MofA Week 4

Musical values, aesthetics, performance, & emotion: turath, asala, and tarab in urban art music

Preliminaries

• Announcements:
  • e-books
  • CSL forms due by Friday - but I need to sign by Thursday!
  • CSL Annotations. Discuss in your group how you'd like to approach this.
  • CSL bibliographies. There's been little progress thus far. Everyone please strive to add at least one bibliographic item by Thursday!
• Assignments
  • Fieldwork assignment
  • SC papers
  • Map quiz
  • Reading presentation.
• Optional creative assignment (extra credit)
  • * Compose: Dulab in your choice of maqam
  • Become familiar with the 12 basic maqamat of Egypt and the Levant (sing or play them)
  • Become familiar with an assortment of durub (at least: bamba, malfuf, maqsum, sa`idi, masmudi, ciftetelli, sama`i darij, yuruk sama`i, sama`i thaqil, dawr hindi, mudawwar masri, murabba` (sing or play them)
• Watch: "Umm Kulthum: A voice like Egypt" (on reserve in the Music Library)

Theory, turath, asala, tarab

• Concepts
  • Turath: heritage (tradition): that music which is continuously connected, in the popular imagination, to the pre-modern Islamicate world (often as represented by the earliest recordings)
  • Asala: authenticity (value): those musical features perceived as constituting those connecting links
  • Tarab: musical ecstasy or emotion, a key ingredient of turath and indicator of asala (listen to Prof AJ Racy on Tarab

• Theory has a variable relation to actual practice (including the turath, value of asala, practice and experience of tarab.
  • Develops following Bayt al-Hikma in 9th century (translation project)...
  • ...as independent philosophical tradition (Greek influence: quadrivium)
  • uptake of Greek theory (from Pythagoreans, to Euclid, Aristoxenus, and others), including Pythagorean theory double octave, tetrachords, scales, modes
  • ...but modified to suit Islamicate (Arab-Persian-Byzantine-...) tonality and instruments
    • placement of "neutral tones", formulated (Greek influence!) as integer ratios
    • use of oud (and tanbur of Baghdad, and of Khorasan) as theoretical instruments
  • ethnographic, descriptive approach (al-Farabi)
  • systematic, prescriptive approach (Safi al-Din al-Urmawi)

Review

• Tuning, scales and modes in theory: past to present
  • Theory and practice
  • Prescription and description
• A comparison of scales in theory and practice (audio, visual) (look and listen)
  • Old Arabian (division of octave into 9 or 11 tones)
  • al-Farabi (division of octave into about 30 tones)
  • Systematist (division of octave into 17 tones)
  • Syrian comma (division of octave into 53 near-equidistant tones)
  • Tempered quarter-tone scale (division of octave into 24 equidistant tones)
  • Rast performed:
    • Sillim (scale)
    • Taqasim
• Microtones, maqamat, modulation in practice today: Egypt and Sham
  • Egyptian theory: based on scales
  • Syrian theory: based on concept of sayr (path)
  • Read: Marcus on modulation, intonation
  • Hear: Sami Abu Shumays on microtones
  • maqamat
  • Modulation among maqamat
• Relation of the above to concepts of "asala" and "turath" and "tarab"

Iqa`a (rhythm)

• Concepts
  • free or metric time
    • Free (aperiodic): associated with solo performance of improvisation (taqsim, mawwal...)
    • Metric (periodic): associated with group performance of composition (e.g. muwashshah)
      • Periodic signal, but slow! (1 Hz or slower, instead of 440 Hz)
      • Period: wazn, usul, mizan, darb
      • Naqra: beat
      • Darb is composed of segments (2 or more), equal or unequal
      • Each segment is composed of series of naqarat (2 or more)
      • Each naqra is
        • Long or short
        • Accented or unaccented
      • Each accented beat is dum (low, heavy) or tek (high, light)

• Examples
  • http://www.maqamworld.com
  • Other theory resources

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The turath: inheritance from the 19th century

Map of the Arab world

Islamicate timeline

• Ideology:
  • Inhitat (decline) of the Arabs: 13th (fall of Baghdad) to 19th c
  • Nahda (renaissance) in 19th c following European contact and Ottoman resistance
  • Revival of turath
• Reality?
  • Early Arab music is Arabian (from the peninsula)
  • With Islamic expansion, musical systems are blended (Arab, Persian, Byzantine)
  • Ethnicities are not defined in linguistic terms during this period
  • Arab nationalists back-project linguistic nationalism to this period, "claiming" Arabic-speaking musicians and philosophers, even when Arabic was not their native tongue (e.g. al-Farabi)
  • In times and places when dominant empires (e.g. Ottomans from Turkey, Safavids from Iran, Mughals from India) are not Arabic-speaking, Arab nationalists speak of "decline" (e.g. 13th to 19th c)
  • 19th c witnessed colonialism, but also (as a consequence) the rise of nationalism and a new sense of Arabism as encompassing Arabic-speaking regions (in imitation of parallel trends in Europe)
  • Rise of media simultaneously froze and transformed these traditions at the beginning of the 20th century
  • Turath is simply those traditions as first captured by recorded media, reinterpreted as a timeless "Arab tradition" (the turath)
  • Ironically, the same media (in conjunction with Western cultural influence) now rapidly transformed and nearly erased those traditions (e.g. negating turath, asala, tarab) by
    • requirements of the recording process (record length, microphone limitations)
    • introducing western music sounds and instruments
    • transforming listening practices and contexts (live to recorded)
    • (we'll talk about this next week)
  • To a great extent, the turath is defined in terms of tonal-temporal systems (including intonation, scales, modes, rhythms), together with compound forms, genres of poetry, and musical instruments.
  • The turath thus assumes an emotional resonance, for at least two reasons:
    • Due to a structure feedback potential designed to evoke tarab
    • Due to its association with national feeling and a sense of cultural authenticity (asala)

Turath (heritage): inheritances from the unmediated 19th century into the mediated 20th

Each region of the Arab World has its set of traditions, "turath" (though these are etic groupings and may be further localized). Roughly speaking, there are five regional types: North African, Egyptian, Levantine, Iraqi, and Gulf, though historically Egypt and the Levant were very close.

As a rule each "turath" includes a compound or "suite" form, comprising a flexible sequence of genres, designed to occupy one or more hours of performance, perhaps an entire evening...they derive directly from the early 20th century (when instances were first recorded and sometimes notated) and their oral tradition can be traced--continuously-- much farther back.

However we do not know the extent of change over the centuries. Furthermore they were not formerly identified as specifically "Arab" (even if texts were in Arabic) but rather were closely linked with broader Islamicate culture, as illustrated by close connections to contemporary Turkish, Persian, and Central Asian art music traditions.

The advent of recording media ironically both preserved and transformed them, and ultimately created a set of social-aesthetic conditions that could not sustain them. They were therefore largely consigned to the musical museum (though current popularity varies by region), while retaining a vast importance as cherished symbols of timeless culture and tradition.

Each such suite form balances:

• instrumental and vocal forms
• improvised and composed forms
• solo and group forms
• multiple meters (durub, awzan), often accelerating and shortening/simplifying
• multiple maqamat (though typically bound by a single principal maqam, often bestowing its name on the whole)

Please browse the following types and listen to the examples provided:

Levantine-Egyptian wasla

North African nawba

Iraqi maqam

Arabian sawt