youtube.com/watch?v=px9alEwBo48
Posted on 03/02/2015 10:33:28 AM PST by CharlesOConnell
Why bother to listen to this music?
How can we come to understand these people in war, if we don't listen to them in peace?
They're on the other side of a divide from us—very high illiteracy rate, if a person who can't read sees a scrap of printed matter from a newpaper on the ground, they will pick it up in case it might be the Holy Quran.
Music has the ability to transcend this divide.
It's great music, one of its influences is Roman culture—this instrument, the Qunan, the name comes from Greek, "Canon", a ruler or tuning measuring rod. They have influenced us in return, in Spanish, Italian & Greek music. It's very easy to listen to, some of what they do is the best in the world.
youtube.com/watch?v=px9alEwBo48
Hi Bunny,
I didn’t see you here.
Hope things are well with you.
Why would you think this?
There are countless massively popular Arabic pop stars whose music gets airplay on radio stations and video channels throughout the region.
Off the top of my head, Lebanon's Nancy Ajram is pretty good.
” Sam the Sham and the Pharoahs!”
Wooly Bully......kinda reminds me of an Imam.
Blew Saudis minds when they would listen to the radio on the national station ( oddly enough named MBC with a similar looking logo to NBC ) and I would “translate” the song. I would tell them that’s it’s an Arabic country song about how a man’s goat left him, his Nissan pickup broke down, and he’s crying in his tea.
Sounds like that Ravi Shankar they tried to peddle us back in the 60s and I didn’t like that either.
Thanks for the vid. The guy is good.
scrap of printed matter from a newpaper on the ground, they will pick it up
If that were true Iraq would not be a filthy as it is.
I tried to listen to Arabic music when I was in Iraq. The constant talking in the middle of songs was too annoying.
I was vacationing in Thailand once and a group of us were having dinner at a restaurant on the river.
A lot of tour boats went by with music and singing and dancing and looked like great fun
Then a boat went by with this screeching devil music, and on board you could see all the women sitting in the back dressed in black burka’s, and all the men line-dancing and swinging swords through the air...
EVERYONE in the place got real quiet and stared at it- it was like you were looking at a vision of escaped demons from hell..
It was about 10 minutes before the quiet murmuring stopped and the pleasant restaurant chatter resumed.
The instrument looks like a zither.
The music is not to my liking.
where’s her burka?
>>The hands of the Chinese, the mouths of the arabs, the minds of the French.<<
SO stolen as a tagline!!
Three quick observations.
First, this would be considered old-fashioned by most of the Arab world, the same way pre-rock-n-roll popular music, much less pre-rock-n-roll classical music, is considered old-fashioned by most of the Western world.
Second, Arab music is based on a musical scale (IIRC it’s called the double harmonic) which is more subtle than the 12-tone-equally-tempered scale used in the West since the mid 1700s. This is not simply because the Arab scale represents frequency ratios more similar to those found in nature, but also because there are ratios that are neglected in the major/minor distinction in the West. A significant example of this is what we call the ‘blues third,’ which at 11/9 is about halfway in ratio width between the Ptolemaic major (5/4) and minor (6/5), and provokes an emotion that is about halfway between happy (major) and sad (minor). Getting used to listening to the Arab-scale-based music is like spending your whole life eating nothing but Midwestern food, and then discovering kebab, kibbeh, and curry, but the aural expansion is well worth it.
Third, one of the problems of contemporary popular music is that everything that can be done in 12-tone-equal-temperament has been done, so that there is no such thing as a “new sound” available. This leads to only one of three options: live in the past musically (old people do this, and I say this as an old person), stop worrying about melody or harmony (most of the drivel that passes for music today does this), or...expanding the melodic universe to include the notes that aren’t on a piano or fretted guitar. That is what I predict will happen in the next generation, an amalgam of Arab-Asian-African-Euro/American sound. The foundation for it has already been laid, beginning with the rise of worldbeat/ethno-pop in the 1980s. All it would take would be a Lady Gaga to begin to promote it, and for all her clown-act style she has the musical background to do it—Paul Simon tried, but he is perceived as too esoteric for the masses to accept.
Muslim music reminds me of sentences without periods, streams of thought that aren’t phrased in, like poetry that never begins nor ends, and then I go find something good to listen to, or read.
Does “Walk Like An Egyptian” by The Bangles count?
I recall dining at a Lebanese restaurant up in Boston in the mid-90s... and it was AMAZING.
The harmonic minor scale has a flat third, and a flat sixth, but also a raised seventh, causing a jump of three semitones between the sixth and seventh notes of the scale. This augmented interval is traditionally recognized by most American listeners as “ middle eastern.”
Arabic music? It makes my ears bleed.
And then its still better with the volume turned off.
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