Most extensive English website dedicated to the qin, an absolute goldmine for its history, theory, literature, and more, by an accomplished qin player renowned for his dedicated reconstructions of the earliest surviving qin repertoire.
Studio Almaya is a studio for music studies founded by Yair Dalal, who dedicates himself to
continue the Jewish-Arabic musical heritage, and pass it to the future generations. His
Goals are to connect and advance young musicians towards the ethnic musical branch, encouraging ethnic
music creativity, and establishing an archive for ethnic music. Almaya became a meeting
Point for people from all ages and origins, which find the studio the only place in Israel
Where they can enrich themselves musically and intellectually in this unique tradition of Jewish-Arab music.
Studio almaya is located in the old Jaffa Port , Almaya means The Universe in Aramaic and On the Water in Arabic.
The classes and topics of the lessons are:
Middle eastern music
Rhythm
Scales
Tonality
Instrumentation:
Oud
Violin
Ney
Percussion
Vocal
Theory and practice
The Maqam phenomena and its philosophy
The history of Judeo- Arab music :
Composition
Songs
Composers and Singers as well as secular and religious songs
From the 1950s in Smyrna and Istanbul and working class/poor Athens, Piraeus, and Thessaloniki, to it's 1922 spread on the Greek mainland, to its height between WWI and WWII...
The purpose of this essay is to examine the aesthetic behind Cage's "silent" composition, 4'33", to trace its history, and to show that it marked a significant change in John Cage's musical thought -- specifically how it forms a point-of-no-return from the conventional communicative, self-expressive and intentional purpose of music to a radical new aesthetic that informs the field of unintentional sound, interpenetration, chance, and indeterminacy. The compositional process is described, both the writing of 4'33" and its evolution from past thought. Implications for performance are examined.