Middle Eastern Sheet Music (Arabic/Turkish/Greek/Persian)

Here are some songs in the "abc" form of music notation (See link below). Note on transliteration: where I've paid attention capital letters in Turkish are used to indicate the non-roman varients.

Note on abc: Some of these songs have quarter tones (non-western, non-12-tone). I've extended the abc format by using "^/" and "_/" to indicate half-sharp and half-flat. This "quarter tone" is somewhere between the two tones you are used to as a western musician - exactly where depends on the style of music. I've modified John Chambers's jcabc2ps to render these. (I'll post that soon -- or he will add the feature to the main branch - I think now maybe he has...).

You can probably use John's "Tune Finder" to find these songs and render them in a number of formats (PDF, PNG, etc...). The [PDF] links below will take you to his PDF download page.

In fact, just CLICK HERE to find all the songs of mine that he has indexed (if I've added songs more recently than he has run the indexer, they may not yet be indexed on his page).

Note: I've noticed that there are a few bugs in the PDF/image rendering...so if a song looks truncated - take a glance at the source and let me know...

Songs:

Links:

  • The ABC Homepage (music notation format and software)

  • Majida's Blog Entry with a lot of good links to online Arabic music resources!

  • Middle Eastern Rhythms FAQ
  • Khafif Middle Eastern Dance and Music Troupe