Iberia as a meeting ground for Muslim and Christian musics

Arabic musical culture collided with European traditions in Iberia—the region that includes the modern countries of Spain, Portugal, and Andorra. This resulted in several notable developments: a unique musical style that arose in al-Andalus (the area of Iberia under Muslim/Moorish control), the creation of multi-lingual songs that would be intelligible to both Arabic and Spanish speakers, and the co-existence and cross-pollination of Christian and Muslim musical styles.

It’s important to recognize Iberia’s complex culture, the result of successive waves of foreign invasion: the Carthaginians and Romans, the Vandals (409 CE) and the Visigoths (419), and the Muslims (beginning 711 CE). Attempts by Christians to reconquer Iberia began almost immediately, and last intermittently over the next 700 years. This continual contact between different cultures is even reflected in the Spanish epic poem, the Cantar de mio Cid (the Song of my Cid). The main character, a Christian Spanish knight, fights for both Christian and Muslim kings while remaining a man of honor.

The Christians had retaken much of the Iberian peninsula by the 1250s. The southernmost part of Spain, which is still called Andalusia today, remained under Moorish control; its last remnant, the Muslim kingdom of Granada, only fell in 1492. This religious nature of this conflict was underscored by the Spanish kings’ efforts to ensure uniform adherence to the Catholic faith—the Inquisition began in 1478; the Jews (who had lived in relative peace under Muslim rule) were expelled in 1492; in 1502, Muslims remaining in Spain were forced to convert to Christianity.

The Muslims were often called “Moors” by Christians at the time, and this remains the word by which the Muslims who invaded Spain from North Africa are still described today. The term’s history is complicated, as it had several uses: (1) a generic term for any Spanish Muslim, including those of Arabic or Berber descent (who are not “black” in modern terminology); (2) as a term for people of sub-Saharan African descent (thus Shakespeare’s Othello is “the Moor of Venice,” traditionally understood to be a black person).

A striking development, following the Muslim conquest of Iberia, was the appearance of a new style of music in Moorish lands. To this day, musicians in North Africa perform music in the Andalusian style, although it is unclear how much the current style has changed over time. The style is said to originate with a legendary musician named Abū ’l-Ḥasan ‘Alī ibn Nāfi‘, who was known by the nickname Ziryab (“blackbird”). Ziryab is said to have been an enslaved musician, possibly of black African heritage, who traveled from Baghdad to Tunisia, and then to Cordoba in Spain. However he died in 852 CE, and the Andalusian style was not necessarily distinct from the Middle Eastern Arabic tradition until the 1200s.

That later style is the one we know the most about. Classical music in the “Andalusian” style is performed across the Muslim Mediterranean today. The types of maqam used vary by region, with musicians in northwest Africa preferring to avoid the microtonal inflections found in Middle Eastern Arabic music. The music is often performed in nubat (suites), which consist of a number of linked sections. Usually these start with an improvisation, followed by a composed piece, which increases in speed throughout the performance. Modern performance styles of this music differ widely.

A popular song form in Andalusian music is the zajal or muwashshah. It’s unique in that it is one of the first recorded song forms to rely on a regularly recurring set of alternating melodies, rather like a modern verse-chorus structure. Whether this musical form was a unique invention of Andalusian musicians, or whether it adapted previously existing European song forms is still open to debate. Its poetry is typically rhymed in the pattern AA BBB AA CCC AA DDD etc., although more elaborate schemes were possible (the AA represents a recurring chorus).

Lyrical topics for Andalusian songs included melancholy love songs in which love is unrequited or prevented by insurmountable obstacles (such as one person being already married). The singer often portrays love as a sickness, and takes on the role of a servant to their beloved. Similar themes will emerge in later European traditions as well, perhaps as the result of cross-cultural contact. Some of these songs are multi-lingual, with lyrics in Arabic, Romance (proto-Spanish), and Hebrew.

Much of our knowledge of music in these past times comes from surviving references in literary and philosophical texts, as the Moors did not use music notation. We do, however, know a good deal about the cross-pollination of musical styles from the music preserved by the court musicians of the Kings of Castile, in Christian Spain. King Alfonso X “El Sabio” (the Wise) ruled Castile and Leon in northern Spain from 1252 to 1284, and was a great patron of the arts.

A collection of songs from Alfonso’s court, the Cantigas de Santa Maria, reveals something of the cultural melting pot of Spain in the Middle Ages. Portraits in several illustrated manuscripts depict Christian, Muslim, and Jewish musicians—even after his death, 13 of the 27 royal musicians were Moorish. The music is preserved in notation derived from the Catholic church tradition, and the lyrics are in Galician-Portuguese, but many of the poems employ zajal form and its variants. Yet the cantigas do not necessarily reflect peaceful coexistence between rival cultures—Alfonso waged war against the Moors for much of his life. Yet given the hybridity of the cantigas, it’s striking that it was apparently Alfonso’s idea to collect these songs, and he might well have written some of the lyrics or created some of the tunes.

The notation of the cantigas only provides a simple melody line and lyrics. The rhythm of the music is unclear, although modern scholars have attempted to deduce principles to recreate the rhythms. Despite the many elaborate pictures of musicians and their instruments in the manuscripts—some of the most detailed medieval European images of musicians and instruments—there are no performance indications to say which songs should be accompanied by which instruments. Thus, even with notation, a tremendous amount is left up to the performers’ imagination, and any performance of this music is essentially reconstructive. The contrast with the Andalusian style as practiced in North Africa today, which has survived as a living oral tradition, is stark.

Arabic music before 1000 CE

So far in this course, this blog has focused on music around the ancient Mediterranean: Egypt, Greece, and Israel have played important roles. In one way or another, these cultures influenced the music of the medieval Catholic Church, which provides the origin for modern musical notation as commonly practiced in the United States today. As the Church traditions were influenced by Greek thought, one can see this as a straightforward story about connected traditions, and if we wanted to, we could continue this course without acknowledging any other non-European sources—there is enough material to sketch a fairly detailed picture.

This lesson takes a different approach. When all one studies is a single musical tradition, it’s easy to imagine that it represents the height of all knowledge. Yet while European musicians were developing a functional notation system, musicians in the Arab-speaking world had developed an oral culture of great rhythmic and melodic complexity. This tradition is worth knowing about in its own right as the ancestor of the modern Arabic classical style such as that practiced by takht ensembles. It also exerted some influence on the European traditions which have affected modern musical practice.  Finally, studying this music serves as a reminder that the European tradition represents only one path out of many.  

The Arabic musical tradition existed in a complex cultural and historical context. It was closely associated with the spread of Islam, which emerged in the Arabian peninsula in the early 600s. By 750 CE, the spread of Islam and the Arabic language created something of a common culture across Arabia, the Middle East, Iran, Turkey, North Africa, and much of Spain. As in most other early societies, we know the most about music that the ruling classes valued—in this case, the music from the courts of the new Islamic states.

Arabia and its culture did not exist in isolation; it sat on the crossroads of trade between Europe, Asia, and Africa. Relations with Europeans were often violent, as Muslim armies invaded Spain and France in the 700s; Christian Europeans waged a long series of wars to reconquer Spain (lasting from the 700s to the 1400s), and a series of ultimately unsuccessful campaigns to take control of modern Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, and and even Egypt (the Crusades, c. 1096 – 1270). Some musical traces of these contacts survive: European musicians adopted Arabic instruments such as the rabab fiddle (called the rebec in Europe) and the ‘ūd (the lute).

As with the music of the ancient Greeks, much modern knowledge of early Arabic music is preserved in theoretical or philosophical writings. Of these, the most important are the works of al-Kindi (d. around 866 CE) and al-Fārābi (d. 950 CE), who are remembered primarily as philosophers. From these authors, we learn that Arabic musicians used meters of 3, 4, or 5 beats; al-Fārābi described rhythm as consisting of a series of short patterns that could be combined in many ways. Both use the neck of the ‘ūd, in the style of the Greek monochord, as a way of calculating intervals. al-Fārābi’s Kitāb al-mūsīqī al-kabīr (the Great Book on Music) includes detailed information on the tuning systems used by Arab-speaking musicians in his time. Elements of Greek thought—such as the division of scales into tetrachords (four note sets)—are present. In al-Fārābi’s system, the four notes of the tetrachord could include modifications to the third note, which could be lowered by a half-step, or could use a microtonal placement. By the 900s, these diverse and sometimes contradictory theories of pitch developed into a coherent modal theory, the ancestor of modern Arabic maqam.

We know a good deal about Arabic music’s role in culture. Professional musicians were often foreigners or slaves; the most famous enslaved musicians were the qaynas, women who were given exhaustive training and sold for high prices to serve as court musicians. Some of them headed musical ensembles which were sold as a unit, and there are reports of qaynas in Spain being sold with repertoire lists so that their purchasers could know which songs the musicians could be expected to play. Some of their biographies and song lyrics are preserved in the Kitāb al-aghānī al-kabīr (Great Book of Songs) by al-Iṣfahānī (d. 967).

Arabic music appears to have been a largely oral culture with no use of notation outside of theoretical treatises. Music itself was considered an inherently secular art-form (qira’at or Quranic chant was not considered music). We know that musicians regularly accompanied themselves on the ‘ūd or similar instruments. A few references to notation survive, but no actual notated Arabic music from the early period survives. al-Fārābi, however, specifically refers to the composition of melodies, which suggests that even in an oral culture, there was a sense that some music was not simply assembled from improvisational formulas, but was understood as a fixed creation.

As you can see, we know quite a lot about the music of Muslim, Arabic musicians before the year 1000. Because Arabic music was a secular tradition, its theory and culture represent a marked contrast to the religious traditions that form the heart of the documented European tradition. In the next lesson, we’ll learn more about how Arabic and European traditions collided in Spain.

Polyphony emerges in the written record

One of the key developments in music history is the appearance of polyphony—music with two independent melodic lines. We have historical documentation of polyphonic music from the ninth century in Europe. Polyphony’s impact on the European tradition cannot be overstated, as it led toward developments in music notation, and it was tied to increased social and professional status for the musicians who were capable of performing it.

You might have noticed that all the chant music we have studied so far relies on a single melodic line with little or no accompaniment (this is often called monophonic music). The entire choir sings the same tune in more or less the same way, often following the rhythm and phrasing of a lead singer. Monophonic music is easy to perform with untrained singers and prioritizes participation.

Given that the earliest notated music from the Catholic tradition is monophonic, it’s a bit of a surprise that some of the earliest surviving references to polyphony are not notated pieces of music. Instead, books such as Musica enchiriadis and Scolica enchiriadis (both from the ninth century) describe the invention of vocal harmonies and melodic lines as improvisational practices. This means that practice of polyphony predates the existence of a notation system for it.

These early books describe a set of musical practices which were already quite developed, including methods of harmonizing chants at an interval of a fourth or fifth below, and ways of doubling the two vocal lines in octaves to create four-part harmony. The techniques described in these books suggest that music that was written down as a single melodic line could have been performed in harmony. Consequently, they highlight the problem with just “singing the notes on the page” with historical music. Although we now think of notation as a comprehensive way to write down detailed performance instructions for music, people in earlier times probably viewed it as more of an outline, capturing essential elements that could be modified by the performers.

Like much of the learning of medieval Europe, these early guides to polyphony center on issues relevant to the Catholic Church. (We don’t have much of a sense of whether musicians active outside the Catholic Church also used these techniques). Therefore, the music in the books is largely based on Catholic chant, and ways of harmonizing it. The general principle of these early books is that the sacred chant melody was to be sung in a high register, with a new melody or harmony part added underneath it. The part that sings the sacred chant is called the principal voice. The new part—whether a melody or a harmony part—was called the organal voice, and a piece of music with both a principal and an organal voice was called a piece of organum. These early treatises from the 800s appear to have been read across medieval Europe (although remember that literacy was rather rare at the time), and we can only speculate about how often Catholic monks actually used these techniques to perform chants.

Over the next three hundred years, an important change occurred: people began to see the organal voice as a valuable thing which deserved to be written down. Writing down the organal voice could have simply been the result of some musically literate people improvising something they enjoyed and deciding to preserve it so they could perform it again in the same way. But it also suggests that polyphony was starting to be seen as composition, not as improvisation. In another important change, later polyphonic pieces start to change the arrangement of the voices, so that the chant is underneath the new melody, not above it.

The radical element of making sacred (divinely-inspired?) chant an accompaniment for new, humanly-created melodies should not be overlooked. Around the 1100s, singers of polyphony became respected specialists among church musicians, and this new, elaborate polyphony was reserved for the holiest feasts. With the organal voice on top, the listener can now focus more readily on the organal voice, which grows increasingly elaborate, while the chant voice recedes into the background. This switching of the voices eventually led to the chant voice being renamed: instead of the “principal voice,” it began to be called the tenor (this is the origin of our modern word tenor, for a vocal range—it’s derived from the Latin tenere, meaning to have something: the tenor was the voice which had the chant).

Perhaps this new elaborate music is what the English philosopher John of Salisbury had in mind in this passage from his Policraticus (1159). Although he does not precisely mention polyphony, scholars have routinely linked his description of virtuosic church singing with organum. His argument about music’s dangers for Christian worship connects back to earlier critiques, such as St. Augustine’s:

The very service of the Church is defiled, in that before the face of the Lord, in the very sanctuary of sanctuaries, they, showing off as it were, strive with the effeminate dalliance of wanton tones and musical phrasing to astound, enervate, and dwarf simple souls. When one hears the excessively caressing melodies of voices beginning, chiming in, carrying the air, dying away, rising again, and dominating, he may well believe that it is the song of the sirens and not the sound of men’s voices; he may well marvel at the flexibility of tone which neither the nightingale, the parrot, or any bird with greater range than these can rival…the mind, soothed by such sweetness, no longer has power to pass judgement on what it hears. When this type of music is carried to the extreme it is more likely to stir lascivious sensations in the loins than devotion the heart. (translated from the Latin by Joseph B. Pike).

Regardless of John’s complaints, elaborate religious music–including organum–was written down with increasing frequency throughout the twelfth century.

Notating this music was tricky. With two separate moving parts, the music needed to be written in two separate staves. Without modern rhythmic notation, the parts had to be written so readers could tell when the two voices sang at the same time. When there was only one note in the organal voice to one in the tenor, this type of lining up was easy to maintain. When the organal voice has multiple notes for every note of the tenor, the rhythm becomes vague and hard to follow: should we understand the tenor as marking a basic pulse, or does it still move freely, as in a solo chant? It’s because of these complications that later generations of musicians developed a system of rhythmic notation, presumably to better coordinate the parts.

One of the great centers of polyphony was the Church of Notre Dame in Paris. An unknown author, known today as Anonymous IV, wrote that there were two great singers, Leonin (d. 1201) and Perotin (active 1200 –1230), who created polyphonic pieces of music that were preserved in a Great Book of Organum (the Magnus liber organi). The book itself has not survived, but copies of music from it have survived in three manuscripts. Anonymous IV gave enough information that some of these pieces can be positively identified as being by Leonin and Perotin.

These pieces are extraordinarily long; the organum are no longer decorations of a sacred chant, but are truly independent pieces. Because some of the pieces take over thirty seconds harmonizing about one single note of the tenor, it’s often impossible to process the chant in the tenor as a melody. A few of the songs even feature more than two notated parts, which makes it even more difficult to coordinate the singers. Consequently, these pieces increasingly include an early form of rhythm notation which allows six basic patterns to be notated. These “rhythmic modes” are limited, but they allowed performers of this music to coordinate their complex parts. Rhythmic notation continued to develop over the next two hundred years, arriving at something closer to the modern system in the 1300s.

The church modes in practice

As we have seen, the music of the medieval Catholic Church led to the development of the modern notation system, laid the groundwork for the idea of music as a literate tradition, and eventually led toward the composition of long pieces in multiple sections (such as the Mass).  This lesson explores another aspect of medieval music that affected our current practice: a coherent system of explaining music in terms of scale and mode.

This system, often referred to as the “Church modes,” is still the primary method of understanding pitch-based structure in Gregorian chant and related traditions. This method, which was established in its current form around the early 1000s, was the dominant theoretical model in European traditions until the emergence of modern tonal theory in the early 1700s, and elements of it survive in modern tonal theory as well. It has also been adapted and modified by jazz musicians, who sometimes draw on scales such as the Mixolydian and Dorian modes.

The basic system is documented in an anonymous manuscript titled Dialogus de musica from the early 11^th century. There are eight basic modes, with names derived from ancient Greek theory: Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, and Mixolydian; however, these names do not refer to the same scales that the Greeks were describing. I’m calling these “modes” and not “scales,” because we’re dealing with more than just a set of notes, but also a series of rules, expectations, and characteristic melodic phrases that are all linked together. (In other words, the Church modes function a little more like an Indian raga or an Arabic maqam than they do a modern major scale).

To begin with, the eight modes are organized in four pairs, so that there are two types of Dorian mode, two types of Phrygian mode, etc. Each pair of modes has the same final (or resting note—the ancestor of our modern idea of the tonic note), but all other features of the mode are different. Thus the Dorian modes have D as their final, the Phrygians have E, the Lydians have F, and the Mixolydians have G. The modes, and their unique intervallic relationships, could be transposed, but this was rare in Gregorian chant. The other defining features of the modes were their ambitus (the range from the lowest note to the highest note) and the reciting tone (a frequently repeated pitch, sometimes called the tenor or the dominant as well).  

Click here for a simple chart of the modes.

This leads to a unique way of thinking about music that differs from modern common-practice tonality. This is essentially a music theory that was designed for singers rather than for instrumentalists. For example, the difference between the authentic and plagal Dorian modes (modes 1 and 2), is that the final note D lies at the ends of the melody’s range in mode 1, but is firmly in the middle of the range in mode 2. Further, both modes have different reciting tones, meaning that the melodies one makes in this mode will rely more heavily on that pitch. Similar differences apply to all the other modes as well.

You might notice, on examining the chart of the modes, that some of them look like modern scales that you can play on the piano, only using the white keys, without any sharp or flat notes. This misunderstanding of the modes is at the root of modern reinterpretations of them, which find a peculiar charm in emphasizing the B-natural found in the Lydian mode. But medieval musicians would not generally have sung that B-natural—a tritone away from F—in cases in which the tritone would be audible. Rather, they developed a system of using “musica ficta” (feigned or faked notes) to ensure that the dissonant tritone would not be heard: so a melody which moved from F to B would often be performed as F to B-flat, regardless of the notation.

Ficta had an indirect, but powerful effect on modern musical notation. When people started writing musica ficta down, it led to the development of modern flat, sharp, and natural signs for the modified forms of each of the seven basic notes. This is why, to this day, musicians in the Western system still only have seven letter names, even though twelve unique notes are commonly used. So, in a curious way, the very ways that modern musicians in the Western tradition name notes is rooted in the practices of a theoretical tradition developed to explain medieval Catholic chant.

Medieval Catholic liturgy in historical context

Because the modern, Western system of music notation has its origins in the liturgy of the Catholic Church, it’s worth looking at Catholic music in more detail. Why did the Catholic Church need music notation, and why were so many music books created that modern scholars can reconstruct the worship music of not just medieval Catholics in general, but of many specific churches across Europe?

For one thing, notation allowed the Catholic Church to assert its central control over a vast and complicated repertoire of sacred music. One can view this, cynically, as simply being a matter of power and politics, but it also served a religious function: devout Catholics believed that the Pope was God’s earthly representative. Therefore, following the Pope’s directives about worship music was a way of following his divinely-inspired message.

Most of the music books, however, survive because of the incredible complexity of Catholic religious practices, which I will touch in more detail below. These needed to be organized in writing. Making books of any kind was a laborious undertaking in this period—except in China, where an early form of printing appeared centuries before the printing press was developed. European Catholics copied their books by hand, usually on a type of prepared leather called parchment. The pages of the largest books were made of single animal skins (usually sheep), trimmed and folded in half. Thus a big book with 100 pages represented the death of 25 sheep. If you folded the skins again, getting eight pages per skin, you would get a smaller book of 200 pages. Killing 25 sheep is not a simple thing, and you can imagine that only the wealthiest people and institutions could afford such educational slaughter.

Learned scholars have written entire books about Catholic religious customs and their variations in different places. For our purposes, it’s worth mentioning the division between the Divine Office and the weekly Mass.

The Office was a series of set prayers, offered up eight times a day, all of which were governed by strict rules, including which hymns were to be sung, which prayers were to be said, which passages from the scriptures were to be read aloud, etc. (If you know the children’s song “Frere Jacques,” then you actually know something about the Office. The song’s original lyrics remind sleepy Brother John to wake up and say his morning prayers (Matins): that’s why the song ends with the imitation of a tolling bell, summoning him to prayer). Monks and nuns were expected to observe the Office, even at night (Vespers and Compline). Much of the Office consisted of the recitation of the Book of Psalms in simple melodic formulas; these were not designed to be entertaining, but were spiritual exercises.

As you can imagine, if religious music was required for every day of the year, then someone had to organize, arrange, and compile a repertory of which songs were appropriate to each day. Consequently, music books and calendars explaining which hymns were to be sung on specific days were deeply important to the Catholic Church. The founding document of the Benedictine Order, one of the oldest Catholic monastic sects, devotes 11 of its 73 chapters to the proper performance of religious music.

The Mass was a sacramental church service, which was offered at least once a week. Masses contained sermons and two types of music—Ordinary music, which was performed regardless of the occasion—and Proper music, which was only performed on relevant holy days (i.e., specific hymns for Christmas, Easter, Lent, the Annunciation, etc.). The Proper of the Mass mattered more to people at the time. The elaborate hymns with which one could celebrate a unique holy day—such as the feast of a local saint, such as St Moritz in Germany—were a special feature of the Mass, one that helped give each sacred festival some of its significance.

Ordinary Catholic people were expected to attend Mass regularly and to do so in groups, and that is probably why the music of the Mass was far more influential on the development of music than the Office, which could be performed alone by one person if necessary. To skip ahead in time: the Ordinary parts of the Mass (Kyrie, Credo, Gloria, Sanctus, Agnus dei) were performed at every Catholic mass—so starting around the 1300s, musicians started writing original music for these sections of the Mass. These sets of mass movements eventually came to be seen as a unified whole, and are the first notated multi-section compositions to survive to this day.

Regardless of the music’s use, Catholic chant usually had some common features. The text was usually derived from the Latin Vulgate Bible, and the rhythm of the music followed the text freely—there does not seem to have been anything approached a rigid sense of meter. The musical forms are generally derived from the sacred texts as well: a common approach was to pair an antiphon (a short melody set to a devotional poem) with a Psalm verse (a poetic Bible extract, usually recited on a simple melodic formula). Hymn tunes which repeated the same melody in every verse were also common. On the holiest of days, a special type of song called a sequence—essentially an elaborate chain of contrasting melodies—would be sung.

We know very little of the people who created this music. Gregorian chant was officially attributed to Pope Gregory the Great (c. 540 – 604 CE) (although modern scholars are skeptical). Pope Gregory himself received little credit for imagination or creative genius; Catholic musicians believed that he had simply received divine inspiration. Consequently, one can imagine that few religious leaders would encourage the prideful act of claiming to have created a piece of religious music. One of the few composers we do know about was a woman named Hildegard from the town of Bingen (1098–1179), whose compositions are known to be hers. Her contemporaries believed that she was divinely inspired; her scribes wrote down her vivid and disturbing visions, and kings and nobles wrote to her for advice.

Her music, as befits divine inspiration, often breaks the mold of accepted chant practices. Her religious play, the Ordo virtutam, employs a much wider melodic range than is customary in traditional chant. Most chants were designed to be singable, even by people with limited vocal skills. Hildegard’s assumption that her singers could easily sing outside the range of an octave suggests that she might have been working with talented and capable singers.

Explaining music’s power: music and philosophy in Greco-Roman culture

This lesson explores three questions which have been historically intertwined:

1. Why does music have an emotional effect on people?

2. What is the purpose and value of music?

3. What is the proper role of a musician in society?

These questions are very old, and it should be no surprise that people have tried to answer them for a very long time. We are, yet again, in the historical position of finding that Greek authors were some of the first to have their writings survive on this subject. It would, again, be a mistake to assume that all these questions or answers were necessarily invented by them, although one also shouldn’t discount the creativity and ability of these early thinkers, either. This post will explore some of these explanations, and their relevance for us today—it’s striking how at some basic level, we are still asking the same questions and reaching similar answers.

One approach was through the concept of ethos. This approach, taken by followers of Pythagoras and Plato, attempted to measure music’s effect on people’s moral character. In The Republic, a treatise outlining the logical structuring of an ideal state, Plato argued that the government ought to regulate music to ensure that citizens remained productive and motivated:

                 – And which are the harmonies expressive of sorrow? You are musical and can tell me.
                 – The harmonies which you mean are the mixed or tenor Lydian, and the full-toned or bass Lydian, and such-like.
                 – These then, I said, must be banished; even to women who have a character to maintain they are of no use, and much less to men.
                – Certainly.
                – In the next place, drunkenness and softness and indolence are utterly unbecoming the character of our guardians.
                – Utterly unbecoming?
                – And which are the soft and convivial harmonies?
                – The Ionian, he replied, and some of the Lydian which are termed “relaxed”.
                – Well, and are these of any use for warlike men?
                – Quite the reverse, he replied; and if so the Dorian and the Phrygian are the only ones which you have left.

Note that the Plato’s Lydian mode, which he wanted to ban, is equivalent to our modern C major scale, one of the most widely-used scales in modern Western music.

There is no evidence that any government ever followed Plato’s musical recommendations in his own time; yet there are echoes of his ideas among educators who create children’s music to “build character,” among music therapists who use music to help people with their mental states, and among those who argue against the “devil’s music” which could lead people to sin. The idea that the government could or should regulate music has had lasting power. In 1985, for example, the United States Senate heard testimony regarding vulgar lyrics in popular music, leading record companies to adopt “Parental Advisory: Explicit Content” labels to avoid official government censorship. Yet it’s worth noting that these hearings focused on lyrics, while Plato wanted to regulate music itself. Still, government censorship of music and the arts is common around the world, as you can see from the annual reports by Freemuse.

Another issue that emerges from Plato’s discussion of music is a contrast between different states of musical experience—comparing the calm enjoyment of music and ecstatic frenzy. He makes this reference indirectly, referring to the legend of Apollo and Marsyas, in which the god Apollo, playing the lyre, defeated the satyr Marsyas in a musical duel, and killed him for his arrogance in challenging a god. (Satyrs were mythical creatures with comically large, perpetually erect penises, and they were associated with lustful behavior). Marsyas played the flute (probably an aulos), which as Plato’s pupil Aristotle wrote, “is not an instrument which is expressive of moral character: it is too exciting” (Politics 8.6). Thus it is no surprise, given his love for order and regulation, that Plato preferred Apollo’s calmer approach to music.

Plato therefore encouraged distrust of overpowering musical experiences, and worried that music could alter people’s character or even control their behavior. Therefore, he felt, a wise government would use this power for good. Aristotle, on the other hand, believed that music did not create feelings so much as remind listeners of feelings—a concept that he called imitation, and which could lead, through careful guidance, to the development of moral character:

                … even in mere melodies there is an imitation of character, for the musical modes differ essentially from one another, and those who hear them are differently affected by each. Some of them make men sad and grave, like the so-called Mixolydian, others enfeeble the mind, like the relaxed modes, another, again, produces a moderate and settled temper, which seems to be the peculiar effect of the Dorian; the Phrygian inspires enthusiasm…The same principles apply to rhythms…Enough has been said to show that music has a power of forming the character, and should therefore be introduced into the education of the young. (Politics 8.5)

Aristotle, however, was clear that education in music should not be carried too far:

                Let the young practice…only until they are able to feel delight in noble melodies and rhythms, and not merely in that common part of music in which every slave or child and even some animals find pleasure…

           …we reject the professional instruments and also the professional mode of education in music (and by professional we mean that which is adopted in contests), for in this the performer practices the art, not for the sake of his own improvement, but in order to give pleasure, and that of a vulgar sort, to his hearers. For this reason the execution of such music is not the part of a freeman but of a paid        performer… (Politics 8.6)

This requires some unpacking. At one level, Aristotle disapproves of musical performance because it is a servile act, one which in his culture was commonly performed by servants and slaves. As Aristotle was chiefly concerned in this chapter with the education of free people, we sense his concern that becoming too skillful would create similarity between the rulers and the ruled. At the same time, there is a sense that performing for the entertainment of other people is inherently demeaning. Earlier in Politics, he wrote “no freeman would play or sing unless he were intoxicated or in jest” (8.5). Aristotle therefore describes a culture in which people loved music but disapproved of musicians–an attitude which still has echoes in American society today.

These ideas survived in the West largely due to Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius (d. 526 CE), a Roman official who wrote De institutione musica, the most widely-copied music treatise in Europe, which remained popular through the 1600s and was part of the Oxford University music curriculum until 1883.[1] Much of Boethius’ thought reflected the adoption of Greek musical values in the Roman world. He divided music into three categories which clearly reflect the influence of Pythagoras and other Greek thinkers:

                Musica mundana (cosmic music) – inaudible, it governs nature; equivalent to the music of the  spheres

                Musica humana (human music) – inaudible, it holds body and soul together

                Musica instrumentalis (instrumental music) – audible music performed by humans

Similarly, his discussion of musicians codifies Aristotle’s prejudices; performers are the least skillful (as they act as servants or slaves to the music), followed by composers (who create from instinct); critics (who can reason logically about music) are at the top.

The relevance of these ideas to modern values is debatable, but there is no denying their lasting influence on the development of musical education in Europe and North America. One can think of the way that classical performers are taught to be servants to the score written down by the composer; of the extra respect that popular songwriters receive over performers; the way that improvisers claim a higher prestige for themselves than performers who simply read notation; and even the power of critical taste-makers (such as producers and patrons of the arts) who shape our sense of what is good and bad music. Sometimes it seems as if we are simply retreading old paths and repeating old conversations.

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[1] C.F.A. Williams, A Short Historical Account of the Degrees in Music at Oxford and Cambridge (c. 1893), 21.

Greek music theory and notation, and their relevance for us today

Today we live in a culture which values music notation—at least as part of its educational system. Literacy is an essential part of musicianship for many American music teachers, even if performers are often still content to play by ear. Consequently, you can imagine that music historians have long been interested in the music of the ancient Greeks, partly because they used a simple form of notation which allows us to reconstruct their music (somewhat). This system linked specific notes of the Greek alphabet to pitches and used simple symbols above the notation to indicate rhythms.

But the striking thing is how little Greek music has survived, even though they had notation. There are several reasons this could have come about—perhaps most of their music was written down on perishable materials, for example—but it is possible that notation was not as important for Greek musicians as it is for us today. Certainly there does not seem to have been a widespread effort to preserve or document music, given how much more Greek literature survives. It’s known, for example, that Greek plays regularly included vocal music to be sung by a chorus (Greek theater is also the origin of our word “orchestra”—which originally referred to the space in front of the stage). Yet very little music from Greek plays has survived, even though the words of the plays have been relatively well preserved. This fragmentary song from Euripides’ drama Orestes, for example, is preserved on a faded and crumbling scroll. The Greek music that has survived is often carved in stone, such as this Delphic hymn, or the Epitaph of Seikilos.

All modern effects to perform this music necessarily involve heavy levels of interpretation and choice by the performers—this is really about reconstructing a lost tradition. As in Egyptian traditions, relatively few ancient Greek instruments have survived intact, although the hydraulis of Dion reveals that the Greeks played a version of the organ which was powered by a water pump (a Greek named Ktesibios, who lived in Alexandria, Egypt in the 3^rd century BC, is supposed to have invented it). Performers such as Michael Levy, who has tried to deduce performing techniques for the Greek kithara, are really engaging in creative work, however much these performances are rooted in research into historical tradition.

Although Greek music is only slightly better preserved than Egyptian music, we know much more about it, because of Greek notation and surviving Greek books about music which explain the ways that they thought about it. Some of these theoretical writings became foundational texts for later generations of European music scholars and remain embedded in some of the ways that we talk about music today in the United States. So it’s really through these ideas about music, rather than through actual surviving repertory, that Greek music has its relevance for us today.

The mathematician Pythagoras (c. 580 – 500 BC), for example, is said to be the first person to discuss the concept of musical intervals. (One must acknowledge that of course attribution does not prove authorship­­—for all we know, Pythagoras might have built on the work of earlier thinkers whose names have been lost, or later authors could have attributed ideas to him by mistake). Using a monochord, a simple stringed instrument, he is said to have generated mathematical formulas governing the relationship of unisons and octaves, fourths and fifths, and the other intervals that still form the basis of musical scales in the Western tradition. These mathematically pleasing ratios, of course, create some problems in practice, and as influential as they were on the development of our modern tuning systems, they have been generally replaced by equal temperament, which adjusts the perfect mathematical ratios to avoid some unpleasantness.

Pythagoras is also credited with originating the idea that musical relationships mirror those in the rest of the world, so that musical intervals (which were mathematical intervals) also reflect the distance of the planets from each other, etc. This was logically developed into the idea of the “music of the spheres,” or inaudible music made by the planets in orbit. From this, it was possible to explain music as an earthly echo of heavenly sounds, and to claim that good music is in tune with the planets. (There is even a new-age community online devoted to tuning the pitch A to 432hz, claiming that this is the way to be in tune with the cosmos). Of course, one might also be struck by the general similarity between Pythagorean ideas and what we know of Egyptian musical aesthetics, in which music similarly reflects the universe or the divine, but the connecting threads which could explain who influenced who are lost.

Getting back to practical matters, another influential Greek thinker was the theorist Aristoxenus (360 – 300 BC), who proposed the existence of scales, and intervals smaller than the pure ratios that Pythagoras liked: he included half-steps, third-steps, and quarter-steps (thus explaining what we now call microtones). Aristoxenus built his scales from four-note collections called tetrachords, which were framed by a perfect fourth, and filled by a variety of intervals, including quarter tones in the enharmonic variant. To this day, tetrachords are still important in music theory, even though the music that they are used to explain must sound different from that in Aristoxenus’ time.

The last musical concept that we have inherited from Greek musicians is a set of modes whose names are well-known to jazz musicians today—the Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, and Mixolydian. Confusingly, however, none of these names as used today actually matches the original mode that the Greeks were referring to—the names apparently became confused by Medieval European theorists. In the Greek system, Dorian went from E to E, Phrygian from D to D, Lydian from C to C, and Mixolydian from B to B. (Also, the Greeks consistently theorized their modes as descending from a high note, rather than rising from low to high as in a modern scale, so even if these modes sounded the same as ours, musicians at the time would not have thought about them in the way that we do). All these modes are named after actual places—Doria is a specific region in southern Greece, while Lydia and Phrygia are now in modern Turkey. These names themselves raise the possibility that some Greek modes may well have reflected contacts with other cultures.

To summarize, Greek musical traditions reveal a striking division between mathematical speculations about pleasingly intervals (from Pythagoras), and descriptions of the mathematically “inappropriate” things that musicians were actually doing (from Aristoxenus). In this sense, one might say that the surviving scraps of knowledge about Greek musical practice reveal a divide between theory and practice—not unlike the ones that modern musicians encounter today.

Uncovering the music of ancient Egypt

Ancient Egyptian music is almost completely lost to us today. Yet the fragments of what we do know suggest its relevance both to the other traditions that we know more about and to our own music today. They also highlight the difficulty of pinpointing the origins of musical instruments and ways of making music.

To begin with, Egypt was a known center of culture in the ancient Mediterranean—so that Herodotus, the Greek writer who is often described as the first real historian, interviewed Egyptian priests as part of his research (see Book II of the Histories here). Clearly, he respected Egyptian culture and learning; by his account, the Egyptians claimed to have invented the calendar, and to have developed the worship of the major gods commonly worshiped in Greece (Book II, chapters 3 and 4).

Yet we know far more about Greek music than we do Egyptian music, and consequently, Greek music occupies a far greater place in our histories (even in this one). We lack much surviving musical documentation from Egypt (notation does not appear to have used), and waves of foreign occupation prevented an Egyptian oral tradition from surviving intact to the present day. We have no way of knowing exactly how much Greek and Egyptian musicians were in contact, and how much each culture’s music influenced the other.

However, certain facts (many of them documented by outsiders) reveal that Egyptian music was probably influential on neighboring countries. It is of course impossible to prove that any of the following elements originated in Egypt or were invented by Egyptian people—Egypt, after all, had trade contacts with many neighboring cultures. But the existence of these features in Egyptian musical culture, and the recognized antiquity of Egyptian culture, are worth noting. It would be a mistake to assume that the first culture to document a thing was its inventor.

We know, for instance, that Egyptian musicians used a system of cheironomy – which is, in the words of Grove Music Online, “hand movements made in the air to guide a musical performance.” This is why the hieroglyph for a musician, hst or heset, was an arm and a hand (see our image gallery on Blackboard). Cheironomic systems survive in Jewish religious chant (see an example here), but of course—again—we don’t know precisely how Egyptian cheironomy worked. It could have functioned in a similar manner to modern conducting, but it’s unclear whether this system communicated the speed or performance style of music, or if it also told performers which notes or melodies to sing or play. Certainly it seems to have been used by ensembles of musicians (see this reproduction of an Egyptian illustration here).

We know that, as in many other cultures, music played an important role in Egyptian religion. (One of the best documented Egyptian musicians was a priestess named Meresamun (c. 800 BCE)). The Egyptians appear to have believed that music itself had divine power. Thus the goddess Meret (or Merit) was said to have helped create the world through the power of music. The Roman author Plutarch, in his summary of Egyptian mythology, wrote that the god Osiris “traveled over the whole earth civilizing it without the slightest need of arms, but most of the peoples won over to his way by the charm of his persuasive discourse and all manner of music.” (The Moralia: Isis and Osiris, 13). This idea of music’s civilizing power still holds force today.

Egyptian religious music appears to have regularly used percussion instruments. In later times, the goddess Hathor was associated with music, as was the god Ihy (Ahy); both are commonly shown holding the sistrum (plural: sistra), a type of rattle (see gallery). The idea of using percussion instruments for worship has survived both in Egyptian Coptic Christian music and in Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahodo church music (around 2:30 in this video, the choir is actually using sistra). To be clear: neither of these examples represents what ancient Egyptian music actually sounded like—but the survival of the concept of religious percussion, and of the sistrum itself, is a striking echo of earlier practices.

Surviving pictures from Egyptian tombs show a wealth of instruments, including lutes, sistra, and double-reed instruments commonly known by their Greek name, aulos. (See the gallery of pictures in our course site). The aulos in particular reveals something important about Egyptian music: it is an instrument capable of playing two notes at once, which suggests that the music played on it perhaps had a melodic part and an accompaniment (perhaps a drone, as in this modern performance).

Very few instruments from Egypt survive intact. You can hear two trumpets found in the tomb of Pharaoh Tutankhamun here; although the British musician playing them is of course relying on his imagination and training, the trumpets themselves probably sound quite close to the way they did so long ago. Similarly, a lute belonging to a musician named Har-mosĕ (c. 1490 BCE) was found intact, and some harps have also survived (see gallery).

Egyptian lutes have given rise to a fascinating, but unsolvable, debate. Numerous observers, of whom the most recent is Eric Charry, have noticed that ancient Egyptian lutes and West African lutes bear more than a passing resemblance to each other. The fundamental question is whether one can meaningfully find connections between Egyptian instruments from 1400 BCE and West African instruments of today. There certainly are some differences in the instruments, although the passage of some three thousand years could perhaps explain this. The debate itself centers on whether this similarity (whatever we make of it), reflects Egyptian influence on West Africa, or African influence on ancient Egypt. One factor to consider is that the lute appears to have entered Egypt from Mesopotamia, although of course the early evidence is fragmentary.

A similar connection might well exist between ancient Egyptian harps and those found further up the Nile (see gallery). Certainly it’s known that Egypt engaged in trade with other cultures along the Nile, such as the Nubians, and could have made contacts further south. It’s tempting to imagine that the music played by this Ugandan musician is an echo of ancient music. But there is no way to know if this is true or not. If carried too far, such an argument might lead us to assume that African musicians today are part of a static, unchanging culture, rather than a vibrant, living, developing culture.

The distant echoes of ancient Egyptian music remain frustratingly inaudible after all these years, and yet they’re still tantalizingly resonant. They reveal a culture which had contact with its neighbors and probably exchanged musical ideas with them; one which valued music greatly, and which admired its special power; and heard in it something creative, powerful, even divine.

Finding a starting point: approaching the study of music in antiquity

History is a vague term that refers both to (1) events as they actually happened and (2) the way we talk about those events. History as we tell it is the story we tell to make sense of the past, and indirectly, the present. History itself happened; but history as we tell it is a story that is told by someone to an audience.

Historical accounts are made by people to preserve a record of historical events or to advocate for a specific interpretation of those events. History is always contextual, and it usually looks different based on whose perspective you’re getting. So what I’m asking you to think about is the perspective implicit in a history book—the way that a historian’s beliefs affect the way that history itself gets told.

This is important because many music history or appreciation textbooks used in North America today pick one of two starting points: either the European Middle Ages or Classical Greece. Starting in either spot reveals something about the authors or their audience. Specifically, it might seem to suggest that the historic music most relevant to us today originated in Europe. Such accounts often begin with Catholic chant music, which formed the basis for some of the first notated multi-part musical arrangements in the Western tradition, or with Greek music theory, which anticipates our own through its emphasis on intervals, octaves, and modes.

Both these starting points seem remote from the bulk of our contemporary music, especially here in the United States today. It is now a widespread idea among music scholars that much North American music owes its unique qualities to a fusion between European and West African traditions (for many people, the blues—which have influenced the development of jazz, funk, hip-hop, country, bluegrass, rock, and metal—are perhaps the most representative music of the African diaspora in North America). The music of an American jazz saxophonist is indebted to the African diasporic traditions which are echoed in the blues, and to the European tradition which led Adolphe Saxe to invent the instrument (resulting in the instrument being designed to play certain types of notes and not others). However, music history textbooks have not generally reflected this balance in practice. Why not?

The answer is fairly straightforward. Historians are generally methodical folk, who like evidence and documentation. The complex musical genres developed in West Africa were not notated traditions, but oral traditions which were transmitted from person to person. This means that a break in the line of people who knew a specific song could mean the end of that song. Western notation, on the other hand, allows anyone who can read it to resurrect the piece, even after all living memory of the music is lost. Anyone who wants to tell the history of West African musics in remote antiquity faces significant problems, as oral traditions rarely survive without some changes over a period of several thousand years. So, one might say, there is a built-in answer: the scholars have relatively little documentary evidence to go on.

But this explanation only leads toward a new problem. Notated European traditions reliably stretch back about a thousand years, with fragments predating the 1000s. If oral traditions cannot reliably be traced backward with the same type of specific detail, then we will suddenly find that West African traditions can only enter history as we tell it when an outsider documents them in writing. In other words, we will recreate the contradiction of Columbus “discovering” an America already full of sentient people, who become historically visible only when we read accounts from Western explorers.

There is no easy way of getting around this problem, but it’s important to bring it up, because it’s important to be honest with each other about who we are as people (both individually and as a society), and what it means for us to present and use history as we tell it. And given the lack of certain kinds of evidence, which we desperately need to tell the full story, the next best thing we can do is to acknowledge the gaps.

The issue of historical evidence is another issue that we have to consider seriously. It’s possible to study the music of recent eras through listening to live and recorded performances by people connected to living historical traditions, and through studying authoritative notated scores of pieces. But music in antiquity lacks these resources. Although there are authoritative performers in the major traditions, early forms of music notation are vague at best and require significant interpretation, and oral traditions have been disrupted in various ways by war, famine, or enslavement. Consequently, there are times when we have to turn to other forms of evidence: paintings and carvings of musicians; descriptions of musical practice by non-musicians, such as poets; theoretical treatises about music; the items buried with musicians; and surviving ancient instruments. All these allow us to try to fill some of the gaps in our knowledge.

Ultimately, however, what are we studying? It’s common to describe early musical traditions as “classical music.” This isn’t always very helpful! As commonly used in the United States today, “classical music” refers to a broad range of European musics from the last thousand years which are implied to be somehow distinct from folk and popular musics. “Classical” music is essentially a cultural construction, shorthand for “music that you should respect.” But many of these musics were used for totally different purposes and served different audiences; some were hardly respectable in their own time, but have only been made so in retrospect. Sacred music, lewd pop songs with openly sexual lyrics, carefully composed symphonies, and improvisational folk song arrangements really have little to do with each other. The concept of “classical music” reflects an attempt to force a wide range of (often unrelated) musical traditions into a single Great Tradition.

Consequently, I don’t use the term “classical” in this way. Instead, classical music is simply a type of music that is associated with cultural elites and a historic tradition, music which enjoys high cultural status (this fascinating book, The Other Classical Musics, illustrates this point nicely). The oral traditions of master musicians in India, West Africa, and the Middle East constitute kinds of classical music, as do the notated traditions of China and Japan. Therefore, it’s important to realize that what Americans call “classical music” is just one of many varieties from across the globe. And much of what we can study from antiquity will be the classical traditions, not because these are inherently better than any other type of music, but because these traditions enjoyed elite support, allowing the traditions to be preserved.

With all this in mind, I want to introduce our starting point for a study of the music of antiquity. One could start with Greece, or with the music of the Jews (a major influence on the development of Catholic chant, which is foundational for much of the European tradition). However, our focus in the first half of the semester is really on the cultures surrounding the Mediterranean Sea and adjacent regions. Of the early cultures, we do know the most about Greece, but it’s a profitable and humbling experience to start with Egypt—a powerful and important culture about whose music we know relatively little, but whose economic power and influence were vast. Just enough evidence of Egyptian music survives to suggest what we don’t know, and to highlight the problems and fascinations of studying ancient music history.

Why this site? Why now?

I have taught music history courses for music majors and minors at Howard University since 2015, and I have used a variety of textbooks, teaching methods, and focuses. However, none of these approaches felt satisfying. This site is an attempt to address two specific problems with the way that music history is taught at the undergraduate level.

Many history books omit or minimize perspectives, repertoire, and musicians that are relevant to American (particularly African-American) musicians today. This is not to deny the important aspects of American music today which draw on European roots. Rather, it’s an attempt to redress the balance so that the history we tell is more immediately relevant to its audience.

The second problem is a matter of length and focus. Many existing textbooks do not provide uniform chapter lengths or divide neatly into lessons. This simple fact makes it difficult for today’s typically over-worked undergraduate student to manage their time and develop a workable daily routine. Further, many existing books provide a heavy focus on factual detail, as if the textbook is the only source of information necessary–an approach which seems to be a relic of the pre-internet age.

The approach taken in this blog is different. Rather than overwhelming students with factual details, each lesson in the blog focuses on key ideas which connect the facts and give them meaning. Each lesson in the blog will be 1000 – 1500 words long, written in a simple manner.

I thought about creating a printed textbook to address these issues, but part of the fun of teaching is the constant process of discovery–of deciding that this semester, we’ll explore something new. Pinning all my ideas down into a printed textbook means giving up some of that freedom–arriving at a Definitive History. By blogging, I can retain my freedom to mix and match as I see fit, and discovery can continue unabated.