Islamic Music

I

Introduction

Islamic Music, the vocal and instrumental art created by the peoples of the Islamic world, a region stretching from the Atlantic coast of North Africa to South East Asia and including major portions of Africa, south-western Asia, Central Asia, and the Indian subcontinent. Despite regional and cultural differences, the musical arts of the various Muslim peoples possess basic traits that identify these arts as a unity. These traits are most evident in lands near the birth-place of Islam—the Arab countries of the Middle East and North Africa, as well as Turkey and Iran. Further from that base, Islamic music displays these traits less consistently; nevertheless, they are often amazingly pronounced. The Koranic chant of Malaysia and the Philippines, for example, is essentially indistinguishable from that of the Middle East, and the sung poetry of Afghanistan, in Central Asia, is remarkably consistent with its western Asian models. On the other hand, the music of the gong ensembles of South East Asia belongs to a different, pre-Islamic musical system.

II

General Characteristics

Of the two basic types of music in the Islamic world, one can be called “musical prose”, because its rhythms are free rather than metred, and its performance technique is highly improvisatory. Such musical prose is exemplified by numerous vocal and instrumental genres; its prototype is the liturgical chanting, or cantillation, of the Koran (called qiraah, “reading”). The second can be referred to as “musical poetry”, for like most verbal poetry, it displays regularly repeated rhythmic patterns. Although they also utilize some elements of improvisation, the genres of musical poetry are generally based on a composed or traditional tune.

A

Divisions

Both types of music reveal a preference for dividing music into recognizable segments. This characteristic is derived from the chanting of the Koran, which is heard on radio and television, at weddings or funerals, and at public events, as well as five times each day during prayers. Regardless of the chanter, his native region, or the context in which he recites this solo improvisation, the division of the Koranic cantillation into musical phrases separated by long or short silences is obvious. The divisions in other genres are sometimes emphasized by similar silences. They may also be articulated by abrupt changes of performer, instrumentation, melodic or rhythmic mode, pitch level, type of rhythm (metred or free), and other elements.

B

Intricacy

Through the centuries, Muslims have utilized not only the half-step and whole-step intervals with which Western ears are familiar, but also the intervals of a quarter tone, the three-quarter tone, the five-quarter tone, and one and a half tones. In addition, several sizes of half steps and whole steps enlarge the tonal vocabulary and increase the possibilities for tonal intricacy. A number of these intervals are chosen to make up a scalelike segment of three, four, or five tones. Similar or different segments in turn are combined to form a one- or two-octave scale for the melodic mode, or maqam (in Persian music, dastgah) on which the improvisation or composition is based.

The rhythmic structure is no less complex and fertile. Instead of regular bars of two, three, four, or six beats, the Muslim prefers the unmetred, improvisatory musical prose and the complicated rhythmic modes of musical poetry. The rhythmic mode (iqa) consists of a repeated pattern of up to 24 or sometimes more beats. Ornamentation further increases the intricacy of the melodic line; hardly any note is performed without some embellishing or repetitive device.