The 29 Songs

Each song has one home: its page opens with the interactive analysis — waveform, a clickable timeline, and the song's modulation network — with Sami's original clip-by-clip grid preserved below it. Browse the 29 below, jump in by maqam, or open the whole corpus at once.

Analyses by maqam

Here are the complete analyses organized by maqam. This site is incomplete: only about a third of the maqamat in common usage are included, and within those only Rast, Bayati, and Zanjaran are in any sense complete. The song selections were made to illustrate the analytical principles of Maqam Analysis: A Primer — with a fairly complete picture of Maqam Rast, the most central maqam of the tradition (20th century up to 1970). Zanjaran, in reality a rare maqam, is over-represented on purpose: to contrast a rarely-used maqam with very common ones like Rast and Bayati.

All 29 songs

A spectrum of Egyptian and Syrian songs, from among the most well-known in their genres — to give familiarity to those who already know Arabic music, and to illustrate the tremendous commonality of most maqam pathways — alongside some lesser-known pieces chosen to show the less common pathways.