and is related to the frequent role of music as dance accompaniment. Thus in the following example, a dance tune from Afghan Turkistan, sections A and B are similar in their overall melodic structure and also in the small units of three or four notes on which they are built. The sequence ABAB and so on, is repeated throughout the dance.vocal music may have greater rhythmic flexibility and melodic range, but in form it is almost always subordinated to the structure of the song text. Quatrains such as the rubai and charbaitai are the most prominent village verse forms, with the exception of the lundai, a couplet used by the nomadic Pashtuns of Afghanistan. In the urban oases, couplet forms based on the classical Persian ghazal, a lyric poem of 6 to 15 couplets, are more common.The generally negative attitude of Islām (Islamic arts) toward music has led in Afghanistan to strictures against musical performance and to extremely low social status for musicians. Music is heard mainly in male-dominated public teahouses or at private celebrations such as weddings and circumcisions. Women may have their own musical genres within their enclosures; in this context the strong tradition of women's music in the Fergana Valley of Uzbekistan (Uzbek) is noteworthy.Within this general picture there is enormous diversity. The Uzbeks (a Turkic people) and Tajiks (Tajik) (an Iranian group), who live side by side across northern Afghanistan and southern Turkistan, tend to share many musical traits and instruments. In contrast, most groups, such as the Pashtuns, Ḥazāras, and Baluchs of Afghanistan and Pakistan or, in the extreme, the isolated mountain peoples of Nūristān (Nūrestān) in Afghanistan and of the Pamirs in Tajikistan and Afghanistan, have maintained distinctive musical styles and, in some cases, unique musical instruments. The Nūristāni vaji, an arched (arched harp) harp (having a bow-shaped body with no forepillar), is a striking case of the possible survival of an instrument type on the margins of a now disintegrated culture area; there are no other harp traditions today between the Caucasus and Burma, although iconographic evidence indicates that in ancient times harps were widespread in Central Asia, the Middle East, and India. The music of the Ḥazāras (Ḥazāra) includes vocal effects produced by striking the throat while singing, causing a break in the sound, and Baluchi (Balochi language) music also features a broken-voice style.Classical musicIn contrast to the folk music styles just described, the court-derived classical style of Bukhara and Samarkand represents a highly systematic, theoretically grounded, cosmopolitan musical tradition. Lying along the medieval Silk Road, the Turkistani oases were open to musical cross-currents. Today's musical roots may reach back to the period in which urban Central Asian music was in vogue at T'ang dynasty (Tang dynasty) courts in China (618–907). The movement of musical instruments across the caravan trail from the Middle East to China via Central Asia is well documented since early times. Over the centuries, town musicians evolved an urban style patronized by the local courts, notably under Timur (Tamerlane) and his descendants (c. 1350–1500) in Herāt (now in Afghanistan) and Samarkand. The degree of musical eclecticism characteristic of the era is illustrated by a court historian's description of the festivities of Timur's son:Golden-tongued singers and sweet-sounding musicians played and sang to motives [melodic figures] in Persian style, to Arab melodies according to Turkish practice and with Mongol voices, following Chinese laws of singing and Altai meters.By the 17th century the court style had been codified into sets of nonimprovised suites of instrumental and vocal pieces using poetic texts in classical Persian and local court Turkish (Chaghatai). In Bukhara this collection of suites was known as the Shashmaqām, or six maqāms (suites), with each maqām (an Arabic term, but changed in meaning) set in one of the classical Persian musical modes. (The Persian modes are melodic framewor