International Council for Traditions of Music and Dance

A Non-Governmental Organization in Formal Consultative Relations with UNESCO

Amine Beyhom: “MAT for the VIAMAP – Maqām Analysis Tools for the Video-Animated Music Analysis Project,” Near Eastern Musicology Online

NEMO-Online is delighted to propose this new article by Amine Beyhom on notational tools and graphical analyses of melody and rhythm.

Musical notation has been reputed as disqualified for the analysis of “Foreign” musics since – at least – the experiments of Charles Seeger with the Melograph. It is nevertheless still used as the main analytic – and teaching – tool for these musics in most researches in musicology, and today in the teaching of these musics in autochthonous conservatories. Seeger’s experiments brought at his time cutting-edge solutions – and alternatives – to score notation but, surprisingly enough, these solutions seem to have not worked out very well in the long run.

Beyhom proposes a voluminous dossier including three parts and relying on the pioneering works of Seeger – and other ethnomusicologists – as well as on the improvements of his method that we have witnessed in the last decades. The first part expounds the past, and on-going debates about the (mis-) use of score notation as applied to "Foreign" musics, while the second part offers a retrospective of Maqām music notation. The third part of the dossier describes different tools of pitch and spectrum analysis which help understand – and listen better to the analyzed music while exposing, in fine, the author’s work and propositions for the implementation of video-animated analyses in the teaching of ethnomusicology as one major basis for this teaching. The dossier is accompanied by a short power point show (PPS) and 41 video-animated analyses (total time = 2 h 13 m).

Amine Beyhom: MAT for the VIAMAP – Maqām Analysis Tools for the Video-Animated Music Analysis Project,” Near Eastern Musicology Online 4 7|2018-11| p. 145–256.