Rhythm in Arabic music

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Wazn wahdah sayirah, a relatively short measure of four beats Wazn wahdah sayirah.PNG
Wazn wahdah sayirah, a relatively short measure of four beats

Rhythms in Arabic music are rich and very diverse, as they cover a huge region and peoples from Northern Africa to Western Asia. Rhymes are mainly analysed by means of rhythmic units called awzan and iqa'at.

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Wazn and Iqa'

A rhythmic pattern or cycle in Arabic music is called a "wazn" (Arabic : وزن; plural أوزان / awzān), literally a "measure", also called darb, mizan in Arabic language, also has other names like usul [1] as is in Ottoman classical music) for example. A Wazn is performed on the goblet drum (tarabuka), frame drum (riqq or tar), and kettle drums (naqqarat). [2]

A wazn is only used in musical genres with a fixed rhythmic-temporal organization including recurring measures, motifs, and meter or pulse. [3] It consists of two or more regularly recurring time segments, each time segment consisting of at least two beats (naqarāt, plural of naqrah). There are approximately one hundred different cycles used in the repertoire of Arabic music, many of them shared with other regional music, also found in some South European styles like Spanish music. They are recorded and remembered through onomatopoetic syllables and the written symbols O and I. [4] Wazn may be as large as 176 units of time. [5]

Iqa' (Arabic : إيقاع / īqā‘; plural إيقاعات / īqā‘āt) are rhythmic modes or patterns in Arabic music. [6] [ full citation needed ] There are reputed to be over 100 iqa'at, [7] [ full citation needed ] but many of them have fallen out of fashion and are rarely if ever used in performance. The greatest variety of iqa'at (ranging from two to 48 beats) are used in the muwashshah . Shaabi . Tarab . Dabke . Khaliji . Maghrebi .

Some examples of Iqa'at

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Varieties of Arabic</span> Family of language varieties

Varieties of Arabic are the linguistic systems that Arabic speakers speak natively. Arabic is a Semitic language within the Afroasiatic family that originated in the Arabian Peninsula. There are considerable variations from region to region, with degrees of mutual intelligibility that are often related to geographical distance and some that are mutually unintelligible. Many aspects of the variability attested to in these modern variants can be found in the ancient Arabic dialects in the peninsula. Likewise, many of the features that characterize the various modern variants can be attributed to the original settler dialects as well as local native languages and dialects. Some organizations, such as SIL International, consider these approximately 30 different varieties to be separate languages, while others, such as the Library of Congress, consider them all to be dialects of Arabic.

References

  1. ↑ Touma 1996, 210.
  2. ↑ Touma 1996, 49.
  3. ↑ Touma 1996, 47.
  4. ↑ Touma 1996, 48.
  5. ↑ Touma 1996, 48.
  6. ↑ Waugh, Memory, Music, and Religion: Morocco's Mystical Chanters, 201.
  7. ↑ Randel, Apel, The New Harvard Dictionary of Music

Cited sources

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