Reference
Music
5 things: Played and sung.
AhidousCommunal dance of the Amazigh villages of the Middle Atlas and the eastern High Atlas, in which men and women dance together and two groups sing the verses in turn. The only instrument is the frame drum, called allun or bendir.Al-AlaClassical music with schools in Fez and Tetouan, arranged in eleven suites (nubas), whose poems, modes and rhythms were written down by al-Haïk of Tetouan at the end of the 18th century. That it arose in al-Andalus is considered likely but is scarcely documented.ChaabiUmbrella term for several kinds of Moroccan popular music that combine rural and urban traditions and are sung in Moroccan Arabic. It began as street music in squares and markets; today it is played in cafés and at weddings.MalhunSung poetry in colloquial Arabic, which arose in the Tafilalet in south-eastern Morocco and in the old cities was cultivated above all by the craft guilds. Since 2023 malhun has been on the UNESCO list of intangible cultural heritage.RaïPopular song of the Maghreb which, since the early 1980s, has spread with synthesisers and new rhythms from its home area into the big cities and as far as Paris. In Morocco, Oujda is the city of raï: it hosts the raï festival of the Oriental region.