The first
task in the research was to find ancient relatives of the Hungarians. There
are many of them. One of the closest relative are the Uighur people. Uighur
people consider the Hungarians also as ancient relatives of them. Though the
Uighur took the Islam religion they somehow managed to reserve the main properties
their ancient music. When listening to the Uighur music we can discover astonishing
similarities between Hungarian folk, Arabic traditional and maqam and Chinese
music. Their music has changed quite a lot in the last centuries, but the old
maqam form is still alive. Uighur use the term muqam to mean a "suite of
compositions" or in some cases to mean "classical music". Even
if there is modal coherency between different pieces in each suite, modulations
occur as the suite unfolds completely obscuring the initial mode, that is why
the Uighur muqams sound so organic. For the Uighur, the term muqam implies that
it has a muqam heading (bash), and a suite of pieces whose structure correspond
to certain modal and rhythmical requirements, which must follow the introduction.