Theory and Practice in the Music of the Islamic World - Essays in Honour of Owen Wright

This volume is dedicated to Owen Wright in recognition of his formative contribution to the study of music in the Islamic Middle East. Ranging across the Middle East, Central Asia and North India, it brings together historical, philological and ethnographic approaches. The contributors focus on collections of musical notation and song texts, on commercial and ethnographic recordings, on travellers' reports and descriptions of instruments, on musical institutions and other spaces of musical performance. Extending the implications of Wright's own work, it argues for an ethnomusicology of the Islamic Middle East in which past and present, text and performance are systematically in dialogue.

List of contents

Introduction - Tuning the Past: The Work of Owen Wright
Martin Stokes
Part I: Ottoman Legacies
1 New Light on Cantemir
Eckhard Neubauer
2 Towards a New Theory of Historical Change in the Ottoman Instrumental Repertoire
Jacob Olley
3 Not Just Any Usul: Semai In Pre-Nineteenth-Century Performance Practice
Mehmet U¿ur Ekinci
4 Itri's 'Nühüft Sakil' in the Context of Sakil Pe¿revs in the Seventeenth Century
Walter Feldman
5 Giambattista Toderini and the 'Musica Turchesca'
Giovanni De Zorzi
6 At the House of Kemal: Private musical gatherings of Istanbul from the late Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic
Panagiotis C. Poulos
7 Kâr-¿ Nev: Elongation and Elaboration in Recordings of a Turkish Classic
John O'Connell
8 Measuring intervals between European and 'Eastern' musics in the 1920s: The curious case of the panharmonion or 'Greek organ'
Eleni Kallimopoulou
Part II: Historical and theoretical themes in the music of the Islamic world
9 "Words Without Songs": The social history of Hindustani song collections in India's Muslim courts c.1770-1830
Katherine Butler Schofield
10 The music of the Timurids and its legacy in Afghanistan
John Baily
11 Theory and practice in contemporary Central Asian maq¿m traditions: the Uyghur On Ikki Muqam and the Kashmiri S¿fy¿na Mus¿q¿
Rachel Harris
12 The Terminology of Vocal Performance in Iranian Khorasan
Stephen Blum
13 Whispering to God: Mon¿j¿t in Khorasan
Ameneh Youssefzadeh
14 Between Formal Structure and Performance Practice: On the Baghdadi Secular Cycles
Scheherezade Hassan
15 Al-Farabi's Qanun: A Re-Exposition of Ptolemy's Kanon as a Didactic Instrument for the Tone System
George Sawa
Postlude - Conversation with Owen Wright
Rachel Harris
Owen Wright: Full Bibliography
Glossary

About the author

Rachel Harris is Reader in the Music of China and Central Asia at SOAS, University of London, UK. Her research interests include global musical flows, identity politics, gender, and ritual practice. She is the author of two books on musical life in China's Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, and co-editor of three books. She currently leads an AHRC Research Network and the Leverhulme Research Project 'Sounding Islam in China'. She is actively engaged with outreach projects relating to Central Asian and Chinese music, including recordings, musical performance, and consultancy.
Martin Stokes is King Edward Professor of Music at King's College, London, UK. He has taught ethnomusicology at Queen's University Belfast, the University of Chicago, and Oxford. He is the author of The Arabesk Debate: Music and Musicians in Modern Turkey (1992), and The Republic of Love: Cultural Intimacy and Turkish Popular Music (2010). His edited volumes include Ethnicity, Identity and Music (1994) and (with Karin Van Neiuwkerk and Mark Levine) Islam and Popular Culture (2015).

Summary

This volume of original essays is dedicated to Owen Wright in recognition of his formative contribution to the study of music in the Islamic Middle East. Wright’s work, which comprises, at the time of writing, six field-defining volumes and countless articles, has reconfigured the relationship between historical musicology and ethnomusicology. No account of the transformation of these fields in recent years can afford to ignore his work. Ranging across the Middle East, Central Asia and North India, this volume brings together historical, philological and ethnographic approaches. The contributors focus on collections of musical notation and song texts, on commercial and ethnographic recordings, on travellers’ reports and descriptions of instruments, on musical institutions and other spaces of musical performance. An introduction provides an overview and critical discussion of Wright’s major publications. The central chapters cover the geographical regions and historical periods addressed in Wright’s publications, with particular emphasis on Ottoman and Timurid legacies. Others discuss music in Greece, Iraq and Iran. Each explores historical continuities and discontinuities, and the constantly changing relationships between music theory and practice. An edited interview with Owen Wright concludes the book and provides a personal assessment of his scholarship and his approach to the history of the music of the Islamic Middle East. Extending the implications of Wright’s own work, this volume argues for an ethnomusicology of the Islamic Middle East in which past and present, text and performance are systematically in dialogue.

Product details

• Authors: Rachel (EDT)/ Stokes Harris, Rachel Stokes Harris
• Assisted by: Rachel Harris (Editor), Martin Stokes (Editor)
• Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd.
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 31.12.2017
• EAN: 9781138218314
• ISBN: 978-1-138-21831-4
• No. of pages: 322
• Series: SOAS Musicology Series; SOAS Studies in Music Series; SOAS Studies in Music; SOAS Studies in Music Series
• Subject: Humanities, art, music > Music > Music theory