Pohlit

AAWM JOURNAL VOL. 8 NO. 1 (2020)

Makam and Beyond: A Unified Theory in Julien Jalâl Ed-Dine Weiss’s Last Composition

Stefan Pohlit

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Abstract:

The Swiss-Alsatian qānūn virtuoso Julien Jalâl Ed-Dine Weiss (1953-2015) belonged to the most prominent performers of maqām music on the world music stage. During the 1980’s, he moved to Aleppo and founded the Al-Kindi Ensemble with which he would deliver many key interpretations of the historical repertoire. An outspoken critic of Western equal-semitone temperament, he invented a tuning system in just intonation and constructed several qānūn prototypes with extended pitch supply in order to encompass the characteristics of various regional contexts.

Despite Weiss’s international fame, the future of his legacy remains uncertain: Due to the Syrian war, most of his estate has been destroyed while his hand-written notations have never been catalogued. My analysis explores his last composition, Spiritual Journey/Sinfonia Sacra, a suite of more than twenty minutes and the most time-consuming project of his career. It was premiered in 2011 at the Beiteddine Festival in Lebanon and completed until Weiss’s death, partly with my assistance. As a curious amalgamation of influences from the Ottoman repertoire, Iran, and India, the score expands the maqām principle towards a novel concept of prolongation, symmetry, and implied polyphony.

Although Weiss’s qānūn was built to reproduce many different customs of traditional tuning, most of the score’s material originates from the Turkish-commatic system and could thus easily be adopted by the specifially Turkish line-up of the Al-Kindi Ensemble after his move to Istanbul. Comparable to his famous teacher, Munir Bashir, Weiss both respected and redeveloped the tradition. Some of his decisions, such as a number of unusual combinations of modal genres, may appear rather experimental in regard to the Ottoman repertoire to which he referred. However, besides offering a unique insight into his concept of seyir (i.e., the outline of a makam with all its related modulations), Spiritual Journey introduces a highly original method of organization by means of small, permutable cells. By tying pitch relationships and metric symmetry together as intrinsic unity, Weiss created an extensive, cohesive structure within a continuum of large rhythmic cycles—an architecture of foreground-background relationships unprecedented in makam music.

My analysis includes the entire score which is published for the first time for further scrutiny.

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Keywords: music analysis, makam theory, contemporary music from the Middle East, cross-cultural music, microtonal music, notation

Contributor Information:

Stefan Pohlit is a composer and music theorist. Until 2015, he served as Assistant Professor at the Istanbul State Conservatory of Turkish Music. He currently participates in the Academy of Science and Literature Mainz/Germany. www.stefanpohlit.com

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