Instrumental Polyphonic Folk Music in Asia Minor

Abstract

The polyphonic fiddling of the Black Sea coast of Asia Minor is remarkable enough as a type of folk music; but it is the more remarkable to find such polyphony within the territory of the Islamic musical world, the territory of the purely homophonic (or at most mildly heterophonic) classical Perso-Arabo-Turkic tradition. From passages in the surviving treatises of Al-Kindī (ninth century) and Ibn Sīnā (eleventh century) it is known that these authors were familiar with fourths, fifths and octaves and their use; and in the Mūriṣtus MSS quoted by Farmer, triads are mentioned and their affective properties described. But these are the only traces of such knowledge in the history of a tradition which as it reaches us today is homophonic. The nature of this tradition has often been misunderstood, as is shown by such a statement as: the Arabs never got beyond the stage of homophony. This implies that homophony as practised in the Islamic world is primitive, or if not primitive is yet a stage in the evolution of harmony. Either view is false; false to that which can be observed all over the world at the present time, and historically false as well. The music of Islam is a music of high sophistication, and its sophistication was well established by the ninth century.