Medieval Arab Music and Musicians: Three Translated Texts

220 Pages·2021·2.254 MB·English

by  Dwight F. Reynolds

Medieval Arab Music and Musicians
Brill Studies in
Middle Eastern Literatures
FORMERLY STUDIES IN ARABIC LITERATURE
Edited by
Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych (Georgetown University)
Ross Brann (Cornell University)
Franklin Lewis (University of Chicago)
volume 44
The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/bsme
Medieval Arab
Music and Musicians
Three Translated Texts
By
Dwight F. Reynolds
LEIDEN | BOSTON
Cover illustration: From a copy of Ṣafī al-Dīn al-Urmawīʾs Kitāb al-Adwār dated 1333, drawing of a lute
strung in five double courses. Oxford, Bodleian Library, Marsh 521, folio 157b.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Reynolds, Dwight Fletcher, 1956– author. | Abū al-Faraj
al-Iṣbahānī, 897 or 898–967. Kitāb al-aghānī. Selections. English.
| Ibn Ḥayyān, Abū Marwān Ḥayyān ibn Khalaf, 987 or 988–1076.
Muqtabas fī tārīkh al-Andalus. 2. Selections. English. | Ibn Sanāʼ
al-Mulk, Hibat Allāh ibn Jaʻfar, 1150 or 1151–1211 or 1212. Dār
al-ṭirāz fī ʻamal al-muwashshaḥāt. Selections. English.
Title: Medieval Arab music and musicians : three translated texts / by
Dwight F. Reynolds.
Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill, 2022. | Series: Brill studies in
Middle Eastern literatures, 1571–5183 ; vol. 44 | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021048930 (print) | LCCN 2021048931 (ebook) | ISBN
9789004501515 (hardback) | ISBN 9789004501546 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Music—Arab countries—500–1400—History and criticism. |
Music—Middle East—500–1400—History and criticism. |
Muwashshah—History and criticism. | Nadīm al-Mawṣilī, Ibrāhīm ibn
Māhān, 742 or 743–803 or 804. | Ziryāb, ʻAlī ibn Nāfiʻ, active 9th
century. | Musicians—Arab countries—Biography. | Musicians—Middle
East—Biography. | Abū al-Faraj al-Iṣbahānī, 897 or 898–967. Kitāb
al-aghānī. | Ibn Ḥayyān, Abū Marwān Ḥayyān ibn Khalaf, 987 or
988–1076. Muqtabas fī tārīkh al-Andalus. 2. | Ibn Sanāʼ al-Mulk,
Hibat Allāh ibn Jaʻfar, 1150 or 1151–1211 or 1212. Dār al-ṭirāz fī
ʻamal al-muwashshaḥāt.
Classification: LCC ML189 .R39 2022 (print) | LCC ML189 (ebook) | DDC
780.917/5927—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021048930
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021048931
Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface.
ISSN 1571-5183
ISBN 978-90-04-50151-5 (hardback)
ISBN 978-90-04-50154-6 (e-book)
Copyright 2022 by Dwight F. Reynolds. Published by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.
Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Hotei, Brill Schöningh, Brill Fink,
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Contents
Preface vii
Acknowledgements xi
part 1
The Biography of Ibrāhīm al-Mawṣilī
Introduction 3
The Biography of Ibrāhīm al-Mawṣilī
[Kitāb al-aghānī, Vol. V – 1964 rpt. of Dār al-Kutub Edition, pp. 154–258]
Ibrāhīm al-Mawṣilī’s Genealogy and Various Anecdotes about Him 13
part 2
The Biography of Ziryāb
Introduction 109
The Biography of ʿAlī ibn Nāfiʿ, Known as Ziryāb
[Ibn Hayyān, Kitāb al-muqtabis: al-Sifr al-Thānī (al-Riyāḍ: 2003),
pp. 307–335]
On Singing: Information about Ziryāb, the Greatest Singer of the Land
of al-Andalus 115
part 3
Ibn Sanāʾ al-Mulk’s Dār al-Ṭirāz
Introduction 155
Contents of Dār al-Ṭirāz fī ʿAmal al-Muwashshaḥāt
[The House of Brocade on the Composition of Muwashshaḥāt] 173
vi Contents
The House of Brocade on the Composition of Muwashshaḥāt
[Dār al-ṭirāz fī ʿamal al-muwashshaḥāt] by Ibn Sanāʾ al-Mulk
(c. 1155–1212) 174
Bibliography 197
Index 202
Preface
Medieval Arabic literature is remarkably rich when it comes to information
about music. Not only are there detailed texts about music theory, musical
instruments, biographies of musicians, collections of song lyrics, and treatises
by religious scholars about the licit or illicit nature of listening to music (Ar.
samāʿ), but descriptions of musical performances, anecdotes about singers and
musicians, accounts of rivalries among super-star performers, descriptions of
their clothing, the rewards they received when they pleased their patrons and
the punishments meted out when they displeased them, the buying and sell-
ing of musically trained slaves, and an astonishing amount of detail about the
day-to-day life of musicians are all found scattered throughout works of his-
tory, compilations of edifying information (adab works), geographical works,
and many other genres of writing. As Eckhard Neubauer has noted, “Music
seems nearly omnipresent in Arabic literature.”1
Sadly, of course, although we have a great deal of information about medi-
eval Arab music, we do not have the music itself or even musical notations,
other than a very few short examples. None of the Arabic textual sources from
the 8th to 13th centuries offer enough detail to even attempt a re-creation of
the music of Mecca, Medina, Damascus, Baghdad, Cordoba or other musical
centers during their heyday. On the other hand, what does survive is one of the
richest records of early medieval musical life anywhere in the world.
This volume includes complete English translations of three of the most
important medieval Arabic texts about music and musicians, each with its own
introduction and explanatory annotations. These texts are significant in their
own right, but together they also represent three of the most important texts
for the study of the music of medieval Muslim Spain, al-Andalus.2 The first text
is the biography of the great musician Ibrāhīm al-Mawṣilī (742–804 CE) found
in the tenth-century compendium of Arab music, Abū l-Faraj al-Iṣbahānī’s
Kitāb al-Aghānī.3 Though portions of this biography have been excerpted by
Eckhard Neubauer, and small snippets from this text are frequently cited by
1 Eckhard Neubauer, “Arabic Writings on Music: Eighth to Nineteenth Centuries,” in The
Garland Encyclopedia of World Music, Volume 6: The Middle East, eds. Virginia Danielson,
Scott Marcus, and Dwight F. Reynolds (New York/London: Routledge 2002): 363–86, at p. 363.
2 As such they serve as a supplement to Dwight F. Reynolds, The Musical Heritage of al-Andalus
(London: Routledge/Taylor & Francis, 2021).
3 Abū l-Faraj al-Iṣbahānī, Kitāb al-aghānī, Vols. I–XVI (Cairo: Dār al-Kutub, 1927–1961);
Vols. XVII–XXIV (Cairo: al-Hayʾa al-Miṣriyya al-ʿĀmma li-l-Taʾ līf wa-l-Nashr, 1970–74). All ref-
erences to KA in this volume are to this Cairo edition.
viii Preface
other authors, the complete text has never been translated into any language.4
In fact, strangely enough, it appears that the only biography of a musician in
KA ever to have been translated in its entirety is that of the singer Maʿbad,
translated into Latin by J. Kosegarten in 1840.5 Several of the biographies of
poets from KA were translated in the nineteenth century, but the musicians’
biographies have not attracted the same amount of attention from western
scholars.6
Ibrāhīm al-Mawṣilī was one of the central figures in the ʿAbbasid court of
Baghdad and was widely considered the greatest musician of his time. His
biography unfolds in a series of anecdotes, each carefully attributed to its oral
or written sources. In some cases, the compiler has chosen to include conflict-
ing accounts of key events or information, such as the great musician’s name,
genealogy, childhood, and so forth, leaving the reader to judge which report
should be deemed closest to the truth. One great advantage, therefore, of pro-
viding a complete translation is that it allows modern readers to observe the
compiler ‘at work,’ so to speak, and also preserves the multivocality of the origi-
nal text.7 Modern scholars, Arabs and Westerners alike, have usually eliminated
the scholarly apparatus from the original text (i.e., the ‘chain of transmission,’
Ar. isnād, that prefaces each section) and selected only choice tidbits from the
wealth of material it contains. This provides many short, readable, fascinating
anecdotes, but erases the structure of the whole.
Ibrāhīm’s life was full of adventures, beginning in his youth when he runs
away from home to avoid the beatings his uncles gave him for wanting to
study music and travels to various places seeking to learn songs and singing
techniques, after which he is conscripted – somewhat against his will – into
the entourage first of an Arab noble and then that of the caliph. At one point
he is whipped and thrown into prison for carousing with the young sons of
the caliph, later he learns some songs from Satan himself, and learns others
from jinn who appear to him in the form of talking cats. Along the way, the
text is filled with remarkable detail about musical performances in the ʿAb-
basid court, rivalries among musicians, negotiations over the prices of female
slave singers, and even an account of Ibrāhīm’s household finances and the
operation of his kitchen. Although the focus of this text is the life of Ibrāhīm
al-Mawṣilī, it provides a remarkably detailed sense of musical life in the early
4 Eckhard Neubauer, Musiker am Hof der Frühen ʿAbbāsiden, Inaug. Dissertation (Frankfurt am
Main, 1965).
5 Joannis Gothofredo Ludovico Kosegarten, Alii Ispanhanensis liber cantinelarum magnus
(Greifswald, 1840).
6 See Hilary Kilpatrick, Making the Great Book of Songs (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003): 1–2.
7 See Kilpatrick, Making the Great Book of Songs, for an analysis of the technique al-Iṣbahānī
used in compiling anecdotes into biographical and historical entries.
Preface ix
ʿAbbasid court and also offers, in miniature, a portrait of the riches contained
in KA as a whole.
Ibrāhīm al-Mawṣilī and his equally famous son, Isḥāq al-Mawṣilī, were the
teachers of the figure featured in the second selection in this volume, the great
singer Ziryāb, who emigrated from Baghdad to al-Andalus in the ninth century.
The text translated here is the earliest full biographical account, which appears
in Ibn Ḥayyān’s eleventh-century Kitāb al-Muqtabis [The Quoter].8 An abridged
version of this text was penned by the seventeenth-century scholar al-Maqqarī
in his history of Muslim Spain, Nafḥ al-ṭīb min ghuṣn al-Andalus al-raṭīb [The
Scented Breeze from the Tender Branch of al-Andalus], which he compiled in
Cairo for an eastern readership.9 Through a twist of fate, al-Maqqarī’s text came
to the attention of Western scholars in the early nineteenth century, some
150 years before the publication of Ibn Ḥayyān’s text, upon which it was based.
The portion of the manuscript of Ibn Ḥayyān’s work that includes the biography
of Ziryāb was first published in facsimile (1999), and has in recent years appeared
in an edited Arabic edition (2003) and in a Spanish translation (2001).10
As I have argued in several publications, Ibn Ḥayyān’s original text offers
a rather different account of this great musician’s life.11 Given that Ziryāb is
without doubt the single most famous musician of al-Andalus, and that his
legendary presence colors almost everything that has ever been written about
Andalusi music, I hope that a translation of this text will be a contribution not
only to the history of medieval Iberia, but also to that of medieval Arab and
European music.
The third and final text included here is the single most important medi-
eval Arabic text on the most famous song genre to emerge from al-Andalus,
the muwashshaḥ. The treatise, titled Dār al-Ṭirāz fī ʿamal al-muwashshaḥāt
[The House of Brocade on the Composition of Muwashshaḥāt], was written
in Egypt in the twelfth century by Ibn Sanāʾ al-Mulk (c. 1155–1212), the text
has appeared in two Arabic editions and was translated into Spanish in a 1962
8 Ibn Ḥayyān, al-Sifr al-thānī min kitāb al-Muqtabis, ed. Maḥmūd ʿAlī Makkī (Riyāḍ: Markaz
al-Malik Fayṣal li-l-buḥūth wa-l-dirasāt al-islamiyya, 2003).
9 al-Maqqarī, Analectes sur l’Histoire et la Littérature des Arabes d’Espagne, par al-Makkari,
ed. R. Dozy, 2 vols. (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1855–61), rpt. Amsterdam: Oriental Press, 1967. This
edition has been superseded, however, by Nafḥ al-ṭīb min ghuṣn al-Andalus al-raṭīb, ed.
Iḥsān ʿAbbās, 8 vols. (Beirut: Dār Ṣādir, 1968).
10 Muqtabis II: anales de los Emires de Córdoba Alhaquem I 180–206 H, facsimile edition, ed.
Joaquín Vallvé Bermejo (Madrid: Real Academia de la Historia, 1999); Spanish trs., Crónica
de los emires Alḥakam I y ʿAbdarraḥmān II entre los años 796 y 847 [Almuqtabis II-1], tr.
Maḥmoud ʿAlī Makkī and Federico Corriente (Zaragoza: Instituto de Estudios Islámicos y
del Oriente Próximo, 2001); Arabic edition, see footnote 8 above.
11 Dwight F. Reynolds, “Al-Maqqarī’s Ziryāb: The Making of a Myth,” Middle Eastern Litera-
tures, Vol. 11, no. 2 (2008): 155–168, and Musical Heritage, pp. 59–85.