source file: mills2.txt Date: Tue, 21 Jan 1997 08:19:45 -0800 Subject: RE: Arabic Tuning From: Manuel.Op.de.Coul@ezh.nl (Manuel Op de Coul) To Graham Breed (2nd attempt, sorry if it appears twice) Helmholtz devotes a number of pages to Arabic and Persian scales in "On the sensations of tone". The scales you gave were catalogued by Safi al-Din (Bagdad, 13th century). They are among the twelve main maqams that he described. To answer your second question, yes they are from a reliable source. A good one is Liberty Manik: Das arabische Tonsystem im Mittelalter. PhD diss. Freie Univ. Berlin, 1969. E.J. Brill, Leiden, 1969, 140 pages. They are also in my list of modes which also contains a few modern Arabic scales: ftp://ella.mills.edu/ccm/tuning/papers/modename.txt . A good introductory source for answers to your other questions is Habib Hassan Touma: Musik der Araber. English translation by Laurie Schwartz: The music of the Arabs, Amadeus Press, Portland, 1996, 238 pages. Modern tunings, at least in Turkey, often use a subset of 53-tET. They also use an interval unit of 1060 parts to the octave (1/20 of a 53-tone comma) there, but I don't know what its name is. Subsets of 24-tET are also used, in more popular music. As an interesting aside: the word maqam is a cognate of the Jewish nickname for Amsterdam: Mokum. Its meaning is "the place", or so I'm told. Manuel Op de Coul coul@ezh.nl Received: from ns.ezh.nl [137.174.112.59] by vbv40.ezh.nl with SMTP-OpenVMS via TCP/IP; Tue, 21 Jan 1997 17:18 +0100 Received: by ns.ezh.nl; (5.65v3.2/1.3/10May95) id AA10671; Tue, 21 Jan 1997 17:21:49 +0100 Received: from ella.mills.edu by ns (smtpxd); id XA10634 Received: from by ella.mills.edu via SMTP (940816.SGI.8.6.9/930416.SGI) for id IAA07459; Tue, 21 Jan 1997 08:21:46 -0800 Date: Tue, 21 Jan 1997 08:21:46 -0800 Message-Id: <009AEA8BF326C8C0.043E@vbv40.ezh.nl> Errors-To: madole@mills.edu Reply-To: tuning@ella.mills.edu Originator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Sender: tuning@ella.mills.edu