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

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Dates

This is a past event
Time
2:00 pm to 3:00 pm
Location

Warburg Institute, Woburn Square, London WC1H 0AB

Institute

The Warburg Institute

Event type

Lecture

Event series

Warburg Work in Progress

Contact

020 7862 8910

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. 

The Work in Progress seminar explores the variety of subjects studied and researched at the Warburg Institute. Papers are given by invited international scholars, research fellows studying at the Institute, and third-year PhD students.

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IMAGE: Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, ms. arabe 3929. Al-Ḥarīrī’s Maqāmāt

This page was last updated on 14 January 2025