What is Moroccan music — the main genres?

Moroccan music is wonderfully layered, and I love that you can trace the whole history of the country through its sounds. The first tradition every visitor encounters is Gnawa — hypnotic, bass-heavy trance music with deep West African roots, brought north by enslaved peoples and Sufi brotherhoods. The hallmark instruments are the guembri (a three-stringed bass lute), iron qraqeb castanets and call-and-response chant, all building toward a healing, almost ecstatic trance. The Gnaoua festival in Essaouira is where I send music-lovers to feel it at full power.

At the other, more refined end sits Andalusian classical music — the courtly orchestral suites called nubas that came with Muslims and Jews expelled from medieval Spain. It is elegant, melancholic and structured, played on oud, violin and qanun, and you hear it in Fes, the spiritual home of the tradition. Alongside it lives Sufi devotional music: the chanting and dhikr of the religious brotherhoods, meant to draw the listener toward the divine rather than to entertain.

Then there is the music of everyday life. Chaabi is the popular sound of weddings, cafés and street celebrations — earthy, danceable, with darbuka drums, and it has modern electric offshoots blaring from every taxi. And running underneath all of it are the Amazigh (Berber) traditions: the communal ahidous and ahwach of the Atlas villages, where whole communities form lines and circles, drumming on the bendir frame drum and singing antiphonal poetry under the stars. These are not performances; they are the village itself.

When I plan trips for music-curious travellers, I try to layer these on purpose — a Gnawa night in Marrakech, an Andalusian recital in a Fes riad, an ahidous in a Berber village in the High Atlas. You come away realising Moroccan music is a map: African, Arab, Andalusian, Amazigh and Sufi strands braided together. Hearing them live, with the drums in your chest, teaches you more about the country than any museum.