Magham

Persian, Arabic, Kurd And Turk maqam (Arabic: مقام‎, romanized: maqām, literally "place"; pl. مقامات maqāmāt) is the system of melodic modes used in traditional Arabic music, which is mainly melodic. The word maqam in Arabic means place, location or position. The Arabic maqam is a melody type. It is "a technique of improvisation" that defines the pitches, patterns, and development of a piece of music and which is "unique to Arabian art music".[1] There are seventy two heptatonic tone rows or scales of maqamat.[1] These are constructed from major, neutral, and minor seconds.[1] Each maqam is built on a scale, and carries a tradition that defines its habitual phrases, important notes, melodic development and modulation. Both compositions and improvisations in traditional Arabic music are based on the maqam system. Maqamat can be realized with either vocal or instrumental music, and do not include a rhythmic component.

An essential factor in performance is that each maqam describes the "tonal-spatial factor" or set of musical notes and the relationships between them, including traditional patterns and development of melody, while the "rhythmic-temporal component" is "subjected to no definite organization".[2] A maqam does not have an "established, regularly recurring bar scheme nor an unchanging meter. A certain rhythm does sometimes identify the style of a performer, but this is dependent upon their performance technique and is never characteristic of the maqam as such."[2] The compositional or rather precompositional aspect of the maqam is the tonal-spatial organization including the number of tone levels and the improvisational aspect is the construction of the rhythmic-temporal scheme.
Background
The designation maqam appeared for the first time in the treatises written in the fourteenth century by al-Sheikh al-Safadi and Abdulqadir al-Maraghi, and has since then been used as a technical term in Arabic music. The maqam is a modal structure that characterizes the art of music of countries in North Africa, the Near East and Central Asia. In this area we can distinguish three main musical cultures which all belong to the maqam modal family, Arabic, Persian, and Turkish.

Tuning system
The notes of a maqam are not tuned in equal temperament (meaning that the frequency ratios of successive pitches are not necessarily identical, unlike the chromatic scale used in modern Western music). A maqam also determines other things, such as the tonic (starting note), the ending note, and the dominant note. It also determines which notes should be emphasized and which should not.[3]

Arabic maqams are based on a musical scale of 7 notes that repeats at the octave. Some maqams have 2 or more alternative scales (e.g. Rast, Nahawand and Hijaz). Maqam scales in traditional Arabic music are microtonal, not based on a twelve-tone equal-tempered musical tuning system, as is the case in modern Western music. Most maqam scales include a perfect fifth or a perfect fourth (or both), and all octaves are perfect. The remaining notes in a maqam scale may or may not exactly land on semitones. For this reason maqam scales are mostly taught orally, and by extensive listening to the traditional Arabic music repertoire.

Notation
Since microtonal intervals are impractical to accurately notate, a simplified musical notation system was adopted in Arabic music at the turn of the 20th century. Starting with a chromatic scale, the Arabic scale is divided into 24 equal quarter tones, where a quarter tone equals half a semitone in a 12 tone equal-tempered scale. In this notation system all notes in a maqam scale are rounded to the nearest quarter tone.

This system of notation is not exact since it eliminates microtonal details, but is very practical because it allows maqam scales to be notated using Western standard notation. Quarter tones can be notated using the half-flat sign (half flat or flat stroke) or the half-sharp sign (half sharp). When transcribed with this notation system some maqam scales happen to include quarter tones, while others don't.

In practice, maqams are not performed in all chromatic keys, and are more rigid to transpose than scales in Western music, primarily because of the technical limitations of Arabic instruments. For this reason, half-sharps rarely occur in maqam scales, and the most used half-flats are Eflat stroke, Bflat stroke and less frequently Aflat stroke.

Intonation
The 24-tone system is entirely a notational convention and does not affect the actual precise intonation of the notes performed. Practicing Arab musicians, while using the nomenclature of the 24-tone system (half-flats and half-sharps), still perform the finer microtonal details which have been passed down through oral tradition.

Maqam scales that do not include quarter tones (e.g. Nahawand, ‘Ajam) can be performed on equal-tempered instruments such as the piano, however such instruments cannot faithfully reproduce the microtonal details of the maqam scale. Maqam scales can be faithfully performed either on fretless instruments (e.g. the oud or the violin), or on instruments that allow a sufficient degree of tunability and microtonal control (e.g. the nay or the qanun, or the Clarinet). On fretted instruments with steel strings, microtonal control can be achieved by string bending, as when playing blues.

The exact intonation of every maqam scale changes with the historical period, as well as the geographical region (as is the case with linguistic accents, for example). For this reason, and because it is not common to notate precisely and accurately microtonal variations from a twelve-tone equal tempered scale, maqam scales are, in practice, learned auditorally.