Usul
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- This article discusses usul in music. Usul is also the secret tribal name of Paul Atreides (Muad'Dib) in Frank Herbert's Dune science fiction novel series.
In
Ottoman and
Turkish music theory, the term
usul denotes a
rhythmic pattern that helps shape the framework of a composition. An
usul can be as short as two
beats or as long as 120 beats. The term
usul has often been translated as "
meter", but
usul and meter are not exactly the same thing. Both of them are defined by a (repeating) rhythmic pattern that with a more or less complex inner structure of beats of differentiated duration and weight. However, in contrast to meters, the definition of an
usul always includes a fixed, performable rhythmic pattern that can be played on
drums or just by striking one's
knees with the
hands. This pattern has a standard pronounceable vocables built from combinations of the syllables
düm,
dü-üm,
tek,
tekkyaa,
teke,
te-ek, where düm, dü-üm indicate a strong low beat of single or double duration, and tek, tekkya, teke, te-ek indicate various combinations of light beats of half, single or double duration. Another difference of
usul from meter is that whereas short
usuls are almost identical to western types of meters (2/4, 3/4, 4/4, 6/4 etc) in their function, the longer types of
usuls (28/4, 32/4, 120/4) are compound metric structures that underly longer sections of entire compositions, and are thus rhythmic frameworks rather than meters.
The usul rhythmic mode is counterpart to makam melodic mode. The parallel system to usul in Indian music is tala.
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