evolution of arab maqam
greetings everyone! i will be candid with you, i am not an 'ud player at all but have been playing nay for a while and more recently double bass (in
an arab fashion, that is). but, this seemed like a good place on the web to discuss theory and such.
i wanted to throw something out there i've been working on. it may be entirely wrong, but then again i haven't found any literature that deals
explicitly with the subject.
i started by asking, "what are all maqams built out of?" ajnas, with some conflicting information as to their number and composition. the simplified
version is a set of 9 jins - 7 tetrachords, 2 trichords, and 1 pentachord. this begs the question, "why aren't they all just tetrachords?" but also,
"are the 9 jins an exhaustive collection, or are there many other possible jins, and if so why are they excluded?" i started with some arbitrary (but
i think sensible) assumptions:
1. notes represent small regions of variable pitch rather than specific pitches.
2. steps less than a semitone do not exist between adjacent notes because the difference is too small to create the sensation of separate pitch
regions.
3. in a fixed tetrachord C to F, the following pitch regions are perceived: C C# D- D Eb E- E F. C+ and E+ are absent because of assumption 2. D+ is
excluded for it's ambiguity; it serves equally well (or poorly) as a 2nd or 3rd, and in a modal sense has little functional "drive" in either
direction.
keeping all that in mind, i enumerated the potential tetrachords and assessed their "validity" according to the above assumptions.
C C# D- F (violation of 2, contains 1/4-tone)
C C# D F
C C# Eb F
C C# E- F (violation of 3, contains 5/4-tone)
C C# E F
C D- D F (violation of 2, contains 1/4-tone)
C D- Eb F
C D- E- F
C D- E F (violation of 3, contains 5/4-tone)
C D Eb F
C D E- F
C D E F
C Eb E- F (violation of 2, contains 1/4-tone)
C Eb E F
C E- E F (violation of 2, contains 1/4-tone)
and we are left with *drumroll* 9 valid tetrachords! but, some of them look unfamiliar. going through the new list we have
C C# D F ???
C C# Eb F kurd
C C# E F hijaz
C D- Eb F bayati
C D- E- F ???
C D Eb F nahawand
C D E- F rast
C D E F ???
C Eb E F ???
C D E F, in dropping the fourth, becomes the trichord ajam. C D- E- F, also dropping the fourth, becomes the trichord sikah (you have to imagine
transposing it to E- or B-). ajam and sikah appear all over the place as overlapping jins, and omission of the fourth makes them much easier to move
around (i can illustrate this later if not clear).
At this point we have two unnamed tetrachords left, C C# D F and C Eb E F. And we have two jins left to define, nawa athar and saba, the most peculiar
of the bunch. So there's clearly some discrepancy going on. My explanation (or really my intuition) is as follows:
C C# D F and C Eb E F are not desirable as jins because they have adjacent semitones. adjacent semitones tend to direct the melody to the inside note
(think of top of shahnaz, ...A Bb C# D Eb..., the focus is D). thus it's a bit peculiar in the case of C C# D F to have the focus on C# even though
the maqam is centered on C. and it's peculiar in the case of C Eb E F to have the focus on E, when F is a perfect fourth from the tonic. so over time,
musicians (knowingly or unknowingly) morphed these two tetrachords into saba and nawa athar for aesthetic reasons.
C C# D F, being bottom heavy, morphed into nawa athar. first, you drop the tonic by a semitone to get B C# D F, eliminating the adjacent semitones.
then you transpose everything up a semitone to get C D Eb F#. the G on top was later tacked-on to ensure there'd be a perfect consonance. therefore, C
C# D F was STRETCHED to produce nawa athar.
C Eb E F, being top heavy, morphed into saba. at some point the F was dropped to eliminate the problem of adjacent semitones. then the minor 3rd gap
between C and Eb was filled in to create a more fluid melodic structure. This creates C D+ Eb E. Transposed up a whole tone, D E- F Gb, we get saba.
therefore, C Eb E F was COMPRESSED to produce saba.
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