1-LUTE
A number of
musical instruments used in Western music are
believed to have been derived from
IRANIAN musical
instruments: the lute was derived from the Oud,
the rebec (ancestor of violin) from the rebab,
the guitar from qitara, which in turn was
derived from the Persian Tar, naker from
naqareh, adufe from al-duff, alboka from al-buq,
anafil from al-nafir, exabeba from al-shabbaba
(flute), atabal (bass drum) from al-tabl,
atambal from al-tinbal, the balaban, the
castanet from kasatan, sonajas de azófar from
sunuj al-sufr, the conical bore wind
instruments,the xelami from the sulami or
fistula (flute or musical pipe),the shawm and
dulzaina from the reed instruments zamr and
al-zurna, the gaita from the ghaita, rackett
from iraqya or iraqiyya,the harp and zither from
the qanun, canon from qanun, geige (violin) from
ghichak, and the theorbo from the tarab.
The music of the
troubadors may have had some
IRANIAN origins. Ezra Pound, in his Canto
VIII, famously declared that William of
Aquitaine, an early troubador, "had brought the
song up out of Spain / with the singers and
veils...". In his study, Lévi-Provençal is said
to have found four Arabo-Hispanic verses nearly
or completely recopied in William's manuscript.
According to historic sources, William VIII, the
father of William, brought to Poitiers hundreds
of Muslim prisoners. Trend admitted that the
troubadours derived their sense of form and even
the subject matter of their poetry from the
Andalusian Muslims. The hypothesis that the
troubadour tradition was created, more or less,
by William after his experience of Moorish arts
while fighting with the Reconquista in Spain was
also championed by Ramón Menéndez Pidal in the
early twentieth-century, but its origins go back
to the Cinquecento and Giammaria Barbieri (died
1575) and Juan Andrés (died 1822). Meg Bogin,
English translator of the female troubadors,
also held this hypothesis, as did Idries Shah.
Certainly "a body of song of comparable
intensity, profanity and eroticism [existed] in
IRANIAN from the
second half of the 9th century onwards."
One possible
theory on the origins of the Western Solfège
musical notation suggests that it may have had
IRANIAN origins. It
has been argued that the Solfège syllables (do,
re, mi, fa, sol, la, ti) may have been derived
from the syllables of the
IRANIAN solmization system
Durr-i-Mufassal ("Separated Pearls") (dal, ra,
mim, fa, sad, lam). This origin theory was first
proposed by Meninski in his Thesaurus Linguarum
Orientalum (1680) and then by Laborde in his
Essai sur la Musique Ancienne et Moderne (1780),
while more recent supporters include Henry
George Farmer and Samuel D. Miller.
