increasingly at risk of disappearing, being reduced to a superficial and de-contextualised tourist curiosity, or confined to academic archives far from the daily lives of its tradition bearers. Since then, Makan has presented traditional music as a living and renewable cultural resource and as a multi-layered reference to the richness of Egyptian music and the arts.
Makan’s vision is rooted in encouraging the diversity, specificity and vibrancy of Egypt’s cultural scene, in response to cultural uniformity, mainstream media culture, consumerism and an increasing intolerance for the irregular and the different.
The Center contributes to safeguarding Egyptian cultural memory through the systematic recording, documentation and archiving of living practices, making them available to scholars, musicians and an increasingly broad audience. Its archive now contains more than 50 terabytes of audio and video material.
Makan also promotes an approach to recording and listening that respects the integrity of instruments and voices, offering an alternative to the aesthetics imposed by dominant commercial products.
Makan’s work is not limited to preserving and documenting music. It is equally concerned with the contexts in which music lives and with the relationship between performer, audience and place. Its presentations therefore seek, as closely as possible, to reflect the nature of these traditions, away from amplification, spectacle and superficial folkloric clichés.
“Traditional arts… [are] a shared experience that links [people] not to the undifferentiated mass audience that television courts, but to a particular, sharply delineated group of men and women who grew up in circumstances probably very much like their own, who respond to the [art] not just as entertainment but as a vital part of their lives.”
— Peter Guralnick, Lost Highway
“Folk art… is based on the aesthetic perception, expression and the appreciation of the community adventures of everyday life…”
— Barre Toelken, The Dynamics of Folklore
This position also responds to the way traditional arts are often presented within official and touristic settings, where they can become a consciously “folkloric” representation detached from their practitioners and living contexts.
Whether this suppression is a response to local religious sentiment or a desire to imitate global media culture as an expression of progress, the result is the same: Egypt’s rich and diverse cultural heritage is at risk.
Makan therefore seeks to present oral and traditional arts without superficial folkloric clichés and to keep them connected to their living human and artistic contexts.
After recording, documenting and presenting the music comes another question: What happens after?
Nass Makan was one practical answer to this question. Through the project, tradition bearers from different Egyptian musical traditions came together, while the roots, techniques, forms and sounds of their music were analysed and reworked into new musical experiences.
Nass Makan combines traditional instruments with more contemporary ones and brings together different Egyptian musical traditions while respecting the specificity of each and bringing its elements into new forms. It is an open and constantly evolving project, not an attempt to freeze heritage, but a way of finding a path towards renewal from within.
This process of renewal does not remain confined to Egyptian music. Nass Makan has developed through encounters, residencies and workshops with musicians from different countries and musical cultures, including Greece, Italy, Spain, Norway, Sweden, Germany, Morocco, Zanzibar and the UK.
Through these encounters and exchanges, Makan creates spaces for dialogue between cultures, explores the possibilities of music as a shared language, and continues to expand its cooperation with cultural, academic and artistic institutions in Egypt and around the world.
All of this is connected to the transmission of knowledge and heritage to new generations. Makan therefore contributes to teaching traditional instruments and musical styles, making this heritage accessible to a new generation—not simply as something belonging to the past, but as a source from which they can learn and build.
From its early years, the Center’s vision has also included encouraging a new generation with a modern cultural and administrative outlook, and contributing to the creation of cultural mechanisms that can offer alternatives or parallels to the forces of globalisation and mass consumption.
Why ECCA – Makan
The Center documents and presents traditional music in Egypt as a vibrant and renewable resource.