Usul and Iqa: Rhythmic Cycles in Ottoman and Arabic Music

A makam is not a complete musical framework on its own. It prescribes pitch, melodic direction, and emphasis — but it says nothing about when those notes occur. That role belongs to usul, the system of repeating rhythmic cycles that governs Ottoman and Turkish classical music. In the Arabic tradition, the equivalent concept is iqa (plural: iqaat). Together, makam and usul (or maqam and iqa) form the two axes of a composition: one modal, one temporal.

What usul is — and what it is not

Established An usul is a repeating cycle of strong and weak beats, ranging from as few as 2 to as many as 128 beats in length. The term itself comes from the Arabic usul (roots, foundations). Each cycle defines not just duration but weight — which beats carry emphasis, which are light, and which are silent.

Established This is fundamentally different from a Western time signature. A time signature like 4/4 tells a performer how many beats fill a measure, but says almost nothing about accent or internal structure. Usul prescribes both. Two different usuls can share the same beat count yet sound nothing alike because their accents and subdivisions differ. Duyek and sofyan, for example, are both often counted in groupings that fill similar spans, but their internal stress patterns produce completely different rhythmic characters.

The dum and tek vocabulary

Established Usul patterns are taught and memorized through standardized syllables that encode each stroke:

• Dum (also dum, du-um) — a strong, low, resonant strike. On a frame drum or kudüm, this is the bass sound produced at the center of the head.
• Tek (also tek, tekkya, teke, te-ek) — a light, sharp, higher-pitched strike at the rim.
• Silence (rest) fills beats where neither stroke sounds.

These are not abstract notation — they are vocalized syllables. Students traditionally learn usul by chanting the dum-tek pattern while striking their knees with alternating hands, a practice rooted in the mesk (master-apprentice) pedagogical tradition. The physical motion reinforces the cycle kinetically: the pattern is felt in the body, not merely read from a page.

Attested In Arabic percussion pedagogy, the equivalent pair is dum (bass) and tak (sharp/rim), functioning identically as mnemonic and performative syllables.

Common usul patterns

Established The following table lists the usuls most commonly encountered in Turkish conservatory education and repertoire. Beat counts and groupings reflect standard pedagogical sources; performers routinely ornament and subdivide these skeletal patterns in practice.

Established The word aksak itself means "limping" or "stumbling" in Ottoman Turkish, and ethnomusicologists have adopted the term broadly for any additive meter built from unequal groupings of 2s and 3s. In Turkish theory specifically, aksak refers to the 9-beat pattern, but the principle of combining binary and ternary cells runs through many usuls in the system.

Long usuls: compound cycles

Established Beyond these short patterns, Ottoman classical music employs compound usuls of considerable length:

Practice Long usuls demand a different kind of musical memory. A performer working in Devr-i Kebir must maintain awareness of position within a 28-beat cycle — not by counting individual beats, but by internalizing the pattern's internal dum-tek phrase structure as a sequence of smaller groups. This is why knee-striking practice begins with short usuls and progresses to longer ones only after the student's body has absorbed the shorter cycles.

Usul and musical form

Established In Ottoman classical music, specific usuls are bound to specific compositional forms. This is not convention but structural requirement — a pesrev composed in aksak semai would be a contradiction in terms.

Attested The fasil (suite) orders its movements in a sequence that moves through characteristic usuls:

• Pesrev — the opening instrumental form. Employs large usuls: Devr-i Kebir (28), Cenber (24), Muhammes (16), or other extended cycles. The defining constraint is that a pesrev may not use an aksak-family usul.
• Beste — a slow vocal form within the fasil, set to large usuls.
• Agir Semai — composed in Aksak Semai (10/8), Agir Aksak Semai (10/4), or Agir Sengin Semai (6/2).
• Sarki — the shorter vocal song form, most commonly in Aksak, Duyek, or Sofyan — the usuls that also dominate Turkish folk song.
• Yuruk Semai — a faster vocal form in its namesake usul (6/8 or 6/4).
• Saz Semaisi — the closing instrumental form. Its first three hane (sections) and teslim (refrain) use Aksak Semai (10/8); the fourth hane shifts to Yuruk Semai (6/4 or 6/8), providing rhythmic contrast at the close.

Attested Feldman observes that by the later Ottoman period, "the melodic gestures [of pieces] frequently overwhelmed the ostensible usul structures that theoretically supported them" — rhythm, that is, could become subordinate to melodic expression in mature compositions. This does not mean usul was irrelevant; it means that mastery of usul allowed performers to play against it expressively, much as a jazz musician plays across bar lines.

Usul in Mevlevi ceremony

Established One context where usul patterns remain explicitly performed by percussionists is the Mevlevi sema (whirling dervish) ceremony. The kudüm (a pair of small kettledrums) sounds embellished versions of the usul, maintaining the rhythmic framework while the ney and strings carry the melodic content. Outside Mevlevi practice, modern Turkish classical performance typically omits explicit drum realization of the usul — performers internalize the cycle without an audible rhythmic anchor.

Iqa: the Arabic counterpart

Established In Arabic music theory, iqa (ايقاع, plural iqaat) serves the same structural function as usul: a repeating rhythmic cycle built from strong (dum) and weak (tak) strokes, with rests between. The two systems share historical roots in the broader theory of rhythmic modes across the Islamic musical world, though they have developed independently in significant ways.

Established There are reputed to be over 100 named iqaat, though many have fallen out of regular use. The greatest variety survives in the muwashshahat (strophic vocal compositions), which employ iqaat ranging from 2 to 48 beats. In popular and folk music, shorter iqaat predominate:

• Maqsum (4/4) — by far the most widely used iqa in Arabic music
• Baladi (4/4) — a heavier variant of maqsum, common in Egyptian music
• Saidi (4/4) — associated with Upper Egyptian folk music
• Masmudi Kabir (8/4) — a longer cycle used in classical and muwashshahat repertoire
• Samai Thaqil (10/8) — the Arabic equivalent of aksak semai, used in the samai instrumental form and muwashshahat
• Aqsaq (9/8) — cognate to Turkish aksak, common in muwashshahat

Attested The Arabic samai instrumental form is structurally identical to the Turkish saz semaisi — four hane (Arabic: khana) with a teslim (Arabic: taslim), the first three in Samai Thaqil (10/8) and the fourth in a contrasting short iqa. The bashraf (Arabic form of pesrev) similarly follows the same structural logic, using large cycles like Masmudi Kabir (8/4) or Dawr al-Kabir (28/4).

Why "time cycle" matters more than "time signature"

Practice The essential difference between usul/iqa and Western meter is one of identity. A Western time signature is a container — 4/4 tells you the measure holds four quarter notes, but two completely different pieces in 4/4 share nothing rhythmic beyond that frame. An usul or iqa is a pattern — it has a specific dum-tek sequence, a specific accent profile, a recognizable character. Musicians do not say "this piece is in 10/8"; they say "this piece is in aksak semai." The name carries the entire rhythmic identity.

Established This is why the notated iqa or usul functions, as Farraj and Abu Shumays describe, as "a skeleton or a prototype." The written pattern is the structural minimum. In performance, percussionists ornament, subdivide, and elaborate — but the underlying cycle remains audible to a trained ear, just as a makam remains identifiable despite the ornamental variations of a taksim.

Understanding usul is prerequisite to understanding Ottoman and Turkish classical repertoire. A pesrev is not merely "a piece in a makam" — it is a piece in a makam and an usul, and both shape its identity equally. The articles in this domain will analyze specific compositions with both axes in view.