The singer whose records were in every house
Rima tells the story of a singer whose monthly radio concerts stopped traffic across the Arab world, with a Cairo musician explaining how her ensemble worked and why the songs ran an hour.
What a maqam is, and why it feels like a mood
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Show notes
Three maqams on the oud
The first episode answers the question Rima gets asked most: what is a maqam. She plays three on the oud, explains the quarter tone without any theory you need to have studied, and shows how singers move between them.
- A maqam is not a scale: what it is instead
- Three maqams played on the oud, with the mood of each
- The quarter tone, explained with a single string
- How a singer modulates and why the audience reacts
- Archival recording: one song, two maqams
A listening list of five recordings is in the notes.
Transcript
Hello and welcome to Maqam Memory, I am Rima Haddad, and this is the heritage of Arabic music, explained in English for everyone who grew up hearing it and was never told what it was. Today we start with the question I am asked most often: what is a maqam. I am going to tell you it is not a scale, and then I am going to pick up the oud and play you three of them, so you can feel how each one carries its own mood before I explain a single thing. We will talk about the quarter tone, which is the note that makes this music sound the way it does, and I will show it to you on one string. Then an old recording where a singer changes maqam mid-song and the audience loses its mind. You are listening on Witspeak Podcasts.
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