What is our mission?

Our vision for community translates into the following actions:

  • Systematically recording, documenting and archiving current practice so as to make it available to scholars, musicians and to an increasingly broad-based audience. ECCA has developed a data base of archived material, using software specially developed for that purpose. Additionally, ECCA is developing its documentation policy in support of an ethical code that negotiates with performers as respected individuals having names and right.
  • Providing increased and diverse performance possibilities for its practitioners, thereby expanding the audience for this tradition, renewing the lively performer-audience relationship and increasing performers’ opportunities for financial sustainability. ECCA’s commitment to high technical standards of documentation, whether photographic, film or audio recording, also facilitates the distribution of material beyond local audiences to television stations, festivals and photo exhibitions.
  • Promoting an audio aesthetic that respects the integrity of the instruments and voices, an alternative to the aesthetic that imposes echo, reverb and other effects dominating the popular market.
  • Organizing encounters among a range of performing artists (musicians, poets, dancers, storytellers), as well as sound, video and light technicians involved in the performing arts, bringing them together in the context of workshops, rehearsals, facilitating their participation in festivals or just socialising. Makan offers these artists and technicians the basic and necessary infrastructure, together with an ambiance and spirit that can inspire the creation of new forms and traditions as a strategy for self-sustainability.
  • Expanding its already substantial network of contacts in order to further cooperation and the establishment of partnerships with a wide range of cultural organizations and scholarly institutions from all over the world.

ECCA is already active in mentoring and facilitating the work of students who are pursuing ideas for research in the field of traditional Egyptian music.
ECCA will continue to build on its activities and strategies to promote creative dialogue among people and cultures and to encourage perception of these traditions as important and critical to the human community.