billkilpatrick
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Safi al Din 'Abd al-Mu'min aka: “Kitab al-adwar”
here's a drawing of a 5-course oud taken from a 14th cent. treatise by "kitab al-adwar." can anyone tell me please what the writing on each of the
courses means and - if it doesn't indicate tuning - please tell me how the oud was tuned?
thank you sincerely - bill
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al-Halabi
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Bill,
The oud displayed in Safi al-Din al-Urmawi's treatise "Kitab al-Adwar" (Book of Cycles) was tuned in straight fourths. The first word appearing on
each string refers to the name used at the time to identify each of the five strings. These names were, in ascending order, al-bamm (the lowest),
al-mathlath, al-mathna, al-zir, and al-hadd. (These string names, by the way, are no longer in use today, having been replaced by the names of the
notes to which the strings are tuned, such as dugah, nawa. etc.) So this medieval oud had essentially a range of two octaves. The tuning of the
strings of his oud in fourths is absolutely certain from Safi al-Din's detailed descriptions, but there is no way of knowing what, if any, standard
tuning of the instrument existed in his time in terms of absolute pitches. He actually designates the pitches using alphabetical letters rather than
tone names.
The seven fret positions indicated on the instrument correspond to the intervals Safi al-Din identified as a making up a fourth (the last fret, played
with the fourth finger according to his treatise, corresponds to the next highest open string, and so on). His octave was divided into 18 tones.
By the way, the treatise was written in the 13th century (Safi al-Din lived 1216-1294).
I hope this is helpful.
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oud_laud_luth_lute_liuto
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Hi,
this is my post about the Lute in the Middle Ages:
http://www.mikeouds.com/messageboard/viewthread.php?tid=2142
ciao
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billkilpatrick
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thank you both very much for sharing your information.
sincerely - bill
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billkilpatrick
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a further enquiry to try your patience:
counting from bass to treble, is this correct?:
d = yaka
e = ushayran
a = duka
d' = nawa
g' = kurdan
could the straight 4ths tuning described by kitab al-adwar have been b-e-a-d'-g'?
traditionally, in arabic music, could one key (pitch) be considered as original? assuming the oud was primarily used as an accompaniment instrument,
is there an original key for singing as well?
the reason i ask is because i tune my 5c. oud (and charango) g-c-e-a-d and obtain the pitch for 4 or the 5 courses by singing "my-dog-has-fleas" -
like a ukulele. most of the time i get it right. if there is a similar "home-spun" (sung?) version in the arabic tradition it might correspond in
part to the original, generally accepted pitch.
i'm trying to imagine how a group of medieval musicians would have tuned-up, prior to notation. was it simply a question of the leading musician
going "hmmmm" and all the rest twisting their pegs accordingly or was there a standard pitch used as a basis?
sincerely - bill
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al-Halabi
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Bill,
Yes, the oud tuning could have been b-e-a-d'-g', or any other straight fourths tuning for that matter. Scholars who have analyzed Safi al-Din's tone
system have arbitrarily designated g or a as the tone for the open lowest string, which would give you a tuning of g-c-f-b flat-e flat or a-d-g-c'-f'
respectively. It's all speculative because Safi al-Din did not indicate the actual notes of his strings and frets. He devised an abstract system by
which each tone was assigned an alphabetical letter: the tone of the open lowest string was the Arabic letter 'alif', the first fret on that string (a
limma or 90 cents higher) was the letter 'ba', and so on.
Other medieval and early modern writers in the region did give the tunings of ouds (and other stringed instruments like the Ottoman tanbur and
kemence) using the traditional tone names for the strings, so there were clearly standard tunings. But there is no indication of an absolute pitch, so
these tunings were most likely understood as relative, with the instruments being in tune with themselves and then adjusted to each other and to the
voice before performance. An oud player could obviously tune up or down some, but also use transposition to adjust to non-standard tonics for modes,
which is common practice among performers until the present. (Some players may have had additional ouds tuned in variant pitches available so as to
avoid having to retune if the singer changed during the performance.)
Ouds are structured logically for tuning in fourths, which we can assume was standard (with variant tunings of the fifth bass string), but the
absolute pitches of individual ouds must have varied widely in the premodern period, especially given the lack of uniformity in the gut strings
produced at the time. It was in 1932, in the first Congress of Arab Music held in Cairo, that it was decided that the note rast would henceforth be
standarized as C. Turkish music also set standard absolute pitches in the modern period, with the note neva (second open string) established equal to
A 220Hz.
The bottom line: if you want to be faithful to medieval practice tune your oud in fourths whichever way you like.
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billkilpatrick
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thank you again - a pleasure to chat with you.
- bill
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