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Culturally speaking,
it is customary to group together the two geographic areas of North
Africa and West Asia, which share many common traits. It is obvious
that the music of these regions is linked for reasons rooted in history
and the circulation of people. These two factors have left their mark
on musical practices. Furthermore, North Africa and the south of West
Asia (the countries of the Persian Gulf and Iran) are both noted for
their undeniable borrowings from Black Africa. Thus, Ziryab, the famous
Baghdad musician who laid the foundations for art music at the end of
the 9th century in al-Andalus (Andalusia), was a freed black slave.
His name has become emblematic in Arab consciousness today.
This vast
territory extends over thousands and thousands of kilometers. Although
it is easy to fix its western borders on the Atlantic Ocean, keeping
in mind that the development of the music of this region also took place
further north in Andalusia, it is difficult to set its eastern borders
in Asia. The reason is that this border is at the meeting point of three
musical cultures, the Persian, the Arab, and the Turkish, which have
continuously nourished, extended, or contracted one another as vehicles
for cultural exchanges. Above all, this mutual interpenetration is rooted
in one religion, Islam, and the common language which transmitted it,
Arabic, a lingua franca in the past. For this reason, the Persians,
as well as the Turks and the Arabs, claim the paternity of the philosopher
al-Farabi, a theorist of music, who left a treatise of important scientific
scope in Arabic. Historically, the Amu Darya river in present day Uzbekistan
is considered the eastern limit of West Asia. Culture is not, however,
obligated to observe this border. Because of the age-old Silk Road,
this border has also so crumbled that it is difficult, for example,
to classify countries like Afghanistan which claim to belong to several
geographic zones at the same time. This observation also holds true
for the Caucasus region, which culturally does not belong to West Asia.
On the other hand, Azerbaijan, which presses against this region, is
quite naturally associated to it. The case of Armenia is all the more
difficult to categorize as its Diaspora continues to disperse into the
large cities of Turkey, Egypt, Syria, or Iraq. In particular it has
given Turkish music its most renowned composers.
Setting the
border in Europe, where the situation is not clear, presents the same
difficulties. Turkey has wanted to be considered European. In the past,
the sultans always worked in that direction, but musically, Greece can
also claim partially to belong to Asia. Greek musicians, the heirs of
Byzantium, dispersed to the large cities of the Ottoman Empire. Constantinople,
Smyrna, and Alexandria were musically cosmopolitan cities. Constantinople
took in the Jews expelled from Spain, who endowed the city with the
ladino repertoire. The rembetika appeared in Smyrna, a
generic term for popular urban music which later became rebetiko
when it arrived in Salonika. There also, setting borders has been made
more difficult given that the Ottoman Empire pushed forward towards
Europe, and there now exist many pockets of European music that can
claim roots in West Asian currents.
An important
influence also spread from Europe. It is to be taken into account in
both North Africa and West Asia and is felt at two different levels.
Remember that, like the Gregorian modes to which specialists have compared
it, the Arab-Andalusian music of Morocco is based on heptatonic scales
and does not have micro-intervals, a basic element of Middle-Eastern
music. The concern to provide Ottoman music with a new notation appeared
at the end of the 17th century with the Rumanian-born Kantemiroglu,
(born Dimitri Cantemir). The Mevlevi brotherhoods or whirling dervishes
were the first to exploit it. Finally, it was the 19th century proliferation
of military orchestras in this region that borrowed the Western model,
abandoning their own military orchestras because they judged them too
archaic. Through these orchestras, Western music notation adapted to
North African and West Asian music spread at the end of the 19th century.
In spite
of this imprinting, a unity in music shows through. The suite is the
form that imposed itself straight-away on the spirit of the music, and
it has epitomized the characteristic genius of the art music extending
from the Atlantic to the borders of the Himalayas. This suite consists
of linking a succession of pieces that alternate between measured parts
and improvised parts in which ornamentation is de rigueur. The
suite is generally sung, but in Iran and Azerbaijan there is a strictly
instrumental counterpart for soloist musicians. The basic language is
classical with references to poems by famous authors, but pieces in
local dialect, generally anonymous, are added towards the end of the
suite. These pieces are cheery and lend themselves to dancing. The suite
is developed in a single musical mode, which gives its name to the suite,
but secondary modulations are desired or encouraged and elaborated to
an extreme, as in the case of the Ottoman Empire. In the past, the suite
was played in chamber ensembles in octaves or in unison. Nevertheless,
vocal heterophony, the overlapping of voices in unison, has prevailed
as a general rule, although it is not necessarily perceived as such
by its practitioners.
Historical
evidence for this suite, particular musical form of the large cities,
appeared in the writing of the Persian author Kai Ka'us (10th and 11th
centuries) who discussed it for the first time. Nevertheless, depending
on the area, it is called by various names and organizes its taxonomy
as it sees best with a concern for accelerating the final part, a phenomenon
which noticeably has to do with instinct. The suite was linked to exact
hours of the day or the night, but, in the present state of things,
this link has disappeared. Above all, the suite is the Arab-Andalusian
heritage and the nuba (nawba) of North Africa. It is also
the heritage of the Mauritanian bhar, the wasla of the
Near East, the Turkish fasil, the Yemenite ghina' sancani,
and the Iraqi maqam. It is also the heritage of the mugam
of Azerbaijan, and finally the dastgah of Iran, not to mention
the Cashmere sufyana kalam, the Uzbek shashmaqam, and
the Uigur muqam, which, to be accurate, are outside the geographic
context of West Asia. Depending on the circumstances, these suites were
put in collections, as in Morocco in the 18th century by al-Hai'ik for
Andalusian- North African music, or more recently in Iran under the
name radif, or in Tunisia under the name maluf. These
efforts attest to a commonly shared will to save this heritage from
oblivion, to add more recent pieces to the older pieces, and to build
the collective memory of the learned music of these peoples.
Nevertheless,
the individual psychologies of these juxtaposed populations is such
that the populations have influenced these suites, which, in turn, reflect
their psychologies. Here we can agree that learned Turkish music presents
a certain seriousness, that it lends itself to introspection, and that
it favors grandeur and unfolds slowly. Learned Persian music
is, above all, a phenomenon of privacy, lends itself to mysticism and
the secretive, and is nourished by passion. Arab art music is much more
lively and stirring, and, despite the passion-filled tragedies that
it's poems evoke, lends itself to optimism. Concerning the art music
of Azerbaijan, disillusionment, drama, and passion always come back
to the foreground. Through their intense power of expression, the aesthetics
of all these forms of music have in common a concern for suspending
time through phenomena of reiterative language and repetition that allow
the music to advance while giving the impression of staying in place.
In addition to this
conception drawn from three sources (Persian, Arab, and Turkish), which
has historically dominated the music of this region, we cannot fail
to mention the rise in force of minorities beginning in the 20th century.
The most important populations are the Berbers in North Africa and the
Kurds in West Asia. They are now a part of the chessboard of music and
are also to be considered in discussions of traditional music. Here
legitimacy has separated itself from learned music and draws its substance
from the rural and popular world. But the upheavals of the recent years,
particularly in Iran, have been the occasion to develop a new art at
the crossroads of the learned, popular, and rural traditions. In this
part of the globe, there is one possible response to questions concerning
the future of traditional music.
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