Theory and Practice in the Music of the Islamic World

Essays in Honour of Owen Wright

Rachel Harris, Martin Stokes, Rachel Harris, Martin Stokes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351752152
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Musik

This volume of original essays is dedicated to Owen Wright in recognition of his formative contribution to the study of music in the Islamic Middle East. Wright's work, which comprises, at the time of writing, six field-defining volumes and countless articles, has reconfigured the relationship between historical musicology and ethnomusicology. No account of the transformation of these fields in recent years can afford to ignore his work. Ranging across the Middle East, Central Asia and North India, this volume brings together historical, philological and ethnographic approaches. The contributors focus on collections of musical notation and song texts, on commercial and ethnographic recordings, on travellers' reports and descriptions of instruments, on musical institutions and other spaces of musical performance. An introduction provides an overview and critical discussion of Wright's major publications. The central chapters cover the geographical regions and historical periods addressed in Wright's publications, with particular emphasis on Ottoman and Timurid legacies. Others discuss music in Greece, Iraq and Iran. Each explores historical continuities and discontinuities, and the constantly changing relationships between music theory and practice. An edited interview with Owen Wright concludes the book and provides a personal assessment of his scholarship and his approach to the history of the music of the Islamic Middle East. Extending the implications of Wright's own work, this volume argues for an ethnomusicology of the Islamic Middle East in which past and present, text and performance are systematically in dialogue.

Part I

Ottoman legacies

1 New light on Cantemir

Eckhard Neubauer

Translated by Lucy Baxandall

Owen Wright’s incisive studies of notation have unlocked for us a neglected area in the history of Islamic music. His two-volume transcription of and commentary on the collection of Turkish instrumental pieces from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, attributed to Demetrius (Dimitrie) Cantemir (1673–1723), has quickly become a standard work.¹ However, because the Cantemir collection is only available in a single, poorly organized manuscript,² questions remain which until now could not be answered without additional information. The recent discovery of a related manuscript demands our attention. This essay, a first impression of this manuscript’s contents, is dedicated to Owen Wright in the spirit of long-standing solidarity and in anticipation of many more years of achievement in his wide-ranging research into the music of the Arab, Persian and Turkish worlds.

In his 1996 catalogue of Persian music manuscripts, Mohammad Taghi Massoudieh recorded an anonymous “List of Peşrevs” and, separately, a similarly anonymous “Collection of Compositions”.³ Both can be found in Manuscript 2804 of the Tehran National Library (Ketâbḫâne-ye Mellî).⁴

The “List of Peşrevs” is presented by Massoudieh as a separate text, although it is directly connected to the “Collection of Compositions” and its pagination corresponds to the collection’s table of contents. Massoudieh also fails to disclose that we are dealing with a Turkish-language document. The details in the library catalogue are not particularly helpful either. They give the impression that it concerns Persian musical theory, containing “tables of musical metres” (ǧadâwel-e żorûb-e mûsîqî) and the names of indigenous modes (dastgâh-hâ, gûše-hâ).⁵ As a result, the significance of the text has not yet been recognized. But it caught my attention as I was leafing through Massoudieh’s catalogue, in which the last line of the manuscript is reproduced in Cantemir’s unmistakeable notation. A digital copy was kindly sent to me by Amir Hossein Pourjavady, who had mentioned the manuscript at a symposium in Turkey.

Mellî 2804 actually proves, on closer inspection, to be the closest relative we have yet found to Demetrius Cantemir’s collection of peşrev and semâʿî notations. Cantemir, the polyglot and polymath historian, geographer and linguist, who spent most of his life between the ages of 14 and 37 living in Istanbul before succeeding his father for a year as Voyvoda of Moldavia and before allying himself with Peter the Great, is known in Turkey by the name of Kantemiroğlu. He was formed as much in the Turkish court as in the Orthodox Patriarchate. He lived in the Greek quarter of Fener on the Golden Horn, associated with Greek and Turkish musicians, Turkish intellectuals, European diplomats and, befitting his social status, spent time at court, where Ahmed III enjoyed listening to his tanbûr playing. Cantemir was also a successful composer. Apart from Owen Wright’s critical edition, the collection of notated instrumental pieces attributed to him is also available in printed form in a Turkish edition by Yalçın Tura⁶, developed from within the indigenous tradition.

The Istanbul Cantemir collection and the recently discovered Tehran collection resemble one another to a significant degree, from content to style of writing. Both contain an astonishingly large number of compositions: around 310 peşrevs and around 40 semâʿîs. The Istanbul Cantemir collection is attached to an anonymous, apparently incomplete theoretical introduction to Turkish notation and music, also attributed to Cantemir, entitled Kitâbu ʿIlmi ’l-Mûsîqî ʿalâ Vechi ’l-ḥurûfât (“The Book of Musical Knowledge by Letters [i.e. Notes]”).⁷ It is presented, without comment, along with the subsequent collection of melodies.

The Tehran manuscript opens with a short essay on music in Persian, which bears no relation to the collection of melodies that follow. The Tehran version initially contained empty pages to accommodate later additions. These, along with the empty margins in the manuscript, were filled with Persian poetry in the early nineteenth century, as well as narrative and educational prose on non-musical subjects. In several instances, the date 1227/1812 is found on these pages. On the last empty folio, we find the date 1285/1868. An entry on the previous page confirms information from the beginning of the manuscript, according to which it was purchased for the Tehran Mellî Library in 1348/1929.

Despite the common content, the Tehran collection does depart significantly from the Istanbul version. The Istanbul Cantemir collection consists of two blocks of peşrev compositions,⁸ whose sequencing comes across as highly arbitrary, and an interpolated block of semâʿî compositions,⁹ whose sequencing likewise makes little sense. The disrupted ordering may be partly traceable to an error when the binding was replaced, but this in itself does not sufficiently explain its apparently rather disorganized condition.

In contrast, the Tehran collection is clearly subdivided. The maqâms follow one other exactly as presented in the table of contents. With each maqâm, the peşrevs come first, followed by the semâʿîs. Headings and musical terms are executed in gold script or red ink. The printed areas of the page are carefully framed. The free spaces were filled up later with unrelated text. The title pages are adorned with coloured vignettes. The names of the maqâms, as well as being in the heading, are also inscribed vertically at the page edges. The manuscript is very carefully executed in every respect.

The table of contents of the Tehran manuscript corresponds to the sequence of peşrevs in the melody section before it. The semâʿî compositions are not entered in the table of contents. As a rule, the headings of the individual pieces in the Tehran version also include the composer’s name and tempo indications. In the Istanbul codex, these are often added afterwards.

The quality of notation in the Tehran version seems to be a similar to that of the Istanbul version, insofar as one can judge from a cursory comparison of melody openings and the lengths of individual pieces. The condition of the digital copy I have in front of me allows only a limited comparison of individual notes and note lengths. One gets, however, the impression of careful execution from the first to the last pages. Overall, the Tehran manuscript, with its logical construction and corresponding table of contents, comes across as a fair copy of the treasury of tunes contained in the Istanbul manuscript. A more precise and detailed codicological and philological study will ultimately be required.

Both parts of the Istanbul codex, the theoretical and the practical, lack a title page. As a result, there are no compilers’ name(s), introduction(s) or dedication(s). The Tehran collection is not helpful in this respect, either. Despite the inclusion of endpapers, it begins similarly, without any indication of names or a title, with maqâm ʿırâḳ. This gives rise to a significant link between the two versions with regard to their originator.

Towards the end of the theoretical section of the Istanbul manuscript one finds three different title lists of peşrev compositions, none of which can be taken as a table of contents for the subsequent collection of melodies. The lists are apparently unrelated documents intended to add further information. Such lists of peşrev compositions were also available elsewhere.¹⁰ They appear to me, regarding the number of maqâms they contain, to be valuable stand-alone documents originating in practice and I will draw on them below as equally valid sources of information about the maqâm repertoire.

What follows is a tabular comparison of the two manuscripts, Tehran (“Mellî”) and Istanbul (“Cantemir”), focusing on the order and number of peşrev compositions (Table 1.1).

The columns of Table 1.1 contain, from ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of music examples
• Preface
• List of contributors
• Introduction – tuning the past: the work of Owen Wright
• Part I Ottoman legacies
• Part II Historical and theoretical themes in the music of the Islamic world
• Owen Wright: full bibliography
• Glossary
• Index