The interaction between Performer and Listener in Arab Music

“Allah”, “Ya Salam”, Ya ’Ieni” are a few exclamatory expressions which the listeners (sammi’ah) address to the performer/s to express their deep emotional excitement, during a live performance. As an oral tradition, Arab music has no barrier between audience and performers, and is characterized by a very close interaction between them. Abundant verbal, facial, and body/head movements inspire the performer and strengthen the effectiveness of the musical performance. Thus, audience’s responses urge the performer to be highly creative, by inventing various melodic-rhythmic ornamentations (zakharef), cadential formulae (kaflat), and improvising new larger sections (taqasim). This reciprocal positive phenomenon contributes to the rise of “Tarab” (enchantment), which refers to a mental-emotional state of a deep musical involvement, and to the domination of a specific “maqam” (mode) on the minds of both the listener and the performer. Indeed, Tarab situation, which is unique for Arab music, has a direct impact on the choice of the songs, the maqam, and the duration of the performance.

In Tarab music, creative listeners (sammi’ah) are supposed to know not only what to say, but when, were, why and how to applause. Whereas, the performer is expected to sense the audience’s explicit and implicit reactions, and to internalize their inner feelings. This “knowledge” is mainly unconscious, and the regularity which governs the “patterns” of their behavior is latent. My presentation, will attempt to uncover the regularity which guides the interaction between the performer and the listener, and to define the musical and extra-musical stylistic elements which evoke Tarab, in terms of “learned and natural schemata”, relying on the "aesthetic ideal" of Arab music, whose one of its’ main principles is “emotional excitement” (Tarab).