Sami Abu Shmais has uploaded a full lecture on politics and the maqam, in which he talks about how decolonizing music means decolonizing himself – reconnecting to his roots as a Palestinian-American. This is an essential backdrop to Sami's work, including the Arabic Tuning section of Ableton Live 12's Tuning implementation and the free companion site.
Here's the full video (which is emotional for me as I discovered it over 20 years ago, and it's good to see where this journey has led).
this is do not have Theory video. There's a reason he gets people on their feet singing and laughing.Maqam “It comes from the body. It's a physical skill, like dancing or cooking.”
If you use the Ableton Tuning Site to practice, this video is a must-watch. It's easy to practice in your spare time. It reinforces the idea that you should get up and sing in the studio too. Move around. Feel something. (And that's even more important if you're working with a screen.)
Check out Ableton's Tuning site, which also includes interactive lessons and can be used with any software, not just Ableton Live (though some extra features are available in Live 12).
https://tuning.ableton.com/
Where politics come into play is in standardization and normalization. This connects directly to both issues of pan-Arab nationalism and the continuing legacies of colonial rule, particularly by Turkish/Ottoman, British, and French. (Now, add to that list the United States, Sámi’s and Peter’s home country.) Just as so-called “Western” approaches to tuning in can be simplified and normalized, Maqam There is an essential confusion and loss of its local, emotional and personal meaning.
Sami doesn't talk much about software and hardware, but this is doubly true with technology: shortcuts and practicality can erase some of those rough edges (you can think of theory itself as a kind of technological development), and technology can also be used to add that roughness back in.
Equally important, but one that has been largely erased from the teaching of musicology and music theory, is that much of the European understanding of music-mathematics comes from knowledge inherited from the Arab world. The myth of European superiority has really undermined that connection and distorted our understanding of both mathematics and music. But for the same reasons, exchanges between South Asia, Southwest Asia, the Arab world, Europe, and other regions continue to exist.
Anyway, the historical story is beautifully told in this video, but pay attention to this statement:
Why do painters and fashion designers prefer the purest version of every color, rather than complex mixtures? Surely each artist has their own unique color choices from an infinite number of possibilities?
It's not purely about mathematics, it's about mood, emotion, body. It's not universal. All of that is beautiful.
By the way, I don't think you have to abandon your musical background, this will not only open the door to new systems but also help you reexamine what you have been doing so far. think You already know it. This includes 12-tone equal temperament (which has its own historical background dating back to early Chinese theory). There are post-tonal ways of dealing with these scale degrees and ways of expressing shifts between them. In sound design, we add dissonances (acoustic and harmonic) all the time. Real-world pianos are never “true” 12-tone equal temperament. There are various tuning systems (Kirnberger!), stretch tunings, ways instruments can go in and out of tune depending on their environment, and it's the instrument we think of as most fixed.
But we can also free ourselves from the colonial burden and normative nature of those institutions, and we should never think of Western European or generally “white” institutions as primal. Such thinking is not a victimless crime.
There's a lot to think about, and I honestly don't want to interrupt you while you focus on dancing and singing. But I just want to point out one more thing to think about how we live. (Maybe it's something to think about.) rear Moving around and singing, Maqam It's in our bodies.
Going back to Sami's video, so much of the violence we're witnessing right now, both in the news and in the environment, is connected. It puts an extra responsibility on all of us, but especially in music and music technology. It asks us to change some basic assumptions and forget some of the things that are around us. Sami puts this more candidly than anyone else:
This video is from the Tanfis project. Check out the results of not only the Palestinian-focused portion of the project, but also many other regions (this is where the musical rabbit hole begins):
https://www.remix-culture.org/Palestine
All digital music technology is computer-based, which means it's military-industrially derived, but there's still time to move that technology away from catastrophe.
We face a world of systematic violence that requires much unlearning. The good news is that we don't have to sit back and be quiet.
Thank you, Sami. I will continue to practice, study, and sing.