Classical music of the Islamic world from the viewpoint of the relation between the part and the whole

Abstract

The analysis of the behaviour of the basic structure of musical composition (makam) undertaken by the author has revealed two types of musical thinking in classical Islamic culture. The first of these can be adequately described in terms of the aristotelian paradigm of the relation between the part and the whole. The other one necessitates the introduction of the notion of “processional dependent” as formulated in the logico-semantic theory (A.V. Smirnov). The genre specimens of Islamic classical music representing the latter are based on the progressive expansion of the scale of applicability of the principle asl–fahr (“the root–the bough”) which gets implemented in the smallest entity of musical discourse, the jumu'ah syntagma, as well as on the level of the musical composition as a whole (dastgah, mugham-dastgah, maqam al-iraqi).