PhilPaine.com

The mul­ti-tal­ent­ed Pani­agua fam­ily of Madrid (one of them is also an archi­tect) have been cre­at­ing, recon­struct­ing and per­form­ing medieval Span­ish music since they were teenagers. They are the acknowl­edged mas­ters. All of Spain’s ear­ly musi­cal tra­di­tions fall under their gaze, and among them is the genre known as “arabo-andalouse”, which flour­ished under Mus­lim rule in Spain, among Mus­lim, Chris­t­ian, and Jew­ish musi­cians alike. Atri­um Musi­cae de Madrid, one of the family’s ensem­bles, has pro­duced a fine intro­duc­tion to the instru­men­tal side of the this tra­di­tion in their album Musique Arabo-Andalouse.

The basic frame­work of this music orig­i­nated with the com­pos­er-sci­en­tist Abu Al-Has­san Ali ben Nafi, bet­ter known as Ziryab, an immi­grant to Cor­doba from Bagh­dad. He intro­duced the oud to Spain, adding a fifth string to the instru­ment, and devel­oped a style empha­siz­ing the plec­trum. Ziryab was said to have been an African slave from Tan­za­nia, who became a musi­cal “star” at the age of twelve, famous through­out the Abbasid Caliphate. The Caliph, his own­er, became bit­terly jeal­ous of his fame, and threat­ened him with exe­cu­tion, but he fled to Cor­doba. By this time, his intel­li­gence and court­ly man­ners had made him a cul­tural asset in the remote west­ern part of Islam, and he is said to have intro­duced Bagh­dadi fash­ions, chess, and polo to Spain. He was also an accom­plished geo­g­ra­pher and astronomer. Locked in his prodi­gious mem­ory where thou­sands of songs from Africa, Per­sia, and Iraq, and to these he added every­thing he could soak up from the Chris­t­ian and Jew­ish music of Spain, and the Berber music of North Africa. In the musi­cal acad­emy he found­ed in Cor­doba, he sys­tem­atized these ele­ments into strict forms, based on a cycli­cal pro­ce­dure sim­i­lar to that employed in the ragas of India. Ziryab was, by all the evi­dence, one of the great musi­cal minds of history.

From Ziryab’s acad­emy, the sys­tem spread across the west­ern Islam­ic world, and sur­vived the Recon­quista of Spain in the Mor­rocco, Alge­ria and Tunisia, into mod­ern times. But there were many inno­va­tions, over the cen­turies. Atri­um Musicae’s recon­struc­tion gives you an idea of the ear­li­est, Span­ish phase. Much of Europe’s music grew out of this tra­di­tion. If you’ve heard medieval Provencçal trou­ba­dour music, or Adam de la Halle, then you’ll instant­ly catch the connections.