Traditional & Classiacl Arabic Music

Traditional & Classiacl Arabic Music



 Arabic music or Arab music (Arabic: موسيقى عربية; Mūsīqā ʿArabīyya) is the music of the Arab World, including several genres and styles of music ranging from Arabic classical to Arabic pop music and from secular to sacred music. Arabic music, while independent and very alive, has a long history of interaction with many other regional musical styles and genres. It is an amalgam of the music of the Arabs in the Arabian Peninsula and the music of all the peoples that make up the Arab World today. As was the case in other artistic and scientific fields, Arabs translated and developed Greek texts and works of music and mastered the musical theory of the Greeks (i.e. Systema ametabolon, enharmonium, chromatikon, diatonon)

Pre-Islamic period

The development of Arabic music has extremely deep roots in Arabic poetry dating back to the pre-Islamic period known as Jahiliyyah. Though there is a lack of scientific study to definitively confirm the existence of Arabic music at those times, most historians agree that there existed distinct forms of music in the Arabian peninsula in the pre-Islamic period between the 5th and the 7th century AD. Arab poets of that time - called شعراء الجاهلية or "Jahili poets" which translates to "The poets of the period of ignorance" - used to recite poems with a high musical rhythm and tone.  Music at that time played an important role in cultivating the mystique of exorcists and magicians. It was believed that Jinns revealed poems to poets and music to musicians.  The Choir at the time served as a pedagogic facility where the educated poets would recite their poems. Singing was not thought to be the work of these intellectuals and was instead entrusted to women with beautiful voices (i.e. Al-Khansa) who would learn how to play some instruments used at that time (i.e. lute, drum, Oud, rebab, etc...) and then perform the songs while respecting the poetic metre.  It should be noted that the compositions were simple and every singer would sing in a single maqam. Among the notable songs of the period were the "huda" from which the ghina' derived, the nasb, sanad, and rukbani'.

Early Islamic period


 Arabic maqam is the system of melodic modes used in traditional Arabic music, which is mainly melodic. The word maqam in Arabic means "station" and denotes a melody type built on a scale and carrying a tradition that defines its habitual phrases, important notes, melodic development and modulation. Both compositions and improvisations in traditional Arabic music are based on the maqam system. Maqams can be realized with either vocal or instrumental music, and do not include a rhythmic component. Al-Kindi (801–873 AD) was the first great theoretician of Arabic music. He proposed adding a fifth string to the oud and discussed the cosmological connotations of music.  He surpassed the achievement of the Greek musicians in using the alphabetical annotation for one eighth. He published fifteen treatises on music theory, but only five have survived. In one of his treaties the word musiqa was used for the first time in Arabic, which today means music in Arabic, Persian, Turkish, English and several other languages in the Islamic world.  Abulfaraj (897–967) wrote great book about music Kitab al-Aghani is an encyclopedic collection of poems and songs that runs to over 20 volumes in modern editions by the 8th/9th-century litterateur . Al-Farabi (872-950) wrote a notable book on music titled Kitab al-Musiqi al-Kabir (The Great Book of Music). His pure Arabian tone system is still used in Arabic music.  Al-Ghazali (1059–1111) wrote a treatise on music in Persia which declared, "Ecstasy means the state that comes from listening to music". In 1252, Safi al-Din developed a unique form of musical notation, where rhythms were represented by geometric representation. A similar geometric representation would not appear in the Western world until 1987, when Kjell Gustafson published a method to represent a rhythm as a two-dimensional graph.