Colophon

Structure

The site is laid out in the four parts of the Symphony of Maqams, in the order and with the descriptions we gave them in 2004: the monadic meditation on Nasri Ushshoq; the expectation of Bebokcha; the Hymn of Love that overcomes darkness; and the return of the first theme “with the new quality of the wisdom of life”.

Text

The English is written from our own English pages of about 2004, recovered from the Internet Archive, together with Russian and Tajik reference sources. Quotations are shown as quotations. Where the 2004 text has a slip of the typewriter it has been set right without comment, and nothing has been reworded.

Names and spellings

Tajik and Persian names appear in the forms the Foundation itself used, which are not always the forms used by the encyclopedias. Muqaddaskhon and Mucaddaskhan are the same man; Komde and Madan and Komde va Madan are the same opera. This site writes maqam and shashmaqom; inside a quotation the source’s own spelling stands, so maqom, makom and Shashmakom also appear. The composer’s name in Tajik is Зиёдулло Шаҳидӣ, in Russian Зиядулло Мукадасович Шахиди, in Persian زیادالله شهیدی.

Type

Set in Cinzel and Karla for English, Forum and IBM Plex Sans for Tajik, IBM Plex Mono for measured facts, and Amiri for Arabic script. All six are open-source and served from this site, not from anyone else’s.

Predecessors

Our first English website was built around 2001 and revised in 2004. Its credits name David Hamilton Clark as webmaster and Mansur Numanov as designer. Without their pages there would be nothing in English to rebuild from, and much of this site is still, word for word, theirs.

Images and recordings

Ten photographs and twenty-eight audio clips were recovered from the same archived site. The audio we published ourselves, as seventeen-second samples, and it appears here as it did then. Rights in the underlying works and in the sound recordings are held separately, and no full-length recording is hosted here.