Theory and Practice in the Music of the Islamic World

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).

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 Uğur Ekinci

4 Itri’s ‘Nühüft Sakil’ in the Context of Sakil Peşrevs 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-ı 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 maqām traditions: the Uyghur On Ikki Muqam and the Kashmiri Sūfyāna Musīqī

Rachel Harris

12 The Terminology of Vocal Performance in Iranian Khorasan

Stephen Blum

13 Whispering to God: Monājāt 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