Download PDF | Owen Wright - Music Theory in the Safavid Era_ The taqsīm al-naġamāt , Routledge 2018.
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The Safavid era (1501–1722) is one of the most important in the history of Persian culture, celebrated especially for its architecture and art, including miniature paintings that frequently represent singers and instrumentalists. Their presence reflects a sophisticated tradition of music making that was an integral part of court life, yet it is one that remains little known, for the musicological literature of the period is rather thin.
There is, however, a significant exception: the text presented and analysed here, a hitherto unpublished and anonymous theoretical work probably of the middle of the sixteenth century. With a Sufi background inspiring the use of the nay as a tool of theoretical demonstration, it is exceptional in presenting descriptive accounts of the modes then in use and suggesting how these might be arranged in complex sequences. As it also gives an account of the corpus of rhythmic cycles it provides a unique insight into the basic structures of art-music during the first century of Safavid rule.
Owen Wright is Emeritus Professor of Musicology of the Middle East at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.
Introduction
Prelude An attempt is made in what follows to present, analyse and consider the implications of a previously unpublished, anonymous and undated Persian treatise on music. Since the pioneering exploration made by Kiesewetter over 170 years ago1 it has remained in unexamined obscurity until very recently,2 and one might conclude that in the intervening years it had been probed by the questing gaze of scholars and deemed unworthy of further attention, although given the nature of its contents it is rather more likely that it was simply, if unaccountably, overlooked, for they are by no means negligible, and certainly not routine.
In fact, it has a unique position within the surviving musicological literature in Persian, partly for its descriptive strategies, but more particularly for the wealth of musicological information that it presents. It is, indeed, to be counted among the most informative of post fifteenth-century texts, being one of the very few that give thorough coverage of both melodic modes and rhythmic cycles, not just naming and ordering them but giving for each a precise definition. Its full title, taqsīm al-naġamāt wa-bayān al-daraj wa-’l-šu‘ab wa-’l-maqāmāt, is conventional in format: it is wholly Arabic in syntax and vocabulary, and exhibits the standard feature of internal rhyme. At the same time it is unusual because of the unexpected presence within it of a term not generally encountered elsewhere in the musicological literature, and certainly not in a title. Written drj, it appears to usurp the slot that, in the light of the following šu‘ab and maqāmāt, both modal categories, one might have expected to be allotted to a third such category, the āvāzāt.
On the other hand, given the existence of cognate terms relating to rhythm, it is tempting to think that rather than to a set of modes it might relate in some way to rhythmic cycles, especially as there is a substantial chapter dealing with this topic in which we encounter daraja, designating a degree or step in the schematic visualization of two rhythmic cycles performed simultaneously, while elsewhere in the theoretical literature the morphologically related adraj is used to refer to the omission of attacks from specific time units in a rhythmic cycle. However, neither meaning appears relevant here, and even the seemingly closer daraja could only be arrived at through scribal error (drj for drjh). It would in any case be a rather unconvincing interloper when all the surrounding terms concern pitch-related phenomena, and although it would be perfectly normal to find a reference to rhythm alongside one to mode in the title of a text that deals with both topics, it would normally be conveyed by generic terms such as ḍurūb. 3
We should therefore presume, rather, a connection with the occurrence of drj in the introductory (if truncated) treatment of pitch, where it designates the discrete steps of the scale, and read daraj (‘steps, stairs’):4 it is thus a preliminary to the two (rather than the expected three) modal categories that conclude the title, for which we may accordingly propose the rather stiff rendering ‘The distribution of notes and clarification of the scale degrees and the branch and main modes’.5 The order of events at the end, with branch modes preceding main modes, is of no significance, being dictated by the exigencies of rhyme. The work itself will be referred to henceforth simply as taqsīm al-naġamāt. Even when sense can be made of them, unidentifiable works stand in acute need of contexts for their significance to be evaluated, and the taqsīm al-naġamāt is no exception. In the first place, and most obviously, this presupposes the possibility of setting them against a range of other works, comparable in content and formal articulation, through which they can be situated both chronologically and conceptually; but also, and equally important, it implies an understanding of the social and cultural environment in which they functioned and to which they contributed.
In the present case, however much one might wish for the survival of a more abundant and, especially, more factually informative musicological literature in Persian, it would be churlish to claim that we do not have a sufficient number of extant treatises to serve as terms of reference. Indeed, recent publications have added appreciably to the number of pre-modern Persian treatises on music that have received critical evaluation, and as a result it has become possible to discern rather more clearly the general characteristics of this body of literature. Setting aside as irrelevant in the present case the specific category of works that programmatically either attack or defend the admissibility of music from an Islamic perspective,6 it can be said, very broadly, to fall into two contrastive types.
One consists of a series of often complex theoretical texts, written over the two centuries from c. 1300 to c. 1500, beginning with the durrat al-tāj by Qoṭb al-Din Širāzi (d. 1311)7 and with the resāla by Banā’i (dated 1484) as one of its last representatives,8 that constitute the Persian branch of what is conventionally called the Systematist school, and it is to these that scholarly attention, until recently, has largely been devoted, for two obvious reasons: one that they demonstrate affiliations to the complex post-classical intellectual world inherited and further developed by early Abbasid theorists, above all al-Fārābī (d. 950), the other that they contain a significant amount of precisely articulated information on the basis of which it is possible to reach conclusions about fundamental matters of structure such as the articulation of the rhythmic cycles and the nature of the intervals in use and the scale complexes compounded from them.
As they also describe, with various levels of detail, vocal and instrumental forms and instruments in use, and even include one or two examples of notation,9 the outlines of the language of art music practice can begin to be discerned through them, in however blurred and incomplete a manner. A question they do not resolve, though, and one which will need to be revisited, is the extent of the geographical area over which this idiom was the norm, for the Persian Systematist texts of the fifteenth century are the work of theorists and practitioners clustered around the Timurid court, first in Samarkand under Timur, and subsequently in Herat under his successors, and most particularly during the reign of the last of the line, Ḥosayn Bāyqarā (1469–1506). To them belong the treatises of Awbahi10 and Banā’i, with which the Systematist articulation of theory virtually comes to an end.11 The territories controlled by Ḥosayn Bāyqarā would soon be incorporated into the more extensive empire of the Safavids, who were to rule Persia from the beginning of the sixteenth century until the first quarter the eighteenth, and in the absence of significant later Systematist treatises it is to the other type of theoretical text that we must turn for information on musical styles and developments during the Safavid period, over and above what little can be garnered from historical, literary and other ancillary sources.
There has been, as yet, no comprehensive study of this corpus, and there is a corresponding lack, whether with regard to practice or theory, of any reliable history of the evolution of music in Safavid Iran. Beyond the domain of theory the available documentation is, admittedly, thin, and with no continuous thread, consisting of scattered remarks in historiographical and biographical works supplemented by a rich iconographical record,12 and it is thus hardly surprising to find that the scholarly literature has made only partial and intermittently successful attempts to cover the broad picture. The rather compressed survey article on Persian music by Farmer, for example, is perfunctory in its treatment of the Safavid period,13 while the extensive materials assembled by Mašḥun are hardly subject to effective analysis,14 and the more recent study by Maysami,15 who provides the most valuable and exhaustive account yet of Safavid sources, is inhibited by its topical arrangement from cohering into a sustained narrative. Nor can appeal be made to general surveys of Iranian history, as they tend to genuflect to literature, art and architecture as vital components of Safavid culture but to pass music over in silence.16
Apart from providing invaluable editions and analyses of individual texts, scholarly endeavours have tended, rather, to concentrate upon Safavid sources as an archaeological site potentially yielding finds that, despite the seismic shifts taking place during the modern colonial and nation state periods, might still demonstrate continuities, seeking thereby elucidation of two questions regarding later historical developments. One, viewing them in a wider Persianate context, has a particular concern with the degree to which, taken in conjunction with fifteenth-century Timurid treatises, they might shed light on the pre-modern development of Central Asian traditions, and in particular on the evolution of the šaš-maqām repertoire.17
The other, involving an understandable emphasis on relatively late material within which the terms dastgāh and guša occur, is focused upon excavating the strata below the radical refashioning of art-music practice during the Qajar period that resulted in what eventually became enshrined, in its twentieth-century dastgāh format, as the canonic radif. 18 For a rather less topic-driven approach we may turn to Pourjavady’s more recent investigation of sources.19 This outlines the contents and characteristics of some of the more significant theoretical texts and provides the most comprehensive survey yet of Safavid musical life, paying particular attention to patronage in provincial centres as well as in the capital.
Not unexpectedly, a prominent role is seen to be played by Herati musicians rooted in late Timurid practice, and as the Timurid heritage is also claimed to be a core constituent of the foundation of the Ottoman tradition, to the later development of which Persian musicians are also deemed to have made vital contributions,20 the question arises of the extent to which art music under the Safavids should be regarded, and approached, as a self-contained entity rather than as one constituent element of a larger and looser great tradition that, with whatever local variations, encompassed Central Asian and Ottoman as well as Iranian practice and also encroached upon the eastern Arab world: indeed, one of the interesting features of the taqsīm al-naġamāt is the fact that as far as the repertoire of modes is concerned the closest parallels to its contents and methods of presentation are to be found in Arabic rather than Persian texts. Equally, the question may be asked of the extent to which local variation might have outweighed uniformity, not only over the wider span but also within the Safavid realm itself, for quite apart from possible style shifts resulting from the capital being successively moved from Tabriz to Qazvin to Isfahan, provincial governors, depending on their taste, are likely to have functioned as significant patrons, and may, indeed, have proved crucial for the maintenance and further development of the art music repertoire and its associated aesthetic norms, especially, but not only, during much of the long reign of the austerely anti-musical Shah Tahmāsp (1524–76).21 Here, however, much must remain guesswork, for the sources provide scant help: there is virtually no information, for example, on the extent to which local folk elements might have been appropriated by court musicians, thereby leading to further regional differentiation, and while the movement of musicians from court to court implies rather the diffusion of a prestigious repertoire and its associated idiom, and a consequent centripetal pull towards uniformity, the fact remains that the definitions we find in the taqsīm al-naġamāt remain at some remove from those provided by other sources, whether earlier or, we may assume, of approximately the same period.
As for the Safavid theoretical corpus, the precise circumstances and location of the composition of any given work are often unknown, even when it is not anonymous;22 little can be said about the pressures exerted by the cultural milieu on the style and thematic range of these texts beyond what they themselves reveal, and as a result they exist in a kind of cocoon. A cursory survey is sufficient to establish that, despite differences of approach and emphasis, most treatises follow a similar pattern in their coverage and adopt a similar style of discourse, but they do not, like the Systematist corpus, constitute a coherent series that refers back to earlier authorities in the same way and includes a major foundation text; indeed, the approach they exemplify is by no means confined to them: it appears in Arabic texts and also in an earlier Persian text that may actually predate the first Systematist treatise.23 Striking about the Safavid corpus, nevertheless, is its clear divorce from the style, form and content of Systematist texts, which are couched predominantly in sober prose and are marked by an emphasis on the precise definition of intervallic relationships and the schematic development of theoretically possible scale structures, often further extended by transpositional grids. Both the mathematical underpinning and the diagrammatic representation of such structures simply disappear: there is no longer a concern with definitions of pitch in terms of ratios and string lengths on the basis of which the scales in use (or an abstract ideal thereof) can be represented, and the horizon narrows down to the classification of modal structures that are simply named, knowledge of their structure, to the extent that it is relevant, being taken for granted.
Emphasis is given to the ways in which they are organized into sets, and to putative derivational schemes, such material often being expressed in verse, where an unfortunate if inevitable concomitant of the literary adroitness necessitated by the constraints of prosody and rhyme is a tendency to reduce to a bare minimum the amount of factual information conveyed. Similarly, whereas Systematist theorists present an abstract treatment of rhythmic structures followed by prosodically derived definitions of the individual rhythmic cycles, Safavid texts again tend simply to provide a catalogue of names, although there are one or two cases in which they are fleshed out with definitions, or at least indications of the total number of time units.24 The one area where they provide succinct and clear information comparable to that found in Systematist treatises is in the brief outlines of vocal and instrumental forms that some of them contain.25
To generalize, it would not be wholly unjust to claim that there is more to be learned from these texts about the persistence of cosmological ideas than there is about the specifics of musical structure, for they embed their laconic coverage of modes within a framework that variously associates them with the elements, humours, times of day, prophets, and the zodiac, and links them to an earlier textual tradition that runs alongside the Systematist one. A particularly rich and instructive example occurs in the resāla-ye karāmiya which, after briefly conceding that for some the word musiqi is of Greek origin, parades a number of accounts of the invention of the maqāms in the first of which we have a competing etymology: the Angel Gabriel instructs Moses to take his staff and strike a rock whence spring twelve streams from the sounds of which—told by Gabriel Musi qi! (‘Moses, preserve [these]!’)26—he learns the twelve maqāms. We then have the claim that there were originally seven maqāms, invented by the Prophets (from Adam to David), after which the Old Testament figures are replaced by Plato, who learned the twelve maqāms from the signs of the zodiac, followed, in yet another version, by scholars including Pythagoras whose endeavours resulted in the creation of eight maqāms.
The abandonment of the Systematist approach should not, though, just be seen as intellectual impoverishment, with learned, scholarly and theoretically inclined performers being replaced by uneducated practitioners who either did not have access to relevant texts or simply found them too difficult.27 The calculations and tables, combinations and transpositions inherited by late Timurid theorists were already on their way to becoming inert matter, increasingly distant from current practice but repeated in deference to authority and never re-evaluated, let alone queried. But it is still surprising to see them simply being jettisoned, rather than, as with al-Lāḏiqī in the second half of the fifteenth century, maintained as a framework within which contemporary as well as inherited data could be presented, for the abandonment of this particular theoretical paradigm resulted in an immediate and substantial loss in terms of precision and descriptive content, with no attempt being made to substitute a different method that might provide a comparably informative account of basic structures.
Mathematics and the sciences generally may have failed to progress during the Safavid period, but that does not mean that they had ceased to be pursued, and to be suspected in the present case is that we are dealing not with any incapacity to match previous complexities of analysis but with a decisive shift in the locus of scholarship. Indicative here are two contrasting texts, one a brief section on music in an encyclopaedia, written in 1571–2, that contains no mention of the usual mode names but does present a vestige of inherited theory in its ratio definitions of the basic intervals,28 the other a contemporary treatise by Mir Ṣadr al-Dīn Moḥammad Qazvini (d. 1599) that contains no hint of such material, despite that fact that his teacher, Mawlānā Amir Mālek Daylami (d. 1562), was reputedly skilled in the quadrivium and hence well equipped to transmit earlier analytical approaches. In that it consists almost entirely of discursive prose, Qazvini’s treatise is, nevertheless, hardly typical of Safavid musicological writings, for other treatises tack away from the dourly explanatory towards allusive brevity, relinquishing linear narrative in favour of curt prose summaries alternating with verse. Particularly apparent in the verse sections of Safavid texts, indeed symbolized by them, is the turn away from any scientific form of disquisition towards more consciously literary conventions: the particular type of scholarship associated with the position of music within the quadrivium is relinquished in favour of the exhibition of skills appropriate to the no less learned but more style-oriented environment of the court majles, where penmanship and panegyric outweigh arithmetic and physics.29
However, although the general physiognomy of Safavid treatises appears novel when compared with the Systematist corpus that precedes them, they are by no means novel with regard to style and content, for they develop, albeit in a somewhat different form, previous thematic concerns, while their stylistic approach is foreshadowed in a number of earlier texts, including the Systematist majalla fī al-mūsīqī by al-Širwānī (d. c. 1453),30 which weaves various mode names and other technical terms into the rhymed prose (saj‘) of its introduction. It also includes a verse section that had appeared earlier in the mid fourteenth-century Persian kanz al-tuḥaf, 31 where prominence is given to the alternation of prose and verse, with a concomitant attenuation of Systematist characteristics. The fifteenth-century Turkish treatise by Seydi also alternates between prose and verse, with the latter predominating,32 and we encounter the exclusive use of verse already in an Arabic text written in 1328–9.33
In both cases, al-Urmawī is cited with respect while his theoretical apparatus is ignored. Among the scraps of information available about the skill sets of prominent sixteenth-century musicians and composers in Iran references to competence in the theory of music are rare, whereas there are frequent indications that they were often also involved in other areas of artistic endeavour, notably poetry and calligraphy and occasionally also miniature painting, as were, indeed, some of their princely patrons.34 Nevertheless, on the evidence to hand it would be imprudent to posit a particular characteristic of Safavid court culture as explanation for the contrast in types of theoretical discourse, and there is nothing more specific, no indication of elements of musical taste that could be thought of as forming with others a particularly Safavid constellation: engagement with music, calligraphy and poetry as a cultural habitus is in any case prefigured in Timurid Herat35 and had, indeed, already been embodied by the founding father of the Systematist tradition, al-Urmawī, the last great composer and theorist of Abbasid Baghdad, but at the same time a poet36 and a celebrated calligrapher.
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