Terry Riley’s In C (Maqam Rast Remodel)

Composer and oud player Khyam Allami is interested in the deconstruction of Maqamat, the melodic systems used in Arab music. According to Allami the rules of Arab music have not be sufficiently broken. Its beauty lies in its elasticity and the expansiveness of time and lines of melody. However, computer programs that generate music generally do not support this, since they generally tend to follow Western concepts of music, tightly constraining the rhythm and melody. During musikprotokoll, Allami presents the solo-electronic version of Terry Riley’s In C, a seminal work of Minimal Music from 1964, transposed into the melodic system of the Arabic mode of a “rest.” To do this, the musician worked with the London-based programmer Charles Matthews to develop his own software based on Max for Live.