Maqam Melodies: Pitches, Patterns, and Developments of Music in the Middle East and other Microtonal Writings [Hardcover]

This book discusses microtonal tunings in the Arabic maqam, prevalent in the Middle East and Central Asia, which employs microtonal intervals from Pythagorean tuning by perfect fifths.

1. Microtonal Modes and Scales in the Middle East and Central Asia

2. Bachian Modality

3. Hypercube

4. Quartertones Are Not Out of Tune: You Are!

5. Charles Ivess Use of Quartertones: Are They Structural or Expressive?

6. Polytempic Polymicrotonal Music, and Freedom

Polymath Peter Thoegersens doctoral dissertation, published in 2022 as Polytempic Polymicrotonal Music: The Road Less Traveled, went around the world and through the whole of musical history to explore mans attempts to use differently tuned scales and competing simultaneous tempos. Here he focuses his extraordinary erudition on the scales of Arab music throughout history, as defined in treatises by medieval scholars like Safi al-Din and Qutb al-Din; he then moves giddily through an exploration of pre-Bach theories of modes as prelude to an exploration of quarter-tones in Western music after 1900, including his own multidimensional music. Once again, the historical sweep and wealth of detail are astonishing.

Prof. Kyle Gann

Bard College, USA

Author of The Arithmetic of Listening: Tuning Theory and History for the Impractical Musician

Peter Alexander Thoegersen was born in Los Angeles, USA, in 1967. He earned his doctorate in music composition from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA, in 2012. He wrote his thesis on polytempic polymicrotonality, previously untouched as a stylistic genre, with only a single precursor in the literature, Charles Ivess Universe Symphony (1915). Polytempic poll³³