9
Round about 870 AD, a man was born in a place called Farab. Farab is in the northern region of what is now called Iran, but in time the man would travel to Baghdad in Iraq and on to Damascus in Syria. As is often the case with famous scholars of the Near East from this period, this man is known today primarily by his nisba – the part of his name that comes from his place of origin. So by and large Abū-Nasr Al-Fārābi is today known to Western scholars, if he is known at all, simply by the name of Al-Farabi. Al-Farabi wrote a great deal, and in particular for us it is important that he wrote a book about music.
Al-Farabi came of age in a place and a time that was richly abundant with Greek philosophy. Already by the fourth and fifth centuries AD, works of Aristotle and others had been translated into Syriac (a language closely related to Arabic and Hebrew, used by many Christians in the ancient Near East). In the Mesopotamian cities of Edessa and Nisibis, Syriac centres of Greek learning sprang up and carried on the tradition of philosophical scholarship that had emerged in the Greek and Roman world after the Classical period. Islam, which emerged and became dominant in the Arab world during the seventh and eighth centuries, flourished in a culture that was already pretty well-versed in the Greeks.
Classical learning in Arabic really took off under the ‘Abbasids, a Muslim dynasty which ruled from 750 to 1258 AD. So by the time Al-Farabi was on the scene, Aristotle and his intellectual descendants were well respected and widely disseminated, available in good translations for careful study. In this context and as a deep scholar of both Greek and Muslim strains of thought, Al-Farabi wrote treatizes on logic, language, metaphysics, and mathematics.
By this point it will have become clear that the Greek philosophical tradition places music under the heading of mathematics and considers it one of the ways in which our human ears can gain access to the deeper truths that undergird the universe. This is why, as part of his examination of mathematics, Al-Farabi wrote a book called the Kitāb al-musiqā al-kabīr, or The Great Book of Music.
The Great Book of Music is a work of music theory by a practising musician. Al-Farabi, much like Lasus of Hermione and the great early theorists of Greek music, was a performer himself. He played the oud, which is a pear-shaped stringed instrument not unlike a lute (and which, legend told, dated back to the grandson of Adam, the first man).
The Great Book of Music devotes careful attention to the maqāmāt (singular maqām), which are tuning modes somewhat analogous to the Greek ones studied in Chapter 7. Each maqām uses a particular series of intervals to dictate which notes are and are not in tune. This is a system that belongs entirely to Arabic music, although like Greek music it places great emphasis on fourths and fifths as the intervals which support the basic structure of each scale. As a musician and a scholar, Al-Farabi was entirely at home in his native tradition.
But he also learned from the Pythagoreans. The Great Book of Music is probably most famous among Western scholars for its use of mathematical calculations to define and delimit the intervals that fit well into a good scale. The Pythagorean preoccupation with music as a maths problem, and with harmony as the sound of well-organized proportions, is alive and well in Al-Farabi’s writing.
At the same time, we can see him struggling with some of the issues that vexed Aristoxenus, too. Aristoxenus inspired the Greek tradition which insists that what we hear, and not the numbers we crunch, has the last word when it comes to musical beauty. This is particularly apparent when Al-Farabi talks about the semitone: he has difficulty reconciling the intervals which he knows sound beautiful in practice, with the more mathematically strict prescriptions of Pythagorean theory which would advize different intervals than the ones that actually work.
Music is beautiful in its orderliness, but it’s also sometimes messy in its beauty: these two contrasting truths of ancient Greek philosophy about music made their way deep into the intellectual bones of this Arab scholar from the ninth and tenth centuries AD. Like so many of the greatest Greek musical thinkers from whom he learned, Al-Farabi was a thinker and an artist, with a philosopher’s insistence on precision but a musician’s sensitivity to nuance.
The point of mentioning Al-Farabi’s story here is to demonstrate that the musical history in this book is not just a collection of academic tidbits of niche interest for the curious. It is the story of ideas and traditions that radiated outward from ancient Greece to take hold all over the globe, long after Athens was no longer at its height and in places where Greek life and society would have seemed very alien indeed. Greek music transcended those cultural barriers, helping to inform the work and thought of artists and scholars half a world away. But the scholars who took Greek musical thought forward, and the musicians who heard the echoes of Greek music, weren’t just slavish imitators producing carbon copies of a bygone tradition. They were freestanding intellectuals and artists in their own right, with deep wells of local tradition and ancient cultures of their own to draw from. The flux and flow of musical practice moved in and out of Athens – from the Levant, from Babylon, from Israel, from what is now Italy – often congregating in that one cultural hub, but always coming from further afield and destined to travel outward again into distant parts of the world.
World music: Greek thinking goes abroad
Various chapters of this book have noted examples of Greek musical notation, philosophy, and practice popping up in the unlikeliest of places. Besides Al-Farabi, there was an epitaph with Hellenistic Greek poetry and accompanying musical symbols in what is now Turkey, probably from the first or second century AD. There were Romans from the twilight of the republic and the Empire who picked up the Pythagorean philosophy of musical cosmology – and thinkers from Kepler to Shakespeare who picked up those same ideas in the modern period. And of course there was more: our earliest Christian hymn – from around the third century AD – is also written in Greek, with Greek notation, on a scrap of papyrus discovered in Oxyrhynchus, Egypt. The success of Greek systems for writing and thinking about music was so great that few regions of the world remained untouched by some part of Greek musical thought in the end.
Then there are parts of the ancient Greek musical heritage – most notably the living tradition of playing Greek scales on Greek instruments – which have pretty much died out. Some scholars will argue that Greek tunings did survive, although in radically modified form, because the early Christian church preserved a few vocal melodies and transmitted them all the way down to the seventh, eighth, and ninth century when the form of Christian singing known as Gregorian chant began to take shape. That tradition, in turn, was the foundation upon which modern Western music was laid, so if it does have real ancient Greek influence then there would be a direct line from, say, Euripides to Bach and on through to the Backstreet Boys.
That kind of idea is a stretch, though. Because between the papyrus scribblings of the early Christian Church and the first examples of written Gregorian chant, there’s a yawning chasm of several centuries during which no written music, that we know of, survives in the West. Most scholars agree that the actual, living tradition of Greek music died out long before modernity really began in earnest.
What didn’t die were the ideas, many of which survive and even have some currency today. Pythagorean philosophy, in particular, got a grip on the world’s imagination. It’s part of why we still analyse our scales in terms of numerical ratios, breaking them down into fourths and tetrachords as we did with the Greek scales in Chapter 2. Pythagorean mathematical ideas, as filtered through Plato, made their way into Roman philosophy and on outward throughout the world, reaching all the way to the Arab Muslim world of Al-Farabi.
There was no more powerful exporter of Greek musical ideas – indeed, of Greek ideas of any kind – than Rome. From a philosophical standpoint, we’ve already seen how this was true with Cicero and Boethius. They weren’t alone – even Lucretius, a contemporary of Cicero’s and a follower of the Greek philosopher Epicurus (who didn’t have a very high opinion of music) sounded almost like Damon or Aeschylus when he wrote in his poem On the Nature of Things that when the Gauls go into battle, ‘the hollow pipe inflames their minds with Phrygian measures.’1 No matter your philosophical allegiances, if you were an intellectual in Rome there was a good chance you had absorbed a few bits of conventional wisdom about the emotional and psychological power of music.
But that wasn’t all – the Romans picked up musical practices from the Greeks, too. Roman tibiae, as we saw in Chapter 2, are basically identical in their basic form to Greek auloi, and like the auloi they were used routinely at parties and in the theatre. Horace, a hugely popular poet and another one of the erudite commentators who frequented the same circles as Cicero and Lucretius, wrote a long poem called the Art of Poetry in which he grumbled about how elaborate and showy pipe music in the theatre had become.2 The developments he was lamenting were Roman, but in attitude and preferences he sounded a lot like Plato – keep it simple, he insisted, and don’t let the crowds tell you how you should sound. The Greeks passed down everything from their music, to their ideas of and elite tastes in music, to the Romans.
Horace had something to say about that too, something we’ve already quoted: ‘conquered Greece conquered her savage captor.’ As Greece fell politically under Roman sway, Rome and her upper classes became infatuated with Greek culture to the point of obsession and self-deprecation. Cicero himself was a prime example: ‘in education and, in fact, in every kind of literature, Greece outdid us. It was easy to do when there was no competition,’ he wrote in his Tusculan Disputations.3
But even in these cases, Greek music was never carbon-copied for mass reproduction. The Romans had a musical culture of their own, one that would take a book of its own to explore. Horace’s little tirade in the Art of Poetry bears witness to the fact that there were cultural developments going on in Rome that took Greek musical instruments and ran with them. Rome was also a key player in the ongoing story of how music came from all over the world into Athens and flowed outward from there to take on innumerable new forms around the world.
This has been a book about an important moment in music history. An underappreciated moment, one whose antiquity has obscured many of its most important details and so made it hard to really see for what it was. But a pivotal moment, all the same, in the chain of events that is human artistic history. Like the poetry of England in the Romantic era, or the films of America in the early twentieth century, the music of Athens in the Classical period represented a profusion of creativity, the convergence of older ideas and practices from around the world to produce something profound and radically new.
Such moments never stand alone. The Romantic poets studied folk song and German philosophy; the freshness of their vision nourished the imagination of J. R. R. Tolkien and inspired countless musicians to set their words to music. The American directors of cinema’s ‘golden age’ cut their teeth watching continental film and emulating the masterpieces of the European stage; their influence is visible in the work of later greats like Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino, and the Coen brothers. So, too, Greek musicians – who in many cases came into Athens from cities far afield in Sicily, the Argolid, or Anatolia – created a hotbed of culture and thought whose consequences would be felt for generations.
Classical and contemporary musicians, scientists, philosophers – people from every walk of life and all over the globe have found in Greek musical heritage a wellspring of inspiration and instruction. Every time we open iTunes, or go to a concert, or even look through a telescope, we are rubbing shoulders with the Greeks and their intricate, complicated legacy. The Athenians and their diverse disciples left only the faintest traces of their actual music behind. But they gave us a uniquely sophisticated set of tools for contemplating and appreciating that vast interconnected web of melody, motion, politics, mystery, and emotion that they called mousikē. Music – that strange and powerfully communicative kind of sound which compels us all, and the countless forms of life it engenders and accompanies – has always been with us. And Greek music, after all these years, is with us still.
Some further reading
Al-Farabi’s Great Book of Music has not been fully translated into English, although Alison Laywine of McGill University is working on an edition. Meanwhile, there are partial translations by Geert Jan van Gelder and Marlé Hammond (published in 2008 by the Gibb Memorial Trust as part of Takhyîl: The Imaginary in Classical Arabic Poetics) and one in a doctoral dissertation by Azza Abd al-Hamid Madian (1992, Language–Music Relationships in Al-Farabi’s ‘Grand Book of Music’). There is also a French translation by Rodolphe d’Erlanger, reprinted in 2001 by Geuthner.
A number of other modern scholars are quite interested in Al-Farabi, among them Charles Butterworth (who wrote a useful essay in 2013 called ‘How to Read Alfarabi,’ which was collected in More Modoque, a book published by the Forschungszentrum für Humanwissenschaften der Ungarischen Akademie der Wissenschaften).
To understand Roman music in its own right, you can’t do better than Timothy J. Moore of Washington University in St. Louis. His Music in Roman Comedy was published in 2012 by Cambridge University Press.