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Contributors to this volume are: Susan Ashbrook Harvey, Shraga Bick, Briouria Bitton-Ashkelony, Alberto Camplani, Thomas A. Carlson, Jeff W. Childers, Muriel Debié, Terry Falla, George A. Kiraz, Sergey Minov, Craig E. Morrison, István Perczel, Anton Pritula, Ilaria Ramelli, Christine Shepardson, Stephen J. Shoemaker, Herman G.B. Teule, Kathleen E. McVey.
Contributors to this volume are: Susan Ashbrook Harvey, Shraga Bick, Briouria Bitton-Ashkelony, Alberto Camplani, Thomas A. Carlson, Jeff W. Childers, Muriel Debié, Terry Falla, George A. Kiraz, Sergey Minov, Craig E. Morrison, István Perczel, Anton Pritula, Ilaria Ramelli, Christine Shepardson, Stephen J. Shoemaker, Herman G.B. Teule, Kathleen E. McVey.
Abstract
The 13th-century Tunisian author Aḥmad at-Tīfāšī describes in his work Mutʿat al-asmāʿ fī ʿilm as-samāʿ a system of melodic modes used in al-Andalus. This essay represents a preliminary attempt to situate at-Tīfāšī’s Andalusi modes within the broader historical development of medieval Arab modal systems and to explore their relationship to the modern modes of North Africa commonly referred to as Andalusi. This is, however, primarily an exploration of terminology or nomenclature rather than of the melodic characteristics of the modes themselves, since the sources examined here give little to no information about the internal features of the individual modes.
Abstract
This article traces the historical and intellectual origins of modern Turkish music theory in the late Ottoman period. It examines debates about music theory in the Ottoman Turkish press during the 1880s and 1890s, focusing particularly on the earliest publications of Raʾūf Yektā (1288–1353/1871–1935). The article shows how the modern Turkish theory of pitch was created by Yektā and his collaborators through the rediscovery of Arabic and Persian treatises associated with the Systematist school of mathematical music theory, which flourished between the seventh/thirteenth and ninth/fifteenth centuries. It argues that this project to bring Ottoman music into the modern “age of progress” was shaped by the ideals of both scientific positivism and Islamic modernism.
The series comprises two sections: Manuscripta contains facsimile editions of Qurʾānic manuscripts with a line-by-line transcript in Modern Arabic script on the opposite page and a commentary about codicology, paleography, variant readings and verse numbering explaining content and characteristics of each manuscript. Testimonia et Studia contains studies about material evidence for the history of the Qurʾān, as manifested on papyrus, stone and rock inscriptions etc., as well in exegetical, narrative and philological sources.
Documenta Coranica inscribes itself into a German-French cooperation: in the framework of the research project Coranica, 2011-2014, and Paleocoran 2015-2018, both funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and the Agence Nationale de la Recherche.
Abstract
Al-Fārābī conceived of music theory as a universal science of melody whose task is to determine the whole range of what is musically possible. It does not restrict itself to codifying the conventions of any particular musical idiom. In this, it is akin to logic – the universal science of all things thinkable, which does not reduce to the grammar of any given natural language.
Abstract
Starting from early Arabic sources, the absolute pitch of the Early Abbasid ʿūd is considered and related to evidence on pitch usage in Roman-period sources. Similar instruments, it is argued, must have existed already in late antiquity. Iconographic evidence takes us back to late Classical Greece, whose music would have provided especially fertile ground for designing such a lute. In contrast to the traditional tuning in fifths and fourths throughout, lutes with equidistant design had also existed for a long time, likely also on precursors of the ʿūd. The association of this style with the name of Manṣūr Zalzal must therefore be reassessed.
Abstract
The phrase “music is the nourishment of the soul” reflects a century-old complex of musical, medical, and astrological thinking; integrated notions of celestial and terrestrial harmony, humoral medicine and ethos theory that reach back to Ancient Greece. Adopted into Islamicate philosophy, those theories were combined with a modal system that amplified them. The present paper traces them in various Ottoman texts with the aim of understanding how concepts of music theory, astrology, medicine, and food interacted. A crucial question is whether music theory sources can be brought into a relationship with descriptions of musical (therapy) practices in hospitals.
Abstract
Samāʿ literature reveals a tension in premodern Islamicate societies. While musical practices were ubiquitous and practiced in many contexts, Islamic legal tradition regarded them with suspicion. Musical instruments occupied a central place in these discussions, perhaps, because as physical objects associated with what is otherwise in the non-tangible domain of sound they were seen as the quintessential manifestation of music. Udfuwī’s Imtāʿ is one of the most comprehensive works in the genre, and its chapter on instruments is unique in both the length and place it ascribes to percussion instruments. Udfuwī argues for their permissibility and stresses their social importance throughout history.