The Lute Scale of Avicenna

Henry George Farmer

doi:10.1017/S0035869X00085397

The Lute Scale of Avicenna

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 March 2011

Henry George Farmer

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The history of the musical scale in the Near and Middle East is full of perplexities. In my Histoire abrégée de I'échelle de la musique arabe, which I submitted to the Congress of Arabian Music at Cairo in 1932, and in my article Mūsīqī contributed to the Encyclopædia of Islām, I have endeavoured to show how this scale developed among the Arabs and Persians. In spite of the appearance of a gradual and natural evolution there are still many problems to be solved in the history of this scale, and one of them is the scale propounded by Ibn Sīnā, better known in the Occident as Avicenna.

Type: Articles
Information: Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society , Volume 69 , Issue 2 , April 1937 , pp. 245 - 253

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0035869X00085397 [Opens in a new window]
Copyright: Copyright © The Royal Asiatic Society 1937

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References

^{page 245 note 1} Recueil des Travaux du Congrés de Musique Arabe, Caire, 1934, p. 647Google Scholar.

^{page 245 note 2} Vol. iii, 749–755.

^{page 245 note 3} This was the old name for a scale, but the moderns use the term sullam.

^{page 245 note 4} Kosegarten, , Alii Ispahanensis Liber cantilenarum magnus, 89–92Google Scholar; Land, , “Reoherches sur l'histoire de la gamme arabe” (in Actes du Sixième Congrès Inter, des Orientalistes …, 1883, pt. i), p. 59Google Scholar; d'Erlanger, R., La musique arabe, i, 218Google Scholar.

^{page 245 note 5} Fol. 85. This MS. is in the Ṭōp Qapu Sarāy Library, Constantinople.

^{page 245 note 6} Dastān was a Persian term taken over by the Arabs.

^{page 245 note} Cents are hundredths of an equal semitone.

^{page 246 note 1} Farmer, , “The Influence of Music: from Arabic Sources” (in Proceedings of the Musical Association, lii, 1926, p. 121)Google Scholar.

^{page 246 note 2} Land, op. cit., p. 59.

^{page 246 note 3} Farmer, , An Old Moorish Lute Tutor, p. 26Google Scholar; JRAS. (1932), p. 386.

^{page 247 note 1} Brit. Mua. MS., Or. 2361, fol. 236 v.

^{page 247 note 2} Al-Maqqarī, , Analectes, ii, 86–7Google Scholar.

^{page 247 note 3} Cf. Kitāb al-aghānī, v, 53.

^{page 248 note 1} Al-Kindī calls this fifth string the zīr thānī but ḥadd was the name given it by all later writers.

^{page 248 note 2} When I wrote my Historical Facts for the Arabian Musical Influence (1930), p. 313, I had not fully appreciated this point, but cf. my article Mūsīqī in the Encyclopædia of Islām, iii, p. 753.

^{page 248 note 3} Brit. Mus. MS., Or. 2361, fol. 236 v.: Lachmann, and El-Hefny, , Ja'qūb Ibn Isḥāq al-Kindī, Risālā fī khubr tā'līf al-alḥān, p. 5Google Scholar. The notes in square brackets were not used.

^{page 249 note 1} Cf. D'Erlanger, op. cit., i, 170.

^{page 249 note 2} Al-Fārābī says that ten notes were to be found on each string, and it is these that are given here. He mentions two others at 114 and 318 cents.

^{page 249 note 3} This was the Pythagorean third, sometimes called by Arabic and Persian writers the Old second finger fret, but Al-Fārābī tells us that the majority of the practitioners termed it the Anterior of the second finger (mujannab al-wusṭā).

^{page 250 note 1} Mafātīḥ al-'ulūm (Vloten, Van ed.), pp. 238–9Google Scholar.

^{page 251 note 1} I have also used the Royal Asiatic Society MS. of the Shifā' (Arabic, No. 58), as well as the two copies of the Najāt in the Bodleian (Marsh 161 and Marsh 521), the Persian Dānīsh Nāma (Brit. Mus. (Add. 16659)) and Ibn Zaila's Kitāb al-kāfī (Brit. Mus., Or. 2361), for comparison.