Home› Middle East & Caucasus›Middle East & Anatolia›Iraq
Music of Iraq
Maqam-based art music, Turkish makam and aşık bards, Persian dastgah and radif, Arabic tarab, Sufi zikr, Kurdish dengbêj and Yemeni oud song.
Sung and searched in Arabic, Sorani Kurdish. The YouTube button above can run your search in that language.
A brief history
History
In 1929, archaeologists led by the British archaeologist Leonard Woolley, representing a joint expedition of the British Museum and the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, discovered the Lyres of Ur or Harps of Ur, which are considered to be the world's second oldest surviving stringed instruments when excavating the Royal Cemetery of Ur between from 1922 and 1934. They discovered pieces of three lyres and one harp in Ur, located in what was Ancient Mesopotamia, modern day Iraq. They are over 4,500 years old, from ancient Mesopotamia during the Early Dynastic III Period (2550–2450 BC). The decorations on the lyres are fine examples of the court art of Mesopotamia of the period.
Popular music
Modern era
In 1936, Iraq Radio was established by two of Iraq's most prominent performers and composers, the Kuwaiti-born Iraqi Jewish musicians, Saleh and Daoud al-Kuwaity with an ensemble, with the exception of the percussion player. The nightclubs of Baghdad also featured almost entirely Jewish musicians. At these nightclubs, ensembles consisted of oud, qanun and two percussionists while the same format with ney and cello were used on the radio. One of the reasons for the predominance of Jewish instrumentalists in early 20th century Iraqi music was a prominent school for blind Jewish children, which was founded in the late 1920s by the great qanunji ("qanun player") Joseph Hawthorne (Yusef Za'arur) (Hebrew: דנדהי ללוואלד-יוסף זערור Arabic: يوسف زعرور). The most famous singer of the 1930s–1940s was perhaps the Iraqi Jewish singer Salima Pasha. The respect and adoration for Pasha were unusual at the time, since public performance by women was considered shameful and most female singers were recruited from brothels.
Read the full article: Music of Iraq Text under CC BY-SA 4.0
Playing now
What Iraq is listening to in 2026
Articles
No articles for Iraq yet. Save a Markdown file to content/articles/ with
country: Iraq in its front matter.
Live radio
Radio from Iraq
Music only, no news or talk. Stations that play the local tradition come first, then the most listened. They play in the corner of the page.
Station directory by Radio Browser Streams come from each station's own server.