Perde: The Named Pitch Positions of Turkish Makam

Western music names its pitches with seven letters and two accidentals. Turkish makam music names its pitches individually — each one has its own name, its own identity, and its own place in the system. These named positions are called perde (plural perdeler), and learning them is the first step toward understanding how makam works.

What perde means

Established The word perde comes from Persian parda, meaning "curtain" or "veil." In the context of stringed instruments, it refers to the frets on the neck — the physical points where a player presses to produce a pitch. By extension, perde came to mean the pitch itself, whether produced by a fret or not. A singer, a ney player, and a tanbur player all perform the same perdeler; only the tanbur has physical frets to show them.

Established This is a fundamentally different approach from Western pitch naming. Western note names (C, D, E) are abstract and context-independent — a C is a C regardless of what key or mode you are in. Perdeler carry functional weight: the name rast does not just label a frequency — it identifies the pitch that anchors the entire Rast makam, the reference point from which the system radiates. The name dügah does not just mean "the A above rast" — it identifies the pitch that serves as karar for Ussak, Hicaz, Huseyni, and several other makams.

The naming system

Established Most perde names derive from Persian, reflecting the Ottoman court's use of Persian as its cultural language. The core names follow Persian ordinal numbers combined with the suffix -gah (from Persian gah, meaning "place" or "position"):

Attested These ordinals originally referred to finger positions on the fingerboard of stringed instruments. Pre-fourteenth-century Arabic theoretical literature used different terminology; the Persian names became standard as the tanbur rose to prominence in Ottoman musical life and Persian cultural vocabulary pervaded court practice.

Established Beyond the ordinals, perdeler carry modifying prefixes:

• Nim — "half" or "lesser," indicating a pitch slightly below its parent (e.g., Nim Hicaz sits one comma below Hicaz)
• Dik — "sharp" or "raised," indicating a pitch slightly above its parent (e.g., Dik Hicaz sits one comma above Hicaz)
• Kaba — "low" or "deep," marking a pitch two octaves below the main register
• Tiz — "high," marking a pitch one octave above the main register

Established Other perde names come from the makams or melodic characters associated with them: Hicaz, Huseyni, Buselik, Acem, and Evic are all both perde names and makam names. The pitch carries the name of the makam for which it serves as karar or a defining tone.

The perdeler of one octave

Established In the Arel-Ezgi-Uzdilek (AEU) system — the theoretical framework formally adopted by Turkish conservatories and TRT — the octave divides into positions measured in Holdrian commas. One octave equals 53 commas; one Holdrian comma is approximately 22.64 cents (1200/53).

The main octave, ascending from rast:

Established Notice the pairs separated by a single koma (one comma): Zirgüle/Nim Zirgüle, Segah/Buselik, Hicaz/Nim Hicaz/Dik Hicaz, Hisar/Nim Hisar, Evic/Mahur. These closely spaced perdeler are not interchangeable — each belongs to different makams and different cesni. A makam that uses Segah (17 commas) and one that uses Buselik (18 commas) are using different pitches that sound different and carry different melodic identities, even though they are only 23 cents apart.

Extended range

Established The full perde system extends well beyond a single octave. Below rast, the perdeler carry the suffix -asiran (from the lower register) or the prefix kaba. Above gerdaniye, they take the prefix tiz or use independent names:

Below rast:

Above gerdaniye:

Established The extended range mirrors the main octave's interval structure — the same comma relationships hold in every register. Muhayyer is to gerdaniye what dügah is to rast: 9 commas higher.

How perdeler relate to cesni

Established Perdeler are the raw material; cesni (tetrachords and pentachords) are what you build from them. Each cesni selects specific perdeler and the intervals between them define its character. The Rast pentachord picks rast, dügah, segah, cargah, neva — intervals of 9, 8, 5, 9 commas. The Ussak tetrachord picks dügah, a neutral pitch 5 commas above it, cargah, neva — intervals of 5, 8, 9 commas. Same perdeler in many cases, different selections and different interval sequences.

Established This is why the perde table matters: it is the palette from which every makam draws its pitches. A student who has internalized where dügah, segah, cargah, and neva sit — and what they sound like above a rast drone — can assemble any cesni that uses them, rather than memorizing each makam's scale independently.

Diatonic and chromatic perdeler

Attested Ottoman theorists, most notably Dimitrie Cantemir (Kantemiroğlu, 1673-1723) in his Kitabu Ilmi'l-Musiki, classified perdeler into two groups: diatonic (tamam, "whole" or "primary") and chromatic (nim, "half" or "secondary"). The diatonic perdeler — yegah, huseyni asiran, irak, rast, dügah, segah, cargah, neva, huseyni, evic, gerdaniye, muhayyer — formed the structural backbone of the system.

Attested Cantemir explained the perde system with demonstrations on the neck of a tanbur, using its fret positions as the physical reference. A key principle from this tradition: only diatonic perdeler can serve as goal tones — a melody's final cadence must rest on a diatonic perde, never a chromatic one.

Fixed theory, flexible practice

Established The perde table above presents the AEU system's theoretical positions — fixed, precise, mathematically defined. Real performance is more complex. Measured pitch-histogram studies, including Bozkurt, Yarman, Karaosmanoğlu, and Akkoç's 2009 comparison of multiple theoretical models against recorded performance data, demonstrate systematic divergence between the theoretical positions and where master musicians actually place their pitches.

Established The most discussed example is the second degree of Ussak: AEU theory locates it at either 5 commas (from the cesni-derived value) or 8 commas (from the segah perde position) above dügah. Measured performance clusters at neither value, instead falling somewhere in between — typically around 140-160 cents above the tonic, varying by performer, melodic direction, and expressive context.

Attested This gap between theory and practice is not a modern discovery. Historical sources document between 32 and 49 fret positions on the tanbur — far more than the AEU's 24 perdeler per octave. Rauf Yekta Bey (1871-1935), whose research laid the groundwork for the modern Turkish notation system, documented 49 pitch values for tanbur fretting. Ozan Yarman's 79-tone tuning model, developed in his 2008 doctoral dissertation, was explicitly designed to close this gap, providing enough pitch resolution to represent the "multifarious middle second intervals" that master musicians actually use.

Practice The practical takeaway: learn the theoretical perde positions as a framework, not as targets for exact reproduction. The named perdeler give you a shared vocabulary and a map of the pitch space. Within that space, the exact intonation of each perde is shaped by the makam you are performing, the cesni you are moving through, and the melodic direction of the phrase. This flexibility is not a deficiency in the system — it is the system working as intended. The mesk tradition (master-student oral transmission) teaches correct intonation by ear, not by theory alone.

Historical development

Attested The perde naming system evolved over centuries of Ottoman musical practice. The earliest systematic treatments appear in the edvar tradition — Ottoman music theory treatises named for the Arabic adwar ("cycles"). These treatises described pitch positions with reference to tanbur fret placements, classifying perdeler as tamam (primary) or nim (secondary).

Attested The modern system took shape in the early twentieth century through the work of Rauf Yekta Bey, who introduced a modified European staff notation with microtonal accidentals for the Istanbul Conservatory in the 1920s and 1930s. After Yekta's death, Hüseyin Sadettin Arel refined this work, and the resulting Arel-Ezgi-Uzdilek system formalized the 24 perdeler per octave that remain the official theoretical framework today — despite ongoing criticism that 24 positions cannot capture the full microtonal nuance of performed Turkish music.

Established The AEU system remains formally accepted by Turkish conservatories and TRT. No replacement has achieved universal adoption, though several alternatives have been proposed, and the tension between AEU's theoretical simplicity and performance reality is widely acknowledged in the academic literature.