A message to musicians whose instrument the repertoire forgot.

Dear colleague,

I grew up in Minnesota, in a school with a marching band of five hundred, where a child became a musician almost by accident. I have spent the thirty years since teaching saxophone at a conservatory in Beirut, in a musical culture at least as deep and far older, which almost none of the world's practice material acknowledges exists.

The consequence is familiar to you if you live on that side of it. The scales, the studies, the play-alongs and the apps are written for a particular set of instruments playing a particular repertoire, and if your tradition is not that one, you are asked to translate everything yourself, forever, and to accept that translation as normal.

So I wrote the other side down. Twenty-two Arabic maqamat, with their traditional tonal centres, their degree names in both English and Arabic, and real quarter-tone notation — transposed correctly for Western instruments that transpose, so a B♭ clarinettist or an E♭ saxophonist can read maqam in their own written key rather than doing the arithmetic in their head at a rehearsal. As far as I have been able to establish, nothing else on the open web does this.

I am not claiming to have solved anything. A maqam is not a scale, quarter-tone notation is a compromise, and a tradition carried by ear for centuries does not become portable because someone typeset it. What I am claiming is narrower and I think it is still worth something: the material now exists, written down, in the key you actually read, for free.

If you are a Western player who has wanted a way in, it is a way in. If your own tradition is the one being written out, I would genuinely like to know where I have got it wrong — I would rather be corrected than polite.

Thank you for reading this far.

Tom HornigSaxophone professor · Henri Selmer Paris Artist · Beirut