Inside Arabic Music: Arabic Maqam Performance and Theory in the 20th Century

The argument of Inside Arabic Music is simple. First, no one has ever written a proper introduction to the whole Arabic music system that is both thorough and accessible. Second, while the oral tradition of Arabic music is something to be respected, it has left the presentation of Arabic music theory incomplete. Thus, authors Johnny Farraj and Sami Abu Shumays narrate their book as a definitive pedagogical solution and tool designed to address both problems. They further tie the Arabic music they are writing about to the urban centers of the Arab Levant and Egypt in the twentieth century. They refer to a golden age of Arabic music, which they initially define as 1930–60, though the dates change throughout the book. At times, the golden age seems to include everything since the beginning of the twentieth century. At other times, the 1970s and even the 1980s seem important to defining this hypothetical era. What the repertoire, performance style, and musicians all have in common is their association with tarab, which is an ecstatic emotional experience unique to Arabic listening audiences and a music performance culture that produces that experience within the defined area of musical inquiry. This is what the authors mean by “Arabic music.”The goals of this book are grand, but the writing style remains relatively breezy throughout, presumably to keep the discussion of music accessible to readers. Starting with common musical instruments and moving through such categories of analysis as ornamentation, musical forms, tuning, and notation, the book covers many details tied to the performance of Arabic music based on the melodic modal system of maqam and the cycles of meter called iqa‛. Indeed, the strength of this text is its extensive analysis of the concepts of maqam and iqa‛. The explanation and cataloging of iqa‛ is very helpful, accessible, and extensive. The analysis of maqam uses the smaller sets of pitches traditionally recognized as forming the bases for maqam (ajnas) and demonstrates how they form the maqam while also creating melodic relationships between different maqam. The authors assert that the sayr is also part of defining different maqam, with sayr being a short melodic development that demonstrates the core melodic features of a maqam. This idea is borrowed from Turkish makam, but it is not consistently applied in Arabic maqam praxis, and the discussion of sayr is more theoretical than practical.There is an ongoing tension in the book between the authors wanting to show the systematic behavior of Arabic music while also trying to distance themselves from any commitment to notions of an idea-driven Arabic music system. Thus, the book vacillates between showing empirical analysis of how the music works in a systematic way but then discussing how Arabic music has nothing to do with being empirical or consciously systematic. Trying always to return to the question of practice and habit, the authors seek to tie their discussions of a comprehensive music theory to the notion that theory is ultimately born of something akin to habitus, not the conscious development of musical knowledge.On a practical level, this book has some organizational issues. The authors spend much time discussing specific Arabic maqam before formally explaining how Arabic maqam actually work. The authors foreshadow the existence of maqam in the introduction, but this vague initial statement is not sufficient to tell the reader enough to make sense of specific references to particular Arabic maqam. In a book of twenty-four chapters, the explanation of maqam does not start in earnest until chapter 13. This seems too late, given how often the first twelve chapters reference maqam. If the goal of this book is to make Arabic music accessible to people with no knowledge of it, it is confusing to expect readers to engage with and understand highly specific modal concepts before they have been properly explained. There are some smaller organizational issues as well. For instance, in the chapter dedicated to describing different types of music ensembles, the authors suddenly switch to discussing “hybrid songs,” a term they seem to have coined to describe an Arabic song that alternates between maqam-driven sections and Western harmonized sections (68–69). The need to define and provide examples of hybrid songs takes the focus away from actually describing and categorizing the ensembles that play such songs. The chapter thus briefly deviates from its intended focus to establish a new analytical category that has more implications for musical form than instrumentation.A core weakness of this book is citation. The authors state that the oral transmission of Arabic music means that they do not need to cite many sources to document it properly (xxi). This is problematic, as they regularly make statements of historical fact that do require citation without providing any. For instance, the authors state that the accordion entered the Arab world from Europe in only one place, Alexandria, sometime between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (34). They give no source of information on this point of fact. In another example, they state that the longa instrumental form in Arabic music comes from eastern Europe, again with no citation or explanation as to how anyone knows that this one form alone comes from eastern Europe (144). This makes much of the historical information they give appear both unreliable and suspect.The ability of Inside Arabic Music to meet the goals outlined at the beginning of the book is ultimately mixed, and the authors seem aware of this. The afterword is dedicated to asserting that “there are no rules and no rule-breakers in maqam” (413). The authors use the afterword to assert that Arabic music can only be defined by the musical habits of particular Arab communities. They disavow their analysis—or any analysis—as too small to actually capture how Arabic music really works. This leaves the reader to wonder if the goals of the book were ever realistic.