Al-Andalus, usually referred to as ‘Moorish Spain’ (or more precisely, Muslim-ruled Iberia), existed under different political configurations for more than 750 years, until 1492. It left its cultural mark worldwide from the eleventh century onwards and its musical heritage can still be recognised in present-day traditions, especially in north Africa. This book, despite its title, is not directly concerned with the musical heritage of Al-Andalus; it provides its necessary prologue, a history of music in Al-Andalus and its cultural remains in Spain after the fall of the kingdom of Granada, up to 1614.
In fact, since the publication in 1922 of a controversial book by Julián Ribera on the influence of Arabic music over the Cantigas de Santa Maria – a serious, substantial and epoch-making study, yet marred by scarcity of available documentation and inadequate historical methodology – this is the first full-length history of music in Al-Andalus, based on a plethora of source material diligently brought together and used with critical flair.Footnote 1 The author has published extensively on the subject, but contrary to possible expectations, this goes much beyond a summary of Reynolds's personal findings: it delivers a coherent yet diverse narrative over a demanding timeframe of 900 years, packed with suggestive overviews, arresting episodes and philological detail. Although I have been reading for a long time in the field of Al-Andalus and Arab music, I found myself repeatedly admiring the breath of the information summoned here and enjoying its novelty and significance.
After a short introduction on music in the Iberia Peninsula to 711, including a few paragraphs about its Jewish communities, the reader is offered some fifteen pages on Arab music up to that point; although this precedes the chronological limits of Al-Andalus, it is much welcome, as it presents data seldom found elsewhere and traces a rich historical panorama of music, musicians and musical patronage providing the reader with a better understanding of the early Islamic traditions.
The next three chapters concern Andalusi music from 711 to the fall of the Umayyad rule in 1031. The extant but little-known biographies of famous singers, trained in the East, provide an astonishing harvest of information on musical life in the Cordoban court, during both the Emirate and the Caliphate (from 929), illuminating the ways in which song, professionally performed, could build and destroy emotional attachments; the thick-fleshed anecdotes about singing slave-girls (the qiyān) in the service of al-Ḥakam I (796–822) are particularly impressive.
Among the early Andalusian musicians, the one most celebrated in modern writings and among today's performers is Ziriāb, purported father of the Andalusi tradition, a black singer trained in Baghdad who arrived in al-Andalus in 822 and became the favourite of emir ʿAbd al-Raḥmān II. Ziriāb gained such an international status that a restaurant in Ramallah, Palestine, where I had lunch some years ago, was named after him. His rise to historical supremacy over other musicians in Arabic sources, from the earliest mentions to the early seventeenth century, receives twenty-one pages of masterly treatment in this book; although Ziriāb's mythical grandeur, enthroned by Ribera, was more recently dismantled by Poché and Davila, Reynolds's account of the centuries-long construction of the legend is enticing; it offers a refreshingly critical, close reading of the sources.Footnote 2
The following chapter, concerning the final years of the Caliphate, is more diverse: it includes an extended discussion of a typical Andalusian reed instrument, the al-būq (Castilian albogón), and delves into several later biographies, ending with that of Gerbert d'Aurillac (Pope Sylvester II), on account of his Iberian sojourn and study of theoretical sources written in or translated from Arabic.
The third section of the book, comprising chapters on instruments and on music theory and performance practice, sets a wider geographical and historical horizon, the medieval Mediterranean, and explores the idea of mutual intelligibility in music as one of its characteristics. Basic compatibility between Western and Eastern musical traditions was similarly proposed by Shai Burstyn as a background for acculturation phenomena.Footnote 3 Reynolds discusses Arabic and romance sources in parallel and argues that a certain amount of musical ‘mutual intelligibility’ reigned around the Mediterranean for several centuries, allowing traffic and trade in music and musicians to take place; although mathematical approaches to music theory and modes are mentioned, he fails to consider, as did Burstyn, patterned, formulaic oral procedures as one of the most relevant transcultural traits. This section also includes an extensive discussion of the instrumentarium (pinpointing those instruments that were typically Andalusi) and a synthesis on music theory in al-Andalus (demonstrating beyond doubt its adoption of Eastern materials) with an important discussion of lute tunings, concluding that Western musicians kept old nomenclature with important explanatory value.
Section four (chapters 8 and 9) is significantly entitled ‘The Musical Revolution in al-Andalus’: it concerns the invention of a new song-form, the muwashshaḥ or zajal (the former written in classical Arabic or Hebrew, the latter in colloquial Andalusian dialect). Reynolds contrasts this with the traditional, Eastern-rooted song (p. 156):
The ṣawt, a highly melocentric tradition with simple texts but very complex melodies, which was almost always performed by professional solo singers, was suddenly faced with a rival … that boasted poetically ornate and comparatively lengthy texts that were performed to relatively simple melodies, which were far more accessible to the masses and could be performed by many singers singing together as a chorus.
Reynolds describes the form in detail, vindicating beyond doubt its musical character, already defended by James Monroe,Footnote 4 based on a number of unambiguous references – namely the Jewish testimonies and a letter by Ibn Sanāʾ al-Mulk (c.1155–1212) about his own muwashshaḥāt. He also underlines its non-classical nature, avoiding the old, unresolved debate about its possible romance or experimental origins. He also discusses the musical structure implied in a passage by Ibn Sanāʾ al-Mulk and seemingly confirmed by the modern remnants of the tradition: in a certain kind of muwashshaḥ, the common-rhyme and the changing rhyme sections of the strophe had contrasting melodies, since between sections the singer on some instruments had to retune a string. This results overall in A/BA form, a conclusion that partially supports Beltrán and reinforces the claim, advanced by Ferreira, that the French virelai form and its Castilian and Italian equivalents are prefigured by the zajal.Footnote 5
The fifth and final section of the book, comprising three chapters, is as unbalanced as are the correspondingly available historical sources. Chapter 10, concerning the era of the ‘petty kings’, Almoravids and Almohads in eleventh and twelfth centuries, draws on the same kind of anecdotal materials as before, concentrating on the condition and cultural exploits of famous female slaves; some of the anecdotes are touching as much as they are revealing. The description of Andalusi song by al-Tīfāshī, a thirteenth-century Tunisian writer, rightly deserves extensive consideration and analysis, as it clarifies the cyclical structure of the contemporary nawba, which by then had already incorporated the muwashshaḥ and zajal as the lighter elements of an extended courtly performance. The following chapters are based on Christian sources, providing a completely different kind of information, mainly on courtly and municipal Moorish minstrels in the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries and the Spanish Muslims and their guilds in the sixteenth and seventeenth. The Cantigas de Santa Maria are referred to only in respect of the musical iconography in codex E. This is unfortunate, as they provide a direct musical link with thirteenth-century Andalusi culture and its theoretical underpinnings, as argued by the present writer in this journal.Footnote 6
Otherwise, only a few, minor details deserve mentioning. Arian Christianity is summarised in terms that do justice neither to its sophisticated theological view (a layered, descending trinitarianism, with Christ uniting divine and human natures), nor to its extended social backing (p. 11); Socrates is quoted without being qualified as Plato's dramatic character (p. 131); and undue weight is given, in the author's cautious discussion of the term urghun as used by Ibn Sanāʾ al-Mulk, to the first of the alternative interpretations eventually proposed: vocal organum or a reed instrument of the būq family (p. 172); only the latter, in my view, fits the passage.
All in all, this book imposes itself as an indispensable reference in the field of the history of music of the Middle Ages and is a model of balanced and exacting scholarship; I would also recommend it for the liveliness of the literary portraits it conveys and for its fluid style, which makes it both illuminating and leisurable reading.
