Sounds and Music
by HELEN RIVLIN
Music is the constant companion of the peoples of Arab lands. In the cries of street hawkers, in the chants of peasants in the fields, in the songs of Bedouin herdsmen, in the cantillation of the Koran, and even in the popular tunes which blare forth from cafés, music is never absent from the stream of life.To Westerners, its pervasive mixture of sounds often seems harsh and monotonous: partly because music serves as a background to language and partly because the musical idiom, based on a different concept of beauty, requires an educated ear to be appreciated.
Music was a popular medium of artistic expression long before the Islamic period. The huda or caravan song, whose meter may have been, suggested by the camel’s pace, is perhaps the most ancient. However, the songs of the singing girl and poet-soothsayer, accompanied by the lute, reed pipe, and tambourine, entertained audiences in the earliest recorded literature.
Islam has long regarded music with deep suspicion, relegating it to the category of forbidden pleasures, but pagan love of music was so strong that eventually it entered the service of religion in the adhan or call to prayer, one of the most memorable sounds of the East, and in the religious rites of the mystic orders as well as in public and private ritual ceremonies.
Harmony as we know it does not exist in Arabic music which, like the plain sang, has developed horizontally rather than vertically. Its bases are melody and rhythm. In the eastern Arab World, the melody is derived from one of the twelve principal modes (maqamat) or six secondary modes (awazat) and is usually set to one of eight rhythmic modes. The vocalist may be accompanied by one or more instrumentalists who play the same melody but whose rhythm may be independent of the melodic rhythm and may even be composed of several rhythms to form a sort of rhythmic harmony. The melody, whether sung or played on instruments, can be embellished by the zaida or gloss, and it is by his ability to improvise with the zaida that the artist is judged.
An orchestra consists of at least a woodwind, a drum, a tambourine, and a string instrument, of which the most common is the rabab, a sort of onestringed ancestor of the violin. But the psaltery, pandore, lute, qitara (precursor of our guitar), and others are found along with a great variety in sizes, shapes, and sounds of flutes, oboes, and drums.
Like other aspects of the Arab scene today, music is caught in the controversy between those who are Western-influenced and who wish to follow Western forms on the one hand and on the other those who desire to keep Arabic music within the classical Arabic tradition which they consider offers rich possibilities for internal growth. The purists feel that to use Arabic melodies in the framework of Western music would so alter the Arabic as to make if unrecognizable. The future of serious music is uncertain, but even if it incorporates aspects of the Western idiom, it must express the musical character of the Arabs and embody the best of their musical traditions.