Instruments, forms and music of other lands

This lesson asks you to understand the development, function and theme of musical forms and conventions, and to research the characteristics of traditional and contemporary music around the world. The museum holds nothing on Aboriginal music in Canada; that part is the work of your class. What it offers is the development of one instrument and one singer from South Asia. ¹

Write what existed before the change and what was added. Who tells us this, and what do we not know?

Name what each record actually describes: a singer, a set of forms and languages. What would you need from other sources to write a report on the characteristics of this music?

The fifth-string record gives the placement in words. Maqqari begins with a four-string oud, and the added string is red, below the mathlath and above the mathna ². The record calls this a refinement, not invention of the oud itself ². Maqqari credits a second change that is not a string: an eagle quill in place of a wooden plectrum, praised for lightness and gentleness on the strings ³. The record keeps three questions apart: the string count, the tuning and the plectrum, and adds that a string added does not automatically specify its tuning, and a changed plectrum does not add a string ³. The passage gives no fully specified pitch for the fifth string and no measurements from which to reconstruct the instrument ².

Does the added string make Ziryab the inventor of the oud? The record says no: it is a refinement, and it adds that the account presupposes an existing instrument and performing craft ². It says too that this is not a surviving reconstruction with complete dimensions and tuning ². The tuning the TDV encyclopaedia reports from Henry George Farmer is the encyclopaedia's account of the historian, and the record says it is not a modern frequency specification for Ziryab's oud ⁴.

The string rests on one text: Maqqari is the record's source for its colour and its position ². The one instrument the record pictures is a later oud at the Cleveland Museum of Art, and the record says its dimensions and pegbox angle belong to that catalogued object, not to an assumed ninth-century instrument ⁵. The record on Abida Parveen rests on English Wikipedia and Wikidata ^{6 7}. It lists the forms she sings and the languages, and does not describe how any of them is sung.

The record names where the string sits and gives no pitch and no measurements. Take a position and answer the strongest objection to it: can a student write a report on the characteristics of the oud's music from this record, or only a report on one writer's account of one change?

• The fifth string: the account of the four-string oud, the red string and the eagle quill, and what the record says it does not establish.
• The Cleveland oud: the later instrument pictured beside the account.
• Abida Parveen: the forms and languages of her singing, as one Wikipedia article gives them.

Read the records on the fifth string and Abida Parveen. Write a paragraph saying what the museum shows and what you must look for elsewhere for your report.