What is maqam Rast?

This page is a lesson, not a poster. Read it top to bottom; every section has something to press, and the whole page follows one root and one octave — change either and everything below changes with it. If the low keys are hard to hear on your speaker, use Octave + to lift the whole lesson.

1. First, hear it — on a bent piano

Look under the keyboard before you press anything. There is a strip of twelve switches, one per note name, and two of them — E and B — are already lit green. Every key with those names has been pulled a quarter tone flat, and the key labels say so: E½♭, B½♭. Now press Play. The shape is a major scale. The sound is not. Two notes sit in the crack between the piano’s keys, and those two notes are the sound of an entire tradition.

This is not a trick of ours. It is what an Arabic-market keyboard does: Korg and Yamaha instruments sold across the Middle East carry a “scale” or “quarter tone” panel with exactly these switches, and Rast is the preset a player reaches for first.

2. Counting from home: two half-flats

Every scale has a home note, the root — here C, and the picker above moves it (and the switches move with it: Rast on G bends B and F♯). The other notes are named by how far above the root they sit: their scale degrees. A flat lowers a note by one key — a half step. A half-flat, written ½♭, lowers it by half of that: a quarter tone, a distance the piano has no key for.

Five plain numbers and two half-flats. Click a chip to hear each degree in C — the ½♭3 and ½♭7 will sound slightly, deliberately “off” to an ear raised on pianos. Stay with them.

3. Same keys, bent pitch: major becomes Rast

This comparer does something the others on this site do not. Flip it and no key turns on or off — the two scales use the same seven keys. Instead, watch the tuning strip under the main keyboard above: two switches release, and the keys go back to the piano’s own E and B. Flip again and they press. Play both runs and listen only to the third and the seventh.

4. What twelve keys get wrong

Without the switches, a piano has two ways to fake Rast, and both miss. The major scale puts the third and seventh a quarter tone too high. Mixolydian fixes the seventh by lowering it a whole key — now a quarter tone too low — and leaves the third high. Rast sits exactly between the two. With the switches on, press the three sevenths in turn.

Mixolydian is the nearest twelve-key shape when the piano cannot bend — a harmonica player’s second position, a guitarist’s dominant scale — and it is what most Western transcriptions of Rast melodies settle for. Its page opens on G; set this page’s root to G and the two share every key but the bent B.

5. How flat is half-flat?

One honest sentence, then the detail. The fifty cents on these switches is a keyboard setting, not a measurement; the real pitch is learned by ear and varies by region and by player. Measured Rast thirds cluster a little below the exact quarter tone — roughly 345 to 355 cents above the root, against the piano’s 400 — with Egyptian playing generally a shade lower and Syrian a shade higher, and the Turkish makam (مقام) of the same name tuned closer to a major third. Practitioners describe not one E-half-flat but several, each belonging to a particular maqam. The switch gets you into the neighbourhood; your ear does the rest.

Try it: hold E½♭ on the keyboard, then click its switch off and on while it rings. That quarter-tone drop is the whole distance between a piano playing a major scale and a piano playing Rast.

6. A maqam is more than a scale

What this page can show is Rast’s scale. The maqam is bigger: it is built from small cells called ajnas (جنس) , and it has a customary way of moving through them. The lower cell is jins Rast — 1 2 ½♭3 4 5, five notes ending on the fifth. On top of that fifth sits a second cell, and here Rast has two habits: going up it is usually another Rast, which gives the ½♭7; coming down it often becomes Nahawand (نهاوند) — 5 6 ♭7 1 2 — so the seventh drops to a full flat, B♭, on the way home. A keyboard lock cannot be direction-dependent, so this page locks to the ascending form; press the two cells and hear the maqam’s two sevenths.

7. What to do with it

Keep the lock and the switches on, hold C low, and play the green keys slowly, coming back to 1 and 5. Let ½♭3 ring against the root until it stops sounding wrong and starts sounding like a colour. Then take the switches to the synth, where the same strip lives under every keyboard, and try the other presets — Bayati (بياتي) bends the second instead of the third. The freygish and double harmonic pages meet maqam from the other side: the Hijaz (حجاز) family, whose notes a piano can reach.

Quick reference

Formula

1 – 2 – ½♭3 – 4 – 5 – 6 – ½♭7

In C

C – D – E½♭ – F – G – A – B½♭