The Musical Heritage of Al-Andalus

Front matter

ROUTLEDGE

ANDALUS ight F. Reynolds

THE MUSICAL HERITAGE OF

SECTION TWO Andalusi music to the fall of the Umayyad Caliphate, 711-1031

3 From the conquest to the reign of ‘Abd al-Rahman II, 711-822 Music in the household of al- Mughira 54

4 “Abd al-Rahmân Il and Ziryab, 822-852 Ziryab in the court of Abd al- Rahman II 62 Ziryăb: the early sources 62

Rivalries in the court 67 Eastern echoes 71

X1 viii Contents

The emergence of the legend 73 The author of Kitab Akhbar Ziryab 75 The final transformation: al-Maqqari 77 Ziryab’s musical legacy 80 An aggregate summary 81

5 The final years of the Caliphate, 858-1031 86 SECTION THREE Music in the medieval Mediterranean 101

“Mutual intelligibility” 101

6 Instrumentarium 105 The Arab lute 106 Bowed string instruments 110 Musical instruments of al-Andalus 116 Other instruments of al-Andalus 121

7 Music theory and performance practices 127 Music as mathematics 127 The music of the spheres 129 Melodic modes 129 The effect of modes 131 Music theory in al-Andalus 132 Rhythm 138 Performance practices 139 Summary: musical mutual intelligibility 141

SECTION FOUR The musical revolution in al-Andalus 147 8 From sawt to muwashshah 149 The musical structure of the medieval şawt 149

The muwashshah/zajal song-form 156

The kharja 160

Muwashshah versus zajal 161

The musical structure of the medieval muwashshah 163 Ibn Sana” al-Mulk and Dar al-Tiraz 163

9 Hebrew muwashshahat 179 Conclusion 184

Contents ix

SECTION FIVE Post-Umayyad Iberia (11th-17th c.) 189

10 The era of the “petty kings,” Almoravids, and Almohads (11th-12th c.) 191 Qiyân as captives and gifts 198 Dance and puppetry 203 Music among the elite 204 Al-Tifasht's description of Andalusi song 205

11 The “Age of Minstrels” (13th-15th c.) 213 Las Cantigas de Santa María 2/4 Andalusi musicians in Christian courts 216 Church and municipal musicians 221

12 Music of the Moriscos (16th—17th c.) 226 The final expulsions 231

Epilogue 233 Bibliography 236 Index 255

Illustrations

Cantigas de Santa Maria (13th c.), albogón

Cantigas de Santa María (13th c.), albogue

Modern alboka, Fundación Joaquín Díaz, Urueña

Gaitas crafted in the village of El Gastor, Andalucía

Floor fresco from Qasr al-Khayr al-Gharbi, completed 727 CE From a copy of Safi al-Din al-Urmawr's Kitab al-Adwar dated 1333, drawing of a lute strung in five double courses

Capitel de los musicos, Cordoba, 10th century

Capitel de los musicos, Cordoba, 10th century

Byzantine /yra (ca. 1000), ivory casket

Cantigas de Santa Maria (13th c), bowed fiddles

Cantigas de Santa Maria (13th c), rabab and Arab lute

Pages from a North African songbook of muwashshahăt

EI Libro de Ajedrez (13th c.), two Moorish women play chess, accompanied by a young woman playing a lute

Cantigas de Santa Maria (13th c.), a Moor and a Christian performing together

EI Libro de Ajedrez (13th c.), a Christian and Moor

playing chess

Moriscos dancing

216 229

Acknowledgments

This volume would not have been possible without the generous assistance and guidance I have been fortunate enough to receive from innumerable scholars and musicians over the years.

I am very grateful for the training I received at UCLA from Claude Audebert and Seeger A. Bonebakker, and, in particular, A. J. Racy, whose musicianship and scholarship continue to inspire me. Equally influential were my studies with Roger Allen, Dell Hymes, Steven Feld, and George Makdisi at the University of Pennsylvania.

During my stays in Cairo I benefited immensely from music lessons with Mansi Amin and classes on music theory with Yusuf Shawqi. The concerts of Firqat al-musiqà al-'arabiyya in the 1980s directed by ‘Abd al-Halim Nuwayra sparked my enduring love of the classical muwashshah repertoire that, decades later, has given birth to this volume.

Across the Arab World I have been welcomed and guided in my explorations of Andalusian music by dozens of extraordinarily generous musicians and scholars to whom I owe a great deal, including Muhammad Qadri Dalal and ‘Abd al-Rahmân Jabagji in Syria; in Morocco, Mehdi Chaachou and Muhammad al-Akrami in Tetuan, Muhammad Briouel and ‘Abd al-Karim Rayyis in Fez, along with ‘Omar Metioui in Tangier. In Algeria, I am grateful to the various ensembles of Andalusian music that allowed me to attend their rehearsals and concerts, as well as conduct interviews with their leaders and performers, including al-Sundusiyya (Algiers), and in Tlemcen, the associations of Gharnata, al-Qurtubiyya, Riyad al-Andalus, Nasim al-Andalus, and la S.L.A.M. (Société de littérature, arts, et musicale). A very special thanks, however, is due to the members of the Ahbab Cheikh Larbi Bensari Association who taught me their version of Nübat Zaydan, which was later performed by the UC Santa Barbara Middle East Ensemble under the direction of Scott Marcus in 1992, 500 years after the fall of Granada in 1492. My understanding of the Algerian traditions of Andalusian music has been greatly enriched by the publications of, and my conversations with, Salah Boukli, Fayçal Ben Kalfat, Yahya Ghoul, Benali and Salim el Hassar, and Fouzi Kalfat. In Tunisia I wish to thank Samir Becha, Mahmoud Guettat, Ikbal Hamzaoui, and Anis Meddeb, as well as the staff of the CMAM (Center xii Acknowledgments for Arab and Mediterranean Music) and the master instrument-makers of the atelier of Ennejma Ezzahra in Sidi Bou Said.

In Paris, my research was supported and greatly enhanced by many musicians, ensembles, scholars, and music aficionados including Nidaa Abou Mrad, Saadane Benbaabali, Farid Bensarsa, Abdelkrim Bensid, Amr'eddine Soufi Betaouaf, Ghani Ben-Yelles, Amine Beyhom, Frederic Billiet, Lila Borsali, Pascal Buresi, Youssef Chédid, Aboubakr Chraibi, Simon Elbaz, Tarik Faroui, Anas Ghrab, Rachid Guerbas, Leila Habashi, Hamdane Hadjadji, Brahim Hadjkacem, Scheherazade Qassim Hassan, Frédéric Lagrange, Nadir Marouf, Abdelwahab Meddeb, Miriam Rovsing Olsen, Francois Picard, Christian Poché, and Mourad Yelles. In addition, I thank the various ensembles who allowed me to attend their rehearsals and concerts, and on occasion rehearse and perform with them, including “Les Airs Andalous” (Ensemble Andalou de Paris), Ensemble Albaycin, Ensemble El Mawsili, and Es-Safina Cultural Association.

In Spain I owe much gratitude to many scholars and colleagues, including Miguel Angel Berlanga, Maria Isabel Fierro, Manuela Cortés Garcia, Daniel Madrid, Inmaculada Manrique, Reynaldo Fernando Manzana, Luis Molina, Maria del Carmen Montané, Begofia Olavide, Carlos Paniagua, Eduardo Paniagua, Emilio Ros-Fabregas, the Department of Art History at the Universidad de Granada that allowed me to teach a doctoral seminar on the history of Arabo-Andalusian music in 2005, and to the many staff members and librarians at the Escuela de Estudios Arabes, the Centro de Documentación Musical de Andalucia, El Legado Andalusi, and the Institución Milá y Fontanals (Barcelona).

Chapters 6 & 7 of this work were inspired by the remarkable NEH Summer Institute “Negotiating Identities in the Mediterranean” in Barcelona 2015, organized and led by Brian Catlos and Sharon Kinoshita. All of the participants and lecturers in that remarkable gathering have left their mark on this work.

I am fortunate to have received advice, contributions, suggestions, and corrections on various sections of this work from a large number of colleagues, including Glaire Anderson, Mohammad Sadegh Ansari, Tova Beeri, Julia Bray, Marcel Camprubi, Hicham Chami, Judith Cohen, Rachel Colwell, Michael Cooperson, Federico Corriente, Carl Davila, Ruth Davis, Vanessa Paloma Elbaz, Jiirgen Elsner, Ed Emery, Jonathan Glasser, Matthew Gordon, Kathryn Hain, Michelle Hamilton, Andrew Hicks, Jared Holton, Lev Arie Kapitaikin, Philip F. Kennedy, Hilary Kilpatrick, Paul Marcel Kurpershoek, Tony Langlois, Matthew Machin-Autenrieth, Maria Rosa Menochal, James T. Monroe, Salvatore Morra, Philip Murphy, Pernilla Myrne, Lisa Nielson, Maurice Pomerantz, Nasser Rabbat, Mariam Rosser-Owen, Everett Rowson, Teófilo Ruíz, Walid Saleh, Jonathan Shannon, Christopher Silver, Susan Slyomovics, Devin Stewart, Shawkat Toorawa, David Wacks, Mark S. Wagner, and Christopher Witulski,

Acknowledgments xiii

A very special thanks is due to the preeminent scholars of pre-modern Middle Eastern music who have graciously suggested sources, assisted in obtaining copies of manuscripts, answered my endless questions, read and corrected passages over many years: Eckhard and Elsbeth Neubauer (to whom this book 1s dedicated), George Sawa, Edwin Seroussi, and Owen Wright.

My final thanks are to a friend and colleague of many decades who has taught me an enormous amount about Middle Eastern musical performance and theory, and has allowed me to benefit from his own fieldwork and research many times over the years, Scott Marcus.

Whatever errors or mistakes remain in this work, despite the best efforts of these many colleagues, are of course my own. I can only hope that they will inspire future scholars to correct them.

Portions of Chapter 4 appeared in the journal Middle Eastern Literatures, Vol. 11, no. 2 (2008): 155-68, and are reproduced here with permission from Taylor & Francis. One section of Chapter 4 appeared in The Aghlabids and their Neighbors: Art and Material Culture in 9th-century North Africa 2017: 144—62, and 1s reproduced here with permission from Brill Publishers.

An earlier version of one section of Chapter 8 appeared in Muwashshah: Proceedings of the Conference on Arabic and Hebrew Strophic Poetry and its Romance Parallels, October 8—10, 2004, School of Oriental and Asian Studies, University of London, 2007: 211—27 and is reproduced here with permission.

Introduction

Medieval Muslim Spain — referred to as “Moorish Spain” in English, al-Andalus in Arabic, and Sepharad in Hebrew — left a rich cultural heritage in agriculture, art, architecture, gardening, medicine, mysticism, philosophy, poetry, the physical sciences, urban planning, and other realms. Perhaps the single most remarkable and enduring contribution of that society, however, has been in the field of music. Al-Andalus, it shall be argued in this volume, was one of a number of points of cultural contact and exchange around the Mediterranean that had a profound impact on medieval music in Europe as well as in the Arabo-Islamic World. Through this network of exchange, for example, the rebec (Ar. rabab) and the lute (Ar. al-'àd) were introduced to Europe, later adaptations of which became nearly emblematic of late medieval and early Renaissance European music. In addition, a new strophic song-form emerged in the 10th-11th centuries known in Arabic as muwashshah if the text was in classical Arabic and zajal if the text was in a colloquial Arabic dialect. Appearing first in al-Andalus, this new song-form spread rapidly across the entire Arabic-speaking Middle East, and has remained in continuous performance for nearly a thousand years from Morocco in the west, to Syria and Iraq in the north, to Yemen in the south. This song-form also had a profound effect on Jewish music, becoming one of the major vehicles for song genres in Hebrew such as piyyutim and bakkashot, in which even today medieval poems composed by the great Andalusian Jewish poets are sung to the same melodies as Muslim and Christian Arabs sing their texts. This song-form is also recognizably related to some of the best-known music of medieval Christian Iberia, including the 13th-century Cantigas de Santa María and the Gallego-Portuguese cantigas de amigo, though the precise nature of that relationship, as we shall see, is hotly debated.

Despite the fascinating and very significant historical role played by the music of medieval Muslim Spain, and the rather large amount of scholarship on this subject published in Arabic, French, and Spanish, it has been nearly a century since a work published in English undertook a detailed study of this remarkable tradition (and that work was in fact an abridged translation from the Spanish).! The present volume therefore seeks to fill this lacuna in a manner accessible to non-specialists while also providing enough technical detail to satisfy those with a more detailed knowledge of medieval music. A volume of this scope inevitably runs into a variety of methodological problems, some of which deserve to be discussed here at the outset.

Methodological issues

To begin with, music of the distant past is not recuperable. Although we at times possess rich historical documentation about music, we do not and cannot examine the music itself, as it was performed and listened to in pre-modern times. Music is, or at least was until the advent of audio-recordings, relentlessly ephemeral.

Nevertheless, the music of al-Andalus was, in the first half of the 20th century, at the center of a great debate that then raged over the question of what “influence” Arabo-Islamic culture did or did not have on medieval Europe and what role that “influence” may have played in setting the stage for the European Renaissance. In particular, heated arguments were exchanged about the question of Arab musical influence on medieval European musical traditions such as the 12th-13th century Provençal, Occitan, and Catalan troubadours, as well as on the 13th-century Cantigas de Santa Maria of Alfonso X, and the 13th-century Gallego-Portuguese cantigas de amor and cantigas de amigo. Proposals that suggested Arab origins for any aspect of these traditions were vigorously rejected by some scholars who refused to acknowledge any Arab influence — indeed often any contact with Arab music — whatsoever. These exchanges boiled down to two opposing camps, one of which saw an indisputable role for Arabo-Islamic culture and music in the history of European civilization, and the other, which viewed all such claims as anathema, imagining European culture instead to have been hermetically sealed off from any enduring traces of contact with Muslims during the 900 years of Muslim presence in the Iberian Peninsula from 711 to the final expulsions of the Moriscos (Muslims who were converted to Christianity) in 1609-14.? During most of this bitter debate, however, very little attention was given to the music of al-Andalus per se, since it was viewed almost exclusively as a puzzle piece within the larger question of the relationship between East and West, understood as Christian Europe and the Islamic Middle East.

Among the most prominent of the scholars participating in that debate were Julián Ribera y Tarragó, Henry George Farmer, Higinio Anglés, and Kathleen Schlesinger.* Given the large body of new evidence that has emerged in the ensuing years, some of the extreme views expressed by both sides now seem untenable: the “Occidentalist” portrayals of a European culture that was immune to outside forces would now be almost laughable given the vast body of historical documentation to the contrary were it not for a handful of modern scholars who still champion this position, such as the Spanish Arabist Serafín Fanjúl and more recently literary historian Darió Fernández-Morera.* On the other hand, the “Arabist” school's views at times reduced Arabo- Islamic culture to scarcely more than a conduit for ancient Greek thought, with little acknowledgment of its original and innovative contributions, and these claims are thus equally ripe for reevaluation. It is, quite simply, time for a fresh look at the rich musical world of medieval Iberia and its relationship to the multiple musical traditions of the modern world that trace their origins back to that source.

In the broader field of medieval Iberian studies, modern scholarship has for the most part moved beyond the extremes of the “Arabist” versus the “Occidentalist” approaches, and contemporary scholars now enthusiastically explore the complexities and fascinating ambiguities of cultural interactions in medieval Iberia. This sense of ambiguity, fluidity, and complexity has, however, not yet been taken up in the field of Iberian music history. There continue to be, I would suggest, two intellectual traps that impede reaching a more nuanced and more accurate understanding of the musical cultures of medieval Iberia: one is the paradigm of “influence,” which continues to haunt the field, albeit in slightly modified forms, and the second is the now widespread tendency to view all cultural phenomena in medieval Iberia as reflections of the supposed tripartite division of Iberian society into las tres culturas — Jews, Christians, and Muslims.

“Influence” is a term that is intellectually both slippery and sloppy, for it allows us to imply in abstract terms that some sort of relationship between two phenomena or social groups existed without having to specify what we think actually took place. It is also a term that is dangerously fraught with unarticulated implications. To begin with, “influence” denotes a process that is unidirectional; it does not allow for any “back and forth,” “give and take,” cultural negotiation, hybridization, or cross-fertilization. It is a process in which something, quite literally, flows in one direction into something else. In addition, it effectively robs the receiving party of any form of agency, an aspect that is made particularly clear by contrasting it with other terms such as to borrow, adopt, adapt, embrace, espouse, acquire, obtain, utilize, repurpose, modify, reshape, among others. In the process of “influence,” one party is understood to have been essentially passive. When one culture “influences” another, the process is also characterized to some degree as being inexorable and unstoppable, and the “influenced” culture appears neither to have had, nor made, any choices or decisions about whether or not to accept or embrace these changes. This is in part true because the term influence also carries within it an unspoken power differential — “strong” cultures influence “weaker” cultures, not the other way round. It is no accident that in many accounts of cultural contact, colonial (1.e., strong) powers are portrayed as having “influenced” colonized (1.e., weak) cultures, whereas any movement in the opposite direction is typically portrayed as a “borrowing” or an “adaptation." Those who argue against the idea of having been "influenced" (such as the “Occidentalists” cited above), are often reacting as much to these unspoken implications of weakness and passivity as they are to the actual idea of cultural exchange. This volume will argue that cultural contacts are in fact far more complex, that there are always choices and decisions being made

(in short, agency), and that the results of cultural contacts are almost never detectable on only one side of the encounter. Almost all cultural phenomena have “complex genealogies.”

Given the desire to find influence, modern scholars often take texts that depict cultural contact and interpret them as proof of cultural influence. Points of contact are relatively easy to document historically, and this volume includes what may strike many readers as an astonishingly large number of times, places, and ways that various musical traditions in medieval Iberia came into contact with each other. But I strive here to limit the interpretation of these contacts to what the original sources actually say. Contact is easy to document, but influence is decidedly not. If there is any intellectual agenda in the approach taken here, it is perhaps my conviction, after years of reading through these historical materials and observing living musical traditions, that borrowings, adaptations, transformations, and cross-fertilizations were constantly at work, not only in the realm of music, but in all aspects of medieval Iberian society. This is, quite simply, the nature of human culture.

The study of the music of al-Andalus and of medieval Iberian culture in general, is also trapped in another matrix, one that tends to approach all cultural phenomena through the lens of Jews, Christians, and Muslims. This is an optic that emerged mostly strongly from another “great debate,” engaged in by Américo Castro and Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz and their followers over the nature of Spanish culture and identity.* In very simplified terms, Castro argued that Spanish identity was forged in the mixing of Jewish, Christian, and Arabo-Muslim cultures, and that Jews and Arabs were therefore not “foreign,” but rather constituent elements of Spanish culture. Castro proposed a model of “living together” that he termed convivencia and popularized the notion of a Spain of “The Three Cultures” (/as tres culturas), meaning Jewish, Muslim, and Christian. Albornoz, on the other hand, argued that Spanish identity — Catholic and eternal — was forged in the period of Visigothic rule (410-711 cE), survived by fending off the influences of Jewish and “Moorish” culture, and then reemerged, purified and resilient after the “reconquest” of Iberia and the expulsion of the “foreign” communities of Jews and Muslims.

The tripartite division proposed by Castro, however, conceals and suppresses many elements critical to understanding al-Andalus and medieval Iberia. For scholars of other parts of the world, this encounter between three monotheistic, closely related faiths is not particularly impressive as an example of diversity. Baghdad of the 8th-10th centuries, Istanbul of the 15th-19th centuries, any number of cities along the Silk Road such as Samargand and Bukhara, and many other locations in different periods of time, have all encompassed far more religious, linguistic, and ethnic diversity than Iberia ever did. So why does the example of Iberian Muslims, Jews, and Christians coexisting (whether peacefully or in a state of constant tension) have such a profound hold on the modern Western imagination? First and foremost, because this took place on what is perceived to be “Western” (1.e.,

“European”) soil. Compared to many other regions in the world, Europe has never been particularly diverse ethnically or religiously, and Iberia is a bit of land in which the modern West is heavily invested culturally and historically. Westerners are not, on the whole, interested in convivencia in Baghdad, Istanbul, or Samarqand, because those places are not located in the West, and the societies and cultures of those locations have never been argued to have influenced the West as profoundly as medieval Muslim Spain.

As we shall see in this volume, the division into Muslims, Christians, and Jews also draws our attention away from many other identities that are alluded to in historical sources: Imazighen’ (Berbers, and their many tribal affiliations), muwallads (the offspring of mixed Arab and non-Arab parentage), northern versus southern Arab tribes, Slavs (Sagaliba), Basques, Castilians, Aragonese, Catalans, Valencians, and, running throughout all of these groups, large numbers of slaves of diverse origins who constituted a significant percentage of the population, as well as numerous other regional and urban-based identities. Sadly, when the question of tolerance in medieval Iberia is raised in modern scholarship, it is immediately assumed that one is speaking about religious tolerance among the three religious communities — all other forms of tolerance remain almost entirely unexplored: How much tolerance, for example, existed for distinct ethnicities such as the Imazighen? How much tolerance existed at different times within these communities on various social, sexual, religious, and intellectual matters? How much tolerance was there at different times and places for “deviant” gender and sexual roles/identities? How much tolerance existed for philosophers or free thinkers who espoused rational approaches to the great questions of existence and at times came close to arguing for a “God-less” universe? (It is worth noting that the works of both Maimonides, the great Jewish scholar, and Ibn Rushd [Latin: Averroes], the great Muslim philosopher, were banned and burned by their own communities at various times and places.) How much tolerance and freedom were granted to women in different eras and regions? How much tolerance or mobility existed among different economic classes or among rural and urban communities? All of these questions and many more have been almost completely overshadowed in recent decades by the modern Western obsession with the idea of Jews, Muslims, and Christians living together on "Western" soil. This obsession is rooted almost entirely in modern political and social concerns and provides a very poor description of the social complexities of medieval Iberian society.

These three sectarian communities and the identities associated with them undoubtedly played very important roles in medieval Iberian culture, but identity is fluid, situational, and contextual. In times of collaboration, aspects of social difference may be entirely latent and ignored, while in times of conflict, various distinctions (based in religious, regional, ethnic, class or gender differences) can be called forth to define and sharpen the lines of contention. The challenge is therefore to understand when particular aspects of identity are invoked and when they are quietly laid aside, and what the implications and results were when various social identities came to the fore and engaged with others.®

The title of this work has been chosen with some care. The reference to the “musical heritage” of al-Andalus is in part meant to indicate both that there are modern musical traditions rooted in this period of time and that we in fact know very little about the actual music of al-Andalus.’ We have no contemporary transcriptions of the music of the medieval courts of Cordoba, Sevilla, or Granada, let alone the popular music of the masses. What we do have from the medieval period are texts that provide — often through brief, isolated anecdotes — disjunct pieces of information. The sum total of all of these diverse bits of information does not, in my opinion, allow for the creation of a coherent historical narrative of the many various musical traditions that came into contact in medieval Muslim Spain, nor of the unique new musical form that emerged from that encounter and then subsequently spread across wide regions of the Mediterranean and beyond. It is for this reason that I have not termed this work a history of the music of al-Andalus.

What exists are clusters of texts that provide occasional glimpses of different aspects of these traditions in specific times and places. For some periods of time we have rather detailed biographical information about singers and musicians; from other periods of time we have collections of song texts; from still other periods we have rich iconographic sources about musical instruments; and from others we have detailed financial records about how much musicians were paid, how long they resided in the courts, and how much it cost to purchase and repair musical instruments. But these clusters of detailed information are like stepping stones across a broad river, sometimes separated by centuries and great distances. For the overall period and region covered in this volume (roughly 8th- to early 17th-century Iberia), we do not possess anything approaching a complete portrait of musicians, repertory, instruments, patrons, finances, and audiences from any one location at a particular point in time. Within the limitations of these varied and dispersed records, this volume attempts to provide a survey of the extant sources and to provide a straightforward account of what we do (and do not) know, attempting to answer some of the more troublesome questions, leaving open those that cannot be answered at this point in time, acknowledging gaps where there are gaps, and, wherever possible, providing scholarly translations of the most significant primary sources, a number of which have never before been translated.

Despite the very incomplete nature of the historical record, the larger contours of the development of what is today referred to as Andalusi (or Andalusian) music are nevertheless discernible. As a result of the Muslim conquest of Iberia in 711, a new, complex cluster of cultures, each with its own musical traditions, was brought into contact. These musical traditions continued to be performed for centuries, with many moments of contact and cross-fertilization among them. For the majority of these traditions we have little to no detailed information; it is only the art music of the courts that is reasonably well documented. Then, sometime in the late 10th to early 11th century, a new song-form emerged that was quite distinct from everything that had gone before. This new musical form with 1ts twin names (muwashshah for songs in classical Arabic and zajal for ones in colloquial Arabic) was composed first in Arabic and soon thereafter also in Hebrew, and was to become among the most successful musical forms in human history, for it has now been performed continuously for roughly a thousand years, and in modern times it continues to be performed in a dozen or so different countries of the Middle East. Although always bearing the cachet of being Andalusi in origin, the new song-form quickly spread across the Middle East in the 11th and 12th centuries and by the 13th century was found in urban centers from Morocco to Iraq, and south as far as Yemen. Once adopted in these new locations, local poets and composers immediately began to add to the repertory that had arrived from al-Andalus.

There was no sense in the Middle Ages that the repertory should not be expanded with new compositions; quite the opposite, for as soon as the new song-form arrived in a region, local composers began to try their hand at creating songs of this type, often by “borrowing” the melody of an older song and setting new words to it, a process known as contrafactum composition. Indeed, the first author to write a work dealing specifically with this type of music, the Cairene scholar Ibn Sana” al-Mulk (1155-1211) proudly appended to his treatise a number of his own muwashshah compositions, and boasted in personal letters that they were being sung by nearly everyone in Cairo.'° Thus the overall repertory continued to grow, and eventually songbooks with hundreds of song texts were compiled.!! For the most part, however, both the structure and the core set of themes and motifs from the original Andalusi model were retained, such that this music was everywhere recognizable and distinct from other repertories. The term Andalusi music in modern usage therefore does not refer to a body of song that was composed in medieval al-Andalus and passed down unchanged for centuries, but rather to a specific form and style that originated in al-Andalus. Just as composers around the world can compose jazz, whether or not they are American, so composers throughout the Arabic-speaking Middle East have created and performed new pieces in the Andalusi style. Composers over the centuries have been so adept, in fact, at retaining the original flavor of the genre that today we often cannot tell if a particular piece is from the 19th century or is several centuries older. However, because regional traditions have developed their own preferences for how to perform this music (using different instruments, different mixes of solo versus choral singing, specific rhythms, and even specific techniques for playing certain instruments), anyone who knows this music well usually can tell what region a given performance or recording is from, sometimes down to the exact city or town.? In many places in the modern Arab world, this repertory, while acknowledged to have originated in medieval Muslim Spain, is also embraced as being a vibrant part of /ocal or regional identity. This 1s a tradition, therefore, that is both medieval and modern, as well as Andalusi and pan-Arab and intensely local, all at the same time. "°

This volume focuses on the early period of the history of this vast musical tradition, primarily within the Iberian Peninsula, from the 8th to the early 17th centuries, ending with the ultimate expulsion of the Moriscos from Spain in 1609-14. A projected second volume will cover the many strands of Andalusi music across the Middle East from the 15th century to the present. This division into two separate volumes reflects not only the eclipse of Andalusi music in its homeland of the Iberian Peninsula, but also a dramatic change in the nature of the historical documentation. From the 15th century to the 19th century, we find almost no biographical information about musicians or composers of musicians in this tradition, with equally few descriptions of performances or information about musical instruments. On the other hand, in this same time period there was a sudden increase in the production of songbooks in Arabic and Hebrew, works that include lyrics, some basic musical information (such as the names of rhythms and melodic modes), and every now and then a glimpse of regional performance practices. Beyond the songbooks, each regional tradition possesses a certain amount of local historical documentation, but these scattered bits of information have not yet been compiled into an academic work that provides an overarching sense of the history of this musical heritage.!* Finally, of course, with the advent of sound recording from the early 20th century onward, we have direct evidence of how the music actually sounded and how it was performed. Early recordings can now be compared with contemporary traditions, and a much more detailed portrait of this repertory can thus be created for recent decades than is possible for the Middle Ages.