The theoretical derivative interrelationships were central to the acceptance of the modalities as applicable in practice. Safi al-Din’s full adwar of scale possibilities would never become relevant to ongoing music in practice: it was the interrelated modalities of the twelve-maqam system that would ultimately have a relationship with creating melody for the purpose of music-making in practice.
In order to actually make music using the twelve-maqam system, a modal entity from the system had to be paired with rhythm and cast into a specific musical form in the course of composition. The twelve-maqam system had a parallel set of rhythmic patterns for percussion instruments, referred to as usul (usūl), typically discussed after descriptions of the twelve-maqam system. Descriptions of these rhythmic patterns changed over time, though they were often demonstrated using some imitation of the representation of ‘aruz (‛aruż): the system of poetic meters (buḥūr) used as the basis of both Arabic and Persian poetry. While some writings substitute ‘aruz for a distinct system of rhythmic conception, the two also appeared side by side with different specific representations of rhythm eventually replacing any reference to ‘aruz altogether.
Like the maqam, avaz and sho‛beh, and gusheh, the usul each had proper names to distinguish different usul from one another in language. The prolific musician and author ‘abd al-Qader al-Maraghi writing in the fifteenth century thus described a series of rhythmic cycles (advār-i īqā‛āt) common in his time using various distributions of vowels around the consonants te ت and nun ن .He provided varying amounts of description beyond this notation, which had been used in Graeco-Arabic writings centuries before.
The notion of usul embodied this concept of a metered pattern of rhythm serving as the organization of time underpinning melodies composed using maqam, avaz, or sho‛beh. While this basic premise was a consistent one for the actual creation of melody in the twelve-maqam system, the usul and description of usul varied over time. Thus, writing at the end of the seventeenth century in the Safavid court in Isfahan, the head of court musicians, Amir Khan Gorgi, notated some different usul, using syllables built around the consonants dal د and kaf ک .Thus Amir Khan described an usul of his time named ramal as having two versions, one significantly longer than the other.
The place where both maqam and usul came together to make music was in composition. Indeed, while there was no tradition of notating compositions for preservation, the few written notations of music in the twelve-maqam tradition were theoretical demonstrations of composition, showing how to apply usul and maqam together to create a set melody within a set meter. Improvisation, by contrast, had no specifically formulated place in the system and there is no description of how one would improvise within the twelve-maqam system. Music-making was always the proper matching of elements of the twelve-maqam system with usul within specific set compositional forms. These compositional forms were often the last aspect of music to be described in writings about the twelve-maqam system, even as the forms themselves changed over time.
Systematic Development of Classic Music in Modern Persia
