Arabic & Dutch music stories, melody, and culture
January 4, 2026
When Om Kalthoum died in 1975, four million people flooded the streets of Cairo for her funeral — more than attended Nasser's. Understanding why requires understanding what her voice meant to an entire generation.
Read more →January 8, 2026
Most people associate the Netherlands with classical music, Vermeer, and EDM. But Dutch folk music has roots stretching back centuries — a living tradition that nearly disappeared and is now quietly coming back.
Read more →January 12, 2026
Western music theory gives us major and minor scales. Arabic music gives us maqamat — dozens of modal scales, each with its own emotional character, historical associations, and rules about which notes can be used in sequence.
Read more →January 16, 2026
From Paris to Detroit to Amsterdam, Arabic-speaking artists are using hip-hop to process displacement, identity, and belonging in languages their grandparents never imagined could carry these rhythms.
Read more →January 20, 2026
The European lute and the Arabic oud are the same instrument viewed from different centuries. The story of how they diverged — and what each tradition kept — tells us something essential about how music travels.
Read more →January 24, 2026
The line from Dutch warehouse parties in the late 1980s to the ADE conference filling Amsterdam every October runs through geography, culture, and a particular approach to nightlife that the Netherlands got unusually right.
Read more →January 28, 2026
Fairuz never took political sides. That neutrality, in a country perpetually at war with itself, became its own kind of politics — and her voice became the sound of what Lebanon wishes it could be.
Read more →February 1, 2026
The Concertgebouw is magnificent. But Amsterdam's most interesting music happens in smaller rooms — a converted warehouse in Noord, a church in de Pijp, a basement in the Jordaan. Here's where to find it.
Read more →February 5, 2026
When Granada fell in 1492 and Muslim Spain was over, the musicians didn't stop playing. They carried the music across the Mediterranean to North Africa, where it has been preserved for five centuries with extraordinary fidelity.
Read more →February 9, 2026
They grew up between a Moroccan household and a Dutch school, between Quranic Arabic and street Dutch, between gnawa and hip-hop. The music that comes from that gap is unlike anything either tradition produced alone.
Read more →February 13, 2026
Before oil wealth transformed the Gulf states, the music of the Arabian coast was shaped by pearl diving, seafaring, and African influences brought by trade. That older sound — rawer, stranger, more complex — still exists if you know where to listen.
Read more →February 17, 2026
A generation of producers in Beirut, Cairo, Tunis, and Berlin is applying electronic production to Arabic melodic traditions — not to sanitize them for Western consumption but to find out what happens when the two systems genuinely collide.
Read more →February 21, 2026
The Dutch Golden Age gave us Rembrandt and Vermeer. But it also gave us Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck, whose keyboard works influenced every major composer who followed him — a legacy that most music lovers have never heard of.
Read more →February 25, 2026
When the Arab Spring protests began in 2011, the images that went around the world showed crowds and placards. What those images often missed was the music — the songs that had been building to that moment for decades.
Read more →March 1, 2026
About 450,000 people speak Frisian — a language closer to Old English than to Dutch. The music they have made in that language is a small but serious tradition worth knowing about.
Read more →March 5, 2026
Where do you start with a musical tradition that spans fifteen centuries, a dozen countries, and dozens of regional variants? Here's a practical first playlist, built for curious listeners rather than scholars.
Read more →March 9, 2026
The Netherlands has a population of seventeen million. Its music industry has a global reach that many countries ten times its size cannot match. The reasons why are partly cultural, partly structural, and partly just lucky timing.
Read more →March 13, 2026
In the Arabic tradition, poetry and music have never been fully separated. Understanding this — understanding that the great Arabic songs are also great Arabic poems — changes how you hear everything.
Read more →