1 - Anonymous Arabic Treatises on Music: Lost Legacies, Hidden Answers

Summary

The musicologist studying Arabic music of the past faces from the outset a peculiar and insoluble problem: musical documents do not exist. Owing to the absence of notation, no artefacts transmit the music from remote ages. Yet, though we can no longer recreate how the music sounded, written sources provide much information on the musical culture of the medieval Islamic world.

Exploring these sources was the aim of my two rism volumes, The Theory of Music in Arabic Writings. In these, I investigated and analysed over 526 texts from primary manuscript sources in collections housed in Europe, the United States, Turkey, Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, Russia, Uzbekistan and Israel. What was startling about this corpus was the high percentage of anonymous treatises, a phenomenon that deserves particular attention. Statistically speaking, out of the 341 treatises described in the first rism volume, seventy-one are anonymous; of the 184 items in the second, fifty-five are anonymous. In other words, the anonymous entries amount to roughly 25 per cent of the body of theory described.

Beyond the statistical aspect, impressive in itself, many anonymous works contain a noteworthy amount of original commentary complementing what is often recycled material. New material, although sometimes drawing on theory and speculation from famous classical treatises, more frequently addresses issues about musical works and performing practice; such commentary apparently arises from knowledge earned through a musician’s experience. Generally speaking, the ideas, valuations and aesthetics in anonymous treatises reflect commentary elsewhere about musical structures and their criteria, a pattern that Alan Merriam has termed ‘verbal behavior’. The appraisal of anonymous Arabic treatises that follows pays special attention to the common material between the treatises and related theoretical commentary. The treatises also share a great deal of commentary among themselves, a theme that I will also explore. Table 1.1 summarises the overlap of materials among the fourteen anonymous works cited in this study.