The Repertoire of Iraqi Maqam (review)

Robert Simms's 2004 The Repertoire of Iraqi Maqam offers an unprecedented introduction to the complexities of the system of melodic modes that underlies the Baghdad-based urban art music tradition of the mid-twentieth century. The volume is divided into two parts, a 45-page introductory section, and an anthology that presents almost 100 pages of transcriptions of recorded maqam performances.

Iraqi maqam refers to a music tradition based in the urban centers of Baghdad, Kirkuk, and Mosul. With each center having its own unique manifestations of the tradition, Simms focuses on the Baghdad school. Historically, performances were based in cafes or in aristocratic homes, featuring a singer (qari', literally, "reciter") and a tchalghi ensemble of santur (hammered dulcimer), joze (spiked fiddle) and percussion, with the instrumentalists serving as chorus members within the songs that conclude each performance item.

Less known than the music traditions of surrounding Arab, Persian, and Turkish cultures, Iraqi maqam received its first widespread exposure in the West through the solo `ud performances of Munir Bashir (1930–1997) (1). The tradition, however, is primarily a vocal one—the solo `ud genre being of rather recent origin—and it is the vocal art that is Simms's focus.

Simms came upon the present project with his primary perspective being that of a musician (including performance on the setar, ney, and kora [197]). "Originally designed for my own use as a means of exploring my private collection of maqam recordings," Simms's main concern is elucidating the various components that distinguish each of the Iraqi melodic modes.

Simms divides the volume's introductory section into two parts, beginning first with a presentation of a basic maqam theory that is shared by "many West Asian . . . traditions" (10), and then moving to a detailed discussion of "Iraqi maqam in particular." The first section includes an introduction to maqam scales and tetrachordal analysis. These concepts represent a system of "modal abstraction, which was grafted onto the [Iraqi maqam] tradition in the 1950s by [Iraqi] theorists familiar with Mashreqi modal theory" (2). Significantly, the Mashreqi (Mashriqi) world, based in Cairo, Beirut, Aleppo, and Damascus, had itself only begun to adopt this very orientation in the early 20th century, with tetrachordal theory appearing from c. 1930 (not "beginning in the late-nineteenth century" as Simms indicates [12]). Simms notes that most traditional performers of Iraqi maqam were not familiar with this type of modal theory (2).

Simms's section on basic maqam theory is guided, in good measure, by a sense that musicians and scholars in the West are more familiar with neighboring modal traditions (eastern Arab [Mashriqi] maqam, Turkish makam, and Persian dastgah) than with Iraqi maqam. Indeed, I found comparative comments throughout the volume to be a great help, although specialists of each of the neighboring traditions might want to fine-tune a few overarching statements (about intonation, for example).

The second part of the book's opening section, focusing on aspects of "Iraqi maqam in particular," provides an invaluable introduction to the melodic modes and formal structures that shape Iraqi maqam performance. We are taught about the initial tahrir section of a performance, akin to the Persian daramad section; jalsa and teslim passages, that is, internal and final cadential passages akin to the Persian forud or the Arab qafla; and the occurrence of one or more meyana sections that explore a mode's upper register, analogous to the Turkish meyan. Simms next devotes extensive discussion to the qit`a sections of Iraqi maqam performance, providing an innovative and insightful threefold classification of these submodal entities. Akin to the Persian concept of gusheh, qit`as commonly appear in performance in preestablished sequences unique to each maqam.

In this section, Simms also presents an invaluable discussion about the number of maqams in the Baghdad repertoire ("around fifty but some estimates exceed sixty" [30]), highlighting a dynamic world in which some modes have been newly created or deliberately imported from neighboring traditions, while others have fallen into obscurity. Common tradition...