Music between Arabic and Greek Texts: A Study of the Science of Harmonics in Islamic Thought (9th-11th c. CE)

ongoing

The project aims at giving a complete and complex study of the science of harmonics within the Islamic philosophical tradition. In centuries 9th-11th CE, harmonic science develops as one of the four mathematical sciences of the ‘Ulum Riyadiyyah (Quadrivium), as a philosophical discipline largely independent of musical practice. The discovery and the translation of the Greek harmonic sources, thanks to the mediation of Byzantine erudition, are the driving force behind the emergence of harmonic science in Islamic thought. Through a philological approach, which involves a critical examination of the six main Arabic texts that represent this phenomenon, their translation, and a textual and content comparison with the Greek sources, an overall philosophical framework of Islamic harmonics will be provided. The six pivotal Islamic sources are al-Kindī, Hunayn ibn Ishāk, the Ikhwān al-Ṣafā (‘The Brethren of Purity’), al-Fārābī, al-Khwārizmī and Avicenna. The project includes also the lemmatisation of the selected texts: through the concordance software AntConc, each text will be compared to the lemmas database, enabling linguistic analyses, and enriching the literary inquiry. The overall framework of Islamic harmonic theory aims at being broad in scope: it will encompass the distinctive features of the exposed theories, the ideological objectives, the utilization of Greek sources, and the intellectual context in which the phenomenon develops.