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Title: | Lines of Thought: Notations and Histories of Music Theory from Abbasid Baghdad (762–1055) |
Authors: | Camprubí, Marcel |
Advisors: | Reuland, Jamie |
Contributors: | Music Department |
Keywords: | Al-Farabi Arabic music Music Theory Notation |
Subjects: | Music history Music theory Middle Eastern studies |
Issue Date: | 2024 |
Publisher: | Princeton, NJ : Princeton University |
Abstract: | This dissertation examines the emergence of musical notation alongside the development of Arabic music-theoretical writings in the early Abbasid period (762–1055). Music theorists active mainly in Baghdad integrated perspectives from recently translated ancient Greek treatises into an Arabic musical tradition of performance practice and theory. The project highlights the tensions that arose between a native Arabic tradition of music theory and a Greek-indebted one that had begun to circulate in writing. Ninth-century Baghdad, the center of the so-called Arabic book revolution, witnessed a dramatic increase in the number of books in circulation and a generalized turn toward written forms of knowledge transmission. This created a unique set of conditions for the development of musical notation. I place al-Farabi (870–950), the leading music theorist of the time, at the center of this story, showing how different facets and phases of his music-theoretical writings relate to this broader paradigm shift. By examining the inception of musical notation in the Arabic context and al-Farabi’s place within it, I provide a compelling counternarrative to the standard story of musical notation’s sudden birth in Carolingian Europe during this same period. Examining more than eighteen theoretical treatises alongside songbooks and compilations of musicians’ anecdotes, I demonstrate that notation was available to theorists and performers active in ninth- and tenth-century Baghdad but remained largely unpursued, a circumstance that defies technologically deterministic historical narratives. |
URI: | http://arks.princeton.edu/ark:/88435/dsp01v405sd77q |
Type of Material: | Academic dissertations (Ph.D.) |
Language: | en |
Appears in Collections: | Music |
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