‘Medieval’ Musics of Asia

Abstract

The documentation of many aspects of early musical history is substantially fuller, and extends further backwards in time, in Asia than in Europe. This is so for the history of secular music in general, for the history of musical forms and melody types, as well as for the history of instruments, of playing techniques, and of ornamentation. Assyriologists, and musicologists with some knowledge of and competence in Assyriology, have recently demonstrated that the Babylonians were already familiar with the seven diatonic modes of the European tradition in the second millennium b.c., and there exists a Hurrian cuneiform tablet of 1400 b.c. bearing words and music of a hymn to the goddess Nikkal, wife of the Moon-God. The concern of this paper, however, is with South and East Asia, rather than with Western Asia and the Ancient Fertile Crescent, and in both East and South Asia numerous documentary sources carry us back to a point in time in musical history some five or six centuries earlier than equivalent European sources. From the standpoint of the historian of Western music, what is perhaps most astonishing is the existence of a substantial body of secular instrumental music of the eighth and early ninth centuries, surviving in score, in mensural tablatures, in documents in part themselves written in the ninth and tenth centuries, or now available in copies made not later than the twelfth or thirteenth centuries.