Bridging Arabic and Western music with a four valve trumpet

"There's this note that we actually call 'the blue note' and I believe it's a heritage from African music," Maalouf says. "Those notes that are right in the middle, between a note and another note, those are 'blue notes' that you bend with the lips. Those are quarter-tones. From these kinds of scales, I can switch to music that is very close to Arabic feelings."
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It's actually derived from the Persian and Greek system of Tetrachords, which was elaborated upon by the Arab philosopher Al-Farabi to create a 25 note, non-equally tempered scale. Sometime around the 19th century, this was approximated into a 24 tone equally tempered scale. Westerners started out using just temperament, which uses perfectly in tune notes but has to be retuned to be used at a higher and lower root pitch. You can't, for instance, switch from one major key to another just by moving to a different note and playing a different pattern, because there aren't even spaces between the notes, so you'd get entirely different intervals. They moved to meantone temperament later on, which basically in between just termperament and equal temperament, sacrificing some purity but allowing several scales of reasonable good quality on the same instrument, making key changes possible - but some keys would be really bad and unusable. In the 19th century, they totally flattened out the distance between the notes, making all scales equally in tune (or out of tune, depending on how you look at it). I would probably guess that this is where the arabs got the idea for the 24 tone equally tempered scale, simply taking the western one and doubling it. You could, of course, theoretically make a 25-tet scale, but it likely wouldn't sound very good - 12-tet is, for certain mathematical reasons, a reasonably good approximation of many just intervals, 24-tet benefits from that because half of its frequencies are the same, but other divisions like 25 don't necessarily have the same quality. As far as experimental music theory goes, 19 and 31 tet are also pretty good starting places, which approximate a lot of just intervals better than 12-tet does.

As for "the" blue note, it's just a description of that's used to describe pretty much any note that blues and soul musicians would bend for artistic effect, there's not "a" blue note". Some of these may be better approximated by the extra notes in 24-tet. For instance, one of the most common uses of a "blue note" was to flatten a 12-tet minor seventh when playing a dominant major chord - the 12-tet minor seventh of 1000 cents* is a good approximation of the 9:5 minor seventh (~1017 cents) being approximated in a minor context, but it's pretty terrible for the 7:4 harmonic seventh (~968 cents) being approximated in a major context. This can create some interesting tension and dissonance in traditional western music, but by flattening the note you get an overall sweeter, more natural sounding dominant chord. The 24-tet scale, however, has a note of 950 cents, which is only about ~18 cents off, so you'd use that for the harmonic seventh rather than approximating both sevenths with 1000 cents as we're forced to do in 12-tet (unless we bend the note). It's also not necessarily a feature of African music itself, it's something African-Americans did after coming into contact with western 12-tet instruments.

*Cents are a unit used a lot in music for conveniently describing microtonal frequencies. Usually you only see it on tuners, to tell you exactly how out of tune you are, but you can also use it to describe a microtonal scale, though. 100 cents is a 12-tet semitone, so, for instance, 1000 is 10 semitones above the root note, while 1200 is a single octave.
 
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Threedee said:
Everything cool about the Arabs was derived from the Persians and Greeks.
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The Arabs are, for the most part, descendants of Hellenistic and Persian civilization. The Roman empire owned basically every part of the Arab speaking world besides the Arabian peninsula itself (although Augustus once made a grab for it) and Mesopotamia, which the Persians usually held. Then one day the Muslims came riding out of the Arabian peninsula and conquered it all in rapid succession, separating them off from the pan-Mediterranean world they'd been part of. I had been under the impression before that the Arab-speaking world today became that way because the Muslims replaced the indigenous languages with Classical Arabic, but apparently I was wrong, and the Arab dialects spoken there predate the Muslim conquests. The Arabs, of course, totally subjugated the Persians, but weren't ever able to assimilate them (Farsi is written in an Arabic script, but it's actually an Indo-European language closer to French than it is to Arabic).
 
At least the Romans were cool in their own right, even without the Greeks. It's like how the British, considered bland and boring, have always learned from the European community, and the world at large.
 
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