Measured Music: Diagrammatics of Musical Time from Baghdad to Paris, 850-1350

Abstract

This dissertation examines the ways in which individuals in the medieval greater Mediterranean—the Afro-Eurasian region that interweaves the Christianate and Islamicate worlds—measured musical time. I begin from the assumption that time can only be known and made sense of through cultural techniques of time measurement. After laying out my methodological approach in Chapter 1, the following chapters investigate the music-theoretical practices by which time was measured. In Chapter 2, I consider the polymath Abū Naṣr al-Fārābī’s (d. 950) theory of īqāʿāt (rhythmic patterns) and introduce what I call his music-theoretical “tools of the trade”: the physical surrogates that theorists relied on to make sense of musical time, and orient their readers in the cognition of its measurement. The multiple affordances of these tools—which included the plectrum, warp and weft, weights, and prosodic notations—allowed al-Fārābī to organize his system around the principles of speed and duration. Chapter 3 focuses on how Latin grammarians, Islamicate physicians, and music theorists treated the voice and the pulse as “airy” matters, governed by musical motion, which could be “geometricized” in three dimensions: length, width, and depth. I show how each dimension corresponded to different, discrete, and measurable aspects of music—what today we might call “parameters.” The theorists examined in this chapter include the anonymous authors of the Musica Enchiriadis and the so-called Paleofrankish notations, the polymath Ibn Sīnā (980–1037), and the physician Solomon ben Abraham Ibn Yaʿīsh (d.1345, Seville). In Chapter 4, I stage a dialogue between al-Fārābī and the thirteenth-century theorists Johannes of Garlandia and Franco of Cologne. I argue that their different approaches to measuring musical time were premised upon a shared cognitive practice: the treatment of their temporal systems of modes as diagrammatic forms, that is, inscriptions (be they acoustically sounded or simply implied) of the cognitive operations involved in time measurement. In the Introduction and the first part of Chapter 4, I also offer critical reflections on the notion of the “medieval Mediterranean,” and investigate how it relates to past and present “chronotropic frameworks”: i.e. historiographical frameworks that temporalize and spatialize the relation between a culture and its Others.