Rami Al-Rajab

Rami Al-Rajab is an Iraqi-German composer, music theorist, educator, and researcher with a lifelong connection to Arabic music and the maqam tradition.

His work brings together practical musicianship, composition, teaching, and academic research, with a particular focus on Arabic maqam theory, microtonality, quarter-tone systems, and the relationship between Arabic and Western musical thinking.

His 2014 dissertation, The Foundation of Harmonizing Arabic Music Scales which Include Quarter-Tones (Rast Scale and Bayat scale as example), forms part of his long-term research into Arabic scales, quarter-tone structures and their theoretical organization.

Maqam Academy grew from his wish to make this knowledge more accessible to musicians, students, composers, teachers, professors and researchers around the world. Rather than presenting maqamat simply as collections of notes, his aim is to help learners understand the musical logic behind them: their intervals, ajnas, tuning, ascending and descending forms, relationships, modulations, and the way maqam functions as a musical language.

His original Maqam Academy work also includes the original theoretical framework Rules of Related Maqamat (RoRM) © Maqam Academy and Keys X-Ray — a Maqam Academy visualization concept independently developed by Rami Al-Rajab, originating from an idea conceived in 2003.

Coming from an Iraqi musical family, Rami also sees Maqam Academy as a way of preserving and passing forward a deeply personal musical heritage.

The project is dedicated to his grandfather, Hashim Al-Rajab, his father, Bahir Al-Rajab, and his family, in gratitude for the knowledge, tradition, and love of music passed from one generation to the next.

Through Maqam Academy, Rami hopes to build a bridge between authentic Iraqi and Arabic musical traditions and musicians throughout the world, encouraging new generations to study, perform, teach, compose with, and further explore the extraordinary world of maqam and microtonal music.