Brother Vincent Malham Center Palestinian Traditional Music Archive

The Palestinian folk songs form an important part of the Euro-Mediterranean heritage, a heritage that is currently under the threats of getting lost for the generations to come as the old and knowledgeable generation in passing away. Many nations in the world have made comprehensive documentation of their folk songs. In the Arab world and mainly in Palestine, only few attempts in a limited number of places have been made. This situation has brought Bethlehem University to adopt a project of preservation and promotion of Palestinian folk songs in the West Bank and Gaza. Funding for this comprehensive effort to preserve folk songs with modern technology was provided by the European Union (EU) during 2010.

Through this effort and under the supervision of the project manager Prof. Dr. Moin Halloun, students were trained by coordinators from Universities in the West Bank and Gaza and are still in the process of collecting and documenting folk songs. During the first six months of the project, hundreds of folk songs have been collected and many of them have not been recorded before. Moreover two consultants from Heidelberg University are involved in the project through the training of students, transliteration and documentation.

The idea of establishing an open archive for Palestinian folk songs was given a great push when a building was donated by Ms. Elizabeth Moley (USA) to the University to function as a center for cultural activities. In April 2010 the “Brother Vincent Malham Centre” was handed over officially to Bethlehem University. It is situated near the Nativity Church and dedicated to the former Vice Chancellor of the University Brother Vincent Malham (April 1997 – June 2005).

Now the second phase of the project has started, also funded by the EU, which includes the process of the establishment of an open archive for Palestinian folk music (PalArch) based on the folk songs collected in the first phase of the project, under the umbrella of Bethlehem University. A website that contains the audio archive of recorded folk songs as well as transliterated material is under construction and will be launched here. The archive will be open to the public and will be part of the education program of Bethlehem University and other Universities in Palestine and throughout the world. Moreover future projects are to build up folktales and oral history archives.

We make some samples available here. The final database will be searchable after the parameters, keywords and data provided in last page of the PDF-textfile.

Those who are interested in supporting these projects can contact:

Prof. Dr. Moin Halloun Palestinian Traditional Music Archive Brother Vincent Malham Center Bethlehem University P. O. Box 11407 92248 Jerusalem e-mail: moinh@bethlehem.edu Assistant: Tony Hanna al-Zomot Office Tel. +972 2 275 51 60 e-mail: tzomot@bethlehem.edu

The Brother Vincent Malham Center is located in an old building in the center of Bethlehem: