Dr. Hicham Chami (GSAS '24) has received the 2025 Music Project grant from the Lebanon-based Arab Fund for Arts and Culture (AFAC) in support of his project, “Heritage on the Margins: Digitizing and Documenting the Music of the Jebala Region, Northern Morocco.”
The project aims to preserve a historically marginalized and largely undocumented sound archive through the digitization and cataloging of approximately 6,000 recordings of Jebala music, currently stored on aging cassettes, LPs, and other fragile formats. This collection represents a rare body of musical heritage belonging to the Jebala people, a tribal society from Morocco’s mountainous northwest whose expressive traditions have long remained outside institutional archives.
By producing detailed metadata and a coherent cataloging system, the project will lay the groundwork for an open-access digital resource serving scholars, educators, musicians, and members of the Jebala community, both in Morocco and across the diaspora. Beyond preservation, the initiative responds to a broader gap in the safeguarding of rural Moroccan sound cultures, as many of these recordings were never formally released and circulated informally in markets, homes, and communal gatherings—making them especially vulnerable to loss.
Making this repertoire digitally accessible will support cultural revitalization, intergenerational transmission, and renewed artistic engagement with one of Morocco’s richest yet least documented musical traditions.
