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‘Abd al-Qādir al-Marāghī and ‘Alī b. Muḥammad Binā'ī: two fifteenth-century examples of notation Part 2: Commentary
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2009
Extract
Part 1 of this paper was concerned principally with the various problems that confront any attempt to provide a satisfactory transcription of these two examples. Given the nature of the difficulties encountered, it is clear that any generalizations we might wish to derive from them can only be tentative and provisional. Nevertheless, the paucity of comparable material, which on the one hand renders the interpretative hurdles all the more difficult to surmount, on the other makes the urge to draw at least some conclusions from the material provided by ‘Abd al-Qādir al-Marāghī and Binā'ī well-nigh irresistible. Such conclusions would involve, essentially, an assessment of the extent to which their notations shed light on the musical practice of the period and provide reliable evidence for the history of composition and styles of textsetting. But in any evaluation of this nature it is essential to avoid the temptation to confuse the sources with the speculative editorial interventions that produce the versions presented in part 1 (exs. 26–8 and 30). The area about which least can be said with regard to the naqsh notated by Binā'ī is, therefore, the nature of the text-setting, while with regard to ‘Abd al-Qādir al-Marāghī's notations it is, rather, the first topic we may consider, the relationship between melody and the underlying articulation of the rhythmic cycle.
- Type
- Articles
- Information
- Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies , Volume 58 , Issue 1 , January 1995 , pp. 17 - 39
- Copyright
- Copyright © School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London 1995
References
1 See BOAS, LVII, 3, 1994, 475–515.Google Scholar
2 Kitāb al-Adwār, ed. al-Rajab, H. M. (Baghdad, 1980), 144–5.Google Scholar See Wright, O., The modal system of Arab and Persian music, a.d. 1250–1300 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978) (henceforth Modal system), 217.Google Scholar
3 Kitāb al-Adwār, 150Google Scholar (repeated in Jāmi' al-alḥān, ed. Taqī Bīnish, Tehran: Mu'assasa-i mutāla'āt wa-taḥqīqāt-i farhangī, 1366/1987, 220).
4 There are two other important theorists contemporary with Binā'ī, al-Lādhiqī and Awbahī. The former, whose treatises are dedicated to Ottoman sultans, reproduces ‘Abd al-Qādir al-Marāghī's definition (D'Erlanger, , La musique arabe, 4, Paris: Geuthner, 1939, 474)Google Scholar, while the latter, who was probably most familiar with the tradition of Herat (see Wright, O., Words without songs: musicological study of an Ottoman anthology and its precursors, SOAS Musicology Series, 3, London: School of Oriental and African Studies, 1992Google Scholar (henceforth Words without songs), 144n) gives the same internal structure as Binā'ī (Muqaddima-i uṣūl, Instanbul University Library MS F 1097, p. 73).Google Scholar
5 They involve the syllables ā and dir. The latter presages the further development of the consonantal range of the set (discussed as a whole in Words without songs, 107–12)Google Scholar to include liquids.
6 Kitāb al-Adwār, 98, 124.Google Scholar
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9 Jāmi' al-alhān, 114, 122.Google Scholar
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11 Modal system, 67–8.Google Scholar Indeed, for Quṭb al-Dīn al-Shīrāzī this version is ḥusaynī proper, while the husaynī of Ṣafī al-Dīn al Urmawī is now classified as a variant.
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4 5, rather than that illustrated in Binā'ī's naqsh, which has 1 4 4# 5. If the latter, the intonation of G
might have been high (G#). In either case, the identity of the new mode would not become clear until F is reached.
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18 op. cit., 50.
19 op. cit., 62.
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22 In the discussion leading to ex. 28 it is suggested that this note should be deleted.
23 Nuruosmaniye MS 3651, fol. 99v: dar talḥīn intiqāl az har yakī (referring to modes) bi-dīgarī bi-munāsabat-i ān sabab-i mazīd-i rawnaq wa-tazyīn wa-tarāwat-i alḥān gardad. The passage (and the meaning of the term) is derived directly from Qutb al-Dīn al-Shīrāzī (Modal system, 290, transl, p. 180).Google Scholar It may also be noted in this connexion that there is an early version of the Kitāb al-Adwār (Suleymaniye MS Fatih 3662) in which intiqāl appears in place of the familiar ṭabaga meaning, therefore, ‘(degree of) transposition’.
24 In the Jāmi' al-alḥān (p. 242)Google Scholar the tashyī'a/bāzgasht is defined as bi-alfāẓ wa-arkān-i naqarāt: aljāz cannot, therefore, be coterminous with the syllables ta, na and nan.
25 p. 187.
26 Nuruosmaniye MS 3651, fol. 101. The original inserts khalq between ḥalq and ḥadīth.
27 p. 238.
28 That ḥurūf designates not just letters (i.e. single syllables) but interjections that may consist of whole words is made clear from the accompanying list of examples, which contains, as well as ā, e.g. shawqī and maḥbūb.
29 Or, if reference to constriction of the throat is taken to imply more specifically a technique of voice production, then with that described in Caton, M., ‘The vocal ornament takīya in Persian music’, Selected Reports in Ethnomusicology, II, 1, 1974, 43–53.Google Scholar
30 The date is that given in Öztuna, Y., Türk musikisi ansiklopedisi, 1 (Istanbul: Millî E
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31 Indicated as long are pitches sustained for one and a half time units or longer. Notes the duration of which is less that half a time unit have been omitted.
32 ed. Gh. ‘A. Khashaba and I. Path Allāh (Cairo: al-Hay'a al-miṣriyya al-'āmma li-l-Kitāb, 1983), 53.
33 The choice of E as the starting point for the representation of husaynī was designed to make as visible as possible the structural similarities with its modern Turkish form. In order to do the same with ‘irāq it would have been necessary to begin from C , which would have resulted in a certain notational awkwardness, and the choice of D at least allows the equation G = (modern Turkish) rast.
34 This evidence thus supports the hints about the relative position of būsatīk given by Ṣafī al-Dīn al Urmawī (Modal system, 271–2).Google Scholar
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36 It would be appropriate here to allude to a further, if marginal, scrap of evidence in the form of a (possible mid-fifteenth-century) piece labelled persikon in a Byzantine MS (Athens 2401, published in Velimirović, M., ‘“Persian music” in Byzantium?’, Studies in Eastern Chant, III, 1973, 179–81).Google Scholar (I am grateful to Mr. J. Plemmenos for drawing my attention to this piece and to Professor J. Raasted for his erudite comments on it.) Although it would be premature to draw any conclusions from a document the precise status of which has yet to be determined, it may at least be noted that the formal relationship of melody to (very garbled) text is by no means dissimilar to that exhibited in the qawl notated by Qutb al-Dīn al-Shīrāzī. Within each A section there is repetition and some variation, and the final A is somewhat abbreviated, but the broad parallels are clear, and would doubtless also have been exemplified in many of the pieces recorded in the song-text anthologies. The kinds of nonsense-syllable strings they use in bāzgasht sections are also mirrored by those that constitute the B section of the persikon piece.
37 Described in Songs without words, 173–9.Google Scholar