Özet:

As expected from the colorful history of Mashriq’s cultural geography and the symbolic system of the “musical East,” there is today in that region a great variety of musical traditions. The richness of this region’s music, regarding rhythm and style especially, is the natural result of these musical traditions’ contextual differences. The fundamental distinction is the prosodic stamp that the language of the lyrics left on the rhythm of the chant, contextually depending on the language (Syrian, Greek, Persian, Coptic, Arabic, Turkish, Armenian, etc.) or dialect. It is mainly caused by the metrical influence (metrical stamp) of religious and non-religious rituals on the rhythm. This influence, which also appears in the logos (utterance/word) – melos (melody) dialectic and the vocal – instrumental music opposition of Ancient Greece, is inherent to the rituals’ aesthetic preference between utterance and gesture. The threefold stylistic and aesthetical music modeling that has been chosen at the outset of the study and thoroughly explored within modal semiotics is based on the symbolic analysis of rituals involving music making. Based on a threefold semiotic approach, it is mainly inspired by the anthropology of religion. Thus have been studied the four principal, constituent and syncretist stages of the great musical traditions of the region: The foundation of the Christian hymnography (4th century); the beginnings of Medieval Arabic court music (7th century); inconsistencies in the traditional Eastern melodic systems (mainly 19th century) as a consequence of the contact with the West, and finally, the embodiment of a new form of theory-based Arabic music tradition (artistic or classic) in Mashriq (19th century). All these stages have been explored, from the double perspective of semiotics and philology, as the evolution of the dialects of a single regional music idiom (trans-modal and trans-traditional) that has undergone musical creolization. 

Anahtar Kelimeler: