ABSTRACT
The process of composing a sawt usually began with the selection of a small number of verses from an already existing poem. The texts of sawt songs were remarkably short, usually no more than two to four verses, and only rarely as long as six. This chapter aims to review the related question primarily from a musical point of view, and to make the argument that studying muwashshah/zajal texts without taking into account the musical dimensions of this tradition may inadvertently exclude some of the most critical and distinctive features of the genre. The early muwashshah compositions also broke with the previous poetic tradition in another fascinating way. Medieval Arabic sources are very clear that the distinction between the muwashshah and the zajal was one of linguistic register: the muwashshah was composed in classical Arabic and the zajal was composed in colloquial Andalusi dialect.
