Music in Performance: A Saudi Women’s Wedding Party

One by one the conversations around us stopped, as the crowd strained to hear distant drumming, in a majestically slow 4/4 rhythm, that announced the bridal procession. From the same distance came women’s cries of joy, zagharīt, filling the pauses between drumbeats. The drumming grew louder, and the crowd turned toward the back of the reception room at the Meridien Hotel in Jidda . An Iranian friend and I also turned, to look beyond the hundreds of Saudi women,...