With Islam underpinning the rise of Mongol and Turkic kingdoms in the thirteenth century, different versions of the same basic concept of the twelve-maqam system appeared on opposite sides of the Caliphate’s domain in West and Central Asia. It then moved from court to court as musicians and their music adapted to the changing fortunes of dynastic patrons and the rise and fall of empires. In this context, documentation surrounding this approach to music comes from the various cities where dynastic rulers and their aristocracies resided at any given time, cities as far east as Bukhara and as far west as Baghdad. Documentation of the twelve-maqam system eventually also appeared in South Asia and Anatolia as rulers who patronized the system moved to occupy more territory.
The twelve-maqam system thus embodied a basic concept of music-making for a polyglot cosmopolitan dynastic context over a wide geographic and linguistic area. Yet it also mostly occupied a narrowly defined cultural context: specific urban centers that stood as islands of dynastic rule. The association of the twelve maqam system with a system of patronage emanating from dynastic courts placed it in a political space that typically stood separate from the larger geographies dynasts sought to control. This relationship between the twelve-maqam system and empire lasted throughout an era of dynastic governance, where an Arabized form of Persian functioned as the lingua franca of cosmopolitan empires where Islam continued to be the dominant religion that also sanctioned dynastic rule.
In current narratives of Iranian music history, the existence of the twelve maqam system begins at the end of the ‘Abbasid Caliphate’s fall, between the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. It thrived through a perceived golden age of Iranian culture overseen by Mongol and Turkic rulers, peaked in the Timurid Empire in the fifteenth century, and entered a period of musical decline in the Safavid Empire of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Both dynastic governance and the twelve-maqam system disappeared for good with the rise of the nation-state under Qajar rule in the nineteenth century.
The complex of ideas about music’s structure and execution associated with the rubric of the twelve-maqam system stood for at least six centuries as a central embodiment of music’s ideal organization and performance. At the core of this ideal was the idea of melodic organization being center in twelve primary pitch modalities. These pitch modalities—their relationships with additional derivative modalities and their application vis-à-vis rhythm in the course of composition—formed the basic conception of music’s construction and creation. The details of modal derivation and compositional forms would change, and different rhythms would also appear at different times in this period, yet the structural logic expressed in the twelve-maqam system itself and the conception of its application in practice remained in place in various guises for six hundred years.
Musical Works of Gustav Mahler
