Andalusian Classical Music - Influence of Andalusian Music

Influence of Andalusian Music

Andalusia was probably the main route of transmission of a number of Near-Eastern musical instruments used in classical music: the rebec (ancestor of the violin) from the rebab, the guitar from the qitara, and the naker from the naqareh. Further terms fell into disuse in Europe: 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, 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 rhaita, rackett from iraqya or iraqiyya, geige (German for violin) from ghichak, and the theorbo from the tarab.

According to historic sources, William VIII brought to Poitiers hundreds of Muslim prisoners. Trend acknowledges that the troubadors derived their sense of form and the subject matter of their poetry from Andalusia. The hypothesis that the troubador 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. Certainly "a body of song of comparable intensity, profanity and eroticism in Arabic from the second half of the 9th century onwards."