ABSTRACT
It is worth beginning with the trite observation that although the domain of analysis is normally held to include features relating both to the production of music and to its reception, as an increasingly autonomous province of western academic musicology it has until recently concentrated almost exclusively upon unravelling the structures embedded in scores. It is generally accepted that the core of the tradition, the essential part that any proficient musician must master as a prerequisite to being accorded credibility as a classical performer, is made up of a set of pieces. The corpus of pieces constituting the radif is conventionally subdivided into twelve unequal segments, each one constituting a modal complex dominated by a particular pitch set. The generic term for the pieces that constitute the radif is gushe.
