Sami Abu Shumays has uploaded his complete lecture on politics and maqams. He talks about how decolonizing music also meant decolonizing himself—reconnecting to his roots as a Palestinian American. This is essential context for Sami’s work, which includes the Arabic tuning section of Ableton Live 12’s tuning implementation and free companion site.
Here’s the full video (moving for me, as we met over two decades earlier so it’s great to see where this journey has led):
This is not a theory video. There’s a reason he has everyone stand up and sing and laugh: “Maqam comes from the body. It’s a physical skill – like dancing, or cooking.”
“Maqam comes from the body. It’s a physical skill – like dancing, or cooking.”
This video is a must-watch if you’re going to work through Ableton’s tuning site – which you can easily do with some spare evenings. It’ll reinforce the idea that you should stand up and sing, even in the studio. Move around. Feel something. (Working on a screen makes that even more important.)
Check Ableton’s tuning site, including interactive lessons – usable with any software, not just Ableton Live. (With Live 12, you’ll get some extra features.)
Where the politics comes in is in standardization – and normalization. This immediately connects both to issues of pan-Arab nationalism and the ongoing legacy of colonial rule, particularly by the Turkish/Ottoman, British, and French. (Now, to that list, add the USA, the native land of Sami and Peter here.) Just as approaches to so-called “western” tunings can become reductive and normalized, so, too, can clumsy approach to maqam lose some essential messiness – and its local, emotional, and personal meanings.
Sami doesn’t really talk about software and hardware, but this is doubly true in technology. Shortcuts and practicalities can also erase some of those messy edges. (You could even think of theory itself as a kind of technological development.) Then again, we can also use technology to add that roughness back in.
Equally important and very much erased from how we teach musicology and theory, major portions of Europe’s understanding of the mathematics of music have come from knowledge received from the Arabic world. The mythology of European primacy does real violence to that connection and warps our understanding of math and music alike. But by the same token, these exchanges between southern Asia, southwest Asia and the Arabic sphere, Europe, and other regions can continue now.
Anyway, that historical story is beautifully told in this video. But let’s highlight this statement:
Why should a painter or fashion designer favor the purest versions of every color, rather than complex blended colors. Doesn’t each artist make their own choice of colors from the infinite spectrum of possibilities?
Why should a painter or fashion designer favor the purest versions of every color, rather than complex blended colors. Doesn’t each artist make their own choice of colors from the infinite spectrum of possibilities?
It’s not purely about math, but mood, feeling, body. It’s not universal. All of that is beautiful.
By the way, I don’t think you have to toss your existing musical background. Not only does this open the door to new systems, but it can help you revisit what you may think you already know. That includes 12-Tone Equal Temperament (which has its own historical thread, even back to early Chinese theory). There are post-tonal ways of working with those scale degrees and expressive ways of bending between them. In sound design, we constantly add dissonance (acoustic and harmonic). A piano in the real world is never “true” 12-TET – there are various tuning systems (Kirnberger!), stretched tuning, ways the instrument falls in and out of tune in its environment… and that’s the instrument that we think of as most fixed.
But we could also liberate ourselves from those systems’ colonial baggage and normative qualities. And we should absolutely, positively stop thinking of Western European or generally “white” systems as primary. That kind of thinking is not a victimless crime.
That’s a lot to ponder – honestly, I don’t want to distract anyone from focusing on moving and singing! But there’s just one more point to be made on how we might reflect on how we live. (Maybe something to reflect on after a good span of time moving around and singing and getting maqams in our body.)
I’m going to return to a video from Sami from earlier. So much of the violence that we’re witnessing now is connected – in our news, and in ecology. That gives all of us added responsibility, especially in music and music technology. It demands that we change some fundamental assumptions, and unlearn some of what is around us. Sami puts this as directly as anyone could:
This video comes from the Tanfis project – check the results, including the Palestine-focused portion of the project, but many other regions, as well. (Here comes a rabbit hole of music):
https://www.remix-culture.org/palestine
All digital music technology came from the computer – so it came from military industrial products. But there’s still time to move that technology away from catastrophe.
We’re faced in a world of systematic violence that requires a lot of unlearning. Fortunately, you don’t have to stay sitting down or quiet.
Thanks, Sami; I hope we’ll keep practicing, studying, and singing.