Music Traditions of the World: Each System in Its Own Terms

Play a note on a piano and then try to sing the note halfway between it and the next one. A pianist has no key for it; a singer in Cairo, Istanbul or Tehran has a name for it and a job for it. A Hindustani singer will spend twenty minutes on a scale of five notes without ever running out of things to say, because the scale is not a ladder to climb but a character to get to know. A drummer in southern Ghana will play a pattern on a bell that would be hard to write in a European time signature, and will not need to write it.

The Western tradition taught in most conservatories (the "common practice" of Bach to Brahms, with its twelve equal semitones, major and minor keys and chords) is one system among many. It is a rich one, and the other pieces in this major teach it well. This piece is about the others, and about what you hear once you stop asking them to be something else.

This explains how musical systems work. Pitches and patterns here are teaching models: living traditions vary by teacher, region and performer, and none of them is defined by what a page can show.

Raga: a scale with a direction and a mood

A raga in the Hindustani (North Indian) and Carnatic (South Indian) traditions is not a scale in the Western sense and not a tune. It is a set of notes plus rules: which notes go up, which come down, which ones are lingered on, which phrases are characteristic and which are forbidden. The tradition links ragas to times of day and to moods. Everything sits over a drone (traditionally a tanpura) that keeps the tonic, Sa, sounding, so every note is heard as a relationship to it.

Two terms matter. The arohana is the ascent and the avarohana the descent; they need not mirror each other. And a raga has a vadi, its most important note, and a samvadi, a consonant partner usually a fourth or fifth away. In Yaman, the textbook ascent is Sa Re Ga Ma(tivra) Pa Dha Ni Sa, the descent the same in reverse, vadi Ga and samvadi Ni. Malkauns is more interesting: it begins from a low komal Ni, omits both Re and Pa, and its descent doubles back on itself in the middle (komal Ga, Ma, komal Ga, Sa).

The Carnatic system organises scales into 72 parent melakarta scales, and many Hindustani ragas have a Carnatic cousin with the same pitches: Bhupali and Mohanam, Yaman and Kalyani, Bhairav and Mayamalavagowla, Malkauns and Hindolam. Same notes, different treatment: Carnatic music leans on gamakas, the ornamental shakes and slides that are part of how a note is sung, not decoration added afterwards.

Slide the glide off and the notes become separate steps, like piano keys. Switch it on and they connect, which is closer to the voice and the sarod. Compare the ruler to the small ticks: the major third (Ga) sits at 386 cents, not the piano's 400. That is the just ratio 5/4, and it is the gap a singer closes when singing over a drone, because the drone's harmonics ask for it.

Cycles and timelines: rhythm you can see from above

Western notation counts along a bar and starts again. Many other traditions think of rhythm as a cycle that is a circle with a landing place. In Hindustani music a tala is such a cycle. Teentaal has 16 beats in four groups of four: a clap on the first beat (the sam, where the cycle lands), claps on beats 5 and 13, and a wave of the hand on beat 9 (khali, "empty"). In Carnatic music adi tala has 8 beats: a clap and three finger counts, then clap-wave, clap-wave. A soloist can improvise anywhere and the audience knows when they are about to land, because the cycle is shown with the hands.

In West Africa and the Americas the cycle is usually carried by a timeline, a short pattern, often on a bell, that everyone else locates themselves against. The most widespread, called the standard pattern, has seven strokes in twelve pulses: struck, rest, struck, rest, struck, struck, rest, struck, rest, struck, rest, struck. It is found across sub-Saharan Africa, among the Ewe of Ghana and Togo (in drumming such as agbekor) and in related forms among other peoples, and versions of it live on in Afro-Cuban and Haitian ritual music. The Cuban clave is a five-stroke relative: in sixteen pulses, son clave strikes pulses 1, 4, 7, 11 and 13, and rumba clave moves the third stroke one pulse later. In Arab music the iqa'at (singular iqa') are rhythmic modes written in dum (low, centre of the drum) and tek (high, rim), for example maqsum and baladi, both eight pulses long. Flamenco's compás is a twelve-count cycle, counted from 12, accented on 12, 3, 6, 8 and 10 in the common bulerías and soleá layouts.

Pick the West African bell, turn on "every 3" (four clicks per cycle) and then "every 4" (three clicks). The same seven strokes sit differently against each: that two-ways-at-once feeling is what players mean by a cross-rhythm, and it is built into the pattern rather than added on top.

Maqam: notes between the piano keys

The Arab maqam, the Turkish makam and the Persian dastgah are related but not identical systems. A maqam is built from small units called ajnas (singular jins): three, four or five notes, each with its own character, joined to make the whole. Like a raga it has a home note, preferred notes to linger on, and a path a performance takes, often starting low and climbing. Unlike a raga it is a modal, melodic system that is typically improvised by a soloist (taqsim) before or within a composed piece.

Several maqamat contain a note between two piano keys. In Rast the third and seventh degrees are "neutral": above a minor third, below a major. Notation in Arab music marks them with a half-flat sign and writes the scale in 24 divisions per octave, but that is a notational convenience: the real pitch is not exactly 350 cents, it varies with the maqam, the player, the region and the context, and theorists in different countries (Arab, Turkish, Persian) divide the octave differently and disagree. Treat every number here as approximate.

Listen to the two versions. On piano keys the Rast third has to become either a minor or a major third, and the scale turns into something else. That is why Arab musicians have built or modified instruments (the qanun's lever-adjustable strings, the oud's fretless neck) for these pitches, and why the oud, ney and voice are the instruments of the tradition's centre.

Gamelan: tunings built for one orchestra

A gamelan is an ensemble, mostly of bronze or iron instruments (metallophones, tuned gongs and gong-chimes, drums), played in Java, Bali, Sunda and elsewhere in Indonesia. Two tuning systems are shared by name: slendro, five tones to the octave, roughly equally spaced, and pelog, seven tones with unequal steps, often played as five-note subsets. The key fact is that there is no standard pitch: every gamelan is tuned to itself. No two sets share the same tuning, and the instruments of a whole ensemble are built together, so an orchestra is a single instrument. A Javanese ensemble is very consistent inside itself. In Bali, instruments are tuned in pairs a little apart on purpose, so that the pair produces a shimmering beat.

Gamelan music also layers time in a way a European ear can mistake for repetition. The colotomic structure is how the "punctuating" instruments divide a cycle: the largest gong ends it, the kenong mark the quarters, the kempul and ketuk fill between. A gongan is one full cycle, and the other instruments elaborate a core melody within it. Javanese and Balinese practice differ in speed, dynamics and interlocking (Balinese music is faster and more strongly contrasted).

Set the beating to about 6 Hz and strike the pair: the loudness swells and fades six times a second. That is not a flaw; in Balinese tuning it is the point.

Pentatonic worlds: China and Japan

The Chinese pentatonic scale has five named degrees: gong, shang, jue, zhi, yu (宮商角徵羽), which on a C-based scale are C, D, E, G and A. Traditional theory derives them from the fifth: take a string length, add a third or subtract a third (the method called sanfen sunyi), and the pitches pile up as stacked fifths. Any of the five can serve as the home tone, so there are five modes from the same pitches. Because there are no semitones in this set, no note clashes with another, and the music is free to concentrate on tone colour, attack and decay. The guqin, a seven-string zither, has thirteen studs on its face that mark where a lightly touched string produces harmonics, among them the middle of the string. Peking opera (jingju) combines singing, speech, acting and acrobatics with a percussion ensemble alongside the singers.

In Japan, gagaku, the court music whose present form took shape in the Heian period (794-1185), uses a pentatonic scale called yo (no semitones), while the in scale (for example in folk-derived and koto music) has semitones. The shakuhachi, an end-blown bamboo flute, takes breath and noise as part of the sound. And ma (間) is the aesthetic of interval: a silence is not an absence but a deliberate shape that the sounds around it make.

Interlocking: one tune shared between players

In a Western orchestra a violinist plays a melody. In many traditions the melody exists only between players. The Andean siku (zampoña) is a panpipe in two halves, called ira and arka; one player holds the half with some of the scale's notes and a partner the other, and a tune runs by alternating between them (a hocket). The tradition is strongly associated with Aymara-speaking communities around Lake Titicaca. In Central Africa, the Aka (BaAka) people of the southwest Central African Republic and northern Congo sing polyphony of several interlocking vocal lines continuously adapted through improvisation, which Simha Arom was among the first to study systematically. In both, a performer has an incomplete part by design: there is no solo, so a listener has to hear the whole.

Who gets to record whom?

Ethnomusicology as a field has argued about its own history. Alan Lomax recorded traditional musicians across the United States, Britain, Spain, Italy and elsewhere from the 1930s onwards, and the Library of Congress holds the work he did for it; his archive was digitised and put online. Admirers say he preserved and promoted music that was being ignored. Critics ask who profited, who was credited, and whether the "folk" categories he used and his cross-cultural singing-style theory (cantometrics) fit the music. Today many scholars work on repatriation (returning recordings to the communities they came from) and on collaborative research. The wider argument is whether the standard music curriculum should still centre on European art music with the rest as an option, or give several systems equal footing. Both camps can say why; this piece teaches each tradition in its own terms and leaves you to decide how you want a curriculum to look.

What a graduate just sees

• A raga is a scale plus a direction, a vadi and a way of moving; it is only the beginning to know the notes.
• Over a drone, intervals tune to the drone's harmonics: a "5/4" third, not the piano's.
• Many traditions count in cycles with a landing place, and show it with hands or a bell, not with bar lines.
• A timeline is a pattern against which everything else is located; the same seven strokes can be felt in three or in four.
• A quarter-tone is notation; the actual pitch of a maqam's neutral note belongs to the maqam, the player and the place.
• Gamelan tuning is local to the set; pairs are tuned to beat on purpose.
• Five pitches make five modes, and a note-free-of-clash scale puts the music in tone colour and timing.
• Some melodies exist only between players.

Where it shows up next

• Rhythm, Metre & Groove (35/66) and Acoustics, Tuning & Timbre (35/68) supply the cycle and the beating you used here.
• Jazz, Popular Music & the Recording Age (35/71): the clave and the 12/8 bell are the rhythmic DNA of Afro-Cuban jazz, funk, reggaeton and Afrobeats.
• Western Music History (35/70) and Composition, Arranging & Orchestration (35/72): composers such as Debussy and Lou Harrison drew on gamelan.
• In the world: film and game scoring, community music, festivals, teaching, field recording and archives.

If you want to go deeper

• 📘 Textbook. Jeff Todd Titon (ed.), Worlds of Music: An Introduction to the Music of the World's Peoples (Cengage). The standard survey course text, with case studies and recordings.
• 📘 Textbook. Bruno Nettl, The Study of Ethnomusicology: Thirty-One Issues and Concepts (University of Illinois Press). The field's own debates, including the ones in the last section.
• 📘 Gentler. Alan Lomax's recordings and the Association for Cultural Equity's Global Jukebox, to hear before you read; and the Smithsonian Folkways catalogue.
• 🌐 Free course. MIT OpenCourseWare 21M.030, Introduction to World Music (Spring 2013).