Instruments across time: the oud

This lesson asks you to show awareness of the use of music and musical instruments in various traditions, from early times to today. The museum offers one instrument, the oud, with an account of a string added to it in al-Andalus. Other instruments and other traditions your class must bring from elsewhere. ¹

In the example notice who attributes what to whom, what the source says and what a later scholar says about it. Then write one sentence about the account: this is what it says, and this is what it does not say.

Look for what already existed before the attributed addition.

Al-Maqqari's account starts with an oud that already has four strings. ² The strings have colours: a yellow zir, a red mathna, a white mathlath and a black bamm. ² Then he adds one more, a red string between the middle ones. ² The record says this is an extra string within the oud's arrangement, not a separate new instrument. ² Maqqari wrote much later, so this is his account of Ziryab. ³

The record's photograph shows an oud made long after Ziryab. Can that photograph show what Ziryab's oud was like, and why or why not?

• Ziryab's reported fifth oud string: the strings in their order, and who tells the story.
• Ziryab: the musician the story is about, and what the records say of his teaching.
• An oud in Cleveland: a wooden oud with a pear-shaped body, made much later.

Read about Ziryab's reported fifth oud string. Draw an oud with four strings, add the fifth, and write beside it who attributes the addition.