A Lecture on the History of the Development of Arabic Music

At Le Conservatoire National Libanais, under the presidency of His Excellency the President of the Republic, the opening ceremony of the lectures on Arabic music was held, and it was most successful. It was introduced by the director of the Conservatoire, the great musician Mr. Wadih Sabra, with an excellent address which the reader will find below:

The musician Kiesewetter, from the province of Moravia in Czechoslovakia, was the first to write on Arab music, in his book "The Music of the Arabs," which appeared in 1842 and will be spoken of in its place. He was followed by Father Collangettes, of the college of the Jesuit Fathers in Beirut, with two valuable studies on music published in the Journal Asiatique in 1904. Salvador Daniel wrote his work "La Musique Arabe" in 1879. And in 1899 the Lebanese scholar Mikhail Mashaqa composed "The Shihabi Epistle on the Art of Music," which made a great stir in the Arab countries and even in Europe. The British scholar Alexander Ellis mentioned it in his translation of the works of Helmholtz, the famous physicist, and in his commentaries upon them. As for the musical scale, Mashaqa adopted the theory of Aristoxenus the Trojan and divided the musical scale into twenty-four equal parts — though it should be known that this scale was rejected by the countrymen of the aforesaid philosopher, and that this same division was rejected by the Cairo Congress of Arab Music.

There lately came to me a letter from the Egyptian Ministry of Social Affairs stating that a committee has been formed there, under the chairmanship of the Honorable Muhammad Zaki Ali Pasha, to examine the questions relating to the Arab musical scale, the problem of Western musical instruments and their incorporation into Arab music, and the relation of the latter to Western music, all in preparation for the convening of a general congress to settle these questions once and for all.

It is no secret that a modern renaissance has arisen in the European countries with respect to Arab music, the proof being the translation of the works of the Arab musicians of the Middle Ages into foreign languages. Of these books there have appeared so far the "Great Book of Music" of al-Farabi, the twelfth chapter of the "Book of Healing" of Ibn Sina, the "Sharafiyya" of Safi al-Din, and the "Fathiyya" of Abd al-Hamid al-Ladhiqi, translated and annotated by Baron Rodolphe d'Erlanger, the great French orientalist.

The famous Russian orientalist Dr. Belyaev was kind enough to send me a letter through the Soviet embassy in Beirut; here is some of what it said: "The subjects you are treating in Lebanon are, for us, of the greatest importance: first, for the relation of these subjects to the questions of the study of the Eastern musical culture found in the lands of the Soviet Union.

"Secondly, for their relation also to the questions of the expansion of musical culture in western Europe and in the whole world. The subjects you treat give the musical scholars of the Soviet Union benefits of real importance, for their interest in the theoretical field is the relation of the tempered scale to the untempered scales among various peoples, and the study of national harmony. And the piece 'Mawtini' which you sent me permits the conclusion that the musicians of Lebanon are also thinking of creating the national harmonic method."

In Britain the well-known musician Dr. Henry Farmer, the Scot, has arisen and taken pains to learn the Arabic language in order to study the old manuscripts and everything relating to the music of the Arabs in the libraries of Europe and elsewhere. In 1940 he produced a book he called "The Sources of Arabian Music," which is an index of all the Arabic manuscripts extant and lost, and he is still searching out everything that relates to the music of the Arabs.

The Greeks wished to add an Eastern music to their own, desiring to give it a universal stamp; but they did not know that their national music already contained the seeds of that universal music. In the early age of Islam al-Farabi composed the "Great Book of Music," in which he turned the intervals of Greek music upside down, and thus came the major scale — as appears plainly in the twelve tables that we find in the third part of his aforesaid book — and this was the greatest event in the history of music.

Al-Farabi was not conscious of the importance of the work he had done, and so it seems to me that he did not foresee what conquest this work of his would achieve in the history of music. Al-Farabi, who conferred upon music the stamp of universality, did not know — just as the Greeks before him had not known — that the individual, single-voiced method carried within it the roots of a universal art.

The Arabs, the completers of the Greeks, by turning upside down the whole body of the Greeks'

national signs, and by obtaining the major scale, and afterward the physical scale which Safi al-Din established, were likewise unaware that they had laid the foundation of a universal music.

The theorists of the West, in calling the individual Greek method the true minor scale, mistook the correct face of the Greek musical method. The Lebanese theorists, by presenting the correct theories concerning the individual Greek art (as reported in the Parisian review L'Acoustique, the organ of the French Academy), have since obtained valuable information about the Greek Dorian mode, from which all the modes of the Greeks were derived, and which is known among us as the maqam Hijaz Kar Kurd — applying to it an accompaniment (harmony) more magnificent and sweeter than the modern Western accompaniment.

Fifty years ago I read, in the dictionary of the British musical academy, an article by James Lecky on the music of the Arabs, in which the following appeared: it may be concluded from the writings of the Moravian scholar Kiesewetter that the Arabs used the major triad (which is the cornerstone of the art of music, and upon which the Westerners built their music). It is not possible, as you know, to conceal the truth; it must come out plainly into the open — above all after the appearance of the translations of the works of the Arab musicians of the Middle Ages, as was mentioned above.

The contemporary physicist Helmholtz succeeded, with the help of a set of diapasons, in devising an instrument that gives artificial vowel sounds in imitation of the human voice, exhibited for the first time in London in 1872. Now the great teacher of singing Delle Sedie, to whom I was introduced by one of my colleagues, was looking for an accompanist during his singing lessons in Paris; he noticed my interest in the question of vocal culture, told me of the foregoing, and made me understand the truth of his theory, built upon the method of Helmholtz's theory, so that I might spread it in my turn. This friend wrote out his study in fourteen volumes. And it is stated in the dictionary of the British Academy that Auber, director of the Paris Conservatoire, after satisfying himself of the evident superiority of his method, urged and persuaded him to accept a professorship at the Paris Conservatoire on conditions that had been granted to no one before him — among them the chairmanship of the artistic committee for revising the program then followed in that institution for vocal culture. But after my return to the homeland I was unable to pursue the theories of Ustad Delle Sedie any further, for my specialty, music, did not allow me to give them the necessary time — until lately there came to me a chance, which I call providential, that placed in my path the delicate instrument that could be employed to demonstrate this theory, in the person of the Lebanese girl whom I have had follow the method of vocal culture used at the Théâtre-Italien of Paris — the temple of vocal culture in former days. And on that same basis Miss Badi'a Ashqar sings the examples that have been composed to display the first Arab harmonies that history has recorded.