Dr. Ayat bint Nasser Al-Mata’ni
Head of Music and Musicology Department, College of Arts and Social Sciences
Music is, at its core, a distinctly human language—one that transcends the boundaries of ordinary verbal communication and reaches into the deepest strata of collective consciousness. Unlike static monuments or written archives, music endures through living practice: it is transmitted through bodies, voices, and communities, and it survives only as long as those communities choose to sustain it. This is precisely what renders music an exemplary form of intangible cultural heritage, as defined within the frameworks established by UNESCO (2003) and affirmed by subsequent scholarship in ethnomusicology and heritage studies.
In Oman, this truth is rendered with particular vividness. The nation's rich musical traditions—from the rhythmic complexity of the lēwa drum to the lyrical grandeur of Al-Razha poetry, from the communal resonance of work songs along the coast of Sur to the ceremonial performances that mark the milestones of social life—each constitute irreplaceable repositories of historical knowledge. These are not performances staged for passive consumption; they are living archives, encoded in gesture, rhythm, and voice, that no written document can fully replicate. Every performance is, simultaneously, an act of remembrance and an act of renewal.
What is especially inspiring about this reality is its democratic character: musical heritage belongs not to institutions or elites, but to the communities that carry it. The child who first catches a rhythm, the elder who recalls a song from a vanished era, the young performer who learns not only technique but the social intelligence of timing and restraint—each is an irreplaceable custodian of a tradition that no algorithm, however sophisticated, can regenerate once it is lost.
The most critical insight that intangible heritage scholarship offers is also its most galvanising: a tradition does not decline gradually and visibly, like a crumbling wall. It disappears the moment the last person who carries it ceases to practise. A traditional song may encode the memory of a migratory route, a seasonal economy, or a communal ritual; a performance tradition may transmit nuanced knowledge of social ethics and interpersonal attunement. None of this inheritance is passive. It demands active, deliberate, and continuous transmission—and that transmission demands courage, commitment, and institutional support.
This urgency should not be experienced as burden, but as extraordinary opportunity. Every generation that engages seriously with its musical heritage participates in an act of civilisational stewardship. Every researcher who documents a practice before its last practitioner is gone, every teacher who introduces students to the aesthetic and ethical dimensions of traditional music, every performer who carries a form forward while allowing it to breathe and evolve—each is making a contribution of lasting consequence. The stakes are high precisely because the rewards are commensurate: to preserve a musical tradition is to preserve a way of knowing the world.
World Music Day offers a timely and valuable occasion to reaffirm these commitments. Beyond its celebratory dimension, it invites scholars, educators, practitioners, and communities to reflect upon the deeper functions that music performs in human life. Music shapes how societies remember (Connerton, 1989); it mediates social cohesion across lines that ordinary language cannot cross; it creates shared rhythmic and affective experience among strangers before a single word has been exchanged. These are not peripheral capacities they are constitutive of what it means to live in community.
The scholarly study of music, in this light, is far more than a technical discipline. It is a training in attentiveness: to sound, to people, to history, and to place. Students of music learn to listen with precision and empathy; students of music history learn to read culture as a register of political and social transformation; students of ethnomusicology learn the foundational intellectual virtue of approaching another community's expressive culture as something to be understood on its own terms, rather than measured against an external hierarchy of value. These are capacities that the contemporary world urgently needs.
The responsibilities of the university in this context are both profound and inspiring. Universities are not merely repositories of established knowledge; they are, at their best, sites of creative and critical engagement with that knowledge. Through research, teaching, performance, and sustained community partnership, a university music programme can simultaneously safeguard musical heritage and prepare students to navigate a world in which digital technologies and artificial intelligence are fundamentally reshaping the conditions under which music is composed, distributed, and experienced.
At Sultan Qaboos University, home to the only university-level music programme in the Sultanate of Oman, this dual mandate is constitutive of the department's identity. Safeguarding living heritage requires a clear-eyed recognition that preservation does not mean freezing: a tradition that ceases to evolve ceases to live. The goal, rather, is to ensure that change occurs with the full knowledge, agency, and consent of the communities that are the true custodians of these traditions. The risk of the well-meaning archive the institutional project that captures the acoustic surface of a tradition while severing it from its community of practice is real and well-documented in the heritage literature (Smith, 2006; Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, 1998), and it is a risk that ethical, community-accountable research practice can and must mitigate.
Beyond its heritage dimensions, music education carries transformative potential that extends across every domain of human development. Learning music cultivates disciplined attention, collaborative intelligence, creative risk-taking, and the capacity to remain present under pressure. A student who has performed before an audience knows something about patience and nerve that no lecture can teach. A student who has studied how musical forms encode social and political change carries an interpretive tool of remarkable versatility.
Music offers comfort, dignity, and a sense of belonging. It accompanies the great ceremonies of national life and the intimate milestones of personal biography. It enables a young person to maintain a living connection with their heritage while simultaneously building something new from it a capacity that is, in the deepest sense, the definition of cultural vitality.
On World Music Day, we celebrate not only the musicians, composers, educators, and researchers whose work is visible and documented. We celebrate equally those whose contributions are less conspicuous but no less essential: the practitioner who keeps a form alive between festivals, the community elder whose memory holds what no archive does, the student who takes a musical tradition apart with scholarly curiosity in order to understand and ultimately to honour its inner logic.
Music endures because human beings choose to sustain it, and they sustain it because it teaches them something irreplaceable: how to listen. To sound, certainly, but also to one another, to history, and to the places that have shaped them. In an era defined by acceleration and noise, the cultivation of that capacity is not a luxury. It is a necessity and it is, above all, an inspiration.
Culture is not merely what we inherit. It is what we continue, with intention and with care, to make together.