Middle Eastern and Islamic Influence on Western Art & Liturgy Cultural Exchanges in Late Antiquity & the Middle Ages

Abstract

Central to the conference, held during March 5-6, 2004, at Trinity College,
University of Toronto (Canada), was the desire of its organizer, Andrew
Hughes, to find analogies in other disciplines to his speculation that the
European plainsong (liturgical chant) of the Middle Ages was performed in a manner similar to that of Middle Eastern music (“Continuous Music:
Natural or Eastern? The Origins of Modern Performance Style”). His speculation
stemmed from decades of discussions with his colleague Timothy
McGee about the nature of musical sound. Oral transmission, its replacement
by various difficult-to-interpret notations, and an often polemic rejection
of Arabic influence make the investigation difficult and controversial.1
McGee responded (“Some Concerns about Eastern Influence in Medieval
Music”) and later, working from practical experiments presented by a
group of graduate students attending the conference, offered a very interesting
new interpretation. Some reservations were expressed by Charles
Burnett (Warburg Institute, London), a distinguished Arabist with musicological
qualifications. He was invited to comment on the initial round table
and the conference as a whole.
Other papers relevant to music were George Sawa’s review of Arabic
theories of medieval music (“The Uses of Arabic Language in Medieval
Rhythmic Discourses”). He referred to numerous matters that might have
a bearing on European music, especially with respect to ornamentation
and rhythm. Art Levine discussed other non-western musical cultures,
some of which were also influenced by Islamic music, and raised questions
about ornamentation, tuning, and the nature of pitch (e.g., what is a
note? “What Can Non-Western Music Offer?”).
Moving from the sound of music to words about it, Randall Rosenfeld
described numerous pilgrimage and Crusader chronicles. They contain
passages reporting that Europeans found little strange in eastern music,
suggesting that eastern and western music cannot have been as dissimilar
as seems to be the case today (“Frankish Reports of Central Asian and
Middle Eastern Musical Practice”). John Haines traced in detail the use of
Arabic terms from Adelard of Bath’s twelfth-century translation of
Euclid’s geometrical writings to an important mid-thirteenth-century
musical treatise, where the terms for quadrilateral shapes resembling
square notation are used to refer to musical symbols (“Anonymous IV’s
Elmuahim and Elmuarifa”). Luisa Nardini presented details of particular
melodic characteristics in Gregorian chants that identify Byzantine and
Gallican melodies in Gregorian repertories (“Aliens in Disguise:
Byzantine and Gallican Songs as Mass Propers in Italian Sources”).
In other disciplines, Philip Slavin revealed the striking similarities of
topics and words between Byzantine and Roman (Gregorian) penitential
liturgy, seeing possible origins in Jewish prayers and the fourth-century
Constitutiones Apostolorum (“Byzantine and Western Penitential Prayers ...