What is offered here is a vocabulary, albeit partial, of the Egyptian and Syrian melodic tradition known as Maqam. No scale system exists without a context. There is no set of mathematical laws that determines the ideal scales for music, in fact no ideal scales--contrary to what the ancient Greeks believed, and contrary to what some people still believe to this day. Scales are the product of individual choices--even when those choices are motivated by mathematical acoustic relationships (as when fourths and fifths are made "just" or "pure," resonating at the harmonic frequency ratios of 4/3 and 3/2 respectively, in many scales all over the world, as they used to be in Western music until about the 15th century). And scales do not exist outside the context of the melodies that use them. That accumulated body of melody around specific scale patterns is what we might call "maqam" or "jins," and that is part of what this website demonstrates.
Demonstrates, without detailing: This website does not go in great detail into what composes each jins (the interval relationships among its notes, and the melodic vocabulary specific to it)--instead presenting each jins as a closed box:
and focusing instead on the higher-order relationships among ajnas that make up the structure of the Maqam System. So more than simply the melodic vocabulary itself, this website offers a classification system for that vocabulary; in other words it provides the structure for a lexicon of maqam melodies. That structure is outlined step by step, starting from the identities of the building blocks (known as "jins," plural: "ajnas"), to some principles guiding parsing (the section on "Jins Baggage"), to common, alternate, and unique pathways among those ajnas. This is a vocabulary of motions among ajnas--some between only two ajnas, some motions between three or more ajnas,
and, building upon those, the sequences of motions that make up a whole maqam--all of these are the types of vocabulary that are given a classification schema here.
What is vocabulary, simply put? Vocabulary is something you remember--or have to remember--to be able to use a system. If you can't remember a piece of vocabulary, you have to find it (look it up, ask someone, find it in your own memory), and if you haven't learned the vocabulary yet, you have no idea what it will be--in other words, you cannot derive vocabulary items from first principles (i.e. a knowledge of the phonemes of a language doesn't predict the word vocabulary of that language, just as the interval relationships between notes in a scale doesn't predict the melodies that will use that scale), but you must learn and remember each item on its own. Systems like language, dancing, driving a car, running a business, and music are among those that require a vocabulary to access, use, and excel at. The size of the vocabulary is a fair determinant of how long it takes to master a given system, and systems as rich and complex as language take around 10 years to master. Music systems have a similarly rich vocabulary, built upon multiple levels (from note relationships, to melodic fragments, to melodies, to ajnas, and all the way up to maqamat).
This website is very incomplete as a lexicon, but fairly complete as an analysis. Of the 30 or so maqamat in practice in the music in question (20th century Egyptian and Syrian music), only about 13 are covered in any form on this site, and only about 3 or 4 of them are in any sense complete, in having nearly all of their available jins modulations represented on this site (those being Rast, Bayati, Zanjaran, and Hijazkar). But the representations here are a guide as to how we can understand and represent the other maqamat: as a vocabulary network build up from pathways among ajnas, with a finite number of well-known pathways shaping the overwhelming majority of Arabic melodies. A network with the possibility of developing new pathways, and forgetting old pathways over time along with the changes in the communities that practice it, as any similar vocabulary system evolves.
The justification for this view of maqam is offered in the article "Maqam Analysis: A Primer," for which this website was created as a companion piece, to host the audio recordings of the musical examples referenced there. The consequence of this understanding is what is presented on the Demo Site developed in 2010, the template for what hopefully will be, when complete, a complete audio catalogue of the lexicon of maqam melody from this tradition.
The point of presenting a vocabulary is to encourage its use. I want more people to be playing, singing, listening to Arabic music, and that is the only way to keep a vocabulary alive, growing, thriving: to have a community of people sharing it. These maqam constructs arise out of collective shared musical activity, and their knowledge is stored in the collective memories of living practitioners.
This belief has a consequence on the usefulness of this site: I think it is not useful if it is passed through once; but that each song, and each jins, and each transition from one jins to another, must be repeated until really absorbed, so that your sense of musical expectation is conditioned by the experience of hearing the same transitions over and over again, getting to know them as well as possible. Only then will the written discussions have any context for you; with your experienced ears you will understand the parts of the analysis that cannot be conveyed in words--the absolute *experience* of each jins and each maqam, the excitement, the suspense, and the ecstasy of hearing Tarab music. And the written discussions will fall into proper proportion for you, that is: insignificant relative to what the music already says all on its own. The more time you spend on this site the more you will be able to ignore the words, and focus on the only really important thing: the audio samples.
The point of presenting a vocabulary is to encourage its use, and there is work to be done on that front.