Some scholars of Turkish music argue that taqāsīm, understood in its early sense as unmeasured vocal and instrumental improvisation, emerged at the Ottoman court in the second half of the 16th century and had not previously been mentioned in the region's musical traditions.
Yet Ibn al-Tahhan, the 11th-century Fatimid scholar of Cairo, refers in his Hāwī al-Funūn wa-Salwat al-Mahzūn to taqsīm as instrumental performance on strings, pipes and drums. He does not indicate whether such performance was composed or improvised. We do know, however, that improvisation was regarded as less accomplished a craft than carefully wrought composition. In the mid-15th century, Fathallah al-Shirwani even described it as “the lightest of the forms of composition”, meaning musical composition. This coincided with the considerable importance accorded to rhythmic cycles, as may be inferred from al-Silakuni’s treatise at the beginning of the 16th century.
The Kitāb al-Aghānī suggests that improvisation was originally a form of composition, albeit a less elaborate one. The improviser was the musician who composed and sang rājilan, meaning while standing, marking the rhythm with a rod held in his hand. The ḍārib, by contrast, played the oud, which opened wider melodic possibilities and allowed for greater refinement in musical craft.
Improvisation and composition
In Mikhail Mishaqa’s 1840 Risāla Shihābiyya, instrumental music falls into two categories. Measured instrumental music he calls bashraf. Among Arabs, however, the bashraf had been a vocal form until the end of the 18th century, whereas among the Turks the term denoted a specific instrumental composition. Unmeasured instrumental playing, without rhythm, Mishaqa calls taqsīm. Yet our musical heritage contains numerous examples of measured taqāsīm. Whether this reflects an error on Mishaqa’s part or simply his own terminology is impossible to know. Nor does he clarify whether the instrumental performance he describes was composed or improvised.
The development of instrumental taqsīm in Istanbul coincided with a narrowing of the space available for instrumental improvisation in Egypt and the Levant, particularly after the fall of the Mamluk state and the collapse of the patron class that had sustained the older musical tradition. One indication is the disappearance, from the 16th to the 19th century, of the names of professional men and women who practised the art. Another is the extraordinary scarcity of specialised writing on music theory in Egypt and the Levant during the same period. Across three and a half centuries, such works can almost be counted on the fingers of one hand.
By the middle of the 19th century, the Cairo author of Safīnat al-Falak wa-Nafīsat al-Mulk could conceive of music only as something “bound to the words of its people”, effectively treating music and song as one. This situation in Egypt, and the subordinate place accorded to instrumental performance, would not change until around the 1870s, when the Khedive brought musicians from Istanbul and asked them to teach Egyptian musicians.
The picture was different in a country that had never come under Ottoman rule, such as Morocco. There, a number of the old nūbas, or musical suites, have survived to the present day. They include instrumental preludes known as bughyāt and tawshiyāt, together with distinctive, fixed instrumental passages that give the instruments a prominent role in the tradition known as tarab al-āla, vocal suites accompanied by musical instruments. The term taqsīm is also used there for solo improvisations within these suites.
It remains unclear whether this terminology arose through cultural exchange with the Ottomans, whether it is a relatively modern designation that spread after the term became common in Egypt, or whether it preserves a much older Arabic usage dating back to Fatimid times. It is worth noting that a comparable form of improvisation in the Tunisian ma’lūf tradition is known as istikhbār.
If istikhbār carries the sense of seeking or eliciting information, perhaps suggesting that the performer draws a response from the ṭab‘, the Maghrebi term for the modes, taqsīm may likewise be understood as instrumental playing that divides a sequence of composed pieces, serving as an interlude between them. Conversely, it may refer to bringing together the constituent sections of a complex maqam.
Both interpretations, however, belong to a period far later than that of the Fatimid Ibn al-Tahhan. A more plausible explanation, and the one we favour, is that taqsīm refers more broadly to the division of instrumental performance into successive phrases, each separated from the next by an interval of silence. Composed music, by comparison, unfolds through a continuous and interconnected melodic line without such breaks.
Space for improvisation
We have little reason to suppose that improvisation itself was ever absent from the Arab region, even if it was regarded as a lesser craft than elaborate composition. Alongside the art of Koranic recitation, one of whose conditions is that the reciter improvise so as to prevent the Koran from being set to a composed melody and made to resemble secular song, we find numerous references to improvisation during the Mamluk period.
One example is al-Mazuni in Mamluk Cairo, who was renowned for reciting poems to ḍurūb, or rhythmic cycles. This suggests that his distinction lay in improvising within a rhythmic framework while reciting poetry, rather than in performing in free rhythm. Something comparable appears in Villoteau’s account of an evening of religious chanting by sheikhs that he attended during Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt and later described in the Description de l’Égypte.
The space given to improvisation in Egypt appears to have expanded most markedly during the final quarter of the 19th century, as the older nūba, centred largely on intricately composed muwashshaḥāt, began to break apart. It was during this period that Abdu al-Hamuli rose to prominence, becoming celebrated for the variations he introduced and for his ability to blend several styles in his singing. His emergence signalled a transition from an age of collective chanting in the manner of the sheikhs to the era of the concert and the virtuoso star, performing before audiences eager to hear the singular inventions of his fertile musical imagination.
This school also spread through the Levant, encouraged by travel, migration and cultural exchange between Egyptians and Levantines, as well as by the increasing openness of these societies to one another from the age of Muhammad Ali onwards, and later by the era of recorded discs.
The widening scope of improvisation, together with the declining importance of complex muwashshaḥāt, which allowed little room for improvisation or vocal display, gave rise to new forms that gradually displaced them. Foremost among these was the expanded qaṣīda. It could be performed freely, without a fixed rhythm, or improvised within metre over a simple four-beat cycle, most often the waḥda. A similar rhythmic basis was used for the dawr, and together these became the two principal forms of the waṣla.
The dawr itself developed through numerous additions to its second section, also specifically called the dawr. This section allowed the singer a range of measured improvisations, ornamental elaboration around the āhāt, and vocal exchanges with the accompanying chorus.
By the end of the 19th century, alongside the transformation of secular music, Egypt also witnessed the development of a new style of Koranic recitation associated with Sheikh Hanafi Barai and Sheikh Ahmad Nada. Nada is said to have competed with al-Hamuli in the performance of devotional invocations from the minarets of al-Hussein Mosque. New forms of religious tawāshīḥ also developed, having previously belonged to the same broad tradition as the muwashshaḥāt, along with the narrative of the Prophet’s birth and the ta‘ṭīra sharīfa. All provided greater room for improvisation and for exchanges between the sheikh and his accompanying chorus.
The rhythm could also be suspended altogether, giving the sheikh the freedom to continue his improvisations for as long as he wished. This became a fundamental distinction between the Egyptian school and traditions of collective religious chanting in the Levant, for example, where solo passages remained rhythmically measured.
A comparable development probably occurred in the performance of the mawwāl. Earlier forms may have been closer to the recitation of zajal, given their connection to its metre and to an underlying melody upon which both mawwāl and zajal were fashioned, much as the ‘atāba is ornamented around a simple and familiar melodic pattern.
The form eventually reached the highly sophisticated treatment given to it by Mohammed Abdel Wahab, whose approach carried it from improvisation into composition. With other singers, however, the mawwāl remained closer to improvisation and was often interwoven with the layālī.
Solo performance
From the beginning of the 20th century until shortly before the Second World War, taqāsīm enjoyed a period of particular flourishing, as did certain instrumental forms such as the taḥmīla, which generally incorporates several short improvisations within a framework of recurring composed phrases.
This was also an era in which a number of instrumentalists rose to prominence. Some acquired enough stature to lead their own takht ensembles and to record taqāsīm and other non-vocal instrumental pieces on disc. Among them was the ney player Amin al-Buzri, mentioned earlier, followed by a large number of distinguished musicians: Ibrahim Sahlun and Sami al-Shawwa on violin; Mohammed al-Qasabgi, Amin al-Mahdi, Dawud Husni and Shahada Saada on oud; Ibrahim al-Aryan and the elder Mohammed al-Aqqad on qanun; and many others.
These musicians recorded both measured and unmeasured taqāsīm, as well as taḥmīlas in which improvised passages alternate with recurring composed phrases. Some also recorded celebrated adwār, rendering them instrumentally in place of the singer’s voice.
Their collaborations were equally varied. They accompanied male and female singers, as well as religious performers such as Sheikh Ali Mahmoud, and played an acknowledged role in musical response and in what was known as “translation”, or muḥāsaba, whereby the instruments echo or restate what has been sung. Together, these practices created an extensive and richly varied heritage of improvisation, ornamentation, musical dialogue and contrasting approaches to performance, shaped both by the individuality of the musicians and by the distinctive character of their instruments.
They also established the singing voice as an aesthetic model for instrumental performance, since musicians generally sought to make their instruments “sing”. All this naturally supplied the improviser with a reservoir of melodic and rhythmic material drawn from composed instrumental works, interactions with singers and chanters, and the heritage of the adwār and muwashshaḥāt, material that could then be recast in the performer’s own musical idiom.
