Maqam Analysis: A Primer

and on that level I have no major disagreement with the presentations of scales on www.maqamworld.com or elsewhere2, such as the following: Example 1a, Maqam Bayati (from http://maqamworld.com/maqamat/bayati.html) Example 1b, Maqam Rast (from http://maqamworld.com/maqamat/rast.html) The major gap I feel exists between the theory and practice of Arabic music is that, from what I have been able to understand, current theory in both Arabic and English amounts to little more than a description of scales. Not only does Arabic music tend to violate the constraints of octave-based scales,3 but the melodic content that uses those scalar skeletons is just as important to treat theoretically as are the scales themselves, if not more important. By analogy, if Western tonal theory only dealt with descriptions of the diatonic scales, rather than accounting for common and uncommon chord progressions, 2 For example, Al-Hilu (1958), who gives similar jins breakdowns over the traditional doubleoctave scale. See also Marcus, Allah Werdi, Touma, Maalouf, etc. 3 Maqam Saba is often presented as the one exception to octave equivalence, whereas a closer look at the repertory reveals that: 1. numerous other maqamat in practice do not display octave equivalence, and 2. the factors leading Maqam Saba not to display octave equivalence (namely the power of typical relationships among adjacent ajnas to outweigh octave relationships) apply generally to all of the maqamat. melodic motifs, and large-scale melodic movement, there would be no way to tell the difference between Bach and Tchaikovsky, since both use the same diatonic scales in their compositions. In fact, the material presented here will not go as far as I would like in characterizing melodic content, but will attempt to lay the groundwork for that discussion4 by clarifying the broader use of the maqamat in actual musical practice.5 A brief note about notation and intonation: in my transcriptions I will be using the fairly standard accidental symbols for the so-called “quarter-tone” notes: for “half-flat” (so that “E-half-flat” is a note roughly halfway between E-flat and E-natural), and for “half-sharp” (so that “F-half-sharp” is a note roughly halfway between F-natural and Fsharp). This does not mean that I am claiming that Arabic music uses an equal-tempered 24-tone schema out of which scales are built: to the contrary, not only was such a schema demonstrated false (Maalouf 2002) at the 1932 international conference of Arabic Music held in Cairo (attended by such well-known Western musicians and scholars as Bela Bartok and Henry George Farmer), but it has been demonstrated that the intonation of the so-called “quarter-tones” differs from scale to scale, being higher in some scales than in others, and that the apparently “normal” notes (E-flat, F-sharp) also differ in intonation from scale to scale (Marcus 1993), so that the musical reality is one of many gradations of pitch, each of which is learned precisely by ear by practitioners of the tradition; by my count I have, as a practitioner, around 12 different distinct notes between my lowest E-flat and my highest E-natural (Abu Shumays 2007). Nonetheless, the similarities in quality among intervals do lend themselves to grouping in three broad categories: flat, half-flat, and natural (or natural, half-sharp, and sharp, depending on the position with respect to the diatonic scale), so that we can say that there are several kinds of E-flat (some higher and lower), several kinds of E-half-flat, and several kinds of E-natural. Therefore, the 24tone schema is useful for nomenclature and notation, as long as it is understood that the precise intonation of the notes so represented must be learned by ear. To those not familiar with the tradition, this may make it complicated to accurately hear and classify the ajnas, but to those within the tradition, such differences add to the clarity with which ajnas can be distinguished from one another, in addition to differences in melodic vocabulary used in each jins, and differences in tonal emphasis. The subject of intonation 4 being drafted at www.maqamlessons.com. 5 I note two important differences between my approach and those of Scott Marcus and Mikhail Khalil Allah Werdi: first, they describe modulation as occurring between whole maqamat—as most practicing musicians do—while I argue that modulation happens mostly between ajnas and only more rarely between maqamat (and that we can categorize these as different types of modulation, a distinction lost when every modulation is described as a move from maqam to maqam). Second, my philosophical objection to Marcus’s attempts to formulate “rules” for modulation, and my preference instead for a catalogue organized by frequency and rarity, should become apparent. My discussion of arbitrariness could be taken as a refutation of his (and most other Western music theorists’) approach in this regard, though it is not directed at him specifically (in his rule-building he is much more in line with the philosophical leanings of mainstream music theory, to which my critique is actually directed). However, in terms of the modulations themselves I am more or less in complete agreement with both Marcus and Allah Werdi, as to which happen and when. The difference lies in how we interpret their occurrence, and their consequences to our understanding of the system as a whole. is too large to be discussed in this paper beyond what I’ve written here,6 so the reader will have to simply accept that the transcriptions are approximations of musical reality, especially from the perspective of intonation, and that the more definitive analytical statements are those made by the naming of ajnas used within the musical examples. I would also note that in my transcriptions I have transposed pieces to pitches that facilitate an easier comparison with other pieces in the same maqam; for example “Fakkaruni” (Example 9) is actually performed by Umm Kulthum in Rast on A-flat, which I have transposed to Rast on C, while “Mihtaar ya naas” (Example 20) is actually performed by Umm Kulthum in Bayati Shuri on B, which I have transposed to Bayati Shuri on D. Maqamat and ajnas are intervallically and melodically invariant with respect to pitch transposition, with transpositions most frequently occurring to accommodate the range of the singer; these transpositions are frequently (but not always) accomplished by the retuning of instruments a half or whole step lower or higher, so that the maqamat are technically and conceptually in the same location as they would be in their original key. Hence I felt no compunction in making matters easier for readers by transposing all of the examples of pieces in the same maqam to the same key, which in most cases is also the key used in the description of that maqam in conventional theoretical sources (Rast on C, Bayati on D, etc.). Therefore, when I refer to pitches by note name in making my analyses, those pitches should not be assumed to be absolute, but instead relative to the root tonic of the piece in question. On the companion website, www.maqamlessons.com/analysis, I have used scale degrees relative to the root tonic of the piece, rather than note names, for consistency and clarity (e.g. “Jins Rast 1,” “Jins Hijaz 5,” “Jins Jiharkah 8”) to refer to the position of each jins within the maqam—“1” refers to the root tonic, “5” the fifth scale degree, “8” the octave, and so on. A Clarification of the Conventional Definition of Jins According to a conventional definition, Maqam Bayati looks like this: