Music and the community it comes from

This lesson asks you to analyse how traditional, commercial and art music respond to, and reflect, the community or culture in which they were made. The museum offers two cases from the Muslim world: an institution of the early Abbasid court and a qawwali written for a film. Your own cases come from your class. ¹

For each record, write who heard this music and where, and who made it. Separate what the record says from what you guess.

Compare the two cases: what does each reflect about the community around it? Can you find something similar in music you know?

In Duha al-Islam, Ahmad Amin names a house in Kufa, the house of Ibn Ramni, and its singer Salama al-Zarqa', and lists those who visited: Rawh ibn Hatim al-Muhallabi, Muhammad ibn al-Ash'ath, Ma'n ibn Za'ida and Ibn al-Muqaffa' ². Salama belongs to the qiyan, whom he describes as singing slave women, a social institution of the early Abbasid period ². He separates two kinds: some belonged to the caliph, the princes and the wealthy, and others were common qiyan, in houses where young men might listen to them ². The record gives the house, the singer's name and four visitors. It gives no song and no date.

Everything the record says about the qiyan comes from one author, Ahmad Amin, and the one source the record cites is his Duha al-Islam ². He points to a second witness, the Kitab al-Aghani, which he says is full of their biographies, among them 'Arib, Mutayyam, Badhl, Dhat al-Khal and Farida ². Hajji Khalifa reports that the author of that book said he gathered it over fifty years ³. Ask how far each author stands from the singers; the records give no dates for either. The second case rests on the English Wikipedia article on the Rockstar soundtrack, which recounts what the director told the composer about the film's hero ⁴.

The Kufa house and the song for a film both put music before a named public: the visitors of a house, a hero among the qawwals of a shrine. Take a position and answer the strongest objection to it: in these two records, does the music reflect the community around it, or only the people it was made for, a house's visitors and a film's audience?

• The qiyan: the two kinds of singing women, and the visitors of one Kufa house.
• Kitab al-Aghani: the book said to be full of their biographies, and how its author is reported to have gathered it.
• Kun Faya Kun: the film, the dargah and the qawwali composed out of the hero's journey.
• Nizam al-Din Awliya: the Chishti master of Delhi to whom the song is dedicated.

Read the records on the qiyan and Kun Faya Kun. For each, write two sentences: who the music was made for, and what the record tells you about the community around it.