Kān yā mā kān... An old pearling shipmaster, often asked about the cultural heritage forged from his occupation, once told a story of how cockroaches once got into his ship's store of dates during a long voyage. Qāl: The only thing to do was to continue eating the dates.

Today, the Gulf states are replete with initiatives and institutions devoted to the recuperation, preservation, dissemination, and appreciation of cultural heritage, often interchangeably described as turāth, patrimony, taqlīd, legacy, or thaqāfah. But, as the shipmaster's story shows, 'heritage' is messy. Though it is commonly conceived as a storehouse of cultural 'goods' or a reservoir of hallowed objects for use and replication, 'heritage' is in fact made up of cockroaches amongst the dates. The parameters of cultural, religious, and historical inheritance are the complexities of human lives, and its 'goods' are the traces — material, imaginary, habitual — of their sensing, feeling, loving, suffering, striving, and failing. In few forms of Gulf Arab cultural life is the complexity, difficulty and anxiety of 'heritage' more evident than in Khalījī musical life.

This workshop examines the challenges to music-making, musical repertoires and the development of music-training programs within the context of institutionalized discourses heritage in the Gulf region. Participants from the NYUAD Research Institute, Music Program, and Arab Crossroads welcome Majid al-Harthy and Ghazi al-Mulaifi — two young scholars of Khalījī musical life who represent a new generation of Gulf Arab musical scholarship and whose work as music researchers, teachers, and practitioners explicitly grapples with the challenges posed by prevalent understandings of music, identity, and heritage in contemporary Gulf societies.