The Iraqi maqam

In Iraq the word maqam names not only a mode but a whole sung composition: a sequence of set parts, in classical Arabic or in the dialect of Baghdad, led by a singer called the qari, the reader, with the small Baghdadi ensemble, the chalghi. This page gathers what our sources say about it.

The Iraqi maqamat on the map of the modes →

A composition, not only a mode

Elsewhere in the Arab world and in Turkey the word maqam means the mode on which pieces and improvisations rest. In Iraq it means the composition itself, something like the Arabic wasla or the Turkish fasıl. The Baghdadi maqam holds about a hundred melodies, each read in his own way by each qari.¹

Its singer is called the qari, the reader, like the reciter of the Qurʾan, and not mutrib or mughanni, singer: the maqam was felt to be a spiritual reading more than a song. Its melodies are heard in the call to prayer and in Qurʾan recitation, and Bernard Moussali finds no clear line in it between the sacred and the profane: it runs through the religious music of Iraq’s Muslims, Jews and Christians alike.^1,2

Some maqamat are sung to classical Arabic poetry, Rast and Mansuri among them; others to folk verse and the Baghdadi mawwal, such as Hadidi and Hilelawi. Hammoudi al-Wardi counted 41 of the first kind and 25 of the second. The poems are often classical, by al-Mutanabbi or Abu Nuwas, and the maqam has also been sung in Persian, Turkish, Armenian, Hebrew, Turkmen and Aramaic.^1,3,4

Abbasid or Ottoman

Its origins are not known. Some trace it to the Abbasid caliphate, ruled from Baghdad; others hold that it came to Iraq with Ottoman culture in the sixteenth century. Hashim al-Rajab, in his book of 1961, argued that the maqam as it grew in the twentieth century does not descend from the Abbasids but from the sixteenth century, made and ordered by Iraqi singers and musicians and handed down from generation to generation.^1,4

In Ottoman Iraq it was the public’s one beloved song, beside a few purely Iraqi songs such as the ataba. It was sung in houses and cafés, where singers challenged one another, in Sufi dhikr gatherings, at mawlids and weddings; a performance could last nine hours. Its maqamat come from many places, Turkish, Persian, Indian, Arab and Kurdish, and many were once sung in Persian and Turkish to please governors who knew no Arabic: words of those languages still stay in them.¹

Its home is Baghdad and Mosul, and the two differ in their tahrirs, their miyanas and the order of their pieces: in Mosul the qari, after the tahrir, takes whatever piece he likes, while in Baghdad he keeps the order known among readers. In the north, among the Kurds, maqamat carry the names of Baghdad’s but differ in their making.¹

From tahrir to taslim

A full maqam is built of five elements. The tahrir opens it, often on words outside the poem, such as «aman, aman» or «waylah, waylah», and sets out the spirit of the maqam whole. The qitaʿ and awsal, pieces of set shape, turn to other scales and genera and always come back. The jalsa descends to the low notes along a set path, and announces the miyana, a high cry of set shape that must follow it. The taslim closes the maqam, again on words outside the poem.¹

Each maqam has its own syllables for the tahrir: «lilay, lilay» in Sigah, «yar, yar» in Rast, «aman, aman» in Nawa, Humayun and Dashti. And each must be sung at its own pitch: raise Sigah, Hashim al-Rajab writes, and you have a new maqam, Awj. Two maqamat of one modal structure may carry different names when their rhythm or their verse differs: unlike the Turkish makam, told apart by its structure alone, the Iraqi maqam may also have a rhythm of its own.³

The Sigah maqam, as the joza master Shaʿubi Ibrahim set it out in 1972, runs: tahrir in Sigah, Mansuri, a miyana in Balaban, Hakimi, Mukhalaf Kirkuk, Sufyan, Tiflis, Jammal, and the taslim back in Sigah.³

Five suites

The maqamat were sung in fusul, suites, five of them, each a known set of maqamat sung one after another and named for the first: Bayat, Husayni, Hijaz, Rast and Nawa. Between one maqam and the next the ensemble sang a pasta, a short song in fixed rhythm, so the qari could rest; between suites all rested. The musicologist Abdul Wahhab Bilal tells of a sixth, a Sigah suite.^1,4,5

That is the cycle as performed and written down in the nineteenth century; many of its maqamat were later replaced, and in recent decades few singers kept the five suites, choosing instead the maqamat they could sing. The pasta, Gen’ichi Tsuge notes, takes its name from the Turkish beste, itself a Persian word; at its end an inspired audience may join in the singing.^3,5

Seven principal maqamat

For practical purposes the Iraqi maqam counts seven principal modes, after Hammoudi al-Wardi; the others, some sixty maqamat and eighty qitaʿ, are held to derive from them, though many use modes found in the music of the region around.^3,5

The seven, after Hammoudi al-Wardi (1964): Rast راستBayat بياتSigah سيكاهHijaz Diwan حجاز ديوانSaba صباAjam Ushayran عجم عشيرانHusayni حسيني

The counts differ: Hashim al-Rajab puts Chahargah in place of Ajam Ushayran and counts some ninety subsidiary modes. Jalal al-Hanafi found that the leading singers of early twentieth-century Baghdad agreed there were only twelve maqamat and twenty-four derivatives; but when he asked them which the twelve were, they gave him different answers. Some maqamat survive only in name, among them Nahuft al-Arab, Zamzami, Abu Ata, Shushtari and Zirafkand.^3,5

With and without rhythm

Some maqamat are sung without a rhythm, such as Bayat and Husayni; others with one, such as Ibrahimi and Nawa. Each rhythm keeps to its maqamat: the yugrug goes with Jabburi; the wahda with Sharqi and Urfa; the jurjina with Hilelawi, Bajilan and Rashidi; the samah with Mansuri, Nawa and Sigah only; and the waltz with Rast only, before its third miyana.¹

UNESCO, entering the Iraqi maqam on its list of the intangible heritage of humanity in 2008, wrote that it has kept, largely intact, its ornate vocal technique and its improvisational character. The Arabic Wikipedia says the opposite of the second: there is no free improvisation in it, and its parts keep set shapes.^1,4

The chalghi

The qari is accompanied by the chalghi al-baghdadi: the santur, a struck zither; the joza, a four-stringed fiddle with a coconut-shell body; the dunbuk, a goblet drum; the riqq or daff zinjari, a frame drum with cymbals; and once the naqqara drums, dropped after the middle of the twentieth century. The word chalghi is Turkish, from «çalgı takımı», a band of instruments. The ʿud, the qanun, the nay and the violin are sometimes added, but as later guests, not part of it.^1,3,6

The ensemble opens with a short prelude, the muqaddama al-dulabi; the qari then sings the tahrir in free rhythm, to set the mode and the mood and to warm his voice, and the melodic instruments answer him in phrases called muhasiba.³

Voices and records

The first records kept the voices of readers born in the second half of the nineteenth century, such as Jamil al-Baghdadi, Rashid al-Qundarchi and Najm al-Shaykhli; records of Ahmad al-Zaydan and al-Mulla Othman al-Mousli are too old to make out. In 1925 Muhammad al-Qubbanchi began to record, and founded a new way of singing the maqam that ruled the taste of his time and of those who came after.¹

At the Cairo Congress of Arab Music in 1932, al-Qubbanchi and six instrumentalists brought the Iraqi maqam, until then unknown outside its country, to the world; their performances were recorded on 78 rpm discs, played on Iraqi radio in the 1950s and reissued by the National Library of France in 2014. After them came Hassan Khaiwka, Yousuf Omar, Nazem al-Ghazali, Zuhur Husayn, Maida Nazhat and many others.^1,3,4

Beside the Persian avaz

Gen’ichi Tsuge, who heard the maqam in Baghdad in 1972, found it closest to the Persian avaz, the Azerbaijani mugham and the Turkish gazel. Many of its names are those of Persian gushehs and Turkish makams; some are found only in Iraq and Iran: Mukhalaf (the Persian Mokhalef), Mansuri, Dashti, Awshar (Afshari), Bakhtiyari and Mathnawi.³

The parts correspond almost exactly: the tahrir to the Persian darāmad, the miyana to the owj, the taslim to the forud, and the closing pasta to the tasnif. Tsuge sets the Sigah maqam beside the gushehs of the dastgahs Segah and Chahargah: Mansuri and Mukhalaf are in both.³