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"ARABIC MUSIC"
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Statistical characteristics of tonal harmony: A corpus study of Beethoven's string quartets
Tonal harmony is one of the central organization systems of Western music. This article characterizes the statistical foundations of tonal harmony based on the computational analysis of expert annotations in a large corpus. Using resampling methods, this study shows that 1) the rank-frequency distribution of chords resembles a power law, i.e. few chords govern a large proportion of the data; 2) chord transitions are referential and chord predictability is significantly affected by distinguished chord features; 3) tonal harmony conveys directedness in time; and 4) tonal harmony operates differently at the hierarchical levels of chords and keys. These results serve to characterize tonal harmony on empirical grounds and advance the methodological state-of-the-art in digital musicology.
Journal Article
Arab music : a survey of its history and its modern practice
Arab Music: A survey of its history and modern practice' is primarily meant for the general Western reader with some basic knowledge of music and music notation. It aims at correcting the still prevalent romantic image of Arab music, spread in the 19th century, as exotic and typified by long, plaintive and erotic sounding melodic lines and inciting rhythms. It offers the reader a comprehensive survey of the history and the development of Arab music and musical theory from its pre-Islamic roots until 1970, as well as a discussion of the major genres and forms practiced today, such as the Egyptian gil, the Algerian rai and Palestinian hip hop. Other topics touched upon are musical instruments and folk music. The analysis of each genre is accompanied by a complete musical notation of an exemplary composition or improvisation, including lyrics and translation.
Book
Firas Zreik: The Paco de Lucia of the Qanun
In March, 27-year-old Firas Zreik released his first full-length album, \"Salute,\" which is also the name of the album's first song, described by Zreik as the most \"bombastic,\" with a \"very intense solo.\" The album combines classical Arabic music with jazz. Its musical ideas, its energy and its clarity are reminiscent of saxophonist Kenny Garrett. The record features eight original compositions written before and during COVID-19, in the United States and in Palestine. Producing an album during COVID-19 was challenging, but Zreik is thrilled with the journey. He finished the album during what he describes as \"one of the most horrible times for both humanity and live music.\" Zreik's creative process involves synesthesia.
Journal Article
The Art of the Early Egyptian Qanun (review)
The accompanying 15-page booklet has photographs of the musicians and their instruments, informative notes about the repertoire and performers, and details of rhythmic patterns and melodic modes. The chamber ensemble allows the listener to appreciate the unique timbres of the instruments, and is particularly welcome among numerous recordings by large Middle Eastern ensembles filled with western violins, cellos, and electric guitars.
Journal Article
A biological rationale for musical scales
Scales are collections of tones that divide octaves into specific intervals used to create music. Since humans can distinguish about 240 different pitches over an octave in the mid-range of hearing, in principle a very large number of tone combinations could have been used for this purpose. Nonetheless, compositions in Western classical, folk and popular music as well as in many other musical traditions are based on a relatively small number of scales that typically comprise only five to seven tones. Why humans employ only a few of the enormous number of possible tone combinations to create music is not known. Here we show that the component intervals of the most widely used scales throughout history and across cultures are those with the greatest overall spectral similarity to a harmonic series. These findings suggest that humans prefer tone combinations that reflect the spectral characteristics of conspecific vocalizations. The analysis also highlights the spectral similarity among the scales used by different cultures.
Journal Article
Colours of Islam
Collects nine illustrated children's poems that explore Islam and the diversity of its followers.
Book
“For Thee America! For Thee Syria?”: Alexander Maloof, Orientalist Music, and the Politics of the Syrian Mahjar
In 1894 Syrian émigré Alexander Maloof arrived in the United States to join the thriving community in New York's “Syrian Quarter.” Working first as a music instructor and pianist, Maloof found success as a bandleader, composer, arranger, and publisher, integrating Arabic and US popular music and light classical styles. He wrote and edited Arabic-language piano songbooks for the Arabophone communities in the United States, and ran the Maloof Records label, the “Oriental” division of the Gennett Company's “race records” enterprise. Drawing on Arabic-language discourse from around the Syrian mahjar (diaspora), this article uses Maloof's output to demonstrate music's role in the vibrant and contested political conversations taking place in Arabic around the world, from the homelands around Beirut and Damascus, to the initial Syrian settlements in Cairo and Paris, to the American colonies in Sao Paulo, Buenos Aires and New York. Concluding with a discussion of the 1919 “American Maid” (composed under a pseudonym), I argue that a thorough understanding of the history of Orientalist popular music in the Americas requires a decentering of European American audiences in order to examine those questions animating the New York mahjar, most centrally the political fate of greater Syria.
Journal Article