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.