Egyptian Center for Culture and Art

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

To comply with Wikipedia's quality standards, this article may need to be rewritten.
Please help improve this article. The discussion page may contain suggestions.

This article may not meet the general notability guideline or one of the following specific guidelines for inclusion on Wikipedia: Biographies, Books, Companies, Fiction, Music, Neologisms, Numbers, Web content, or several proposals for new guidelines. If you are familiar with the subject matter, please expand or rewrite the article to establish its notability. The best way to address this concern is to reference published, third-party sources about the subject. If notability cannot be established, the article is more likely to be considered for redirection, merge or ultimately deletion, per Wikipedia:Guide to deletion.
This article has been tagged since June 2007.

This article is orphaned as few or no other articles link to it.
Please help introduce links in articles on related topics. (November 2006)

The Egyptian Center for Culture & Art (ECCA) was founded in 2003 to record and promote traditional music in Egypt. Traditional Egyptian music is increasingly in danger of being relegated to the status of an exotic and de-contextualised tourist curiosity or to a place on the shelves of academic archives far from the daily lives of its dwindling practitioners. ECCA aims to document, renew and present traditional music in Egypt as a vibrant and renewable resource, a multi-layered point of reference to the cultural richness of Egyptian music and arts. ECCA further encourages efforts to return the music to the critical role it has played in the daily life and imagination of the Egyptian people, to counter the trend to isolate it from its original communities and to share this rich resource with the world community. A number of strategies activities support these aims:

1-to systematically record, document and archive current practice so as to make it available to scholars, musicians and to an increasingly broad-based audience. ECCA's commitment to high technical standards of documentation, whether photographic, film or audio recordings facilitates the distribution of material beyond local audiences to television stations, festivals and photo exhibitions.

2-to promote 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.

3-to provide increased and diverse performance possibilities for its practitioners, thereby expanding the audience for this tradition, renewing the lively performer-audience relationship and increasing performers' opportunties for financial sustainability.

4-to organise 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.

5-to expand its already substantial network of contacts in order to further cooperation and the establishment of partnerships with a wide range of cultural organisations and scholarly institutions from all over the world.

The value of cultural diversity to the human community, like the value of biological diversity to continued life on 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. ECCA will continue to build on its activities and strategies to promote creative dialogue among people and cultures with special focus on Mediterranean and African people and to encourage perception of these traditions as important and critical to the human community.