Reference material
Reference material for makam-based music on fretless instruments — cümbüş, oud, and by extension tanbur, kemençe, violin, fretless bass. Fretless instruments can play pitches keyboards can’t, and the entire expressive vocabulary of this music lives in those pitches.
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The cümbüş, the oud, and fretless technique.
Why sources disagree, and every attested tuning.
Pitch systems, çeşni and ajnas, seyir, and the Turkish/Arabic split.
The makam catalog and the named pitch positions.
The Turkish Roman clarinet tradition, and a case study in sourcing.
This subject is unusually polluted with confident misinformation, and LLM-generated answers about it are frequently fabricated wholesale — see the Şurmat case study for a documented example. Every factual claim in these pages carries a confidence marker:
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