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The Musical Heritage of Al-Andalus The Musical Heritage of Al-Andalus is a critical account of the history of Andalusian music in Iberia from the Islamic conquest of 711 to the final expulsion of the Moriscos (Spanish Muslims converted to Christianity) in the early 17th century. This volume presents the documentation that has come down to us, accompanied by critical and detailed analyses of the sources written in Arabic, Old Catalan, Castilian, Hebrew, and Latin. It 1s also informed by research the author has conducted on modern Andalusian musical traditions in Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Lebanon, and Syria. While the cultural achievements of medieval Muslim Spain have been the topic of a large number of scholarly and popular publications in recent decades, what may arguably be its most enduring contribution — music — has been almost entirely neglected. The overarching purpose of this work 1s to elucidate as clearly as possible the many different types of musical interactions that took place in medieval Iberia and the complexity of the various borrowings, adaptations, hybridizations, and appropriations involved.
Dwight F. Reynolds is Professor of Arabic Language and Literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and author of numerous publications, including the co-editorship of the award-winning, The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music, Volume 6: The Middle East, published in 2002, with Virginia Danielson and Scott Marcus.
Acknowledgments
This volume would not have been possible without the generous assistance and guidance I have been fortunate enough to receive from innumerable scholars and musicians over the years. I am very grateful for the training I received at UCLA from Claude Audebert and Seeger A. Bonebakker, and, in particular, A. J. Racy, whose musicianship and scholarship continue to inspire me. Equally influential were my studies with Roger Allen, Dell Hymes, Steven Feld, and George Makdisi at the University of Pennsylvania. During my stays in Cairo I benefited immensely from music lessons with Mansi Amin and classes on music theory with Yusuf Shawai. The concerts of Firgat al-musiga al-‘arabiyya in the 1980s directed by ‘Abd al-Halim Nuwayra sparked my enduring love of the classical muwashshah repertoire that, decades later, has given birth to this volume. Across the Arab World I have been welcomed and guided in my explorations of Andalusian music by dozens of extraordinarily generous musicians and scholars to whom I owe a great deal, including Muhammad Qadri Dalal and ‘Abd al-Rahman Jabaqji in Syria; in Morocco, Mehdi Chaachou and Muhammad al-Akrami in Tetuan, Muhammad Briouel and ‘Abd al-Karim Rayyis in Fez, along with ‘Omar Metioui in Tangier. In Algeria, I am grateful to the various ensembles of Andalusian music that allowed me to attend their rehearsals and concerts, as well as conduct interviews with their leaders and performers, including al-Sundusiyya (Algiers), and in Tlemcen, the associations of Gharnata, al-Qurtubiyya, Riyad al-Andalus, Nasim al-Andalus, and la S.L.A.M. (Société de littérature, arts, et musicale). A very special thanks, however, is due to the members of the Ahbab Cheikh Larbi Bensari Association who taught me their version of Núbat Zaydan, which was later performed by the UC Santa Barbara Middle East Ensemble under the direction of Scott Marcus in 1992, 500 years after the fall of Granada in 1492. My understanding of the Algerian traditions of Andalusian music has been greatly enriched by the publications of, and my conversations with, Salah Boukli, Faygal Ben Kalfat, Yahya Ghoul, Benali and Salim el Hassar, and Fouzi Kalfat. In Tunisia I wish to thank Samir Becha, Mahmoud Guettat, Ikbal Hamzaoui, and Anis Meddeb, as well as the staff of the CMAM (Center for Arab and Mediterranean Music) and the master instrument-makers of the atelier of Enneyma Ezzahra in Sidi Bou Said. In Paris, my research was supported and greatly enhanced by many musicians, ensembles, scholars, and music aficionados including Nidaa Abou Mrad, Saadane Benbaabali, Farid Bensarsa, Abdelkrim Bensid, Amr’eddine Soufi Betaouaf, Ghani Ben-Yellés, Amine Beyhom, Frédéric Billiet, Lila Borsali, Pascal Buresi, Youssef Chédid, Aboubakr Chraibi, Simon Elbaz, Tarik Farou1, Anas Ghrab, Rachid Guerbas, Leila Habashi, Hamdane Hadjadji, Brahim Hadjkacem, Scheherazade Qassim Hassan, Frédéric Lagrange, Nadir Marouf, Abdelwahab Meddeb, Miriam Rovsing Olsen, Francois Picard, Christian Poché, and Mourad Yelles. In addition, I thank the various ensembles who allowed me to attend their rehearsals and concerts, and on occasion rehearse and perform with them, including “Les Airs Andalous” (Ensemble Andalou de Paris), Ensemble Albaycin, Ensemble El Mawsili, and Es-Safina Cultural Association. In Spain I owe much gratitude to many scholars and colleagues, including Miguel Angel Berlanga, Maria Isabel Fierro, Manuela Cortés Garcia, Daniel Madrid, Inmaculada Manrique, Reynaldo Fernando Manzana, Luis Molina, Maria del Carmen Montané, Begoña Olavide, Carlos Paniagua, Eduardo Paniagua, Emilio Ros-Fábregas, the Department of Art History at the Universidad de Granada that allowed me to teach a doctoral seminar on the history of Arabo-Andalusian music in 2005, and to the many staff members and librarians at the Escuela de Estudios Árabes, the Centro de Documentación Musical de Andalucia, El Legado Andalusi, and the Institución Milá y Fontanals (Barcelona). Chapters 6 & 7 of this work were inspired by the remarkable NEH Summer Institute “Negotiating Identities in the Mediterranean” in Barcelona 2015, organized and led by Brian Catlos and Sharon Kinoshita. All of the participants and lecturers in that remarkable gathering have left their mark on this work. I am fortunate to have received advice, contributions, suggestions, and corrections on various sections of this work from a large number of colleagues, including Glaire Anderson, Mohammad Sadegh Ansari, Tova Beeri, Julia Bray, Marcel Camprubi, Hicham Chami, Judith Cohen, Rachel Colwell, Michael Cooperson, Federico Corriente, Carl Davila, Ruth Davis, Vanessa Paloma Elbaz, Jiirgen Elsner, Ed Emery, Jonathan Glasser, Matthew Gordon, Kathryn Hain, Michelle Hamilton, Andrew Hicks, Jared Holton, Lev Arie Kapitaikin, Philip F. Kennedy, Hilary Kilpatrick, Paul Marcel Kurpershoek, Tony Langlois, Matthew Machin-Autenrieth, Maria Rosa Menochal, James T. Monroe, Salvatore Morra, Philip Murphy, Pernilla Myrne, Lisa Nielson, Maurice Pomerantz, Nasser Rabbat, Mariam Rosser-Owen, Everett Rowson, Teófilo Ruiz, Walid Saleh, Jonathan Shannon, Christopher Silver, Susan Slyomovics, Devin Stewart, Shawkat Toorawa, David Wacks, Mark S. Wagner, and Christopher Witulski, A very special thanks is due to the preeminent scholars of pre-modern Middle Eastern music who have graciously suggested sources, assisted in obtaining copies of manuscripts, answered my endless questions, read and corrected passages over many years: Eckhard and Elsbeth Neubauer (to whom this book is dedicated), George Sawa, Edwin Seroussi, and Owen Wright. My final thanks are to a friend and colleague of many decades who has taught me an enormous amount about Middle Eastern musical performance and theory, and has allowed me to benefit from his own fieldwork and research many times over the years, Scott Marcus. Whatever errors or mistakes remain in this work, despite the best efforts of these many colleagues, are of course my own. I can only hope that they will inspire future scholars to correct them. Portions of Chapter 4 appeared in the journal Middle Eastern Literatures, Vol. 11, no. 2 (2008): 155-68, and are reproduced here with permission from Taylor & Francis. One section of Chapter 4 appeared in The Aghlabids and their Neighbors: Art and Material Culture in 9th-century North Africa 2017: 144-62, and is reproduced here with permission from Brill Publishers. An earlier version of one section of Chapter 8 appeared in Muwashshah: Proceedings of the Conference on Arabic and Hebrew Strophic Poetry and its Romance Parallels, October 8—10, 2004, School of Oriental and Asian Studies, University of London, 2007: 211-27 and is reproduced here with permission.
Introduction
Medieval Muslim Spain — referred to as “Moorish Spain” in English, al-Andalus in Arabic, and Sepharad in Hebrew — left a rich cultural heritage in agriculture, art, architecture, gardening, medicine, mysticism, philosophy, poetry, the physical sciences, urban planning, and other realms. Perhaps the single most remarkable and enduring contribution of that society, however, has been in the field of music. Al-Andalus, 1t shall be argued in this volume, was one of a number of points of cultural contact and exchange around the Mediterranean that had a profound impact on medieval music in Europe as well as in the Arabo-Islamic World. Through this network of exchange, for example, the rebec (Ar. rabab) and the lute (Ar. al-'ud) were introduced to Europe, later adaptations of which became nearly emblematic of late medieval and early Renaissance European music.
In addition, a new strophic songform emerged in the 10th-11th centuries known in Arabic as muwashshah if the text was in classical Arabic and zajal if the text was in a colloquial Arabic dialect. Appearing first in al-Andalus, this new song-form spread rapidly across the entire Arabic-speaking Middle East, and has remained in continuous performance for nearly a thousand years from Morocco in the west, to Syria and Iraq in the north, to Yemen in the south. This song-form also had a profound effect on Jewish music, becoming one of the major vehicles for song genres in Hebrew such as piyyutim and bakkashot, in which even today medieval poems composed by the great Andalusian Jewish poets are sung to the same melodies as Muslim and Christian Arabs sing their texts. This songform is also recognizably related to some of the best-known music of medieval Christian Iberia, including the 13th-century Cantigas de Santa Maria and the Gallego-Portuguese cantigas de amigo, though the precise nature of that relationship, as we shall see, is hotly debated. Despite the fascinating and very significant historical role played by the music of medieval Muslim Spain, and the rather large amount of scholarship on this subject published in Arabic, French, and Spanish, it has been nearly a century since a work published in English undertook a detailed study of this remarkable tradition (and that work was in fact an abridged translation from the Spanish).! The present volume therefore seeks to fill this lacuna in a manner accessible to non-specialists while also providing enough technical detail to satisfy those with a more detailed knowledge of medieval music. A volume of this scope inevitably runs into a variety of methodological problems, some of which deserve to be discussed here at the outset.
Methodological issues
To begin with, music of the distant past is not recuperable. Although we at times possess rich historical documentation about music, we do not and cannot examine the music itself, as 1t was performed and listened to in premodern times. Music 1s, or at least was until the advent of audio-recordings, relentlessly ephemeral. Nevertheless, the music of al-Andalus was, in the first half of the 20th century, at the center of a great debate that then raged over the question of what “influence” Arabo-Islamic culture did or did not have on medieval Europe and what role that “influence” may have played in setting the stage for the European Renaissance. In particular, heated arguments were exchanged about the question of Arab musical influence on medieval European musical traditions such as the 12th-13th century Provencal, Occitan, and Catalan troubadours, as well as on the 13th-century Cantigas de Santa Maria of Alfonso X, and the 13th-century Gallego-Portuguese cantigas de amor and cantigas de amigo. Proposals that suggested Arab origins for any aspect of these traditions were vigorously rejected by some scholars who refused to acknowledge any Arab influence — indeed often any contact with Arab music — whatsoever.
These exchanges boiled down to two opposing camps, one of which saw an indisputable role for Arabo-Islamic culture and music in the history of European civilization, and the other, which viewed all such claims as anathema, imagining European culture instead to have been hermetically sealed off from any enduring traces of contact with Muslims during the 900 years of Muslim presence in the Iberian Peninsula from 711 to the final expulsions of the Moriscos (Muslims who were converted to Christianity) in 1609-14.? During most of this bitter debate, however, very little attention was given to the music of al-Andalus per se, since 1t was viewed almost exclusively as a puzzle piece within the larger question of the relationship between East and West, understood as Christian Europe and the Islamic Middle East. Among the most prominent of the scholars participating in that debate were Julian Ribera y Tarrago, Henry George Farmer, Higinio Anglés, and Kathleen Schlesinger.’ Given the large body of new evidence that has emerged in the ensuing years, some of the extreme views expressed by both sides now seem untenable: the “Occidentalist” portrayals of a European culture that was immune to outside forces would now be almost laughable given the vast body of historical documentation to the contrary were it not for a handful of modern scholars who still champion this position, such as the Spanish Arabist Serafin Fanjul and more recently literary historian Dario Fernandez-Morera.* On the other hand, the “Arabist” school’s views at times reduced AraboIslamic culture to scarcely more than a conduit for ancient Greek thought, with little acknowledgment of its original and innovative contributions, and these claims are thus equally ripe for reevaluation. It 1s, quite simply, time for a fresh look at the rich musical world of medieval Iberia and its relationship to the multiple musical traditions of the modern world that trace their origins back to that source. In the broader field of medieval Iberian studies, modern scholarship has for the most part moved beyond the extremes of the “Arabist” versus the “Occidentalist” approaches, and contemporary scholars now enthusiastically explore the complexities and fascinating ambiguities of cultural interactions in medieval Iberia.? This sense of ambiguity, fluidity, and complexity has, however, not yet been taken up in the field of Iberian music history. There continue to be, I would suggest, two intellectual traps that impede reaching a more nuanced and more accurate understanding of the musical cultures of medieval Iberia: one is the paradigm of “influence,” which continues to haunt the field, albeit in slightly modified forms, and the second is the now widespread tendency to view all cultural phenomena in medieval Iberia as reflections of the supposed tripartite division of Iberian society into /as tres culturas — Jews, Christians, and Muslims. “Influence” is a term that is intellectually both slippery and sloppy, for it allows us to imply in abstract terms that some sort of relationship between two phenomena or social groups existed without having to specify what we think actually took place. It is also a term that is dangerously fraught with unarticulated implications. To begin with, “influence” denotes a process that is unidirectional; 1t does not allow for any “back and forth,” “give and take,” cultural negotiation, hybridization, or cross-fertilization. It is a process in which something, quite literally, flows in one direction into something else. In addition, it effectively robs the receiving party of any form of agency, an aspect that is made particularly clear by contrasting it with other terms such as to borrow, adopt, adapt, embrace, espouse, acquire, obtain, utilize, repurpose, modify, reshape, among others. In the process of “influence,” one party is understood to have been essentially passive. When one culture “influences” another, the process is also characterized to some degree as being inexorable and unstoppable, and the “influenced” culture appears neither to have had, nor made, any choices or decisions about whether or not to accept or embrace these changes. This is in part true because the term influence also carries within it an unspoken power differential — “strong” cultures influence “weaker” cultures, not the other way round. It 1s no accident that in many accounts of cultural contact, colonial (1.e., strong) powers are portrayed as having “influenced” colonized (1.e., weak) cultures, whereas any movement in the opposite direction is typically portrayed as a “borrowing” or an “adaptation.” Those who argue against the idea of having been “influenced” (such as the “Occidentalists” cited above), are often reacting as much to these unspoken implications of weakness and passivity as they are to the actual idea of cultural exchange. This volume will argue that cultural contacts are in fact far more complex, that there are always choices and decisions being made (in short, agency), and that the results of cultural contacts are almost never detectable on only one side of the encounter. Almost all cultural phenomena have “complex genealogies.” Given the desire to find influence, modern scholars often take texts that depict cultural contact and interpret them as proof of cultural influence. Points of contact are relatively easy to document historically, and this volume includes what may strike many readers as an astonishingly large number of times, places, and ways that various musical traditions in medieval Iberia came into contact with each other. But I strive here to limit the interpretation of these contacts to what the original sources actually say. Contact is easy to document, but influence is decidedly not. If there 1s any intellectual agenda in the approach taken here, it is perhaps my conviction, after years of reading through these historical materials and observing living musical traditions, that borrowings, adaptations, transformations, and cross-fertilizations were constantly at work, not only in the realm of music, but in all aspects of medieval Iberian society. This 1s, quite simply, the nature of human culture. The study of the music of al-Andalus and of medieval Iberian culture in general, is also trapped in another matrix, one that tends to approach all cultural phenomena through the lens of Jews, Christians, and Muslims. This is an optic that emerged mostly strongly from another “great debate,” engaged in by Américo Castro and Claudio Sanchez-Albornoz and their followers over the nature of Spanish culture and identity.° In very simplified terms, Castro argued that Spanish identity was forged in the mixing of Jewish, Christian, and Arabo-Muslim cultures, and that Jews and Arabs were therefore not “foreign,” but rather constituent elements of Spanish culture. Castro proposed a model of “living together” that he termed convivencia and popularized the notion of a Spain of “The Three Cultures” (/as tres culturas), meaning Jewish, Muslim, and Christian. Albornoz, on the other hand, argued that Spanish identity — Catholic and eternal — was forged in the period of Visigothic rule (410-711 CE), survived by fending off the influences of Jewish and “Moorish” culture, and then reemerged, purified and resilient after the “reconquest” of Iberia and the expulsion of the “foreign” communities of Jews and Muslims. The tripartite division proposed by Castro, however, conceals and suppresses many elements critical to understanding al-Andalus and medieval Iberia. For scholars of other parts of the world, this encounter between three monotheistic, closely related faiths is not particularly impressive as an example of diversity. Baghdad of the 8th-10th centuries, Istanbul of the 15th-19th centuries, any number of cities along the Silk Road such as Samarqand and Bukhara, and many other locations in different periods of time, have all encompassed far more religious, linguistic, and ethnic diversity than Iberia ever did. So why does the example of Iberian Muslims, Jews, and Christians coexisting (whether peacefully or in a state of constant tension) have such a profound hold on the modern Western imagination? First and foremost, because this took place on what is perceived to be “Western” (1.e., “European”) soil. Compared to many other regions in the world, Europe has never been particularly diverse ethnically or religiously, and Iberia is a bit of land in which the modern West 1s heavily invested culturally and historically. Westerners are not, on the whole, interested in convivencia in Baghdad, Istanbul, or Samargand, because those places are not located in the West, and the societies and cultures of those locations have never been argued to have influenced the West as profoundly as medieval Muslim Spain. As we shall see in this volume, the division into Muslims, Christians, and Jews also draws our attention away from many other identities that are alluded to in historical sources: Imazighen” (Berbers, and their many tribal affiliations), muwallads (the offspring of mixed Arab and non-Arab parentage), northern versus southern Arab tribes, Slavs (Sagáliba), Basques, Castilians, Aragonese, Catalans, Valencians, and, running throughout all of these groups, large numbers of slaves of diverse origins who constituted a significant percentage of the population, as well as numerous other regional and urban-based identities. Sadly, when the question of tolerance in medieval Iberia is raised in modern scholarship, it 1s immediately assumed that one 1s speaking about religious tolerance among the three religious communities — all other forms of tolerance remain almost entirely unexplored: How much tolerance, for example, existed for distinct ethnicities such as the Imazighen? How much tolerance existed at different times within these communities on various social, sexual, religious, and intellectual matters? How much tolerance was there at different times and places for “deviant” gender and sexual roles/identities? How much tolerance existed for philosophers or free thinkers who espoused rational approaches to the great questions of existence and at times came close to arguing for a “God-less” universe? (It 1s worth noting that the works of both Maimonides, the great Jewish scholar, and Ibn Rushd [Latin: Averroes], the great Muslim philosopher, were banned and burned by their own communities at various times and places.) How much tolerance and freedom were granted to women in different eras and regions? How much tolerance or mobility existed among different economic classes or among rural and urban communities? All of these questions and many more have been almost completely overshadowed in recent decades by the modern Western obsession with the idea of Jews, Muslims, and Christians living together on “Western” soil. This obsession is rooted almost entirely in modern political and social concerns and provides a very poor description of the social complexities of medieval Iberian society. These three sectarian communities and the identities associated with them undoubtedly played very important roles in medieval Iberian culture, but identity is fluid, situational, and contextual. In times of collaboration, aspects of social difference may be entirely latent and ignored, while in times of conflict, various distinctions (based in religious, regional, ethnic, class or gender differences) can be called forth to define and sharpen the lines of contention. The challenge is therefore to understand when particular aspects of identity are invoked and when they are quietly laid aside, and what the implications and results were when various social identities came to the fore and engaged with others.* The title of this work has been chosen with some care. The reference to the “musical heritage” of al-Andalus is in part meant to indicate both that there are modern musical traditions rooted in this period of time and that we in fact know very little about the actual music of al-Andalus.’ We have no contemporary transcriptions of the music of the medieval courts of Cordoba, Sevilla, or Granada, let alone the popular music of the masses. What we do have from the medieval period are texts that provide — often through brief, isolated anecdotes — disjunct pieces of information. The sum total of all of these diverse bits of information does not, in my opinion, allow for the creation of a coherent historical narrative of the many various musical traditions that came into contact in medieval Muslim Spain, nor of the unique new musical form that emerged from that encounter and then subsequently spread across wide regions of the Mediterranean and beyond. It 1s for this reason that I have not termed this work a history of the music of al-Andalus. What exists are clusters of texts that provide occasional glimpses of different aspects of these traditions in specific times and places. For some periods of time we have rather detailed biographical information about singers and musicians; from other periods of time we have collections of song texts; from still other periods we have rich iconographic sources about musical instruments; and from others we have detailed financial records about how much musicians were paid, how long they resided in the courts, and how much it cost to purchase and repair musical instruments. But these clusters of detailed information are like stepping stones across a broad river, sometimes separated by centuries and great distances. For the overall period and region covered in this volume (roughly 8th- to early 17th-century Iberia), we do not possess anything approaching a complete portrait of musicians, repertory, instruments, patrons, finances, and audiences from any one location at a particular point in time. Within the limitations of these varied and dispersed records, this volume attempts to provide a survey of the extant sources and to provide a straightforward account of what we do (and do not) know, attempting to answer some of the more troublesome questions, leaving open those that cannot be answered at this point in time, acknowledging gaps where there are gaps, and, wherever possible, providing scholarly translations of the most significant primary sources, a number of which have never before been translated. Despite the very incomplete nature of the historical record, the larger contours of the development of what is today referred to as Andalusi (or Andalusian) music are nevertheless discernible. As a result of the Muslim conquest of Iberia in 711, a new, complex cluster of cultures, each with its own musical traditions, was brought into contact. These musical traditions continued to be performed for centuries, with many moments of contact and cross-fertilization among them. For the majority of these traditions we have little to no detailed information; it 1s only the art music of the courts that is reasonably well documented. Then, sometime in the late 10th to early 11th century, a new song-form emerged that was quite distinct from everything that had gone before. This new musical form with its twin names (muwashshah for songs in classical Arabic and zajal for ones in colloquial Arabic) was composed first in Arabic and soon thereafter also in Hebrew, and was to become among the most successful musical forms in human history, for it has now been performed continuously for roughly a thousand years, and in modern times it continues to be performed in a dozen or so different countries of the Middle East. Although always bearing the cachet of being Andalusi in origin, the new song-form quickly spread across the Middle East in the 11th and 12th centuries and by the 13th century was found in urban centers from Morocco to Iraq, and south as far as Yemen. Once adopted in these new locations, local poets and composers immediately began to add to the repertory that had arrived from al-Andalus. There was no sense in the Middle Ages that the repertory should not be expanded with new compositions; quite the opposite, for as soon as the new song-form arrived in a region, local composers began to try their hand at creating songs of this type, often by “borrowing” the melody of an older song and setting new words to it, a process known as contrafactum composition. Indeed, the first author to write a work dealing specifically with this type of music, the Cairene scholar Ibn Sana’ al-Mulk (1155-1211) proudly appended to his treatise a number of his own muwashshah compositions, and boasted in personal letters that they were being sung by nearly everyone in Cairo.'* Thus the overall repertory continued to grow, and eventually songbooks with hundreds of song texts were compiled.!! For the most part, however, both the structure and the core set of themes and motifs from the original Andalusi model were retained, such that this music was everywhere recognizable and distinct from other repertories. The term Andalusi music in modern usage therefore does not refer to a body of song that was composed in medieval al-Andalus and passed down unchanged for centuries, but rather to a specific form and style that originated in al-Andalus. Just as composers around the world can compose jazz, whether or not they are American, so composers throughout the Arabicspeaking Middle East have created and performed new pieces in the Andalusi style. Composers over the centuries have been so adept, in fact, at retaining the original flavor of the genre that today we often cannot tell if a particular piece 1s from the 19th century or is several centuries older. However, because regional traditions have developed their own preferences for how to perform this music (using different instruments, different mixes of solo versus choral singing, specific rhythms, and even specific techniques for playing certain instruments), anyone who knows this music well usually can tell what region a given performance or recording is from, sometimes down to the exact city or town.!? In many places in the modern Arab world, this repertory, while acknowledged to have originated in medieval Muslim Spain, is also embraced as being a vibrant part of local or regional identity. This 1s a tradition, therefore, that 1s both medieval and modern, as well as Andalusi and pan-Arab and intensely local, all at the same time.'* This volume focuses on the early period of the history of this vast musical tradition, primarily within the Iberian Peninsula, from the 8th to the early 17th centuries, ending with the ultimate expulsion of the Moriscos from Spain in 1609-14. A projected second volume will cover the many strands of Andalusi music across the Middle East from the 15th century to the present. This division into two separate volumes reflects not only the eclipse of Andalusi music in its homeland of the Iberian Peninsula, but also a dramatic change in the nature of the historical documentation. From the 15th century to the 19th century, we find almost no biographical information about musicians or composers of musicians in this tradition, with equally few descriptions of performances or information about musical instruments. On the other hand, in this same time period there was a sudden increase in the production of songbooks in Arabic and Hebrew, works that include lyrics, some basic musical information (such as the names of rhythms and melodic modes), and every now and then a glimpse of regional performance practices. Beyond the songbooks, each regional tradition possesses a certain amount of local historical documentation, but these scattered bits of information have not yet been compiled into an academic work that provides an overarching sense of the history of this musical heritage.'* Finally, of course, with the advent of sound recording from the early 20th century onward, we have direct evidence of how the music actually sounded and how it was performed. Early recordings can now be compared with contemporary traditions, and a much more detailed portrait of this repertory can thus be created for recent decades than is possible for the Middle Ages. Ultimately, the present volume aims to explore musical life in al-Andalus from the 8th to 17th centuries in as much detail as possible, and to do so without being unduly guided by the questions of origins and influence that dominated earlier scholarship. Instead, I hope to open up our understanding of music in medieval al-Andalus as part of a complex network of cultural exchanges. Despite the unevenness of the extant historical record and our unfortunate inability to recuperate the music itself, I hope that readers will find in this account a sense of the richness of medieval Andalusi music and of the cultures that contributed to its formation and transmission. In addition, it is hoped that this study of Andalusi music will contribute to the growing body of ethnomusicological research that focuses on the medieval and early modern courtly musical traditions of the Middle East and South Asia by such scholars as Walter Feldman, Eckhard Neubauer, George Sawa, Katherine Butler Schofield, Bonnie C. Wade, Owen Wright, and others.
Notes on terminology and transliteration
In English there is a single adjectival form — “andalusian” — for both al-Andalus (medieval Muslim Spain) and the modern province of southern Spain, Andalucia. In Spanish the distinction 1s clear since the adjective from al-Andalus 1s andalusí, whereas the adjective for modern Andalucia is andaluz (£. andaluza). Thus, la musica andalusí and la música andaluza are not easily confused. For good reason, then, the term andalusi has been adopted by a growing number of scholars and will be used in this volume. Readers should understand, however, that it is still common in English to refer to “Andalusian music,” despite the ambiguity of the term, and that most older publications refer to this music in that manner.!* I must apologize to my Middle Eastern colleagues for the use of the terms “medieval” and “Middle Ages” throughout this volume, since these western concepts do not map well onto Middle Eastern history. They are, however, terms that are widely understood, and the Arabo-Islamic practice of referring to different time periods in dynastic terms (Umayyad, Abbasid, Fatimid, Ayyubid, Mamluk, etc.) is opaque to all but specialists.
Many individuals who appear in this volume are known by multiple versions of their names: some Arab writers are often referred to in English by their Latinized names (Avicenna, Averroes, Avempace); for the Arabic-speaking Jewish writers of al-Andalus there are typically three versions to choose from (English, Arabic, Hebrew); and many Christian Iberian monarchs are variously referred to in works of history by the English, Castilian, Catalan or Portuguese versions of their name (e.g. John, Juan, Jaume, Joao). In general, I have given preference to the Arabic and Castilian versions of names simply because these are the most familiar to English readers, except for cases where an accepted common form exists, such as Maimonides and Saladin. Several Arabic-derived geographic terms are used here including Mashrigq for the Eastern Mediterranean, Maghrib for the western part of North Africa, and /frigiya for the region occupied by modern Tunisia.
The transliteration style for Arabic is that of the International Journal of Middle East Studies (IJMES). All translations from Arabic, Castilian, Catalan, French, and Latin are my own except where otherwise noted.
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