The sound of mugham instantly evokes the hot, sandy shores of the Caspian. With its plaintive vocals and texts of love, loss and longing, it’s almost impossible to hear the strains of this ancient art without conjuring images of traveling merchants relaxing in the Karvansarai.

But this is more than just a colourful piece of local culture. In its richness and complexity this music rivals anything in the Western classical tradition, going far beyond the raucous dances or straightforward lyricism normally associated with folk music. Built around a system of seven modes, each of which evoke a certain emotion or mood, mugham inhabits a sound world as sophisticated and expressive as anything conjured by the diatonic structures of classical music. It is music of great emotional depth and huge rhythmic complexity and despite usually being played by small forces it can often have the dramatic sweep of a cinema score.

The seven modes of mugham — Rast, Shur, Segah, Shushtar, Bayaty-Shiraz, Chahargah and Humayan — each explore distinctive emotional states. Rast, perhaps the most prominent, is associated with courage and excitement and is often heard in music associated with the Novruz festival around the time of the Vernal Equinox. Shur, by contrast, is known for its lyrical, melancholy tones. Unlike western classical music, which relies heavily on harmony to convey its emotional impact, mugham is almost entirely based on melody and rhythm. That transforms the musical palette – while western ears are accustomed to music built around a 12-note scale, mugham explores microtones that allow up to 84 notes within an octave. While initially this can be disconcerting for the first-time listener, it also allows for great expression.
The roots of mugham lie in an era when Islam was the dominant social force in Azerbaijan, and that has a huge impact on the early development of this music. Much of early mugham was devotional music – in its secular form it tended to be used for lullabies – and even today its texts deal as much with the love between god and man as with love between people. Its religious origins also make it a fascinating counterpoint to the devotional music of Christian Europe, something that this performance explores in partnership with the Floreat Cantus choir.

That kind of creative cross-fertilization also chimes with mugham’s past and contemporary forms. Mugham has always been a style of music that has brought together different cultures; its name has links to Arabic, its sound is a refinement of an ancient Persian form and its musical structure carries a strong echo of Indian raga. In modern times it has been adapted into operatic forms, and harnessed to Europop rhythms, broadening and refreshing its audience. Fittingly, then, it was chosen by NASA to form part of a ‘Welcome to Earth’ disc sent into space with the Voyager probes launched in 1977. In September 2013 it was confirmed that Voyager I had travelled more than 12 billion miles to become the first manmade object to leave our solar system and enter interstellar space, taking its mugham with it.

Mugham also finds itself at the forefront of Azerbaijan’s on-going cultural revival. One of the first major cultural projects in the transformation of Baku’s cityscape from dreary post-Soviet concrete into vibrant contemporary design was the Mugam Evi — the House of Mugham. An ambitious structure shaped like a traditional musical instrument, the tar, houses a concert hall and exhibition space devoted to mugham.