This is a companion volume to Sawa's An Arabic Musical and Socio-Cultural Glossary of Kitāb al-Aghānī (Brill, 2015). Abandoning the dictionary format of the Glossary, Sawa here presents the musicological and related material of the Kitāb al-Aghānī (Book of Songs) as an anthology under the following eleven headings: theory; instruments; composition; education and transmission; performance; solos, accompaniment and ensemble music; musical stability and change; musical and textual improvisation; ṭarab and the effects of singing on people and animals; dance; physiognomy, attire, character, social status and the permissibility of music. The book concludes with an Arabic–English glossary, charts of instrumental tuning, indexes and bibliography.
Each section is divided into thematic sub-sections, with the translations from the Aghānī being introduced by explanatory passages, some of them lengthy, in which Sawa draws on his vast knowledge of the medieval Arabic writings on music. The material is arranged in such a way as to bring out the many aspects of the themes, and the sections conclude with useful summaries. Many of the book's topics have already been discussed before either by Sawa himself or by other specialists such as Neubauer, Racy and Wright, but here they are illustrated with a wealth of detail and attention to musical terminology. Occasionally Sawa, a practising musician, adds a personal reminiscence. For instance, under the heading “Technique and process of composition”, he cites al-Ḥasan b. al-Kātib, al-Fārābī and his own teacher, Amīn Fahmī,
Topics treated briefly in Sawa's dissertation, Music Performance Practice in the Early ʿAbbāsid Era (Toronto, 1989) or simply mentioned in passing are here analysed in detail and illustrated. One of the most original sections concerns dance. It includes definitions from different sources, passages from the Aghānī mentioning dancing at court and al-Masʿūdī’s description of the ideal dancer in the Murūj al-dhahab. The anecdotes show that rulers sometimes cavorted on (or in) hobbyhorses, and one wonders whether any representations of these have survived in miniatures or on pottery. A few subjects such as the status and emancipation of male and female slaves could be considered borderline, but in view of the importance of music-making slaves in this culture, their inclusion is justified.
The material presented in this book is extremely valuable, but its value would have been enhanced with a little more thought and linguistic precision. One misses the intervention of the series editors here. First, the individual passages from the Aghānī are all given the heading “Anecdote”. Anecdotes by definition contain a narrative element, but this element is absent from many of the entries here, which may be statements of fact or quotations from musicological treatises. “Anecdote” is in fact employed to render khabar, but khabar has a much wider semantic field, denoting any kind of information in prose; not all readers will realise why so many non-narrative passages are qualified as anecdotes. Furthermore, when the heading “Anecdote” precedes both an introductory passage and the subsequent “anecdote”, the division between them is not always clear.
Composers drew on poetry for the lyrics of their songs, and in Aghānī anecdotes songs are referred to by the first line of the lyrics. Here, however, lyrics are very often transliterated but left untranslated, so that the non-Arabic-reader has no idea what they mean. This is particularly regrettable when the meaning is directly relevant to the anecdote. For instance, Ibrāhīm ibn al-Mahdī used a vibrato technique and emphatic repetitions when he came to the phrase “… which [i.e. the Revelation] Gabriel conveyed to the Prophet” in the song he was performing; the meaning of the words evidently inspired this climax. But with the phrase given only as Jibrīlu ballaghahā l-nabiyya (p. 40), it will escape non-Arabic-readers. Where poetry is translated, it is done in a wooden fashion, with only the superficial meaning rendered.
By contrast, the prose material abounds in interspersed Arabic words glossing the English ones. While it may be necessary to include the Arabic original of certain technical terms for absolute precision, nothing is gained from, for example, glossing “unable” with ʿajaza, “fall short” with qaṣṣara and “be apologetic” with iʿtazara [sic.] (p. 129, first §). The reader is continually brought up short by these needless interruptions to the flow of the Aghānī’s prose.
Frequent interruptions are not the only problem with the English versions. Basic differences between Arabic and English, for instance in tense sequence, are often ignored. Subordinate circumstantial clauses (ḥāl) are treated as though they were main clauses. The Arabic perfect can be rendered by the present tense when it expresses generalizations, as in Sulaymān b. ʿAbd al-Malik's speech beginning “The camel stallion roars and the mare becomes restless and aroused…” (Aghānī IV: 273), but here it is translated as a narrative past: “The camel brayed (hadara) and the she-camel rushed and stretched forth its legs (ḍabiʿa) toward it in sexual desire…” (p. 350). Another difference is in the use of connectives, far more widespread in Arabic than in English. Not every fa has to be translated as “so”; it can often be omitted.
Because of these and other problems with the translations the book may put off some readers; its style does not do justice to the linguistic sophistication of the Aghānī’s compiler and his sources. Nonetheless it will serve as a major reference for those interested in the theory and practice of Arabic music up to the fourth/tenth century. It well conveys the social context in which the music was created, the process of its performance and the many and varied uses to which it was put, including (p. 344) commercial publicity.
