Brand me not wavering just because
my heart is imprisoned by a voice singing;
Sometimes one must stay grave,
other times be carried away.
Like a piece of wood,
equally destined for the warrior’s bow
as for the lute of the bard.

Ibrahim bin Utman, vismand fra Cordoba, 12. årh.

The three religions

Trying to understand our culture-historical roots, there is no way around the influence the three Middle Eastern religions, Christianity, Judaism and Islam cause on our every day lifes, our view of the world and conception of art. Despite the common roots of the religions - or perhaps because of these - the co-exsistence between the people of the three religions has often been tense, if not of a violent and discriminating nature. Nonetheless, over the course of history, we find periodes of more frictionless co-exsistence between the three different religions beneficial to the cultural life of that particular periode, but also to the culturel edificy which our presentday lives is a part of.

The People of the Book

The title of the concert is taken from a definition in the Koran and refers to the three people, the Christians, the Jews, and the Muslims, whose guidelines has been given them in the shape of a Holy Book. Do the People of the Book have more in common than generally believed? Is the conflict rather an ideological struggle than a matter of civilization? These questions can – and should – certainly be answered in other foras and by other means. Here we intend to tell – unpretentious and via a musical journey in time and space – the tales about a society, where a symbiosis between the three cultures was possible for a time.

The musical court of Alfonso X the Wise

Alfonso the Tenth, with the epithet ‘the Wise’, ruled Castile from 1252 to 1284. His succes as a king was by no means absolute; His ambitions to become the emperor of Christian Europe were shattered by the Pope and his allies in the decisive moments of the election. He dreamed of christianizing the entire Iberian Peninsula, but was forced to spend time and resources to fight rebellions among los Mudejares, the Muslim people living in the Christian Castile. In the end he was dethroned by his own son, Sancho the Fourth.
In the cultural-political field though King Alfonso was gifted by particular flair for unifing the cultural ressources displayed by the multi-cultural society on the Iberian Peninsula, and it is by this particular effort that History remembers him as ‘The Wise’.

 

A multimedia event

Musicians from the entire civilized world would flock to Alfonso´s musical court, teaching and learning from each other. The results of these musical gatherings was compiled in the songbook ‘Cantigas de Santa Maria’, a ‘multimedia’ publication and documentation of the musical events at the Alfonsian court. The songbook contains lyrics, sheet music and drawings of musicians with the instruments used for performing the music, totalling more than 300 highly different songs. Still, the lyrics bear a common theme, a tribute to ’The Holy Mary’, written as a sort of troubadour songs, where the courtly, earthly love – a general theme in medieval poetry – was replaced by a noble, spiritual love for the Virgin Mary.

The poetic music in Al-Andalus

Following the death of Mohammed in the year 622, the new religious movement, Islam, quickly spread across vast parts of the Middle East, Northern Africa and the southern part of Europe. In this manner, the Muslim civilization, Al-Andalus, was to influence life on the Iberian Peninsula for the next seven centries.
In many cases, the new Muslim societies allowed the original inhabitants in the conquered areas to continue practicing their religion and cultural habits. Thus the music in Al-Andalus was known to be a ‘mixture of music as played by the Christian people and the Arabic music from the East’, and ‘that this blend was so popular, that the people in Al-Andalus didn’t bother to listen to anything else …’ (1)

Reconstruction of the music

The music in Al-Andalus was not written down, but rather – as a kind of ‘commercial secret’ – handed down from teacher til pupil. On the other hand, both musical praxis and theory was described in comprehensive tracts and textbooks. Therefore, to a certain degree, it is possible to imagine the music, despite the lack of precise manuscripts. An echo of the music from those days can be heard in the socalled ‘música andalusí’, still played in Morocco, Tunesia and Algeria.
In spite of of the fact, that the melodies were kept as a professional secret among musicians, the lyrics exsist in numorous collections. Often we are witnesses to poetry of immense beauty, written by men and woman alike, telling the tale of refined and sophisticated cultural life in the old Al-Andalus.

The ships sat out from the quay,
accompanied by a quiet sobbing.
Like a lazy caravane the camel driver leads by his song.
Ay! How many tears felt into the sea?
Ay! How many broken hearts were taken away
on these merciless vessels?

Ben Al-Labbana, Denia 12th cent.

Interludie about the prevailing intolerance

Christianity, Judaism and Islam, co-exisited for better and for worse through out the centuries, but in the 14. century the relationship between the three cultures was noticeably aggravated. In 1492 – when the last Muslim bastion in Granada surrenders, and the Italian Cristobal Columbus reaches the shores of America – the Spanish Jews, Sephardim, are exiled from the now Christian Spain. Approximately a hundred years later, in 1608, the last Muslims leave the Spanish mainland to take up residence in Northern Africa on the other side of the strait of Gibraltar. The era of the multi-culturel society in Spain has come to an end.

The cultural treasures of Sephardim, a living story

In a matter of month in 1492, Sephardic Jews by the thousands from all over Spain were forced to sell their possessions and property and leave the country. The majority took up residence in Morocco and in various areas of the Balkans. With them, they didn’t bring much more than their Spanish language and culture in the shape of popular ballads and romances. For the next centuries, the memory of Sefarad, Spain, is kept alive by the Sephardic Jews through these songs, zealously passed on from generation to generation.

Historical fingerprints

The sheer number of surviving ballads and romances is extensive, and one can choose to regard this treasure as a historical print of the Spanish popular song traditions in the 15. century. Over the centuries though, a great part of the melodies, carriers of the Spanish lyrics, has been ‘balkanized’. While the lyrics by and large have stayed clear of influence for more than 400 years, apparently the music is a more ‘elusive’ media, open to local influence. Nonetheless, the Sephardic ballads and romances contain music with a strong musical expression, bearing wittness to the fact, that beauty often appears a result of cultural multiplicity.

(1) Ahmad al-Tifãsi (1184-1253), ‘Ten Hispano-Arabic Strophic Songs in the Modern Oral Tradition’, Benjamin M. Liu, James T. Monroe, p. 42