The Quarter Tone in The Middle-East

It's a rhythmic phrase. After, you do a mawal. It's called "Ateba, Ateba a Mijana". Here, in the mountains of Lebanon, we don't ask how music is learned. We learn it automatically singing with our families, at Mass, kartil. We sing when we work in the woods, cutting trees to make charcoal. When we learn music, we learn what's in our ear, not major scales! The quarter-tone invented by Semitic peoples was a very simple thing. Very simple but also very touching. Extremely moving. The Mi is low. The five notes entered here, one by one. But our internal nervous system mixed them up and harmonized them so that lowered Mi still resonates in the ear with the other notes one by one. This creates a feeling inside. A very profound emotion It touches something in our nervous system. What does the chord touch? A great, harmonic chord. It touches our nervous system. It scratches us somewhere. And this quarter-tone... To me, it touches us much more deeply. When we sing it, we hear so many people say, "Ah..." That's what tarab is. Tarab is a state of ecstacy, head to toe and, as Lorca said, it's not the human flesh, it's the marrow of the bones that is stirred. The human body and spirit quiver. That's the state of tarab. It's when our soul... When we're moved, from the bottom of both our soul and body at once.