A System of Modes Used in the Urban Music of Afghanistan

Abstract

T he question of the melodic modes used in the music of Afghanistan is a complicated issue and one that has received scant attention in ethnomusicological literature. Problems arise from two identifiable factors. Firstly, there is the diverse range of regional musics in Afghanistan, associated with the various ethnic groups making up the population.' These regional musics are usually identified in Dari (Afghan Persian) as mahali, as local or village music. Although a certain amount of research has been directed towards these regional musics (e.g. Hoerburger 1969, Sakata 1976a, Slobin 1976, Fujii 1980, Takahashi 1980), only a limited amount of information is currently available regarding variations in modal concepts between the ethnic groups. What data are available from these authors seem to be mainly etic in origin, and do little to assist our understanding of modal practice from the inside, from the folk view. The second complication arises from the fact that at least three types of art music are known in Afghanistan which have, in one way or another, been brought in from outside. These are the art musics of North India, Iran and Uzbekistan, Afghanistan's neighbors to the South-east, West and North. Of these three, Hindustani music (North Indian art music) is the best known in Afghanistan and the most frequently performed, and also constitutes the official art music of Afghanistan, with government sanction and support. This genre is known as klasik, i.e., classical music. The presence of these three art musics and their associated modal systems has tended to mask indigenous Afghan modal concepts and practices. As a result, it has been generally assumed that Afghanistan, in modern times at least, does not maintain a distinct, indigenous, modal system equivalent to the rags of North India, or the modes of the dastgahs of Iran or the shashmaqamat of Uzbekistan. My purpose in this paper is to show that while Afghanistan does not have an individual modal system comparable in terms of the number of discrete modes to those of India, Iran or Uzbekistan, when we look at the music of the cities, where a degree of homogeneity is found across the country, we find that there is a set of modes in common use, and that their