Ru
EnA. Shayakhmetova
Musical syntax in the chants of Muslim worship (on the example of the juma namaz of Krasnoyarsk Cathedral Mosque)
The orthodox music of Islam (the singing of the Quran and sacred texts in the mosque) is purely vocal, the nature of its intonations is in many ways related to the intonational structures of the Quranic texts; in addition, it assumes a special manner of intonation with the involvement of specific resources of the human voice expression. The transmission of musical information to the sacred matter happens through a sounding word. Since ancient times, information has been transmitted by reading of the Quran, and then its fixation in Arabic. The priests memorized the text of the Quran by heart and passed it by the word of mouth. The codification of the written text of the Quran after the death of Muhammad made Muslims face the need to improve the Arabic written system. This study focuses on the very matter of the sounding word in the mosque on the example of juma namaz (collective Friday worship). A detailed consideration of the sound of Muslim worship allows us to detect a number of patterns that indicate the presence of a complex, graded system of musical intonation in prayer texts. For the first time it was possible to identify a number of basic structures at the syntactic level in a musical text. The structures cement the music, and sometimes carry the semantics of a particular chant. The author considers juma namaz (cathedral Friday service), recorded and notated by the author of the article in the Krasnoyarsk Cathedral Mosque. This article presents the structure of the entire service and analyzes the musical syntax of the hymns of the service. It was possible to identify syntagmatic features in the musical text using terminology of the classical music culture of the Muslim world. Among the many variants of the basic structures (melodic formulas), there are a number of the most characteristic ones that perform a cross-cutting dramaturgical function and amenable to a certain systematization.
Key words
juma namaz, worship chants, Quranic chanting, basic structure, tone (nagma).
For citation
Shayakhmetova A. Musical syntax in the chants of Muslim worship (on the example of the juma namaz of Krasnoyarsk Cathedral Mosque) // South-Russian Musical Anthology. 2023. No. 4. Pp. 30-37.
