Writing the History of Unwritten Music: On the Treatise of Darwesh ‘Ali Changi (17th Century)
Writing the History of Unwritten Music: On the Treatise of Darwesh ‘Ali Changi (17th Century)
The chapter deals with the representation of memory about the musical past as represented in the Risalei musiqi by Darweh ‘Ali Changi, music master from Transoxiana (b. c.1547, d. after 1611). This treatise, written in the convention of adab genre, is an exceptional document of an essentially oral tradition, with its ‘unacademic’ way of organising musical knowledge, free from philosophical-scientific discipline and mathematical speculation, immersed in myth, legend and fable, most closely linked to poetry. It represents an attempt to fix in writing knowledge that existed in the form of a non-formalised, free-ranging discourse, testified directly by the memory of living musicians and beyond its boundaries transformed into a mythical complex.
Keywords: Central Asian music, adab literature, oral history, Central Asian theory of music, Islamic musical culture
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