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Music in Arab Life
| Article
# : |
12196 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
Date : |
2 / 1987 |
3,680 Words |
| Author
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Amnon Shiloah
Amnon Shiloah is professor of ethnomusicology at the Hebrew
University of Jerusalem in Israel. |
The initial encounter of Easterners and Westerners with each other's music did not, in most cases, result in love at first sight, or rather sound. Instead of poetical associations or feelings of delight, the other's music often reminded the novice listeners of a dog's barking.
In the mid-tenth century, an early Iraqui traveler to Europe, Ibrahim ibn Ya'qub, reported, "I have never heard worse singing than that of the people of Schlesvig. It is a humming that comes out of their throats, like the barking of dogs, but more beastlike." In August 1648, the French traveler M. de Monconys attended a dervish ceremony in Cairo, which he described in macabre terms: "They all danced for more than an hour with horrible shoutings and screamings; they whirled with violence and a vertiginous speed to the extent that their dance went beyond what the wildest imagination can conceive of the witches' Sabbath....They frequently alter their screamings to voices which sound now as enraged wolves and now as the barking of suffocated dogs." More courteous in his observations was the Ottoman envoy to Spain, who wrote in 1780, "All the great men, by order of the king, invited us to meals, and we suffered the tedium of their kind of music."
Coming closer to our time, we find from the sardonic pen of the French composer Hector Berlioz such evaluations as, "The Chinese sing like dogs howling, like a cat screeching when it has swallowed a toad." Or the following judgment on Oriental music, "They call music that what we designate by charivari.....Their song consists of nasal, guttural, groaning and hideous notes similar to the sounds that dogs emit, when after a long sleep they stretch their limbs and yawn with a marked
... (1958 of 22434 Characters)
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