A new article by Amine Beyhom and Hamdi Makhlouf, entitled “A VIAMAP exploration of the Tunisian ṭubūʿ“, was published online on June 2 2021 on the site of the CTUPM (CTUPM – Tunisian Center of Musicological Publication). The article is also available as a pdf publication, with direct access to the videos, which include video analyses (seven for fourteen ṭabʿ or modes) and videos made from Power Point shows of analyses of the scales of the ṭubūʿ of Tunisian music, included in the CD 1 accompanying the book of Manoubi Snoussi Initiation à la musique tunisienne: Musique classique with 3 CDs, Tunis: Centre des Musiques Arabes et Méditerranéennes Ennejma Ezzahra.
The article is the continuation of three previous articles by the first author concerning the new (video) tools used by the CERMAA team for the analysis of maqām performances. Knowing that the notation and scale tools used in maqām analysis are biased as they are based on the ideological premises of Western musicology, video animated analyses become one alternative way of analysing maqām and other musics – especially solo performances.
While previous VIAMAP (Video Animated Music Analysis Project) analyses concentrated mainly on more complex performances with numerous modulations and musical or vocal and instrumental techniques, the video analyses proposed in this article concern more simple performances, which develop generally one single ṭabʿscale with few modulations.
Each main video shows the analysis of two successive istikhbār(s) each in a different ṭabʿ (a Tunisian maqām), the first being performed on the r[a]bāb by Muḥammad Ghānim (Figure 1 below), and the second on the ʿūd °ʿarbī° – the two “degree” signs surrounding a word indicate that this term is transliterated from Tunisian vernacular; the ʿūd °ʿarbī° would be thus, in standard Arabic, the “ʿūd ʿarabiyy” – by °Khmayyis° Tarnān (Figure 2 below).
Figure 1. Muḥammad Ghānim and his rabāb at the 1932 Congrès du Caire
A special page with all the videos and additional explanations was added in the VIAMAP website, entitled Tunisian ṭubūʿ.