What Inspired Me

The quiet of Gregorian chant, the intricate counterpoint of Josquin des Prez, the medieval and Renaissance instrumental music brought back to life by David Munrow. Europe's “early music” always has a place waiting in the playlist.

But it occurs to me: what sounds were ringing out on the other side of the Mediterranean, in that same era?

What was there was another orthodoxy — one that lived through a time continuous with European early music, yet chose an entirely different path.

A Difference in Musical Character

Europe — Voices Interweaving

The European church was long suspicious of instruments (the organ was more or less the only exception), and so it tried to say most of what it needed to say through voice alone. From the single melodic line of Gregorian chant, through the Notre Dame school, to the imitative counterpoint of Josquin and Palestrina — a technique in which several independent voices hand a theme back and forth as they interweave. Each voice remains independent, yet harmonically they support one another. It is a world built up meticulously, like a structure of sound.

The Arab World — Melody That Undulates, and Tarab

Arab classical music refined a completely different vector. The oud, qanun, and ney all share a single melody. But that doesn't mean everyone traces exactly the same notes. Each instrument and voice slips in its own trills and microtonal shadings, suited to its own character, layering them onto one thick melodic line. This is called “heterophony.” It is a fundamentally different sonic principle from the interweaving independent voices of Western polyphony.

Tuning itself differs too. In the 13th century, the theorist Safi al-Din worked out a system of 17 pitches based on string-length ratios, bringing far finer gradations into the music than the West's whole-tone/semitone framework. The West wouldn't arrive at an even-tempered tuning system until much later — not until the 18th century, in fact.

At the heart of this music is tarab, the rapture that music brings to the listener. But tarab isn't so much something that shakes the body along with a steady beat — it arises, rather, at the moment one is set free from the beat. Taqsim and mawwal are unmetered improvisations — over a drone, the melody drifts freely, gradually raising the emotional temperature. Just as Umm Kulthum would sing and re-sing a single phrase for hours on end, tarab is an exaltation that arrives precisely when one is released from the framework of time itself.

What the Score Preserved, What the Name Preserved

Why did one survive as precise notation, while the other was entrusted to oral transmission?

Europe — The Gate of Notation

The European church needed to deliver the same chant, note for note, to choirs scattered across distant lands. For that, it refined the art of notation. But this benefit fell only to composers of church music. Listen to David Munrow's classic recording Instruments of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, and you'll notice that many of the dances it contains are credited to “Anon.” Shepherd's tunes, bagpipe dances — surely beloved in their day — were not considered worth recording by name.

The exception was when a celebrated composer got involved. “Scaramella va alla guerra” began life as an anonymous 16th-century Italian popular song, but once Josquin des Prez and others arranged it, it was finally written down and passed on to posterity.

*David Munrow & The Early Music Consort of London, “Scaramella va alla guerra” (from The Art of the Netherlands)*

The Arab World — The Name Remained, the Sound Was Transmitted

Al-Andalus was the Islamic-ruled region of the Iberian Peninsula that existed from the 8th to the 15th century, a literal crossroads straddling the Mediterranean between North Africa and Christian Europe. Muslims, Christians, and Jews lived side by side there, and through musicians such as Ziryab, who arrived from Baghdad in the 9th century, the musical culture of the Islamic East underwent its own distinctive fusion on this soil.

The music of Arab al-Andalus survived by exactly the opposite route. No score recording the actual performance survives at all. The writings of al-Farabi and Safi al-Din were theoretical treatises on interval ratios — not notation meant to reproduce a performance.

Instead, this music recorded “people.” The names of singers remained in the historical record, but because notation was so difficult, the music itself was carried forward as oral tradition. In 1492, Granada, the last Islamic dynasty on the Iberian Peninsula, fell, and the Muslims living there fled to Morocco; through that migration, through patronage at court, and through modern musicological reconstruction work, the tradition continues to live on in North Africa today. It is performers like Eduardo Paniagua who are carrying out that work of reconstruction.

So the “medieval Arab music” we hear today is not, strictly speaking, the sound of the medieval period itself. Having no fixed point in the form of a score, this music has changed shape little by little across generations of oral transmission — and what we hear is its present form, having survived all the same. Where European early music reconstructs the past from a single fixed point of written notation, Arab early music is closer to hearing a tradition that has kept changing all along, and is still breathing today. Even though we group both under the same word, “early music,” the way each relates to time is something else entirely.

*El Arabi Ensemble & Eduardo Paniagua, “Camino Orgullosa” (from Wallada & Ibn Zaydún)*

A piece built on the love poetry of Wallada, the 11th-century princess of Córdoba, and her lover, the poet Ibn Zaydún — one example of the elevated tradition of the muwashshah.

*Calamus & Eduardo Paniagua, “Bitayhí: Zejel 'Oh Cría De Gazela', Zejel 'Este Amor'” (from The Splendour of Al-Andalus)*

This recording, also by Paniagua, is instead built on the zejel, a more popular poetic form in colloquial Arabic. Set alongside the elevated muwashshah, the difference between the two becomes clear.

Incidentally, there is a theory that this muwashshah tradition influenced the emergence of courtly love poetry among the troubadours of southern France. It's not a settled question, but if the theory holds, then Arab song that was never written down had, in another form, become part of the flesh and blood of secular European music.

Closing Thoughts

European church music, with its individual composers granted authority and its wide circulation through the medium of notation, made it as far as the Voyager Golden Record selected by NASA in the 20th century. But that is only the story of one layer — “church music.” Secular instrumental music and popular melodies remain, for the most part, buried and nameless in Europe too.

In the Arab world, the names of individual singers were firmly preserved in the historical record, but the performances themselves were never notated and were instead entrusted to oral transmission — and as a result, this music is not as widely known today as Western early music. That is not a difference in musical worth, but simply a difference in the conditions each tradition found itself in.

The exaltation that rises the instant one is freed from the beat, the shading of microtones, and a history in which nameless singers were nonetheless recorded as individuals — this sound world has every reason to be listened to.

And yet, for those of us living in the present, there may not be so great a distance between these two kinds of early music after all. The sound of Gregorian chant and the melody of a maqam are both, equally, sounds estranged from our present-day lives. Encountering that strangeness, and finding delight in it — that experience itself, I think, is exactly the same whichever early music you happen to be listening to.