Knowra Arabic maqam Arabic maqam Arabic maqam is a modal system in Arabic music built from characteristic pitch collections, melodic pathways, and expressive conventions. Its practice varies across regions and musical traditions.
Arabic musical scales : Ordered pitch collections used in Arabic music, often combining whole tones, semitones, and intervals smaller than a semitone. Maqamat draw on characteristic pitch collections, but their identity exceeds a scale alone.
Sayr (Arabic music) : The characteristic melodic course through a maqam, including its focal pitches, direction, and points of rest. Sayr describes how a maqam unfolds rather than merely which notes it contains.
Arabic music : Music traditions associated with Arabic-speaking societies, encompassing diverse regional styles and historical periods. Maqam is a central modal framework across many, but not all, Arabic music traditions.
Western church modes : A set of seven diatonic scales associated historically with medieval and Renaissance Christian music. Unlike these fixed diatonic patterns, maqam includes distinctive melodic pathways and variable intonation.
Quarter tone : An interval equal to half a semitone in twelve-tone equal temperament, though actual performance and tuning vary. Some maqamat use intervals between the pitches of the standard Western semitone system.
Modulation (music) : A change from one tonal center or mode to another during a musical passage. Improvisers and composers move between related maqamat as the melody develops.
Muwashshah : A strophic song form that emerged in al-Andalus and became part of several Arabic musical traditions. Muwashshah melodies are performed within maqam frameworks in established regional traditions.
Raga : A melodic framework in Indian classical music that combines characteristic pitches, motifs, and rules of development. Raga also guides melodic development, but belongs to a distinct theoretical and performance tradition.
Jins (Arabic music) : A small melodic unit, usually three to five notes, that serves as a building block of maqamat. A maqam’s lower and upper jins help define its pitch material and melodic direction.
Taqsim : An improvised instrumental solo in Arabic music that explores a maqam and its possible transitions. Taqsim makes a maqam’s characteristic pathways audible through unmetered improvisation.
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