Historically, Yemen has been the most populous region of the Arabian Peninsula, and an important area of cultural continuity. Geographically, it occupies a high plateau facing Ethiopia across the Red Sea, and its ports along the Indian Ocean maintained sea contact with India and Indonesia for many centuries. Yemen exported frankincense and coffee to the East by sea and to the West by Camel caravans, exports whose prominence has in the past century been replaced by oil. The division between North and South Yemen (Aden) was the result of a boundary established in 1904 between two occupying forces – the Ottoman Empire in the North and the British in the South, and after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1918 North Yemen closed its doors to the outside world. Despite ideological differences, the two nations reunited in the 90s, drawn together by ancient cultural bonds.
The melodies, meters and forms of Yemeni music are part of the same general system that links all the traditional art musics of the Middle East, although until the 1960s, it developed in relative isolation from the intellectual centers of Cairo, Beirut, and Damascus. Poetry and vocal expression has always been central to the development of Arabic music, but Yemen has retained the ancient emphasis on poetry as the foundation of the music, and the role of instrumental accompaniment as supportive to the text, which included both classical Arabic poetry as well as that of Yemeni poets. Vocal music predominated particularly in the northern highlands where musical instruments have been largely discouraged and, in some periods of the Yemen's history even outlawed by ruling imams, who considered them licentious. Thus, unlike other branches of Arabic music, traditional Yemeni music has not developed an ensemble style or an independent instrumental repertory.
Historically, the professional roles for musicians included unaccompanied chanters, or solo singers who accompanied themselves on the oud, and sometimes, percussion instruments that highlighted the rhythms in subtly expressive ways. The interpreter of the most formal of the sung poetry and is the nashad. The nashad sings not in the melismatic vocal style which one associates with the Middle East, but in a sustained and high-pitched voice, often in a responsorial manner, with chorus (or several choruses) answering in alternating and changing refrains, accommodating melodic variation and incorporating group participation. Many variants on the vocal solo style, which is closely linked to the music of the early Arabic Empire, still exist in Yemen, with musical forms and especially, rhythmic fluidity and variety of metrical patterns deriving directly from poetic language. The soloist musicians presided over funerals, weddings, life-cycle events and private engagements. The Yemeni Ministry of Information and Culture has only in the past several decades begun to cultivate orchestral musicians, and in some cases, to create government positions for them.
Beyond the roles of professional musicians, Yemen has an ancient tradition of amateur folk singing that has typically been performed at the home, in the early evening hours, when household members would gather in a window-lined room at the top of the house to chew ghat (a mild narcotic) and to perform a sung poetry called homayni, a tradition that dates back to the 14th century, in which poetry is aligned with specific melodic forms and meters. In support of the sung poetic traditions of Yemen, UNESCO proclaimed the songs of Sana'a (Yemen's Capital), called al-Ghina al-San'ani, a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity on November 2003. But all over Yemen, there are different poetic-musical genres that accompany a variety of settings such as large tribal meetings, wedding celebrations, or more intimate social gatherings, and hymns of praise to the prophet at religious occasions.
Despite the predominance of vocal music, instruments, especially percussion, are prevalent in the north, with frame drums providing accompaniment to religious singing in many parts of Yemen. In the coastal areas, a large variety of percussion instruments have been in the past used by drummers, who hired out their services as percussion ensembles to 'drum' the boats ashore. The mizmar, a double reed instrument, and the baurazyan, a rare type of trumpet, are sometimes brought out for ceremonial occasions. Flutes may be played solo or in flute ensembles. A variety of lyres are used to accompany love and healing songs. The qambus, a skin-covered lute which, along with a copper plate and a drum, accompanied the sung poetry of the urban art music, was in particular a target of suppression. From the 1930s the qambus gradually gave way to the oud, the standard lyre of the Arab world, and qambus players are now virtually non-existent.
While colloquial poetry sung to the accompaniment of the oud might be considered a type of a Yemeni classical tradition, it is by no means a static one, and present day poets and musicians are constantly enlarging the repertoire with new songs. And although the capital, Sana'a, has long been central to the development of this tradition, it has also absorbed melodies and rhythms from all over Yemen. Following many years of isolation from the outside world in the Northern republic, the music is now available to nearly everyone in the country through radio, television, and distribution of cassettes, and a number of artists have pursued formal music training abroad, especially in Cairo. One such example is singer and oud player Ahmad Fathi, who fuses traditional Yemenite folk music with orchestral arrangements. Fathi has become an international star and his popularity extends into Egypt and the Gulf countries. Along with Fathi, other artists and poets known to have modernized Yemenite folklore creatively and to popularize it beyond the country's borders include Faisal Alawi, Fadl Kuraidi, Najib Saeed Thabet, Shayf al-Khaledi and Osama al Attar.—Nili Belkind
