Differences between Arab and Western music

Music as a language reflects a certain society’s socio-economic, environmental and cultural characteristics. Here it’s important to stress that music, like languages, develops in time according to the social, economic and cultural drivers.

Arab music relies heavily on percussions and solo singing, while Western music relies on instrumentals, and sometimes choirs.

As explained earlier, music has four elements: melody, harmony, rhythm and dynamics. In Arab music, melody makers rely on only three of the aforementioned elements. Harmony, or Harmonia (Greek goddess of harmony and concord), is simply defined as a concord of sounds.

Moreover, there are other features such as texture, articulation and timbre. A piece of music is constructed of a number of building blocks, comprising melody, harmony, rhythm and form.

A musical texture is defined as these building blocks, which are set along with tempo and timbre. A timbre is simply a tone colour, while articulation is more like punctuation in a language.

Arab music is based on a monophonic system, while Western music relies on a polyphonic system or harmony. Monophony is a musical texture that is made of one single melodic line, while polyphony is a musical texture consisting of two or more simultaneous melodic lines.

In Arab music, there are eight main maqams Saba, Nahawand, Ajam, Bayat, Sikah, Hejaz, Rast and Kurd. A maqam comprises eight notes named “octave”. A maqam, which is defined as a set of pitches, is an arrangement of musical scores according to certain rules. It is aimed at classifying melodies in a way that enables the player to correctly deal with them while playing an instrument.

A maqam consists of musical dimensions: full dimension, half a dimension, or three-quarters of a dimension or quarter tone.

In Western music, a clef (French for key), which is a symbol of the pitch of a particular line, is of three forms used in modern notation: F, C, and G.  Harmony, which plays a key role in Western musical composition, aims to create harmonious sentences that are played in synchrony with the original melody.

While rhythm and melody constitute the core of Arab music, the use of harmony has been on the rise since the early 20th century. Sayed Darwish (1892-1923) and Mohamed el-Qassabgi (1892-1966) launched a new approach based on simple harmony in the first half of the 20th century.