Kinetic and temporal aspects of Maqam performance

Through the comparative study of the four analytical models, a performer can gain a relatively comprehensive understanding of the structure. We may refer to it as an inner architectural blueprint of maqām. Such spatially centered language is often encountered in the discourse, even within the less analytical and more hermeneutical traditions of Middle Eastern musical thought. A particularly direct example can be found in Persian hermeneutical theories, where the structure of the dastgāh is compared in considerable detail to the layout of a bazaar (as documented in the 1991 volume The art of Persian music by During, Mirabdolbaghi, and Safvat). The visitor enters through a grand entrance (an introductory darāmad section establishing the modal identity), and is then presented with a multiplicity of possible paths, as the bazaar itself offers numerous alleys to explore and different exits through which to leave.

Alongside this spatial dimension, however, it is necessary to consider the processual/temporal dimension of performance. The progression of the sayr is often described as depending on implicit and intuitive processes that cannot be fully accounted for by a structural plan alone. 

In this article, we shall examine these dimensions through the Sufi concept of asar, in juxtaposition with Western analytical approaches to musical temporality and actoriality. Understanding of these factors is important for performance in general, but becomes particularly central in modal improvisation. Metaphorically speaking, if the previous article approached maqām from the perspective of the bazaar's architect, this one zooms in to that of the visitor: not only which paths are available to them, but what determines how long they might decide to stay in one alley, how fast/slow will they move to the next, or what they are doing inside at all (“are they planning to buy anything, or are they just wasting our time?”)

“Life” inside the melody

In Sufi thought, asar (Persian: اثر; from Arabic athar, literally “trace,” “imprint,”) refers to an inner power or energy imprinted into music and transmitted from its creator through the performer to the listener. The term belongs to a much older vocabulary of Islamic aesthetics, related to taʾthīr, the influence exerted by art upon the soul, already discussed by al-Kindī and al-Fārābī, as well as to a general notion of the connectivity of all beings and things across the visible and invisible worlds.

In his 1990 article L’autre oreille, drawing on the teachings of the masters of the Ahl-e Haqq order of Kurdistan, Jean During identifies several factors involved in the transmission of asar. As he explains, “The effect is first inherent to the musical form: a melody is a being that has its own life. The person who composed it (the saint, the prophet, or the inspired master) imprinted a particular life power into it, and this power is preserved as long as the melody is played.” The performer, as transmitter, serves as the channel through which the asar passes to the listener, or receiver. This transmission, however, can take place only when both occupy an adequate mental and spiritual state. In the words of the celebrated Azerbaijani singer Fərgana Qasimova: “Maqam is a sound for humanity in the universe. People who listen to it, get it, but it’s a matter of taking the time to sit, listen, and think. It demands looking inward. Everyone can find themselves in the music as long as they give themselves the opportunity”

The Ahl-e Haqq also viewed the instrument, tanbur, as a living participant in the samāʿ  (spiritual concert). The tambur was considered a sacred instrument and was said to be charged over years of use with the asar of the masters who played it.

A final factor is the participation of "invisible beings", as a Kurdish dervish of the Qādirī order explains in his interview with Jean During:

Each formula of dhikr possesses a master (sāheb), an overseer (movakel), that is to say, an entity, an angel who is attached to it in particular, similar to the invisible guardian of a holy place. It is through this overseer that the dhikr produces its specific force." When the cantor (khalife) plays and sings, he must establish a relation with the Divine Throne ('arsh). Then the angels listen to the tambourine (daf) and form in the invisible world a circle of dhikr, a jam', and more precisely a conical spiral whose center points upward, like a ziggurat. The angels dance and sing along the curves of this spiral and the musician must put himself in harmony with their music. It is then that the effect of the dhikr becomes extraordinary and that the spiritual forces permeate the entire place. It is therefore a matter of establishing a harmony between earth and heaven and of making the energies circulate between the two planes in order to benefit from the graces of the celestial world

To make better sense of such esoteric notions as the invisible beings and the life inside a melody, we can draw several parallels to the field of Western music theory called Existential Semiotics, introduced in the 1990s by a musicologist and semiotician Eero Tarasti. In the framework of existential semiotics, musical material (e.g. the melody) is given a subject-position, a capacity to act and be acted upon within a signifying process.

Tarasti builds his theory of the musical subject on the narrative semiotics of A. J. Greimas, in particular on the modalities that describe a subject's relation to action: vouloir - “wanting to”, but also: “not wanting to”, “wanting not to”, or “not wanting not to”;  devoir - “(not) having to” or “(not) being allowed to”; pouvoir - “(not) being able (not) to” and savoir - “(not) knowing (not) to” 

Tarasti organizes these relations in what he calls the “zemic model”, worked out most fully in his later volume Sein und Schein (2015). Two paths run through it: one, labeled M, moves outward from the subject toward the environment; the other, labeled S, moves inward towards the subject to mark the reciprocated influence between the subject and the external world. The model reworks the Hegelian distinction between being-in-itself (An-sich-sein) and being-for-itself (Für-sich-sein): between a mode of existence that has not yet become explicitly self-conscious and one that has acquired an awareness of itself and its own relation to the world. In a Kierkegaardian sense, this would be seen as the movement of a subject becoming a subject, an increasing shift from subjective toward objective self-observation. Sartre, in L'Être et le néant, reads it as an act of negation: being becomes aware of itself only by registering a lack in its own existence, and this lack, this néantisation, is what opens onto transcendence . Tarasti arrives at his own version of these categories by way of Jacques Fontanille's corporeal semiotics, which distinguishes between the Moi, associated with the flesh (chair) as the sensory-motor ground of experience, and the Soi, associated with the proper body (corps propre) as the locus of identity constructed through semiotic activity. The Moi provides the Soi with impulse and resistance against which it takes shape, while the Soi provides the Moi with the reflexivity through which it can maintain itself in the midst of change

Eero Tarasti’s zemic model (Sein und Schein, 2015)

A melody/subject, read through these modalities, moves from internal impulses toward external norms, limitations and societal practices. For instance, in the case of maqām tonality: vouloir is manifested through gravitating tones that want to resolve toward their tonal center; the external limitations are found in the finite pitch content of the master scale, as well as in formal structures and traditional conventions of sayr development.

Tarasti uses the Heideggerian term Dasein to designate the shared world in which subjects and objects exist (“Others as much as Me”). It encompasses the reality within which the subject acts and encounters what is outside itself. Beyond Dasein lies transcendence, which Tarasti defines as directly as the concept allows: “anything that is absent in actuality, but present in our minds”. A subject dwelling in Dasein, finding it deficient, negates it; this is the first transcendental act. A second act, affirmation, follows, in which the subject encounters what Tarasti calls the opposite pole of nothingness: a universe that takes on meaning independently of the subject's own act of signifying it. Here, Tarasti adds to the Greimassian framework a fifth modality: croire (believing), through which such transcendental possibilities can be apprehended. The traffic between Dasein and transcendence is handled, Tarasti notes, by what he calls metamodalities: signs moving back and forth across the boundary between the world a subject inhabits and whatever exceeds it. We could draw an apt parallel with the invisible beings of the Sufis, which can be understood as transcendental in a Tarastian sense and which also resonate with the idea of the spectral that gives this project its title. We shall explore this connection in more detail in future blog posts.

“Energy accumulation”

Existential semiotics borrows the concept of primordial kinetic energy (one of the “M1” manifestations within the zemic model) from the earlier speculative theoretical work of Ernst Kurth, a Swiss music theorist writing in the early twentieth century. A tone, for Kurth, is never simply itself: as a physical stimulus, it points beyond itself toward an underlying dynamic, a state of forces he called Kräftevorgang (“a process of forces”). The essence of melody therefore lies not simply in the succession of notes, but in the transitions between them. As Kurth puts it:

The experience of movement felt in a melody is not only a kind of subsidiary psychological phenomenon; rather, it leads us to the very origin of the melodic element. This element, which is felt as a force streaming through the tones, and the sensual intensity of the sound itself both refer to the basic powers in the musical formation, namely to the energies which we experience as psychic tensions…

…The energy of movement is a tensional phenomenon which precedes sounding. . . . The tones of a melodic line are surface levels of these streams of psychic energies which break forth. Therefore one must not only speak of feelings of forces between tones, but also over them. The sounding shape represents to a melody what a drop of water represents to the tensions of a mass of water.

In Kurth's framework, melodic continuity can therefore be understood as depending upon the persistence of this underlying kinetic tension - the melody will only last for as long as there is energy left. As the sayr of a maqām performance moves through different registers, we can draw a strong parallel to this principle of accumulating and releasing energy. The sayr ebbs and flows as it moves through building blocks in an attempt to reach the awj, the upper-register section that serves as the most emotionally expressive, climactic point in the performance. The decision of whether to remain in a register, move up, or move down, and above all when to approach the awj, is governed by something close to what Kurth describes: a tension accumulating beneath the audible surface, which the performer senses and times rather than simply calculates according to a formal rule.

It could be speculated that this capacity for accumulating and refueling such forms of energy is also tied, to some extent, to a performer's expressive power (or asar, if you will). For instance, Alim Qasimov, whose singing combines exceptional virtuosity with remarkable visceral intensity and control in the upper register, will often move to the awj multiple times within a single piece. Each ascent nevertheless feels justified, as though the energy had built up anew rather than having been exhausted by the first ascent.

Ecstasy and the perception of musical time

At this point, it may be worth returning to the question of optimal mental states of the performer and listener (which we previously glossed over as factors in the transmission of asar) and examine them more closely through a set of parallel concepts found in the more secular and urban tradition of ṭarab, as documented by A. J. Racy in his 1991 article “Creativity and Ambience: An Ecstatic Feedback Model from Arab Music”

Although widespread across many countries of the Arab world, the city of Aleppo is widely regarded as the heartland of ṭarab, having produced some of the genre’s most legendary voices. Here is how the celebrated Aleppine singer Sabah Fakhri described his relationship with the audience when interviewed by Racy in California in 1990: 

As a matter of fact, I feel delighted when I see the people understanding me and judiciously following what I am performing (bīḥāsbūnī). Indeed, I prefer an audience that is fully able to fathom my music, one that is learned and artistically enlightened. First and foremost, a listener has to love music because the more he loves it, if he is also able to understand the words and the tunes, the more his presence delights me. Such a listener knows the value of the music, as the jeweler can tell diamond from glass. Of course I sense people's reactions from their movements and by observing their inner emotional tribulations (infiʿāl) and their responses (tajāwub) to what I am singing. In order for me to perform best, first I have to be sure that I am physically in good condition and that I am accompanied by good musicians as well as equipped with an appropriate sound system, one that I have tried out and adjusted in advance. Beyond that it is the audience that plays the most significant role in bringing the performance to a higher plateau of creativity (ibdāʿ). ... I like the light in the performance hall to remain on so that I can see the listeners and interact with them. If they respond I become inspired to give more. As such we become reflections of one another. I consider the audience to be me and myself to be the audience. Of course, the performer has also to be in a state of ecstasy (maṭrūb) in order to perform in the most inspired fashion. Obviously, in order to deliver something you must have it yourself first and then reflect it, as the moon shines by reflecting the light it receives from the sun. In a large measure, this state emanates from the audience, particularly the sammīʿa (talented and sensitive listeners), although the singer must also be endowed with rūḥ [the ability to be emotionally expressive, literally, "soul"] and iḥsās (feeling), in addition to being in a state of elation and ecstasy (basṭ and tajallī) at the time of performing. Indeed, elation causes the talented artist to shine. 

Particularly notable here is the concept of sammīʿa. The basic idea behind it is perhaps not foreign to any musical genre, but in Arabic practice it is differentiated and defined in a particularly detailed manner. Derived from the same root as samāʿ, the Sufi spiritual concert, sammīʿa refers to initiated listeners who understand the rules of the music and are able to focus on and follow its development more closely than a casual listener or passer-by. Their role is not merely receptive: as we can clearly read from Fakhri’s account, sammīʿa are understood as active participants in the creative process of ṭarab, whose responses can directly influence the performer. This conception of attentive listening belongs to the broader tradition of ādāb, or codes of appropriate conduct, surrounding musical listening, extending from the rules governing Sufi samāʿ and wajd.

A. J. Racy traces these ideas through the performance practice of ṭarab, focusing in particular on the concept of salṭana, a term derived from the verb tasallana (تَسَلَّنَ), “to dominate” or “to reign over”. He describes salṭana as a kind of “modal ecstasy”: an ecstatic state that develops before and during the performance, and identifies several factors that have historically been understood to contribute to its emergence. These range from now largely obsolete Pythagorean doctrines linking musical ethos to the particular configuration of celestial bodies, including the prescription of specific modes for specific times of day in medieval maqām treatises, to practices that remain relevant today. Among the latter are the performer’s own mental attunement, often achieved by warming up through playing in the mode of the performance; the attunement of the audience, facilitated by a solo taqsīm that introduces the basic modal identity; and, finally, the dynamic exchange between the maṭrūb, the ecstatically transformed performer, and the sammīʿa, the correspondingly transformed audience, resulting in what Racy calls an ecstatic feedback loop:

A. J. Racy’s ecstatic feedback model of ṭarab performance (1991)

Salṭana can also be understood more generally as a form of flow state, in which the performer operates at a high level of concentration and efficiency. The ecstasy should therefore not exclusively imply a usual association with wild, frenzied outburst of primal energy. It could emerge in calm, meditative, introspective performance situations just as much as in more overtly expressive ones. Despite the surface differences in volume and extent of bodily movements, the underlying principle remains.

Similar relationships can also unfold in the concerts of free, or non-idiomatic, improvisation styles, which likewise range between both extremes of calm introspection and explosive intensity. Christopher Small proposed that rather than speaking of music as an abstract art form, we should speak of “musicking”: a social activity in which humans partake, together, regardless of their particular roles as performers or listeners. 

We could also view this feedback loop even more simply as a shared control of musical time.

In Sufi conceptions of asar, transmitted from the creator through the performer to the listener, the “creation,” or source of the transmission, is understood as originating from a higher power, even when we are speaking of a composed piece of music that has been written down. Yet the nature of this initial impulse need not be tied so explicitly to a divine source. As with many concepts in Sufi philosophy, this can be open to different interpretations, and may equally be understood as encompassing the human intellect and the emergence of the idea that the composer receives before giving it musical form.

In his 1987 essay “Tempus ex Machina: A Composer's Reflections on Musical Time,” French spectralist composer Gérard Grisey proposes a division of musical time into three “zones”: the skeleton of time, the flesh of time, and the skin of time. The skeleton refers to the underlying structure of pulses and durations (durée, in the Bergsonian sense), which Grisey places along a descending scale of predictability, from periodic through complex and aperiodic time to smooth time, in which there are no pulsations at all. The flesh of time envelops the skeleton and concerns the relative perception of durées in relation to their surrounding sounds: the perceived “holes in time” following an unpredictable sound event, or the “expansion of time” that follows a period of prolonged predictability. A composer may attempt to influence these through precise chronometric markings, but ultimately this effect is rather elusive and depends primarily upon the performer's intuition. The skin of time lies entirely beyond the composer's direct control, in the moment of performance itself. As Grisey puts it: “it is in fact the listener who selects, who creates the changing angle of perception which will endlessly remodel, perfect, sometimes destroy musical form as the composer dreamed it. In turn, the listener’s sense of time is in correlation with the multiple times of his native language, social group, culture and civilization.”

It would probably be misleading to view the skeleton, flesh, and skin as three clearly demarcated realms belonging respectively to the composer, performer, and listener. They refer more closely to transitional zones: “before the composition,” “between composition and performance,” and “between performance and listening.” This emphasis on thresholds is particularly significant in Grisey's broader aesthetic outlook. He famously rejected the term “spectral music,” which had been introduced by his fellow composer Hugues Dufourt, and advocated instead for the term “liminal music,” underscoring the importance he placed on thresholds and transitional states. The implications of this temporal model extend beyond the organization and perception of musical form. For Grisey, the transformation of our experience of musical time can itself become an ecstatic experience:

These transfigured moments of time fulfill us to the point of ecstasy since they are, at a given moment, exactly the fulfillment that our “emptiness” requires, or the vertiginous vacuum to which our body, saturated with physiological rhythms, would aspire. These shocks, these impacts, because of the affect they provoke, will illuminate certain sound events and render them “unforgettable” in their own right. We will then have regained entropy a little, and in our own way.

Sources:

During, Jean. 1990. “L’autre oreille: Le pouvoir mystique de la musique au Moyen-Orient.” Cahiers de musiques traditionnelles, no. 3: 57–78.

During, Jean, Zia Mirabdolbaghi, and Dariush Safvat. 1991. The Art of Persian Music. Washington, D.C.: Mage Publishers.

Fontanille, Jacques. 2004. Soma et séma. Figures du corps. Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose.

Greimas, Algirdas Julien. 1987. “Toward a Theory of Modalities.” In On Meaning: Selected Writings in Semiotic Theory, translated by Paul J. Perron and Frank H. Collins, 121–39. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Grisey, Gérard. 1987. “Tempus ex Machina: A Composer’s Reflections on Musical Time.” Contemporary Music Review 2 (1): 239–75.

Kurth, Ernst. 1922. Grundlagen des linearen Kontrapunktes. Berlin: Max Hesse.

Racy, Ali Jihad. 1991. “Creativity and Ambience: An Ecstatic Feedback Model from Arab Music.” The World of Music 33 (3): 7–28.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1943. L’Être et le néant: Essai d’ontologie phénoménologique. Paris: Gallimard.

Small, Christopher. 1998. Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.

Tarasti, Eero. 1994. A Theory of Musical Semiotics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

———. 2015. Sein und Schein: Explorations in Existential Semiotics. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.

Qasimova, Fərgana. 2025. Interview. Talk to Al Jazeera. YouTube. “Alim Qasimov: The Voice of Mugham Tradition.” YouTube video