Music Sound And Architecture In Islam

Bringing together the perspectives of ethnomusicology, Islamic studies, art history, and architecture, this edited collection investigates how sound production in built environments is central to Muslim religious and cultural expression.

Music, Sound and Space is the first collection to integrate research from musicology and sound studies on music and sound as they mediate everyday life. Music and sound exert an inescapable influence on the contemporary world, from the ubiquity of MP3 players to the controversial use of sound as an instrument of torture. In this book, leading scholars explore the spatialisation of music and sound, their capacity to engender modes of publicness and privacy, their constitution of subjectivity, and the politics of sound and space. Chapters discuss music and sound in relation to distinctive genres, technologies and settings, including sound installation art, popular music recordings, offices and hospitals, and music therapy. With international examples, from the Islamic soundscape of the Kenyan coast, to religious music in Europe, to First Nation musical sociability in Canada, this book offers a new global perspective on how music and sound and their spatialising capacities transform the nature of public and private experience.

This surveys the philosophies of music of the most important thinkers in Islam between the 9th and the 15th centuries A.D. It covers topics ranging from the physics and aesthetics of sound, the nature of music, its place in the total scheme of things and in human life, the relation between music, astronomy, astrology and meteorology, the relation between music and human feelings character and behaviour, to the question of whether a good Muslim should be allowed to listen to music at all, and if so, to which type. The book traces the influence of Greek, in particular Pythagorean and Aristoxenian, thinking in Islam on this subject, and aims to provide a philosophically coherent statement of thinking of the Islamic writers concerned, a clarification of their central arguments, as well as a critical evaluation of their line of thought. The author introduces a wide range of material from manuscript sources, including much that has not been published before.

The early-Republican era (1923-1938) was a major period of musical and cultural change in Turkey. Alaturka: Style in Turkish Music is a study of the significance of style in Turkish music and, in particular, the polemical debate about an eastern style of Turkish music (called, alaturka) that developed during this rich and complicated era of Turkish history. Representing more than twenty years of research, the book explores the stylistic categories that show the intersection between music and culture; the different chapters treat musical materials, musical practices and musical contexts in turn. Informed by critical approaches to musical aesthetics in ethnomusicology as well as musicology and anthropology, the book focuses upon a native discourse about musical style, highlighting a contemporary apprehension about the appropriate constitution of a national identity. The argument over style discloses competing conceptions of Turkish space and time where definitions of the east and the west, and interpretations of the past and the present respectively were hotly contested. John Morgan O'Connell makes a significant contribution to the study of Turkish music in particular and Turkish history in general. Conceived as a historical ethnography, the book brings together archival sources and ethnographic materials to provide a critical revision of Turkish historiography, music providing a locus for interrogating singular representations of a national past.

Cover -- Half Title -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Table of Contents -- List of figures -- List of contributors -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- 1 Aural architecture in Jerusalem, Rome, Constantinople, and Alexandria -- 2 The great outdoors: liturgical encounters with the early medieval Armenian church -- 3 Byzantine chant notation: written documents in an aural tradition -- 4 Understanding liturgy: the Byzantine liturgical commentaries -- 5 Christ's all-seeing eye in the dome -- 6 Transfigured: mosaic and liturgy at Nea Moni -- 7 We who musically represent the cherubim -- 8 Spatiality, embodiment, and agency in ekphraseis of church buildings -- 9 Acoustics of Hagia Sophia: a scientific approach to the humanities and sacred space -- 10 Live auralization of Cappella Romana at the Bing Concert Hall, Stanford University -- Glossary -- Bibliography -- Index

An alternate approach to Islamic art emphasizing literary over historical contexts and reception over production in visual arts and music.

The study of listening—aurality—and its relation to writing is the subject of this eclectic edited volume. Theorizing Sound Writing explores the relationship between sound, theory, language, and inscription. This volume contains an impressive lineup of scholars from anthropology, ethnomusicology, musicology, performance, and sound studies. The contributors write about sound in their ongoing work, while also making an intervention into the ethics of academic knowledge, one in which listening is the first step not only in translating sound into words but also in compassionate scholarship.

Since the turn of the twentieth century the dramatic rise of mass media has profoundly transformed music practices in the Arab world. Music has adapted to successive forms of media disseminationDLfrom phonograph cylinders to MP3sDLeach subjected to the political and economic forces of its particular era and region. Carried by mass media, the broader culture of Arab music has been thoroughly transformed as well. Simultaneously, mass mediated music has become a powerful social force. While parallel processes have unfolded worldwide, their implications in the Arabic-speaking world have thus far received little scholarly attention. This provocative volume features sixteen new essays examining these issues, especially televised music and the controversial new genre of the music video. Perceptive voicesDLboth emerging and establishedDLrepresent a wide variety of academic disciplines. Incisive essays by Egyptian critics display the textures of public Arabic discourse to an English readership. Authors address the key issues of contemporary Arab societyDLgender and sexuality, Islam, class, economy, power, and nationDLas refracted through the culture of mediated music. Interconnected by a web of recurrent concepts, this collection transcends music to become an important resource for the study of contemporary Arab society and culture. Contributors: Wael Abdel Fattah, Yasser Abdel-Latif, Moataz Abdel Aziz, Tamim Al-Barghouti, Mounir Al Wassimi, Walter Armbrust, Elisabeth Cestor, Hani Darwish, Walid El Khachab, Abdel-Wahab Elmessiri, James Grippo, Patricia Kubala, Katherine Meizel, Zein Nassar, Ibrahim Saleh, Laith Ulaby.