Arabic music
Arabic music is the music of the Arab world with all its diverse music styles and genres. Arabic countries have many rich and varied styles of music and also many linguistic dialects, with each country and region having their own traditional music.
Arabic music has a long history of interaction with many other regional musical styles and genres. It represents the music of all the peoples that make up the Arab world today.
History
Pre-Islamic period
was the cradle of many intellectual achievements, including music, musical theory and the development of musical instruments. In Yemen, the main center of pre-Islamic Arab sciences, literature and arts, musicians benefited from the patronage of the Kings of Sabaʾ who encouraged the development of music. For many centuries, the Arabs of Hejaz recognized that the best real Arabian music came from Yemen, and Hadhrami minstrels were considered to be superior. Pre-Islamic Arabian Peninsula music was similar to that of Ancient Middle Eastern music. Most historians agree that there existed distinct forms of music in the Arabian peninsula in the pre-Islamic period between the 5th and 7th century AD. Arab poets of that time—called shu`ara' al-Jahiliyah or "Jahili poets", meaning "the poets of the period of ignorance"—used to recite poems with a high notes.File:Ancient Egyptians playing music.png|alt=Ancient Egyptians playing music|thumb|An ancient Egyptian mural of people playing music.|left
It was believed that Jinns revealed poems to poets and music to musicians. The choir at the time served as a pedagogic facility where the educated poets would recite their poems. Singing was not thought to be the work of these intellectuals and was instead entrusted to women with beautiful voices who would learn how to play some instruments used at that time such as the drum, the lute or the rebab, and perform the songs while respecting the poetic metre. The compositions were simple and every singer would sing in a single maqam. Among the notable songs of the period were the huda, the nasb, sanad, and rukbani.
Early Islamic period
Both compositions and improvisations in traditional Arabic music are based on the maqam system. Maqams can be realized with either vocal or instrumental music, and do not include a rhythmic component.Al-Kindi was a notable early theorist of Arabic music. He joined several others like al-Farabi in proposing the addition of a makeshift fifth string to the oud. He published several tracts on musical theory, including the cosmological connotations of music. He identified twelve tones on the Arabic musical scale, based on the location of fingers on and the strings of the oud.
Abulfaraj wrote the Kitab al-Aghani, an encyclopedic collection of poems and songs that runs to over 20 volumes in modern editions.
Al-Farabi wrote a notable book on Islamic music titled Kitab al-Musiqa al-Kabir. His pure Arabian tone system is still used in Arabic music.
Al-Ghazali wrote a treatise on music in Persia which declared, "Ecstasy means the state that comes from listening to music".
In 1252, Safi al-Din developed a unique form of musical notation, where rhythms were represented by geometric representation. A similar geometric representation would not appear in the Western world until 1987, when Kjell Gustafson published a method to represent a rhythm as a two-dimensional graph.
Al-Andalus
By the 11th century, Islamic Iberia had become a center for the manufacture of instruments. These goods spread gradually throughout France, influencing French troubadours, and eventually reaching the rest of Europe. The English words lute, rebec, and naker are derived from Arabic oud, rabab or Maghreb rebab, and naqareh.16th to 19th century
spent 13 years as a slave in the Ottoman Empire. After escaping, he published De Turcarum ritu et caermoniis in Amsterdam in 1544. It is one of the first European books to describe music in Islamic society.20th century–present
In the early 20th century, Egypt was the first in a series of Arab countries to experience a sudden emergence of nationalism. English, French and European songs were replaced by national Egyptian music. Cairo became a center for musical innovation.Female singers were some of the first to adopt a secular approach. Egyptian performer Umm Kulthum and Lebanese singer Fairuz were notable examples of this. Both have been popular through the decades that followed and considered legends of Arabic music. Moroccan singer Zohra Al Fassiya was the first female singer to achieve wide popularity in the Maghreb region, performing traditional Arab Andalusian folk songs and later recording numerous albums of her own.
During the 1940s and 1960s, Arabic music began to take on a more Western tone – Egyptian artists Umm Kulthum and Abdel Halim Hafez along with composers Mohammed Abdel Wahab and Baligh Hamdi pioneered the use of western instruments in Egyptian music. By the 1970s several other singers had followed suit and a strand of Arabic pop was born. Arabic pop usually consists of Western styled songs with Arabic instruments and lyrics. Melodies are often a mix between Eastern and Western.
Western pop music was also influenced by Arabic music in the early 1960s, leading to the development of surf music, a rock music genre that later gave rise to garage rock and punk rock. Surf rock pioneer Dick Dale, a Lebanese American guitarist, was greatly influenced by the Arabic music he learnt from his uncle, particularly the oud melodies and skills which he later applied to his electric guitar playing when recording surf rock in the early 1960s.
Baligh Hamdi who created and composed many hit songs for several Arab singers, frequently said that he drew upon musical ideas and aesthetics in Egyptian folk melodies and rhythms in composing his songs. He also drew on ideas in the contemporary music of his time. His sound has a classical flavor due to the heavy use of the string orchestra. But he also made some use of electronic keyboards and guitars in harmony with the strings, or alternating with the strings.
His best work is published as recordings under the name of the singer. The singers include Umm Kulthum, Abdel Halim Hafez, Shadia, Layla Murad, Najat Al Saghira, Fayza Ahmed, Warda, Sabah, and other singers. He had also collaborated with the legendary singer Aziza Jalal who promoted her songs Mestaniak and Haramt El Hob Alaya one of the best Arabic songs in the 80s.
In the 1990s, Arab artists who took up this style were Amr Diab, Moustafa Amar, Najwa Karam, Elissa, Nawal Al Zoghbi, Nancy Ajram, Haifa Wehbe, Angham, Fadl Shaker, Majida Al Roumi, Wael Kfoury, Asalah Nasri, Myriam Fares, Carole Samaha, Yara, Samira Said, Hisham Abbas, Kadhem Al Saher, Ehab Tawfik, Mohamed Fouad, Diana Haddad, Mohamed Mounir, Latifa, Cheb Khaled, George Wassouf, Hakim, Fares Karam, Julia Boutros, and Amal Hijazi.
In 1936, Iraq Radio was established by the Iraqi Jewish musicians, Saleh and Daoud al-Kuwaity. The brothers played a pioneering role in the modern music of Iraq. Saleh was considered the father of Iraqi maqam and wrote the first song. He also composed for famous singers of that era in Iraq and the Arab world, such as Salima Murad, Afifa Iskandar, Nazem al-Ghazali, Umm Kulthum, Mohammed Abdel Wahab.
One of the main reasons for the predominance of Jewish instrumentalists in early 20th century Iraqi music was a school for blind Jewish children in Baghdad founded in the late 1920s by the qanunji Joseph Hawthorne .
Salima Pasha was one of the most famous singers of the 1930s–1940s. The respect and adoration for Pasha were unusual at the time, since public performance by women was considered shameful in the region, and most female singers were recruited from brothels.
The music in Iraq began to take a more Western tone during the 1960s and 1970s, notably by Ilham Madfai, with his Western guitar stylings with traditional Iraqi music which made him a popular performer in his native country and throughout the Middle East.
Influence of Arabic music
The majority of musical instruments used in European medieval and classical music have roots in Arabic musical instruments that were adopted from the medieval Arab world. They include the lute, which shares an ancestor with the oud; rebec from rebab, guitar from qitara, naker from naqareh, adufe from al-duff, alboka from al-buq, anafil from al-nafir, exabeba from al-shabbaba, atabal from al-tabl, atambal from al-tinbal, the balaban, castanet from kasatan, and sonajas de azófar from sunuj al-sufr.The Arabic rabāb, also known as the spiked fiddle, is the earliest known bowed string instrument and the ancestor of all the European bowed instruments, including the rebec, the Byzantine lyra, and the violin. The Arabic oud in Arab music shares an ancestor with the European lute. The oud is also cited as a precursor to the modern guitar. The guitar has roots in the four-string oud, brought to Iberia by the Moors in the 8th century. A direct ancestor of the modern guitar is the guitarra morisca, which was in use in Spain by the 12th century. By the 14th century, it was simply referred to as a guitar.
A number of medieval conical bore instruments were likely introduced or popularized by Arab musicians, including the xelami.
Some scholars believe that the troubadors may have had Arabian origins, with Magda Bogin stating that the Arab poetic and musical tradition was one of several influences on European "courtly love poetry". Évariste Lévi-Provençal and other scholars stated that three lines of a poem by William IX of Aquitaine were in some form of Arabic, indicating a potential Andalusian origin for his works. The scholars attempted to translate the lines in question and produced various different translations. The medievalist Istvan Frank contended that the lines were not Arabic at all, but instead the result of the rewriting of the original by a later scribe.
The theory that the troubadour tradition was created by William after his experience of Moorish arts while fighting with the Reconquista in Spain has been championed by Ramón Menéndez Pidal and Idries Shah. George T. Beech states that there is only one documented battle that William fought in Spain, and it occurred towards the end of his life. Beech adds that William and his father did have Spanish individuals within their extended family, and that while there is no evidence he himself knew Arabic, he may have been friendly with some Europeans who could speak the language. Others state that the notion that William created the concept of troubadours is itself incorrect, and that his "songs represent not the beginnings of a tradition but summits of achievement in that tradition."
Most scholars believe that Guido of Arezzo's Solfège musical notation system had its origins in a Latin hymn, but others suggest that it may have had Arabic origins instead. It has been argued that the Solfège syllables may have been derived from the syllables of an Arabic solmization system Durr-i-Mufassal . This was first proposed by Meninski in his Thesaurus Linguarum Orientalum. However, there is no documentary evidence for this theory, and no Arabic musical manuscripts using sequences from the Arabic alphabet are known to exist. Henry George Farmer believes that there is no firm evidence on the origins of the notation, and therefore the Arabian origin theory and the hymnal origin theories are equally credible.