Arabian Maqam - Emotional Content

Emotional Content

It is sometimes said that each maqam evokes a specific emotion or set of emotions determined by the tone row and the nucleus, with different maqams sharing the same tone row but differing in nucleus and thus emotion. Maqam Rast is said to evoke pride, power, soundness of mind, and masculinity. Maqam Bayati: vitality, joy, and feminity. Sikah: love. Saba: sadness and pain. Hijaz: distant desert.

In an experiment where maqam Saba was played to an equal number of Arabs and non-Arabs who were asked to record their emotions in concentric circles with the weakest emotions in the outer circles, Arab subjects reported experiencing Saba as "sad", "tragic", and "lamenting," while only 48 percent of the non-Arabs described it thus with 28 percent of non-Arabs describing feelings such as "seriousness", "longing", and tension," and 6 percent experienced feelings such as "happy", "active", and "very lively" and 10 percent identified no feelings.

These emotions are said to be evoked in part through change in the size of an interval during a maqam presentation. Maqam Saba, for example, contains in its first four notes, D, E-quarter-flat, F, and Gb, two medium seconds one larger (160 cents) and one smaller (140 cents) than a three quarter tone, and a minor second (95 cents). Further, E-quarter-flat and G-flat may vary slightly, said to cause a "sad" or "sensitive" mood.

Generally speaking, each maqam is said to evoke a different emotion in the listener. At a more basic level, each jins is claimed to convey a different mood or color. For this reason maqams of the same family are said to share a common mood since they start with the same jins. There is no consensus on exactly what the mood of each maqam or jins is. Some references describe maqam moods using very vague and subjective terminology (e.g. maqams evoking 'love', 'femininity', 'pride' or 'distant desert'). However, there has not been any serious research using scientific methodology on a diverse sample of listeners (whether Arab or non-Arab) proving that they feel the same emotion when hearing the same maqam.

Attempting the same exercise in more recent tonal classical music would mean relating a mood to the major and minor modes. In that case there is some consensus that the minor scale is "sadder" and the major scale is "happier," but only for audiences pre-conditioned to this association. Attempting the same exercise in older modal classical music with Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian and Mixolydian modes might have produced similar results in audiences of those periods.