Aleppo is Syria's Tarab Music Capital

A person in traditional Syrian clothing plays a string instrument

Tarab is a thousand-year-old genre of traditional Arab music that has emotional and poetic lyrics.

Its name is also a verb which means a heightened sense of emotion in Arabic and describes the intense feeling of connection between the listener and performer. That almost trance-like state comes from hearing vocalists sing verse-repeating muwashahshat poems for hours.  

The poems consist of three-line stanzas with a recurring rhyme, introduced at the beginning. They are performed to the sounds of several instruments—a large zither called a qanun that has a trapezoidal soundboard, a pear-shaped Arab lute called an oud, a flute called a ney that has been played continually for 5,000 years, and a rebab, the world’s oldest bowed instrument.

Though heard throughout the Middle East, tarab is central to daily life in Aleppo, Syria, known as the “Mother of Tarab.” In fact, the city’s tarab aficionados—sammi’aare vital to the success of any artist.  

Performances take place at different venues and usually begin with a nostalgic poem about the city. In a high-pitched chant, the vocalists, both men and women, then sing joyful and sad muwashahshat poems in Aleppine dialect. People have described the experience as, both, cathartic and hypnotic. 

While deeply woven into Syrian culture, this genre of music is going global as Syrians introduce tarab abroad.

Here’s a song by the Syrian tarab band Musiqana, which is based in Berlin.