Random thought

Huseyni -> Journeyman like Ibn Battuta, it sounds good to me

Whew!
It is a relief that others have had similar thoughts
I was wondering whether to remove this 'poetic' comment, lOL.

Ajam (meaning Persian) and Nahawand (place in Iran) have
a Persian association for me, Kurdi=Kurdish, and Nakriz; Greek and Balkan.
Huseyni was the favorite mode in Istanbul in the 17th century too.

I have been working with the Hijaz family for over a month.
But over the last few days I have been enjoying the other maqamat.
It is like rediscovering them after just listening to Hijaz family for a while.
The mood at the time of writing was definitly Sikah (Huzzam).
I love Sikah family after about 8pm for some reason?

Thanks, both of you
Your thoughts are very inspiring

Very interesting.
What a cool way to think of them
I will try this approach.
Reminds me off Ziryab and the Abbasid guys.

I learnt about Sabah Fakhri when I was in Aleppo and got many of his recordings.

Al Kindi was responsible for introducing me to Adib, he is still my favorite although Sabah is amazing too for sure.
I heard he won a world record for singing for 10 hours straight!!

http://www.bashirtarab.net/Tarab_ag/sabah.php

I got a (not official) CD in Aleppo that has about 7 or more hours of Adib singing live with just a nay accompaniment, rough but beautiful.

Here is one:

http://www.4shared.com/audio/1p-qbfOk/adib_al_dayekh_-_ana_ya_souad...

Quote: Originally posted by Jono Oud N.Z

Al Kindi blew me away the first time I heard them. The album 'Courtly Love' with Adib Al dayekh is one of my favorite albums of all time. Such soul and tarab! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ScO2NY1q-_Y Adib is up there with Oum Kalsoum in my opinion, but I prefer the takht small group.

For sure LOL

I have all their albums, they are one of my favorite groups and I love their work in preserving the Wasla style.

I play the nay also, and Ziyad Qadi Amin is my favorite nay player.
Beautiful!

Quote: Originally posted by littleseb

i always thought of it in colours and shapes. and mixin and matching colours and shapes. ajam being a bright blue, a bit like the stroll bare on the right of your screen -----> but more shaped like a narroe stair case. the faster the taqsim the narrower and steeper. nahawand is sort of light nutty brown, also shaped like a stair case but more worn out and smoothed around the edges by years worth of feet dragging themselves up and down. saba is sort of paisleyish green and yellow with maybe a few blueish dots thrown in, and lots of twists and unexpected turns, shapwise. hijaz and its relatives are red and yellow, and have a triangular fiery sort of shape to it. kurd is definitely not as triangular as kar, but has the benefit of being more red and less yellow. lami is red and brown and a bit like a slowly expanding mass of oily water. and so on and so on, lol! peace!

Quote: Originally posted by michoud

well, great idea about the maqamat...let me think about it... About Al Kindi and his album with Adib Dayekh...for me it is also one of my favorite albums... When I was living in Aleppo, my friends were surprised that I love Adib singing, not all people knows him, he was not so famous like Sabah Fahri, for example...for me Adib style is unique...also I´m with you...I prefer takht sharqi, not the big orchestras...

I was looking for the signification of Nakriz (to understand the link I made with coquetry), and I came across this note :

"(...) The traditional chamber ensemble (the takht) ideally had only one of each type of instrument. The modern day orchestra (the firgah) usually has 10 to 12 violins. With such a large violin section, the freedom inherent in heterophony could easily result in cacophony. Playing in unisons and octaves, facilitated by the presence of Western notation, became the norm." AMTMP p. 160

I'm curious to know how many are there because of and for heterophony, and how many because of and for monophony ...

I'm looking for buying this CD :



Thanks for sharing

Quote: Originally posted by David.B

Sikah -> Magician, like Merlin (superstition)

Quote: Originally posted by David.B

Quote: Originally posted by David.B   Sikah -> Magician, like Merlin (superstition) I learned the 'scale' E-b- F G Ab B c d e-b- with the name Sikah! It seems to be common ... So, Huzam -> Magician, like Merlin (superstition) Sikah -> The Lovers Sikah is connected to something suspended and irrational. As expressions of love, indeed!

Very good description!

The artistic approach is also appealing
I was an artist before playing instruments, so can dig that for sure.

I took six months of lessons with a portraitist, it's no accident if I feel personalities into maqamat

By the way, I quited about 10 years ago, music or drawing ... I miss my long sessions in Le Louvre or Le Musée d'Orsay, drawing statues, watching people and breathing the air of that time, surrounded by masterpieces of art ...

I tried pastels but color is too tricky for me, I came back on charcoal quickly!

hi david!

first of all - cool drawings! a lot of skill involved i bet! how come you gave up painting? is it really an arts-or-music thing for you? for me it is very important to counter-act a creative activity with another one. partly to use a different part of the brain (or to let newly acquired skills sink in), partly to incorporate newly explored stuff into other art forms.
btw - i'm not much of a painter myself, even though i teach art (to autistic people). i'm more comfortable in film making, writing and theatre. but being a musician my job as an arts teacher make me think a lot about the effects visual- and audio stimuli have on us.

and yes, i'm vaguely familiar with the articles you've linked to. i don't want to get too much into them, as they pretty much speak for themselves, but they made me think about a few things, mainly things i observe in myself....

i don't know why maqamat take on certain shapes and colours for me, synaesthetic or not. i wonder if maqamat were such a strange concept for me when i first started studying them that my brain was looking for something familiar to make sense of them, colours being the obvious connection. also - they don't always or instantly appear. they sort of pop up when i'm in the zone (after hours of playing) or when i do the brain work around them. and they become important when working on a taqasim. like i said before: say i start with nahawand, which is a nut brownish vaguely reddish worn-out staircase, and then i think 'to make it work i need some green and silver with twists and turns', so i switch to saba. again, turning something familiar nothing to do with music into something musical. music is an art form, and art should speak to more senses than one, so to me it makes sense. (might be time to upload a taqasim soon to show that my way of thinking sort of works, lol).
also - like others have said: isn't a comparison between maqamat and mystical figures a similar approach? adding something to a sound to allow your brain to draw yet another connection?
a bit like food as well - it's not just the taste (even though taste comes first), but it's also about the texture and the way it looks.

and: what do you mean by

Very interesting!
This is an unexpected but certainly interesting approcah.

Very good artwork!.

I had considered colours melding when maqamat change a couple of years ago, kind of like some of the visuals on media player.

I remember listening to a Rast taqsim by Munir Bashir and thinking that the colours on the visualisation seemed to match the music.

I would like to explore this further.

By the way I am also from a Jazz background, so like to chuck in the odd informal phrase here and there LOL.
'What's cookin' with the oud cats at the mo'.
LOL

hi jono

i've tried it the other way around - letting light effects guide a taqasim. i've made up visual films of shapes and colours, getting more fast and erratic with time, taqasim style and follow them with the oud. it's fun, but a bit restricting.

Very good idea.


I would like to experiment with this kind of thing.
It would be an interesting idea for a concert.
I might try to organise someting for my final concert.

I am doing performance on oud and researching 'Art Music of the Ottoman Empire' at my Uni' this year.

This afternoon, I have my first concert with Doug and Tim, my percussionist friends.
We are playing a Hijaz suite.

I also have a 'trial run' of my research subject for the year 'Modulation in Art Music of the Ottoman Empire'.
I am a bit unprepared, but I actually prefer not to be too prepared, kind of like a taqsim.

Hope all this goes well, will be good when it's over.
The concert is fine, but I am improving at speaking to an audience, there will be some examples I will play on the oud too.

cool, good luck with it this afternoon dude!

hijaz suite - didn't you post something along those lines a little while back? might have been somebody else....
you must be the most clued-up sounds-of-the-ottoman-geek in kiwi-land!
anyway. it's always good to read your posts, relly good stuff!

if you want some visuals to jam along to - try liquid crystal experiments. they work for me. a friend of mine's a scientist and a while back made me a long clip. it's weird but strangely energetic. i'm sure you can find plenty of footage on youtube.

Thanks!!
Yes it's the same stuff I posted on the member clips section.

Always learning, and adjusting my approach.
Sometimes history, theory, maqamat and modulation, other times tarab and zooming in on one maqam.
And above all, countless hours of listening!

There are not many people here that know what i am on about LOL, so it's very cool to have others to talk to about this.

Some of the classical students gave me blank looks and acted like I was from outer space last time I talked to my classmates, LOL.

Thanks for your ideas!

Quote: Originally posted by littleseb

first of all - cool drawings! a lot of skill involved i bet!

Quote: Originally posted by littleseb

how come you gave up painting?

Quote: Originally posted by littleseb

for me it is very important to counter-act a creative activity with another one. partly to use a different part of the brain (or to let newly acquired skills sink in), partly to incorporate newly explored stuff into other art forms.

Quote: Originally posted by littleseb

i don't know why maqamat take on certain shapes and colours for me, synaesthetic or not. i wonder if maqamat were such a strange concept for me when i first started studying them that my brain was looking for something familiar to make sense of them, colours being the obvious connection. also - they don't always or instantly appear. they sort of pop up when i'm in the zone (after hours of playing) or when i do the brain work around them. and they become important when working on a taqasim. like i said before: say i start with nahawand, which is a nut brownish vaguely reddish worn-out staircase, and then i think 'to make it work i need some green and silver with twists and turns', so i switch to saba. again, turning something familiar nothing to do with music into something musical. music is an art form, and art should speak to more senses than one, so to me it makes sense. (might be time to upload a taqasim soon to show that my way of thinking sort of works, lol).

I know what you mean and I can feel music this way, but not with maqamat, instead, with jazz or classical music for example. I think I need harmony ... And yes, upload something with your way of thinking on the side! Examples are always better than long speeches

Quote: Originally posted by littleseb

also - like others have said: isn't a comparison between maqamat and mystical figures a similar approach? adding something to a sound to allow your brain to draw yet another connection? a bit like food as well - it's not just the taste (even though taste comes first), but it's also about the texture and the way it looks.

Quote: Originally posted by David.B

And Personification has not be dug about maqamat!

Sorry, sometimes I try French expressions translated in English, I realize if it works or not when I see people wince ... or not.
What I wanted to say : "And synaesthesia about the personification has not been thorough about maqamat!".

Now I think I become too talkative. The best is to express our thoughts (or our non-thought) through artistic works. I go back on my studies (impossible to find a serious smiley with eyeglasses).

PS
Do you know "Nova" by Samuel R. Delany? I'm sure you should love the Mouse and his syrynx!

"The Mouse. This is the nickname for Pontichos Provechi, a young Gypsy from Earth, who, by age 18, has led an extremely varied life, and is just beginning to work in a starship navigation crew. He also entertains people by creating illusions and music with his "sensory syrynx" (a sound, scent, and hologram projector)." -> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nova_%28novel%29

Very interesting again!
Wow!
You have certainly brought some enlightenment.
Hope your studies go well.