Marcel Camprubí
Arabic music theory from the Abbasid period (750–1258) is a rich and sophisticated tradition that incorporates ancient Greek thought into autochthonous Arabic musical theorization and practice. Extant Arabic theoretical writings on music, which survive from the 9th century onwards, were penned by theorists mainly active in Baghdad. [1] Al-Fārābī (d. 950), author of the mighty Great Book on Music and two smaller works on rhythm, is arguably the most prominent theorist from the period.[2]
The last decade has been rightly characterized as a silver age in Arabic manuscript studies. Numerous studies have investigated the history of reading practices and knowledge transmission in the Arabic context through close scrutiny of details and paratextual information in handwritten sources.[3] The increasing digitization of Arabic manuscripts in European, North American, and Middle Eastern collections has undoubtably contributed to this trend. A correlative phenomenon has been the revalorization of the historische Hilfswissenschaften, the technical disciplines such as paleography employed to make historical evidence legible and thus, meaningful. This arsenal of techniques, once dismissed as ancillary due to being applied with naïve positivism, is being reclaimed as central to the historical project.[4]
My research focuses on the use of notation in Arabic musico-theoretical works, an area that is not well served by the existing printed materials.[5] Due to silent editorial interventions, modern editions and translations of early Abbasid writings on music present notated examples through means other than those appearing in the manuscripts. My contribution here draws attention to the kind of insights that can be gleaned when engaging with the manuscripts themselves.
Greek Notation in al-Fārābī’s Great Book on Music?
Jamāʿa (جَماعة), a note collection or “scale,” is one of the topics that al-Fārābī addresses in the last section of his Great Book on Music. Twelve such collections, employing different genres of tetrachords within the framework of a double octave, known today as the Greater Perfect System, are visually presented in twelve double tables: the first table lists the fifteen notes of each collection and its particular intervallic configuration; the second indicates the consonances and dissonances among the pitches of the collection.[6]
While there is much to be said about this passage of the Great Book, I want to focus on a detail that appears in just one of the extant manuscripts of al-Fārābī’s magnum opus: Istanbul, Köprülü Kütüphanesi, ms. 953; the surviving copy with the most reliable readings.[7] I present here the first table for the first jamāʿa or collection in the manuscript (Figure 1) alongside a rendering in English (Figure 2).
Al-Fārābī’s jamāʿa tables work as follows: the first column consists of letters from the Arabic Abjad alphabet assigned to each note or scale degree; the second gives the name of such notes; the fourth numerically represents the pitches in the collection; and the fifth displays the intervallic relationships between consecutive notes as ratios. What distinguishes manuscript Köprülü’s rendering from that of other copies of the Great Book is the third column, featuring what appear to be modified letters from the Greek alphabet.
These signs in al-Fārābī’s Great Book resemble the notation signs of vocal music employed in the treatises of Greek theorists such as Alypius, Aristides Quintilianus, Gaudentius, and Bacchius (3rd and 4th century CE).[8] A tentative interpretation of the signs in al-Fārābī’s table may be as follows: the signs in rows 4–11 appear as a reversed psi (ψ), chi (Χ), pi (Π), reversed phi (φ), sigma (Σ), omega (ω), mu (μ), and reversed tau (Τ); in row 2 a delta (δ); rows 14–15 could be a modified omicron (ο) and epsilon (Ε). Yet, while a few individual signs can be matched to those appearing in Greek sources, al-Fārābī’s set of signs does not coincide with the ones featured in Greek notation tables. (See Figure 3 for an illustration of such tables).
Despite the elusive relationship between al-Fārābī’s and Greek notation tables, Gaudentius’ Harmonic Introduction (῾Αρμονικὲ εἰσαγωγἐ) suggests that this is a possibility worth entertaining. Al-Fārābī’s numerical representation of pitches—column 4 in the table (see Figure 1 and 2)—has a precedent in Chapter 15 of Harmonic Introduction, in which Gaudentius describes this very same procedure to introduce two diagrams that are unfortunately absent in the extant manuscripts.[9]
Yet, divergences between Gaudentius and al-Fārābī might outweigh their ostensible similarities. Gaudentius, in the section of his Harmonic Introduction devoted to ancient Greek musical notation, argues that there cannot be a single notation sign for each note, i. e. proslambanomenos, hypate hypaton, etc. Given that different tetrachordal configurations produce dissimilar pitches, one requires a unique sign to specifically represent each of them.[10] Yet, what we find in al-Fārābī’s Great Book is precisely the opposite: all the jamāʿa tables in the Köprülü manuscript present the same identical set of signs, no matter what kind of tetrachord is employed. Therefore, in al-Fārābī’s tables these signs do not represent pitches, but rather act as a shorthand for notes as scale degrees, a function that the Arabic letters in column 1 already fulfill.
The letter-like signs in al-Fārābī’s Great Book appear as a puzzling vestige of his Greek sources. Yet, precisely identifying and substantiating al-Fārābī’s intellectual debts to specific ancient Greek writings is no simple task. While I continue working on this, I would very much welcome thoughts and feedback (camprubi@princeton.edu). Get in touch!
Bibliography
Manuscript and editions
Istanbul, Köprülü Kütüphanesi, ms. 953.
Facsimile: Neubauer, Eckhard. Kitāb al-mūsīqī al-kabīr: MS 953, Köprülü Library, Istanbul. Publications of the Institute for the History of Arabic-Islamic Science, series C 61. Frankfurt am Main: Institut für Geschichte der Arabisch-Islamischen Wissenschaften, 1998.
Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, ms. Grec 2456.
Al-Fārābī, Abū Naṣr. Kitāb al-mūsīqā al-kabīr, edited by Ghaṭṭās ʿAbd al-Malik Khashaba. Cairo: Dār al-kātib al-ʿarabī, 1967.
Erlanger, Rodolphe. La musique arabe, volume 2, Al-Fārābī, Livre III du Kitābu l-mūsīqī al-kabīr. Paris: Librairie orientaliste Paul Geuthner, 1935.
Quintilianus, Aristides. On Music: In Three Books, edited and translated by Thomas J. Mathiesen. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983.
Secondary literature
Blum, Stephen. “Foundations of Musical Knowledge in the Muslim World.” In The Cambridge History of World Music, edited by Philip V. Bohlman, 103–24. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
Jan, Karl von. Musici scriptores graeci: Aristoteles, Euclides, Nicomachus, Bacchius, Gaudentius, Alypius et melodiarum veterum quidquid exstat. Leipzig: B. G. Teubneri, 1895.
Mathiesen, Thomas. Greek Views of Music. Vol. 1 of Source Readings in Music History, edited by Oliver Strunk and Leo Treitler. New York: W. W. Norton, 1998.
Neubauer, Eckhard. “Arabic Writings on Music: Eight to Nineteenth Centuries.” In The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music. Vol. 6, The Middle East, edited by Virginia Danielson, Dwight Reynolds, and Scott Marcus, 363–86. New York: Routledge, 2002.
Rudolph, Ulrich. “Abū Naṣr al-Fārābī.” In Philosophy in the Islamic World. Vol. 1, 8th–10th Centuries, edited by Ulrich Rudolph, Rotraud Hansberger, and Peter Adamson, 526–654. Leiden: Brill, 2017.
Rustow, Marina. The Lost Archive: Traces of a Caliphate in a Cairo Synagogue. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020.
Wollina, Torsten. “Tracing Ibn Ṭūlūn’s Autograph Corpus, with Emphasis on the 19th–20th Centuries.” Journal of Islamic Manuscripts 9 (2018): 308–40.
Zanoncelli, Luisa. La manualistica musicale greca. Milan: Guerini, 1990.
[1] To name a few, al-Kindī (c. 800–c. 870), Yaḥyā ibn al-Munajjim (856–912), the Brethren of Purity, Ibn Sīnā (980–1037), al-Ḥasan ibn Aḥmad (fl. late 10th c.) and Ibn Zayla (d. 1048). For a magisterial exposition of the main topics addressed in these works, see Blum, “Foundations of Knowledge.” For an overview of the sources, see Neubauer, “Arabic Writings.”
[2] Rudolph, “Abū Naṣr al-Fārābī,” provides a comprehensive overview of al-Fārābī’s works in all disciplines, his biography and intellectual context, and secondary scholaship.
[3] Wollina, “Tracing Ibn Ṭūlūn’s Autograph,” 309–10. The Journal of Islamic Manuscripts documents this phenomenon, providing a snapshot of the directions in the field.
[4] Rustow, The Lost Archive, 8–10.
[5] Preparing critical editions as well as translations that would facilitate access to these materials for non-Arabic speakers remain fundamental tasks for the advancement of the field. The launch in 2020 of the project Saramusik—“Sources arabes sur la musique” (المصادر العربيّة للموسيقى)— by the Tunisian musicologist Anas Gharab (أنس غراب), a site that aims to host digital editions of Arabic theoretical works, is a phenomenal recent development. Saramusik: https://saramusik.org (accessed March 13, 2021).
[6] Al-Fārābī, Kitāb al-mūsīqā, 880–958; Erlanger, La musique arabe, 2:2–17.
[7] Facsimile in Neubauer, Kitāb al-mūsīqī, 343–65. This manuscript was copied in 654H [1256 CE] according to its colophon. The title page contains an ownership statement from Ibn al-Sarrāj al-Qalānisī, an eminent astrologer mostly active in Aleppo, dated 748H [1347 CE]. The manuscript was part of the initial collection of Köprülü Library in Istanbul, which opened its doors in 1678.
[8] Greek texts in Jan, Musici scriptores graeci and Zanoncelli, La manualistica (with Italian translations). English translations in Quintilianus, On Music, tr. Mathiesen; and Mathiesen, Greek Views, 47–85.
[9] Jan, Musici scriptores graeci, 343–44; Mathiesen, Greek Views, 76–7. The procedure is straightforward: taking the Proslambanomenos as starting point and assigning a certain number to it, one proceeds to allocate numerical values to the rest of scale degrees according to the specific interval ratios. The caveat is that one needs to choose an integer for the Proslambanomenos that is large enough to allow for all subsequent divisions without resulting in fractional numbers. A plain example in the table above is the octave relationship (2:1) between Proslambanomenos (1620), Mese (810), and Nete hyperbolaion (405).
[10] Mathiesen, Greek Views, 79.
History of Music Theory 