This section of Racy’s “Making Music in the Arab World” could be just as applicable to the non-Arab musician. In the chapter titled simply, Music, he begins the section titled “The art of accompanying” with When called for, musical accompaniment plays a crucial role in the evocative process. Basically, an accompanying performer must be musically [...]
Also tagged Aesthetics, Arabic aestheticsIn tarab music, the ability to play or sing in correct pitch is another requisite for creating ecstatically effective performances. Essentially, few theoretical works describe the ecstatic role of intonation, despite the abundance of treatises and text-books that deal with tuning and modal scales. Furthermore, in such sources melodic intervals are most often presented in [...]
Also tagged Microtonal Music, Microtones, scalesI’ve been playing music from the Middle East for some years now. I’ve picked up skill with various Middle Eastern percussion; I play and actively perform what amounts to hours worth of music from the region; I even sing in Turkish, Arabic, some Armenian. But right now I feel like I don’t know the first [...]
Also tagged Turkish musicI posted a bit about “authenticity” and the issues modernization and Westernization in indigenous Art Music traditions previously. Here’s a quote from Ali Jihad Racy’s article, “Musical Aesthetics in Present-Day Cairo,” that illustrates a broad pan-Arabic sense of some of the issues with descriptive phrases used in value judgments about musical activities: Common in Cairo [...]
Also tagged Ali Jihad Racy, Arabic aesthetics, Egyptian music, fannan asilSo I’m in the middle of “Among the Jasmine Trees: Music and Modernity in Syria” by Jonathan Holt Shannon who’s one of the leading experts on Arabic music (from an academic standpoint). What I’m really struck by is the story, and I hear and read this time and time again, of the issue of Modernization [...]
Also tagged "Among the Jasmine Trees: Music and Modernity in Syria", Jonathan Holt Shannon, Middle Eastern Music, Mugam, Ottoman music, Syria, Turkish music, Western Classical MusicThis is a prewritten post as I will be performing at the Perkfection Cafe & Bar with Ahel El Nagam, Louisville’s Classical Arabic Band, and the Gypsies of the Nile bellydancer troupe. If any readers are so inclined then please come to the show for live Classical Egyptian and Arabic music as only Ahel El [...]
Also tagged Ahel El Nagam, Bellydance, Classical Egyptian music, Egyptian music, Gypsies of the Nile, Indiana, Jeffersonville, Perkfection Cafe & Bar, Turkish musicCalling a music microtonal is really such an unfortunate and misleading thing and belies alot of the assumptions that we make (in the world of Western Music) about how another culture’s music is organized. Basically we take as a standard Western diatonicism and when discussing other culture’s scale systems (the idea of a “scale” is [...]
Also tagged Cello, Microtonal Music, Microtones, scales