CHAPTER VII.

THE ARABS OR SARACENS.

Upon many accounts the influence of the Arab civilization was important in this quarter of the musical world, and it may here well enough engage our attention, since its most important aspects are those in which it operates upon the European mind, awakening there ideas which but for this stimulus might have remained dormant centuries longer.

From the standpoint of the western world and the limited information concerning the followers of Mahomet which enters into our educational curricula, the Arab appears to us an inert figure, picturesque and imposing, upon the sandy carpet of northern Africa, but a force of little influence in the world of modern nineteenth-century thought.

Nevertheless, there was a time when this picturesque figure became seized with an activity which shook Europe and Christendom to its very center. The voice of the prophet Mahomet awakened the Arab from his slumber. He aroused himself to the duty of proselyting the world to the doctrine of the One God and the Great Prophet. With sword in hand and the rallying cry of his faith he went forth, with such result that a vast proportion of the inhabitants of the globe at this very hour profess the tenets of his religion. Once awakened into life, he penetrated the distant east, and brought back thence the foundation of our arithmetic, the predecessor of our greatest of musical instruments, the violin, and discovered for himself the productions of the greatest of the Greek minds, the works of the philosopher Aristotle. He established a new state in Spain, and for several centuries confronted Christendom with the alternative of the sword or his faith. One of the best characterizations of this people upon the musical-literary side is that of the eminent M. Ginguène, who in his "History of Italian Literature," remarks as follows, concerning the points under immediate consideration:

"In the most ancient times the Arabs had a particular taste for poetry, which among almost all people had opened a way to the most elevated and abstract studies. Their language, rich, flexible and abundant, favored their fertile imagination; their spirit lively and sententious; their eloquence natural and artless, they declaimed with energy the pieces they had composed, or they sang, accompanied with instruments, in a very expressive chorus. These poems make upon the simple and sensitive auditors a prodigious effect. The young poets receive the praises of the tribe, and all celebrate their genius and merit. They prepare a solemn festival. The women, dressed in their most beautiful habits, sing a chorus before their sons and husbands upon the happiness of their tribe. During the annual fair, where tribes from a distance are gathered for thirty days, a large part of the time is spent in a contest of poetry and eloquence. The works which gain praise are deposited in the archives of the princess or emirs. The best ones are painted or embroidered with letters of gold upon silk cloth, and suspended in the temple at Mecca. Seven of these poems had obtained this honor in the time of Mahomet, and they say that Mahomet himself was flattered to see one of the chapters of the Koran compared with these seven poems and judged worthy to be hung up with them. Almansor, the second of the Abassides, loved poetry and letters, and was very well learned in laws, philosophy and astronomy. They say that in building the famous town of Bagdad he took the suggestions from the astronomers for placing the principal building. The university at Bagdad was honored and very celebrated. Copious translations from the Greek were made, and many original treatises produced in other parts of Arabia, but the most brilliant development of Arabic letters was in Spain. Cordova, Grenada, Valencia were distinguished for their schools, colleges and academies. Spain possessed seventy libraries, open to the public in different towns, when the rest of Europe, without books, without letters, without culture, was sunk in the most shameful ignorance. A crowd of celebrated writers enriched the Spanish-Arabic literature in all its parts. The influence of the Arab upon science and literature extended into all Europe; to him are owed many useful inventions. The famous tower at Seville was built for the observatory. It is to be noticed, however, that the Arabs, while taking much from the Greeks, did not take any of their literature, properly so-called--neither Sophocles, Euripides, Sappho, Anacreon, nor Demosthenes. The result is that their own literature preserved its original character; they preserved also in all purity the peculiarity of their music--an art in which they excelled and in which the theory was very complicated. Their works are full of the praises of music and its marvelous effect. They attributed very powerful effects not alone to music sung, but to the sound of certain instruments and to certain instrumental strings and to certain inflections of the voice."

The modern world is indebted to the Arab for at least three of its most important instruments of music. The ravanastron he brought home with him from India, and under the name Rebec it found its way into Europe, where in an appreciative soil it grew and expanded into that miracle of sonority and expression, the modern violin. The instrument of the south of Europe during the latter part of the Middle Ages was the lute, which had its origin in the Arab Eoud. (See Fig. 24.)

Still more familiar to domestic eyes is that descendant of the Arab santir, the modern pianoforte. This, under the name of psaltery, begins to figure in manuscript as early as the ninth century. The Arab canon, which is commonly taken as the immediate predecessor of the pianoforte, had the important difference of being strung with catgut strings. The essential foundation of the pianoforte was the metal strings, necessitating hammers for inciting the vibrations, and affording in the superior solidity incident to metal support a firmness and susceptibility to development. This is the santir. It has survived in Europe as the dulcimer, or the German hackbrett.

Yet while the Arab wrote so abundantly upon the subject of music, and while it filled so prominent a part in his social and official life, and in spite of his sagacity in seizing perfectible types of instruments, there is very little in his treatment of the art which need delay us in the present work. His music belongs entirely to the ancient period of monody. He never had a harmony of combined sounds, nor a scale with intervals permitting combined sounds. He was sufficiently scientific to carry out the intonations of the Pythagorean theory, and when he went beyond this and formed a scale for himself he devised one which did not permit the association of sounds into chord masses; and, more fatal still, he not only invented such a scale, but carried it into execution so exactly that the ear of the race was hopelessly committed to monody, and has remained so until this very day. The scale of the Arabs in the latter times contained twenty-two divisions in the octave, of which only the fifth and fourth exactly correspond with the harmonic ratios. The place of the Arab in music, therefore, is that of an unintentional minister to a higher civilization and to the art of music.