22 Facts About Arabic music

Arabic music has a long history of interaction with many other regional musical styles and genres.

For many centuries, the Arabs of Hejaz recognized that the best real Arabian Arabic music came from Yemen, and Hadhrami minstrels were considered to be superior.

Arabic music joined several others like al-Farabi in proposing the addition of a makeshift fifth string to the oud.

Arabic music published several tracts on musical theory, including the cosmological connotations of music.

Al-Farabi wrote a notable book on Islamic Arabic music titled Kitab al-Musiqa al-Kabir (The Great Book of Music).

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Arabic music composed for the most famous singers of that era in Iraq and in the Arab world, such as Salima Murad, Afifa Iskandar, Nazem al-Ghazali, Umm Kulthum, Mohammed Abdel Wahab.

One of the main reasons for the predominance of Jewish instrumentalists in early 20th century Iraqi Arabic music was a prominent school for blind Jewish children in Baghdad, which was founded in the late 1920s by the great qanunji Joseph Hawthorne (Yusef Za'arur) (Hebrew: ????? ???????-???? ??????).

Music in Iraq began to take a more Western tone during the 1960s and 1970s, notably by Ilham Madfai, with his Western guitar stylings with traditional Iraqi Arabic music which made him a popular performer in his native country and throughout the Middle East.

Arabic music rabab, known as the spiked fiddle, is the earliest known bowed string instrument and the ancestor of all European bowed instruments, including the rebec, the Byzantine lyra, and the violin.

Evariste Levi-Provencal and other scholars stated that three lines of a poem by William IX of Aquitaine were in some form of Arabic music, indicating a potential Andalusian origin for his works.

Rather, the discussion is more focused on the idea that the Arabic music world is not monolithic in its view on improvisation in music.

Taqasim Arabic music uses a maqam and improvises the form or structure of the song, which creates a cathartic experience for the listener.

Listeners have been known to laugh, cry, and shout, all from different parts of the same performance due to the improvisation Arabic music aligning exactly to draw extreme emotion from someone.

Franco-Arabic music is a popular form of West-meets-East style of music, similar in many respects to modern Arabic Pop.

Arabic music Jazz has met many new kinds of composition since the end of the 20th century:.

Rock Arabic music is popular all around the world, the Arab world being no exception.

Arabic music rock has been gaining a lot of attention lately in the Middle East with bands like JadaL, Kayan, Autostrad, El Morabba3 and Akher Zapheer of Jordan, The Wanton Bishops, Mashrou' Leila, Adonis and Meen of Lebanon, Cairokee, Massar Egbari, Sahara, Wyvern and Cartoon Killerz of Egypt, Khalas, and Chaos of Palestine and Acrassicauda of Iraq.

World of modern Arabic music has long been dominated by musical trends that have emerged from Cairo, Egypt.

Much of Arabic music is characterized by an emphasis on melody and rhythm, as opposed to harmony.

Unlike the tradition of Western music, Arabic music contains microtones, which are notes that lie between notes in the Western chromatic scale.

In 1932, the first Congress of Arab Music was held in Cairo, where scholarship about the past, present and future of Arabic music was presented both from Western as well as Arab experts.

Research on Arabic music is a focus of departments of ethnomusicology at universities worldwide, and the global interest in World music has led to a growing number of studies and re-issues of historic recordings by independent researchers or private companies.