‘Ajam ( Turkish: Acem) is the name of a

maqam Maqam, makam, maqaam or maqām (plural maqāmāt) may refer to: Musical structures * Arabic maqam, melodic modes in traditional Arabic music ** Iraqi maqam, a genre of Arabic maqam music found in Iraq * Persian maqam, a notion in Persian clas ...

(musical mode) in

Arabic Arabic (, , or , ) is a Central Semitic languages, Central Semitic language of the Afroasiatic languages, Afroasiatic language family spoken primarily in the Arab world. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) assigns lang ...

, Turkish, and related systems of music.

Ajam (, ) is an Arabic word for a non-Arab, especially a Persian. It was historically used as a pejorative—figuratively ascribing muteness to those whose native language is not Arabic—during and after the Muslim conquest of Iran. Since the ea ...

(عجم) in this usage means "Persian". The maqam Ajam is constructed of two Ajam trichords with "whole step-whole step" pitch intervals and spacing similar to the 1-2-3 (or 5-6-7) scale degrees found in an equal-tempered Western

major scale The major scale (or Ionian mode) is one of the most commonly used musical scales, especially in Western music. It is one of the diatonic scales. Like many musical scales, it is made up of seven notes: the eighth duplicates the first at doubl ...

(although the Ajam trichord's third scale degree may be tuned just slightly flat of an equal-tempered third). Because most uses of these Ajam trichords place the next (fourth) scale step a halfstep above the last (third) scale step of the Ajam trichord, the result is essentially the same as the "whole step—whole step—half step" tetrachord construction of the Western major scale, and thus the maqam Ajam sounds generally the same as the major scale in Western music. On F (notated C in Turkish music), Ajam is known as ''Jaharkah'' (in Turkish: Çârgâh, see also Chahargah (mode)).

External links

Ajam page
fro
Maqam World
Modes (music) Arabic music theory {{Asia-music-stub

See also

External links