1 Introduction

The theme of this anthology, social codicology, represents an approach to manuscript works and the texts they bear that has lain on the margins of manuscript studies for a very long time, but whose full significance has only just begun to be appreciated. The idea that the form of a written work follows its function and the purpose for which it was created has long been a fundamental assumption in the field. For example, when looking at a pre-modern Arabic dīwān, you can see that the texts you have before you are poems because of the way the words are arranged on the page, even if you know nothing about Arabic. They are set out in lines, usually with one caesura in the middle, a form designed, among other considerations, to make the text easier to read, to mirror to some extent the metrical and recitational expectations, and to highlight the important end rhyme.

In much the same way, the layout of poetry on the page in an anthology can be diagnostic: Departures from this format may signal departures in linguistic register and other matters of style, or in the function or intended use of the work. With a few exceptions (such as the muthallath type of didactic verse), pre-modern poetry arranged in strophes, or with multiple caesurae (to highlight internal rhymes within the line), can mark the work as post-classical before one has read a single word, which may then carry with it expectations about the register of language in use, whether or not it adheres to the traditional poetic metres and licenses, and perhaps even whether it was created to be sung. In short, many considerations have helped to establish the marking of text as poetry quite firmly in Arabic letters. Conversely, an anthologist who departs from these conventions risks undermining the text’s use-value.

But the conventions of representing poetry on the page carry social meaning as well. Departing from these conventions of visual presentation risks undermining the reader’s perception of the work’s social value. Poetry is, of course, the idiom of literary prestige in Arab culture. This is so obvious that one notes it only in order to underscore the fact that the arrangement on the page consequently imparts a certain prestige to the written text. The reader approaches a poetic text differently from prose, with different expectations, a different understanding of the level of discourse that will be in play, and a concomitant construction of the work’s social meaning or value. (And yonder lies Arabic poetics, beyond the scope of this essay.)¹

Considerations like these have long been taken for granted in traditional manuscript studies, without a great deal of attention being devoted to their larger social implications. Social codicology, in contrast, has the potential to bring a new focus upon the social and cultural implications of a manuscript’s “functions,” with accompanying implications for understanding the form and content in deeper ways. Interweaving concern for social realities with material and/or formal considerations brings forward a number of interesting questions, among them: What socio-cultural practices are manifested or embedded in the document? How might a more careful scrutiny of its form and content lead us to a more sophisticated understanding of its functions, and vice-versa? And most significantly for this essay: How does a given written work come to embody meanings in various social domains?

This essay focuses on one work, Kunnāsh al-Ḥāʾik (“Al-Ḥāʾik’s Notebook”), an anthology of song texts originally compiled in Fez by Muḥammad b. al-Ḥusayn al-Ḥāʾik (d. after 1788), and in particular one exemplar: manuscript #144 found at the Khizāna Dāwūdiyya in Tetouan (hereafter D144). This anthology will serve as a test case for approaching manuscripts and their texts from three related dimensions, each one more or less overlapping with the others, in order to suggest a framework for exploring the complex relationship that obtains between the text of the work, its form, and its function:

• The meaning (that is, the value) the work holds as a function of its social frame,

• The manuscript as objectified cultural capital,

and emerging from these two,

• The social life (and afterlives) of the manuscript.

Each of these dimensions requires some explanation of how they can be applied to a work like Kunnāsh al-Ḥāʾik in its various iterations, but understanding them together may lead to a fuller appreciation of how complex processes of signification and embodiment bind these anthologies into the social frameworks within which they circulate. Form and content come to be seen, not merely as products of function, but as mutually implicated with function within a larger social frame that may account for both the social life and the complex and diverse afterlives of the work and its specific exemplars.

2 Value and the Social Life of Cultural Capital

Written works are created for one or several purposes. They are copied and circulate narrowly or widely within and across communities (of users and non-users); they may come to represent or stand in for institutions or traditions or indeed any number of socially informed belief systems, values, and so on; and just as is true for other material objects, they circulate as items of economic and social exchange and can be repurposed, reframed, and revalued within and beyond the symbolic systems that conditioned their creation, often even while retaining traces of their “original” purposes, values and so on.

What is literature after all—simply a thing (or a body of things) intended primarily to be read, or is it also a more complex socio-cultural phenomenon, even an ethos, that engages with larger domains of intellectual and social life? Is “literature” merely a private experience, an exchange between the author and reader we might term Lesevergnügen? Or does it also embody interpersonal dimensions not focused entirely upon the reader?

There is obviously a robust, often self-referential body of works that wrestle with the question of what it means to speak of literature, usually defined by its relationship to processes of production and/or interpretation. Alongside these approaches, however, one may engage more directly with the position of the reader (or more appropriately for our purposes, the user) within the social frame. Conceptions of value and meaning may be employed to unpack that position and the ways in which the manuscript comes to represent or embody it. The theoretical frame adopted in this essay thus bears some affinity with reader-response varieties of literary theory, although such theories usually are more concerned with the construction of linguistic meaning than with social value, as such.

On the other hand, one of the limitations inherent in studies of value and meaning within the usual conceptions of literature has been their typical focus on “modern” socio-economic relations in which literary objects seem almost inevitably to be reduced to “commodities.” Although the literal meaning of this word has also to do with usefulness, it is loaded nowadays with mainly economic connotations that are not so appropriate to this discussion because the works in question are situated within stereotypically “traditional” modes of production and consumption, in which personal relations overshadow the institutional and mass-production contexts that preoccupy much of the literature. In other words, these manuscripts are not notable for their economic value as such, and so do not sit comfortably within frameworks that too firmly emphasize economic exchange. All social life is in some sense “exchange,” but that does not mean that the language of economy (commodity, consumption, and so on) is always the best way to describe it. Indeed, the argument here rests upon the insight that “value” and “meaning” are ways of talking about something else more fundamental to human experience: the importance that people attach to action within the social frame and the relationships that it generates. We shall therefore be reading theoretical frameworks against the grain, in order to tease from them the more useful elements that might actually be relevant to the non-modern (“traditional”) economic and social frameworks in play here.

Coming at the problem from another angle, Roy Harris in Rethinking Writing² observes that written language exists to integrate various forms of communicative and even non-communicative acts. Such a view places a literary work like Kunnāsh al-Ḥāʾik in a much more comprehensive context, revealing it as something much larger than simply a collection of speech acts. Writing may have evolved in ancient times as an effort to “freeze” speech or enhance the memory of it, but in societies characterized by extensive reliance upon the written word, writing becomes capable of “speaking” for itself, in its own way(s) and bearing functions in and of itself that may in some contexts transcend the boundaries of what we normally think of as the meaning of the text per se.

As a simple example, imagine the cover of a songbook. It is of course intended to tell a potential reader what to expect from the pages inside, and its typeface and design will have been created both to generate interest and to evoke the spirit of the contents. Yet an image of the same book cover, when posted on a social-media platform in the context of an announcement of a concert, can operate in an iconic way to communicate a great deal of cultural (i.e., not explicitly textual) information about the event, the social position of the organizers or performers, expectations about the audience, and so on. The actual text of the book cover has not changed at all, nor has the literal meaning of the words, but the title of the book (as well as its typeface and presentation) encourages it to take on larger meanings. Because it calls to mind the texts between the covers, the book has come to serve the organizers of the concert by importing socially significant details of the music’s cultural-symbolic realities into the post. The text on the book cover has helped to integrate the songbook’s social meaning into the communicative act of the concert advertisement.

It is important to keep questions like these in mind, because traditional manuscript studies have rarely considered a) how the symbolic, referential, and even iconic potential of works can condition their form and contents, and b) how these reframings can sometimes point us toward layers or dimensions of meaning in the text itself that might otherwise go unnoticed. Ultimately, a songbook like Kunnāsh al-Ḥāʾik is not only a work of “mere” literature but also a sophisticated signifier communicating larger social meanings associated with the song tradition it represents, such as traditionalism, prestige, and authenticity, because meaning may converge with value, and value with cultural capital. The manuscript’s social life is informed by these factors, but it also informs them in turn. It both operates and is operated upon, in a back-and-forth movement of signification and embodiment that is not unique to this work or this social-cultural context.

Arjun Appadurai, in his introduction to the book The Social Life of Things, reminds us that the meanings of things “… are inscribed in their forms, their uses, their trajectories.”³ While Appadurai himself seems mainly concerned in his essay with commodities (that is, things-as-they-circulate—either engaging with or pushing against Marx), and accordingly modern, production-consumption economies, it should be obvious that the social life of objects is not limited to their circulation through exchange but also encompasses their positions when they are “at rest.” The social relations that determine how a thing moves do not alone necessarily define its value, which may also derive from the social meaning(s) associated with its immobility. When an object is regarded as unique and intended for display as well as for its material uses, its meaning may be measured as much by the cultural attributes it embodies (prestige, exclusivity, etc.) as by its “velocity.”

Indeed, the social life of the thing may appear to be as much a function of the limitations on its “sociability” as the fact of its tendency to circulate. We might even say that a thing may have no social life at all (or nearly none, or one so sharply constrained that it may not appear to exist) and yet still bear significant social meaning by virtue of its simple presence in an individual’s hand or library.⁴ I would argue as well that it is effectively impossible to determine across all cases which came first, the “chicken” of the object itself or the “egg” of the social value(s) it embodies.

As David Graeber observes, value is not limited to exchange value, because the various domains within which we use the term are not as distinct as they may appear to be. In his search for an anthropological definition of value, he points out that in English, the word may be used in three contexts: economic value (the cost of things, monetary or otherwise), social values (the significance attaching to objects and actions), and linguistic value (meaning). These three domains, which we are accustomed to thinking of as distinct, are in fact phases of a single phenomenon, the fact that humans attach significance to actions within the social contexts that form our lives.⁵

Social values seem obviously to be driven by relativistic cultural considerations, but even the economic cost of a thing is by no means merely an objective measure of its worth. Traditional economics is very good at explaining why a given object costs a given amount of money in a given context, but it is notably bad at explaining why people in one society value one thing and not another. Why, for example, do some people in the U.S. prefer pickup trucks to land rovers, even when the two cost about the same amount of money? They may be equally functional and equally expensive, but in the end the often elaborate social rituals, even mythologies, around pickup trucks demonstrate that the preference for those has less to do with material considerations than with conceptions of tradition, masculinity, patriotism, and so on. Owning and driving a land rover makes an entirely different social statement.⁶ The economic cost of the thing (what people are willing to pay for it) may influence who owns it to some degree, but it does not really account for its value in particular social contexts.

Seemingly, the odd one out in Graeber’s formulation is linguistic meaning, but it is in fact cut from the same cloth (and intimately engaged with the subject of this article). The meanings of words are related to economic or social value because they are entirely the result of how we use them in social interactions. The meaning of shirt rests upon the reality of all the things we use the word to indicate, so in a universe without shirts, the word would not exist. Moreover, both the specific meaning and the socio-cultural implication are important. Shirt and blouse refer to approximately the same kind of garment, but one would never regard them as completely interchangeable. Anthropologically speaking, the meaning of a word appears the moment we use it to talk with someone about something.

Hence, a social value such as prestige cannot be separated from the economic value attaching to the objects and actions that impart prestige, nor from the linguistic values (meanings) attaching to the use of words or texts that “speak prestige” to their users and hearers. They are of a piece, bound together by how people evaluate (i.e., attach importance to) behaving, using things, and speaking in particular ways in social contexts and thus in the construction and maintenance of social relations. All of this turns upon the contexts in which prestige has social implications. A poetic-musical tradition that bears significant social prestige does so because people a) have a meaning-full concept of prestige in their socio-cultural repertoire, and b) evaluate the tradition as meaningful in one or more domains. The more domains, and the greater the depth of the engagement in each, the greater the sense, the aura, of prestige. And so it goes with other socially valued concepts, like traditionalism, honour, erudition, generosity, and so on. For the same reasons that social (and economic and linguistic) contexts change, values (such as prestige or traditionalism) shift in meaning, as do the objects that signal or embody them. It is precisely the nature of the underlying value-matrix that generates a manuscript’s social life, and the mutability of that value-matrix makes its “afterlife” appear.

One way that the social life of an object like a manuscript may manifest can be seen in its ability to reflect (or embody) its owner’s “cultural capital.” It may do so because of the way in which it engages value in all these dimensions, within a particular social frame. And by the same token, the social life of such a manuscript can be expected to change as the value-structure upon which that social life stands changes.

In “Forms of Capital,” Pierre Bourdieu employs the idea of cultural capital to explain the role that education plays in the maintenance of capital (i.e., the ability to appropriate the products of others’ labour), how it disguises power-capital, and why it represents an expensive but productive investment of economic resources. In doing so, he reduces all social interactions to economic terms, which, if understood too crudely, is problematic for reasons laid out by Graeber. But if we take economic in Bourdieu’s work to refer rather to the general fact of exchange in social life, then cultural capital may be seen as a way to describe social inequality as embodied not merely in the brute force of economic domination but also in the non-material facts—the meanings, the values—of social exchange. To the extent that cultural capital functions as a value-signifier, it does so within economic, social, and linguistic dimensions.

Bourdieu goes on to describe cultural capital as existing in three forms: embodied (“long-lasting dispositions of the mind and body”), objectified (“cultural goods” which are the “realization of theories”), and institutionalized (e.g., “educational qualifications” which “guarantee” cultural capital).⁷ Of the three, the objectified state would seem to be the most relevant way to describe the cultural capital inhering in a work like Kunnāsh al-Ḥāʾik. Each exemplar—whether a fine manuscript like D144, a musician’s notebook, or a modern print edition—is a “cultural” item whose importance lies in the “theory” of its relationship to the prestigious performed tradition, which itself bears a range of cultural and social-hierarchical associations. It is thus less of an independent object than one element in a web or network of objects and actions that together signal certain social values, including (but not limited to) some that imply “capital” in the sense that Marx and Bourdieu used the word, namely in the sense of the ability to appropriate resources.

Bourdieu recognizes the complicated interrelationship between the object and the value it possesses, pointing out that an object that represents objectified cultural capital may be “transmitted” without “appropriating” the cultural capital itself. For that, one must also acquire the embodied cultural capital that makes “consuming” the object valued (in the case of the song anthologies, what makes both “owning” them and “using” them meaningful).

We may describe the social life of a manuscript like D144, then, in terms of the objectified cultural capital it embodies, understanding that that capital stands entirely upon a particular value-matrix deriving from a collection of social, economic, and linguistic values associated with actions within the social frame relating to a certain poetic-musical tradition, actions that signal attachment to highly-valued characteristics like erudition, traditionalism, and so on, and which then inform social relationships among users of songbooks, aficionados, performers, etc. Those social values (that cultural capital) may be detected in the form, content, and function of the object, but they are also contingent. When outside forces, such as technological, economic, or political changes, threaten to transform the society at large, they also threaten the foundations of the value-system which supports the social life of the object.

In this way it becomes possible to talk about both the social life of Kunnāsh al-Ḥāʾik (and D144 in particular) as it relates to form and function, as well as the afterlife of the manuscript in the wake of social transformations. To understand this, we must consider the manuscript in its socio-cultural context.

3 Al-āla, Kunnāsh al-Ḥāʾik, and D144

Kunnāsh al-Ḥāʾik is an anthology of song texts associated with the Andalusian music tradition of Morocco, known colloquially as al-āla. This musical genre is one of several similar traditions found today across the modern North African nations. It comprises perhaps 800 or 900 songs (ṣanāʾiʿ, sg. ṣanʿa) as well as a handful of instrumental pieces, structured around the large ensemble known as a nūba, of which there are eleven in the contemporary repertoire. Al-āla probably owes its origins ultimately to the courtly music of the Islamic period in Iberia (al-Andalus), though this connection is almost impossible to trace conclusively. There is no direct documentation of the music (no practical form of musical notation was in widespread use at the time), nor do the texts reveal much. The oldest surviving indication of a nūba repertoire as such in al-Andalus (from an encyclopedia compiled by Aḥmad al-Tīfāshī, who died in Cairo in 651/1253) suggests that the repertoire at that time strongly emphasized songs composed by Andalusi individuals, but the modern North African repertoire, as defined by song anthologies dating back to the eighteenth century, draws on the whole of the Arabic poetic tradition, east and west (embracing selections of poetry going back even to Ḥassān b. Thābit, who died ca. 54/674), and includes a majority of song texts that are of unknown authorship. Yet the musical characteristics today differ enough from the musical traditions of the eastern Mediterranean that a distinct origin in the Arab-Islamic west is more than plausible.

Despite the uncertainty of the connection, the modern al-āla retains significant cultural prestige in the public mind by virtue of this association with the cultural florescence of al-Andalus.⁸ Enjoying significant patronage from the national government, as well as from private music lovers’ associations, al-āla serves as a kind of national classical music, with its own conservatories, festivals, and gala performances attended by the wealthier classes.

The nūba tradition as known today has been preserved throughout its history by both oral and written means. The performed versions of these songs have always been taught orally through rote memorization, which remains the preferred mode among traditional performers and aficionados. Since at least the early eighteenth century, however, scholars and aficionados of the music have collected the texts in more or less comprehensive anthologies, often accompanied by discussions of the legitimacy of music as a field of study, the anthologist’s interest in the subject, and music theory. Consequently, the tradition has been marked for at least three centuries by the interweaving of oral and literary processes of preservation and transmission across generations. This cultural ethos of “mixed orality” has fundamentally conditioned the production of the manuscript anthologies discussed here.⁹

In this regard, while these works may represent the musical tradition, they embody it only imperfectly. The anthologies are, after all, collections of repertoires that would not exist without the performed tradition. Given that the performed ṣanāʾiʿ typically involve repetitions, instrumental passages between words (and even between syllables of individual words), and often elaborate use of nonsense syllables (tarāṭīn, such as hā nā nā and yā lā lā)—none of which are reproduced in the songbook—it is impossible to learn the performed ṣanʿa from the written one alone. One needs someone who already knows it (or nowadays a recording, which is practically the same thing, though widely regarded as insufficient), in order to derive the sung version from the written text. Consequently, these works are much more than collections of poetry: They are also signifiers of the social frameworks of their use, and of the larger performed tradition that they in some sense embody, however incompletely. Moreover, the ability to read and be able to derive the sung version from the written page marks the owner as an individual with significant cultural capital in the context of Moroccan society. The slippage between the oral and the literary thus highlights the social lives, the social contexts and functions, that have occasioned the creation of these anthologies and, in part, conditioned their construction.

Furthermore, there is another cultural logic behind presenting the repertoire as poetry per se, which involves the value placed on poetry in the broader Arabic culture and the historical lack of a socially valued way to represent songs on the page. The ability to read and understand poetry combines with the prestige of the poetic genre itself, linking the texts (and hence, the performed tradition as well) to the grand heritage that is poetry in Arabic and imparting all on the owner/user of the songbook. The form, content, and use(s) of the anthologies of this musical tradition do not operate in simple cause-and-effect relationships, but actually inform one another.

Kunnāsh al-Ḥāʾik was not the first effort at compiling a more-or-less comprehensive anthology of the texts of al-āla.¹⁰ But in the decades after its creation, al-Ḥāʾik’s work came to be recognized as bearing a unique relationship to the tradition as a whole. Exactly how and when this came to be is impossible to determine now, for the evidence surely lay in the day-to-day lives of musicians and audiences, probably in many places in Morocco. Perhaps it was partly a result of the Kunnāsh being copied more frequently (only one exemplar of al-Būʿiṣāmī’s anthology has survived, suggesting that few copies were ever made). However it happened, certainly by the middle of the nineteenth century Kunnāsh al-Ḥāʾik had become the reference work par excellence.

In the 1880s, one Muḥammad b. al-Mukhtār al-Jāmiʿī (d. after 1886) was commissioned by the Moroccan Sultan al-Ḥasan I (d. 1894) to assemble another anthology of al-āla, but even this was understood to be a re-compilation or revision of the Kunnāsh, based upon the repertoire current in his day (at least in Fez, though not necessarily elsewhere in Morocco). This Majmūʿ al-Jāmiʿī differs from its precursor in the arrangement of nūbāt and some of its content: Quite a number of songs in the various Kunnāsh manuscripts are not to be found in it; a few songs (or individual lines in songs) are found in it that do not appear in any of the Kunnāsh manuscripts; and others are reduced to two or three lines. This is relevant to our social-codicological analysis as well, since this anthology probably represents the influence of various regional sub-repertoires which seem to have come to the fore in the century after al-Ḥāʾik. Nevertheless, the al-Jāmiʿī anthology testifies to and depends upon the value assigned to the Kunnāsh. Indeed even today, many copies of this work deposited in libraries and archives across northern Morocco are identified as “Kunnāsh al-Ḥāʾik bi-tartīb al-Jamiʿī” (“Kunnāsh al-Ḥāʾik in al-Jāmiʿī’s arrangement”).

To judge from the diversity of the surviving manuscripts, the history of Kunnāsh al-Ḥāʾik is complicated and has yet to be worked out satisfactorily. The main subject of this essay, D144, bears a date earlier than any other existing exemplar, but it differs in content from all other surviving manuscripts (it contains some nūbāt that are not known today and some ṣanāʾiʿ that are not found in other manuscripts or the modern repertoire, and it does not include others that appear in later manuscripts), and because some folios have been lost from the beginning, the anthologist’s name no longer appears in it. What remains of its introduction, however, is entirely in keeping with the introductions to later manuscripts clearly attributed to al-Ḥāʾik, and the contents are also broadly similar to those manuscripts, including the use of some technical terminology in common with later iterations of the work.

The manuscript itself is 20 cm × 17 cm, executed on modern laid paper with no watermarks, and bound in a typical leather-board cover. The text has been rendered in an ornate maghribī mabsūṭ hand, fifteen lines to the page, in brown-black, red, and blue inks, and with the text block set in a red and blue frame (see fig. 4.1). Occasional green ink and gilt highlights are found in the early folios, especially in the text of a well-known poem about the melodic modes, Ṭabāʾiʿ mā fī ʿālam al-kawn arbaʿun (“The Natures of Created Things are Four”) attributed to ʿAbd al-Wāḥid al-Wansharīsī (d. 955/1549?)¹¹ and the related illustration of the shajrat al-ṭubūʿ (the Tree of Modes that represents elements of the musical theory) that follows it (fig. 4.2).

An unknown number of pages has gone missing from the beginning of the document, and parts of the first folio that remains have been torn away. For this reason, neither the title of the work nor the anthologist’s name are to be found in the manuscript. However, a note on the last page gives a date of 1202 AH (1788 CE, fig. 4.3), and the colophon indicates that the manuscript was “executed at the hand of its collector” (nujiza‮…‬‎ʿalā yad jāmiʿihi). Given that no other compiler of the tradition has ever been identified with this time period, neither in written documentation nor in oral tradition, and that what remains of the introduction, the work’s overall structure, and the terminology used in it, all mirror exactly the characteristics of later manuscripts clearly identified with al-Ḥāʾik, there can be no doubt that D144 belongs within the stream of Kunnāsh al-Ḥāʾik manuscripts. There is also no question that it is the earliest known exemplar of the Kunnāsh, and it may well be the original which lies behind later versions.

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Figure 4.1

A page from D144

Courtesy Hasna Daoud / Khizāna Dāwudiyya

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Figure 4.2

shajarat al-ṭubūʿ from D144

Courtesy Hasna Daoud / Khizāna Dāwudiyya

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The images of D144 in figures 4.1–4.3 illustrate well that this version of “al-Ḥāʾik’s Notebook” was not created merely as a reference work for a performer or ensemble leader. The use of coloured inks, especially in the elaborate rendering of the shajarat al-ṭubūʿ, goes well beyond the utility of a document meant to be carried about to rehearsals, to be used as a reference for teaching, and so on. Moreover, the care revealed in the copyist’s hand, as shown in figures 4.1 and 4.2, as well as the relatively high quality of the paper the work was written on shows clearly that this songbook was created as a library piece, a work intended to be both read and seen.¹² The socio-cultural logic that lies behind this relies upon the relationship between Kunnāsh al-Ḥāʾik and the performed tradition in particular, and in the position of al-āla within the larger culture of Morocco more generally. In turn, these factors emerge from the regimes of value and cultural capital that underpin the social lives of the work itself and the musical-poetic tradition it has come to represent.

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Figure 4.3

The last pages of D144

Courtesy Hasna Daoud / Khizāna Dāwudiyya

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In contrast, we find many other manuscripts in various archives and private collections, some of which are much less elaborate and formal in their presentation. Figure 4.4 presents a good example, a page from manuscript 838 ‮ج‬‎ at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Rabat. It makes use of coloured inks, but the hand is looser, and the overall presentation is much more relaxed and informal. Moreover, it bears indications in red ink for the number of turns through the rhythmic cycle for each line. While it certainly represents a significant investment of time and resources (it contains the entire repertoire), it seems to have been intended for the practical uses of a musician or teacher, rather than as a display item.

Little is certain about the economic structures that framed the production of the manuscripts considered here, but study of the papers upon which they were executed offers some clues, because the quality of the materials used in them varied with time and the purpose of the copy being made. From the late eighteenth century through the late nineteenth century, we find either relatively high quality “modern” laid paper for the finer exemplars, pages from manufactured accounting notebooks for the less decorative versions, or occasionally more decorative copies (i.e., rendered with well-controlled hands in several ink colours) in such notebooks (fig. 4.5). By the beginning of the twentieth century, higher-quality, machine-made wove paper (often with distributors’ dry stamps) predominate for the finer exemplars alongside general-use papers for less ostentatious copies. Although the materials that went into them were commercially produced, the various examples of Kunnāsh al-Ḥāʾik clearly were not mass-produced commodities, but rather were copied individually. Some appear to be the product of personal interactions between the user and one or more calligrapher-copyists, while others were executed for practical forms of use, possibly by the users themselves.

Behind all this there was very likely a latter-day version of the ancient system of booksellers.¹³ It seems that a person of means could arrange to have a fine copy of the Kunnāsh executed in an excellent hand by a local copyist on very nice paper that was available from one or two companies, while more pedestrian copies might be made on whatever commercial paper was available for personal use. For example, two sets of surviving al-Jāmiʿī manuscripts were each executed on paper with similar dry stamps in hands so similar as to suggest that each set derives from one copyist, who apparently used paper from one manufacturer for such work. Similarly, manufactured accounting books seem to have been an increasingly popular writing medium for this sort of work (the pages already being marked with lines and columns that facilitated the rendering of the poems, as in fig. 4.5). A number of late-nineteenth or early-twentieth-century exemplars attest to this.¹⁴ Consequently, exchange value as such was more important to the production of the paper than it was to the social lives of the work in hand (even if the quality of the paper might to some degree index the social value of the finished product).

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Figure 4.4

A page from ms. 858 ‮ج‬‎

Courtesy la Bibliothèque Nationale du Royaume du Maroc

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Figure 4.5

A page from an anonymous copy of the Kunnāsh executed in an accounting notebook

Courtesy Dar El Ala

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These manuscripts should therefore not be situated too firmly within regimes of exchange and “consumption.” They were probably not understood as objects of significant commercial value (except perhaps by the professional copyists), but rather as bearers of repertoire with attendant use-values and linguistic and social meanings. If their economic value was significant, it was so as a marker of the owner’s social status, not of the value of the manuscript itself.

4 Text, Repertoire, and Social Value

One key to grasping the position of D144 and its related manuscript tradition within their socio-cultural milieu is to recognize that although Kunnāsh al-Ḥāʾik (like its sister anthologies in other nūba traditions in North Africa) presents the texts in the form of poetry, its function is to re-present repertoire. The nūba is especially important to this discussion of the social lives of these anthologies, because song texts are grouped according to their nūbāt, which are then subdivided by rhythmic mode. In other words, the anthologies are organized according to performance practice, which is accordingly the first and most basic element in the social construction of these works that clearly separates them from a poetic dīwān, which is typically arranged according to other criteria, such as the author, theme, rhyme (qawāfī), poetic form (qaṣīda, muwashshaḥ, etc.), subject-matter, and so on. One could not reasonably see these Moroccan Andalusian music manuscripts as being exclusively anthologies of poetry.

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Figure 4.6

A page from the Bennānī al-Jāmiʿī manuscript at the Dar El Ala

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The relationship between performance (clearly a socially situated practice) and text (which has a social life of its own) thereby drives structure, content, and use, so that the manuscript itself is easily identifiable as relating to the al-āla repertoire because its structure parallels that of the performed tradition. For the same reason, a knowledgeable user can, for example, locate a specific text (such-and-such ṣanʿa in such-and-such movement of such-and-such nūba) even if the text is itself only minimally recognizable as reproducing the ṣanʿa-as-sung. The manuscript, in its conception, execution, and social position, therefore exists at the intersection of written text, performed repertoire, and practical use. The social life of this work is (or was) a function of all of them.

And yet beyond these considerations lies the curious ability of Kunnāsh al-Ḥāʾik not only to represent the repertoire, but also to represent the tradition as a whole as the definitive reference work, an ability rooted in questions of social values like prestige, erudition, and traditionalism. The tradition’s historical associations, the style of the music, the style and content of the texts, and the ways that performances are socially constructed and presented, together mark al-āla in these ways. The form and content of the anthology intersect with its functionality in a way that imports the prestige-value of al-āla into the social construction of the work.

To the extent that aficionados trace the history of this musical tradition to al-Andalus, its associations with high culture begin there. The old Arabic sources indicate that from an early stage, art music as such (as opposed to work, mourning, or other “folk” music) among the Arabs was conceived as sound performed within organized rules and theory, deriving largely from Persian and Greek models.¹⁵ What did not fall into the category of refined musical art was not termed al-mūsīqā as such.¹⁶ The nūba tradition of Morocco belongs squarely within this domain of al-mūsīqā by virtue of its systematically defined melodic and rhythmic features (which also determine the structure of the parallel written tradition). Moreover, the standard narrative of its history in particular is usually held to begin with the arrival in Cordoba from the Middle East of the famous composer and man-of-taste, ʿAlī b. Nāfiʿ Ziryāb, in 206/822. He is said to have transformed the court culture and art music of the Umayyad emirate, ushering in an era of style and great sophistication, which later generations built upon, until the music itself was transplanted to North Africa.¹⁷

Yet although the art music of al-Andalus carried significant associations with erudition and highbrow taste (and therefore probably was not strongly associated with non-elites), when this high-class music made its way to North Africa, it ceased to be the purview of the elites alone and became equally the province of middling folk—still educated, but not of the true upper crust—through a process that is not entirely clear today.¹⁸

Moreover, with the advent of the Alawite dynasty in the seventeenth century, al-āla came to be regarded as a kind of national classical music associated with the monarchy itself, with significant implications for the social life of the music, including the songbooks. Since the end of the Protectorate period, the government has invested in institutional infrastructure intended to support the tradition and disseminate it throughout the country. A national conservatory system employs leading performers to teach the music as a pastime to students of all ages and to train successive generations of professional-level performers. Print versions of the repertoire serve as reference works in these conservatories.

Additionally, music lovers’ associations (jamʿiyyāt) have sprung up in many cities, offering paid subscriptions to soirees (ḥafalāt) where leading ensembles perform, and the audience is educated in the tradition’s history and culture. These jamʿiyyāt also team up with local and national government to sponsor Andalusian music festivals (mahrajānāt) that feature series of concerts presented in a gala format that highlight the tradition’s highbrow associations. Finally, the status of this music as a national tradition has created a substantial passive audience of people who may not have a particular affinity to it, but who experience it as part of the soundscape of daily life, whether on speakers playing from the doorways of music shops or through radio and television broadcasts on important holidays.

Parallel with these developments, a market has sprung up for print anthologies of the song texts since the 1970s. Three books in particular (those by Binmansur, Binjallun, and al-Rāyis) have come to be regarded as authoritative representations of the tradition. The first two explicitly present themselves as editions or updates of al-Ḥāʾik’s work, and the third embodies a comprehensive rendering of the al-Jāmiʿī material.¹⁹ This modern print tradition clearly reflects the impact of several processes, including evolutions in the technologies of printing, the efforts of the government and others to promote al-āla, and the simple economics of scale, which has made the expensive process of producing large written documents dramatically cheaper and thus more accessible to middle-class folk.²⁰

In the face of this expansion of the audience beyond the palaces of the powerful, the texts of the songs and the musical style have continued to reflect a level of erudition and refined taste. To appreciate the lyrics and the subtleties of the music properly required—and continues to require—a commitment to both education and sophistication, and likewise to a certain sense of traditionalism (because of the genre’s historical associations and the more recent efforts of the government and others to promote it precisely this way). An aficionado acquires these attributes by means of his or her association with al-āla through education, and through the social acts of attending concerts and/or by owning one or more anthologies of the song texts. In the heyday of handwritten manuscripts, a shelf work like D144, having been crafted from high-quality materials and executed in a fine hand, embodied its owner’s personal investment in the tradition and the cultural capital that that represented.²¹

Just as the performed tradition is itself saturated with oral processes of preservation, the written texts also bear traces of orality interwoven into their content and organization, all the while answering to rather different values than the performed aspect of the tradition: The literary aspect of al-āla both represents and fails to embody the larger tradition that gave it birth. All this complexity emerges from social context.

5 Defining the Social Life and Afterlives of Kunnāsh al-Ḥāʾik

In general, the social life of a work has to do with how it functions within its owner’s social milieu, understanding that its functions are conditioned by how its form and content engage with various domains of value. As one example, some works live the lives of sacrality. Their sacred form and content delimit how they are handled, by whom and in which circumstances.

Some come to be revered within institutions that preserve them because of the links they represent to sacred doctrines and individuals and because of their use-value within these institutions, such as the manuscripts that populate the archives discussed by Olly Akkerman in this volume. Other documents acquire their sacrality in the context of historical processes, as with the US Declaration of Independence, which spent decades rolled up in libraries before being publicly displayed as a “sacred founding document” some sixty-five years after its creation (perhaps not coincidentally near the beginning of a long and painful national process of debate over state sovereignty and so on). From this point on, the document’s condition (the state of the paper, the legibility of the signatures, etc.) increasingly became a cause of popular concern. Unusual steps for both preservation and display were finally begun in the context of its own centennial, after the crisis of the Civil War and at a point where its sacrality had become a matter of national attention.

The social life of Kunnāsh al-Ḥāʾik has, broadly speaking, been shaped by its function as a re-presentation of an erudite and traditional performed repertoire, and yet its many iterations and exemplars have lived at least two distinct kinds of social lives. The erudition and traditionalism inherent in the repertoire really tell only part of the story, since even a songbook, constrained as it is by its chief function as container of repertoire, may nevertheless be used in more than one way. Finer exemplars, like D144 and some later manuscripts (including a number of the al-Jāmiʿī manuscripts, e.g., 4.6), might be said to have lived rather privileged social lives as objects of display (which could include demonstrating one’s erudition or traditionalism to others by deriving the sung version from the written text) as well as sources of Lesevergnügen. Note the well-executed hand and the relatively elaborate use of colours—red, blue, yellow, and gilt—typical of such high-quality exemplars. Likewise, the text box is framed in colour in such manuscripts, adding another decorative touch. These details, along with the higher quality paper, point to the more privileged social lives of these manuscripts. It is unlikely that such works travelled much beyond their owners’ libraries.²²

Other, less finely crafted versions may have lived more active lives as teachers’ notebooks, references for ensemble leaders, and so on. Figures 4.7 and 4.8 present a page each from two of these more workmanlike manuscripts: figure 4.7 from ms. #3376 ‮د‬‎ at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Rabat (dated 23 Dhū l-Ḥijja 1331/23 November, 1913), and figure 4.8 from a facsimile edition of a Kunnāsh manuscript owned by ʿAbd al-Salām b. Ḥasan al-Raqīwāq (dated 25 Shawwāl, 1325/1 December, 1907). Note the rather looser hand, the more limited use of colour, and the generally less elaborate presentation in both. Such manuscripts often lack the introduction found in other exemplars. The Raqīwaq manuscript has musical indications (numbers on the margin indicating the turns through the rhythmic cycle for each line); other versions sometimes have marginalia indicating alternate texts to be sung in this place in the nūba, fī waznihi madḥan or fī waznihi ayḍān: texts to be sung to the same melody, sometimes as al-madīḥ al-nabawī (in praise of the Prophet Muḥammad).²³

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Figure 4.7

A page from 3376 ‮د‬‎

Courtesy La Bibliothèque Nationale du Royaume du Maroc

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Figure 4.8

A page from the Raqīwāq manuscript facsimile edition

Courtesy Jamʿiyya Huwāt al-Mūsīqā l-Andalusiyya

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Hence, these manuscripts—all constructed according to the same general pattern and reproducing essentially the same texts—appear to have been produced with quite different social lives in mind. Some were created at least in part for teaching or study: Their less elaborate presentation suggests that they were mnemonic works used by teachers or leaders of ensembles, some with indications that would make that task a bit easier. Others, like D144, seem unlikely to have been carted about to rehearsals and so on, but instead were destined mainly to provide their owners with Lesevergnügen in the setting of a private library or social space. All of them represent the prestige and traditionalism inherent in the performance of al-āla, with the attendant ability to signify their owners’ cultural capital, even those whose actual social lives were not particularly privileged. What would have varied, perhaps, was the degree or depth of that cultural capital.

The clearest evidence for the social value attaching to even these lower-quality manuscripts lies in their afterlives, that is, how they have come to be used once their immediate, effective use-value had been supplanted. If a manuscript can be said to have lived a social life by virtue of the uses for which it was created (reflected in its structure, but also in its form, style of execution and so on, as we have just argued), what happens when larger circumstances conspire to shift the social foundations upon which that use-value was based? Given the mutability of tradition in the face of social change,²⁴ what becomes of a work whose social value is bound up with its capacity for representing a prestigious musical tradition? In the case of al-āla and Kunnāsh al-Ḥāʾik, the musical tradition continues to be performed, so that these anthologies do not simply lose all meaning in the larger cultural context. If anything, their prestige and sense of traditionalism are enhanced with time, as long as al-āla persists as a living tradition.

And yet, most of these manuscripts have landed in libraries and archives in various Moroccan institutions, but also in foreign countries.²⁵ D144 has been rendered in a scholarly print edition.²⁶ Manuscript # 3376 ‮د‬‎ actually contains two versions of the Kunnāsh, a fact that implies a somewhat complicated afterlife for these two exemplars: How did they come to be put together under one shelfmark at this particular library? The Raqīwāq manuscript has been published in a facsimile edition, and yet another manuscript, a late copy owned by the Spanish scholar Valderrama (dated 1350/1931 and based on a lost original), has also been published in facsimile edition and is now available in an animated version online.

In all these cases, these manuscripts (or anyway, images of them) now live very interesting afterlives outside or alongside their owners’ libraries. Such works no longer serve only as tools for performers or as markers of personal prestige. Just as the prestige-value of al-āla has shifted over time as the audience for the music has expanded, so too has the cultural capital inherent in owning a songbook of al-āla been transformed by these and other social changes. It is evident that something has driven any number of these manuscripts out of their accustomed domains in private hands and into institutions where they function very differently and to some extent serve different social purposes. Thus the afterlife of the manuscript: The prestige-value of Kunnāsh al-Ḥāʾik has not necessarily changed, but it now serves different functions from those in its heyday, so to speak.

There are really two value aspects here, operating together and yet distinct from one another (even if not always recognized as such). In one, any anthology of the al-āla texts has the potential to impart to its user the prestige and traditionalism of the musical genre to some degree, regardless of the qualities of the work, as long as the owner also possesses sufficient embodied cultural capital to make ownership meaningful. Much depends, of course, upon the use to which it is put. A bookseller, whose interest may be entirely financial and whose connection to the tradition would be correspondingly weak, does not qualify. A musician, who needs a functional document to help remember ṣanāʾiʿ he has already memorized, does. The other aspect is populated by those finer manuscripts whose production and acquisition required a greater investment of resources, and whose specific characteristics make them suitable primarily for leisure and/or scholarly activities (both evidence of high cultural capital). This latter aspect engages other social values beyond the prestige and traditionalism of al-āla, such as wealth or elevated social status more generally.

If value is always social and hence performative, as Graeber argues, the value-matrix that lies behind the manuscripts of Kunnāsh al-Ḥāʾik may be said to engage with cultural capital in more than one way: There is the object with its raw economic value (perhaps appraisable mainly through the quality of the materials, the quality of the execution, the relative scarcity of exemplars, etc., though never really central to its social meaning), which makes it suitable for display to one’s friends and guests; there is the performance, which it in theory facilitates (the social value of entertainment); there is the immersion in the tradition inherent in the ability to sing a song based upon a highbrow but incomplete rendering on the page (and to appreciate such a performance); there is the linguistic value which allows the text to “speak erudition” when recited or sung by an owner able to read it; and there is the performed tradition as a whole, which it is held to represent symbolically (bifurcated into the musical qualities, ritualization, and contextualization of the performance, on the one hand, and the literary dimension inherent in the repertoire of lyrics on the other).

But beyond these factors, several historical processes have shifted the social foundations of the value-matrices behind the tradition in general, and its literary dimension in particular, transforming the social lives of these manuscripts. They are not, however, easily sorted as causes and effects because they have operated parallel to and enabled one another.

The first of these is the expansion of the audience. We have already noted the music’s shift from a more purely elite status in al-Andalus toward a broader social environment beginning in the earlier phases in North Africa. If the observations of Europeans like Alexis Chottin, a Protectorate official in Morocco in the early twentieth century, are to be believed, the Andalusian music had been enduring a prolonged process of decline for some centuries.²⁷ One may assume that such a view was shaped at least in part by the opinions of the music’s masters of the era, yet efforts at both new composition (ʿAlāl al-Baṭla is said to have created Nūbat al-Istihlāl in the late 1600s) and preservation (three anthology projects—including al-Ḥāʾik’s—between 1700 and the 1880s) cast considerable doubt on this narrative of decline and decay.²⁸ Certainly by the mid-twentieth century, the music was beginning to reach an ever-widening audience, thanks to the efforts of the government and private-sector jamʿiyyāt. And finally, the arrival of commercial recording and broadcast technologies further encouraged the growth of a substantial passive audience familiar with al-āla as part of the urban soundscape. The value-load of the literary domain underwent a corresponding shift, though not necessarily away from its erudite and prestigious roots.

Secondly, there were transformations of the national economy. A middle class, properly speaking, grew in Morocco in the 1950s and 1960s, coincident with independence.²⁹ It is no accident that the government’s efforts at preserving the tradition followed this change that put more disposable income in the hands of people at the middle levels of the economy and made print editions of the nūba repertoire economically viable. This also gave music-lovers’ associations an expanded membership base among people who could afford to spend the money.

Thirdly, there was an evolution of writing technologies. The evolution from handwritten manuscripts to lithography to mechanically printed books made al-āla songbooks cheaper and more widely available, simultaneously supporting the expansion of the audience while driving out manuscript works for nearly all practical purposes. High-quality handwritten manuscripts have almost ceased to be produced, except by or for particular people or situations (such as the Valderrama copy in 1931). Since the 1950s, one finds only lower-quality copies created by notables such as Muḥammad Dāwūd, the great historian of Tetouan, who added handwritten supplements to other documents for his own personal use. At the same time, the availability of inexpensive print anthologies in particular tended to dilute somewhat the aura of exclusiveness surrounding the tradition.

A fourth factor was the largely urban focus of Moroccan economic, social, and political power. Since al-āla is an urban, Arabic phenomenon almost completely alien to the rural, largely Amazigh environment, both the active and especially the passive audiences for the music have grown in proportion to the expansion of urban power, which has exerted important influence upon the development of the print anthologies and likewise on the lives of the al-āla manuscripts.

One effect of these developments has been to transform the use-value component for many old manuscripts, rendering them less important as reference works while generating afterlives for them as objects of study and cultural display in private libraries, archives and museums, and online. D144, a venerable manuscript held in the archive-library of its last owner, Muḥammad Dāwūd, is effectively useless today as a reference work, and likewise as a signifier of cultural capital. Few have any interest in it for those purposes. The community of aficionados whose interest at one time may have sustained its social life as a symbol of its owner’s prestigious associations with the al-āla tradition has largely vanished and been replaced by the community of scholars studying the texts of the tradition. It serves today mainly as an artefact for historical or literary study.³⁰ We may make similar observations about the manuscripts on display at the Dar El Ala museum in Casablanca, or the al-Jāmiʿī manuscript at the Dār Ṣbīḥī library in Salé: These manuscripts “live” in glass cases, parked next to signs that offer details of their history, signifying the historicity of the tradition alongside its aesthetic and literary values. But they are rarely, if ever, actually handled. Still others, such as those in the Moroccan and European libraries, literally sit on shelves until they are sought out by scholars. And now, in the digital age, scanned and photographed images of these manuscripts are available for acquisition and use on digital storage media and online, so that the actual manuscript itself almost never moves. Indeed, the afterlives of such manuscripts are now shaped to a large extent by their existence alone, their potential to signify the tradition in absentia, so to speak, rather than their current use-value.

6 Concluding Thoughts: Value Flowing toward and Away from the Document

The social life of a manuscript both dwells within and is conditioned by the various aspects of its form, content, and uses. Its use-value emerges from these formal characteristics, while at the same time it signals a social position on the part of its user. In many cases, that position is understood as not particularly consequential. A carpenter’s handwritten notes for how to make a table are unlikely to be regarded as especially meaningful, unless the carpenter himself (or his table) is somehow socially significant, in which case the note may come to signify social value that flows to it from the significance of the carpenter or his table, and away from it to its current owner for the same reasons. In the same way, values like prestige and traditionalism are social significations that flow in two directions, toward the text and out from it. It is as if the object itself is a transceiver, “receiving” social value by virtue of its material qualities and associations, and “broadcasting” that value to the community on behalf of its owner/user.

In this way, value flows toward the Kunnāsh manuscripts from the social prestige of al-āla and the poetic tradition which they have been constructed to embody, marking them and elevating them as high Arabic literature, interestingly, even when the language of the text itself is sometimes less than formal. The texts of many of these songs are composed in a poetic colloquial register, usually identified as Andalusi colloquial (al-ʿāmiyya al-andalusiyya), but some also in the Moroccan dārija, as well. This “inward flow” of social signification has the power to elevate all the texts, regardless of their individual characteristics, to the level of highbrow art.

The other direction, away from the manuscript, depends upon this value that flows toward it, and upon the fact of ownership itself, but then broadcasts to the community that its owner/user possesses the cultural capital inherent in its connections to al-āla and the poetic tradition. There are degrees of this, naturally: A relatively inexpensive print anthology may “receive” social value to some degree, but it will not “broadcast as loudly” as an old handwritten manuscript of the same texts. Yet the signal remains and can be heard and understood by anyone conversant enough in Arab-Moroccan public culture.

This two-way, back-and-forth process of signification represents a fundamental characteristic of the social lives of the manuscripts in question. They both act within, and are acted upon by, the socio-cultural contexts through which they move or in which they rest. And in this, our discussion of the social life of Kunnāsh al-Ḥāʾik comes full circle: Just as the form, content, and function of the manuscript operate in mutually informing ways, so too do these manuscripts both absorb and project gravitas as representations, imperfect but prestigious embodiments of both the literary and performed traditions of the Andalusian music of Morocco.