Work in Progress Spring 2025 - Forbidding Music (in Theory)

Marcel Camprubí (Frances Yates Fellow): 'Forbidding Music (in Theory)'
Hostile actions toward musicians under the Islamic ethical tenet of ‘commanding right and forbidding wrong’, while not a new phenomenon, reached dramatic heights in Baghdad during the early decades of the tenth century. In a climate of mobs smashing lutes on the streets of Baghdad and a caliph sending ‘effeminate’ singers to exile, al-Fārābī completed his Great Book of Music, arguably the most significant Arabic music treatise of the medieval period. Previously unexplored materials on al-Fārābī’s patron allow me to establish, for the first time, a date for al-Fārābī’s main musical treatise. Read against the background in which the Great Book was composed, al-Fārābī’s reflections on the political role of music in his ideal city-state, the ‘Excellent City’, appear less as abstract musings and more as a response to actual developments taking place in contemporary Baghdad.
Marcel Camprubí is a Frances A. Yates Long-Term Fellow at the Warburg Institute, having recently completed a PhD in Musicology from Princeton University. His research focuses on Arabic music, technologies of music writing and cross-cultural exchanges in the medieval Mediterranean.
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IMAGE: Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, ms. arabe 3929. Al-Ḥarīrī’s Maqāmāt
This page was last updated on 14 January 2025