Books by Gabriela Currie
Cambridge University Press, 2022
This Element explores the circulation of musical instruments, practices, and thought inpremodern ... more This Element explores the circulation of musical instruments, practices, and thought inpremodern Eurasia at the crossroads of empires and nomadic cultures. It takes into consideration mechanisms of transmission, appropriation, adaptation, and integration that helped shape musical traditions that are perceived as culturally and geographically distinct yet are historically linked. The five stories featured here range from the geographically diverse performing groups during the Sui and Tang era, to the elusive musical world of Kucha in the Tarim Basin; from the fragmentary history of a single instrument linked to the Turkic peoples across Eurasia, to the transcontinental circulation of sound-making automata, including the organ, on both east-west and north-south axes. Within the conceptual background of cultural encounter and exchange, this Element provides possible strategies for integrating such information into the historical tapestry of Eurasian transcontinental networks as explored in other Elements in the series.
Articles by Gabriela Currie
Itineraria: Rivista della Società Internazionale per lo Studio del Medioevo Latino 20, 2021
Seventeenth-century European visitors to Safavid Persia encountered, and at
times participated i... more Seventeenth-century European visitors to Safavid Persia encountered, and at
times participated in, music making during their Persian peripatetics, and their
testimonies populate the numerous travelogues published in Europe in the aftermath
of their journeys. Many of these visitors approached the sound and sights
they encountered from an experiential angle and, in most cases, were apparently
determined to gather empirical knowledge and describe what they witnessed accurately.
Some of them seem to have observed, noted, and published their observations
at times in versions faithful to their original experiences, and at other
times in forms altered for reasons of self- or outside censorship. While the sense
of exotic or the antiquarian penchant often mark their reactions to the sounds,
objects, and cultural contexts of musical events they record, there is also an inclination
to appreciate difference and often to forgo any overt projection of cultural
superiority on their part. The musical vignettes chosen from primarily from
the writings of Don García de Silva y Figueroa, Raphaël du Mans, and Adam
Olearius, while they yield organological and performative details that capture
glimpses of the Safavid musical world through the eyes of Europeans, stand witness
to the wide variety of musical phenomena different travelers found interesting,
the musical shapes, materials, sounds, and performances that seized their attention,
and also determined both the level of their ethnographic engagement
and the preferred modes of processing their field-data for the benefit of their
readers. Moreover, these vignettes demonstrate that many of these writings are
documenting not only the Persian musical traditions and perceptions of European
music, but also certain noteworthy aspects of European musical practices
overlooked by other contemporaneous documentation. ultimately, this essay
suggests that seventeenth-century travel writing on Persia embodies the epistemological intersection of two musical worlds or roughly commensurate sophistication if not always cross-cultural appeal.
Imago musicae 31/32 (2021), pp. 7-47, 2021
The magical power of music, a topic already crystallized in Greek antiquity in the myth of Orpheu... more The magical power of music, a topic already crystallized in Greek antiquity in the myth of Orpheus, was transmitted in the Arabo-Persian world through the tenth-century Rasa (Epistles) of the Ikhwan al-Safa (Brethren of Purity) and other writings. The basic tenets of this doctrine of musical ethos are that the various musical modes affect the human psyche, and thus that a musician’s skillful manipulation of carefully
chosen modes and corresponding melodic constructs can affect a listener’s mood, character, and even state of consciousness. At the center of the present essay stands the archetype of such magical musicianship within the literary space of the Persianate world, as manifest in the literary and visual personas of two different protagonists who belong to two different, albeit related works: Plato, from the early thirteenth-century Iskandarnama of Nizamı Ganjavı, and Aristotle, from the early seventeenth-century Resale i-musiqi of Darvısh ‘Alı Changı. In manuscript miniatures accompanying Plato’s magical acts, each of the illustrating artists expands the story’s range of meanings and possible interpretations, through specific music-iconographical choices showcasing a diverse and at times incongruous collection of musical objects and symbols. At the same time, in Aristotle’s legend, text and visual representation engage in a different relation, one that places the
reader, rather than the visual artist at the center. This essay proposes that both artists and readers took advantage both of deftly deployed terminological ambivalence and of evoked mental schemas embedded in the literary text, and thus privileged certain options by contextually re-framing (historically or otherwise) said terminology and its corresponding organological or symbolic meanings.
Crossing borders: musical change and exchange through time, edited by Arnd Adje Both and Matthias Stockli. Publications of the International Council for Traditional Music (ICTM) Study Group for Music Archaeology, Vol. 2. Ekho Verlag, 2020, 223-242, 2020
A funerary box, currently part of the Otani Collection in the Tokyo National Museum, was unearthe... more A funerary box, currently part of the Otani Collection in the Tokyo National Museum, was unearthed in the early twentieth century from grounds surrounding the ruins of the Buddhist monastery of Subashi in Kucha province (today Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, China). It features a long procession of masked individuals dancing to the sound of a musical ensemble consisting of percussion, wind, and string instruments, along with music-making putti. The Otani box shares some decorative and music-iconographical motifs with two other boxes of
similar provenance currently part of the Pelliot Collection at Musée Guimet in Paris. Together, these objects form a relatively homogeneous group of archaeological artefacts, both significant and thought-provoking from the standpoint of organological and music-iconographical analysis.
A reading of their decorations in conjunction with representations of musicians and musicmaking featured in the murals at Kizil, near Kucha, aords a unique perspective in deciphering some of the cultural practices in the ancient kingdom of Kucha during the sixth and seventh centuries CE. Furthermore, it enlists them as potential witnesses to the various processes of synthesis and diffusion representative of Eurasian transcultural commerce in the first millennium. More specifically, this article argues that the organological and music-iconographical elements
under discussion belong to a system of signs that distinguish Kuchean musical culture during this period in two capacities: as having reached maturity through the interweaving of strands spun from diverse cultural geographies, particularly Indian and Persian; and as becoming an agent in the eastward transmission of new Central Asian cultural syntheses.
The Music Road: Coherence and Diversity in Music from the Mediterranean to India. Ed. Reinhard Strohm. Proceedings of the British Academy 223. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 41-70, 2019
Itineraria: Rivista della Società Internazionale per lo Studio del Medioevo Latino , 2017
Two thirteenth-century manuscripts known as the Morgan and Arsenal Bibles – apparently commission... more Two thirteenth-century manuscripts known as the Morgan and Arsenal Bibles – apparently commissioned by the French king Louis IX and executed in Paris in the 1240s and Acre in the 1250s – contain miniatures depicting David dancing before the Ark of the Covenant The two ensembles depicted herein display different instruments and relate to iconographical and performance traditions each characteristic to the locale of their production. In particular, the Arsenal miniature features a character wearing a turban and playing a round frame drum with his hands in a position indicative of Middle Eastern performance practice. Among other examples of crusader art that display elements suggestive of Levantine musical customs is the
Creation miniature in the London Histoire universelle (c. 1250).The miniature’s decorative border is iconographically reminiscent of Fatimid ivory frames and, like the Fatimid frames, it shows a number of musicians and dancers dressed in Levantine garb and handling Middle Eastern instruments.In the present essay,I argue that the presence of musical instruments and performance practices associated with Levantine Islamic societies in miniatures of manuscripts produced in crusader’s lands of the Latin East should be considered in the context of the specific Mediterranean pre-modern cultural dynamics. In part, they are the consequence of choices made by artists steeped not only in Western, but also Byzantine and Islamic music-iconographic traditions. Mostly, however, they reflect ideologies of acculturation that took place locally despite religious, ethnic, or class barriers – self – or otherwise enforced. As such, I would argue, they put forth a local cultural alternative and function as expressive objects that, through their world of imaged sound, embody complex local cultural negotiations and set the artistic world of the Outremer at odds with some of the ideological models current in contemporaneous Frankish lands.
Sing Aloud Harmonious Spheres Renaissance Conceptions of Cosmic Harmony, edited by Jacomien Prins and Maude Vanhaelen. Routledge, 2017. Pp. 62-79, 2017
Medieval and early modern performance in the Eastern Mediterranean., edited by Evelyn Birge Vitz and Arzu Ozturkmen. Turnhout: Brepols , 2014, 423-449
Proportions: Science, musique, peinture et architecture, edited by Sabine Rommevaux, Philip Vendrix and Vasco Zara. Tours: Centre d’études superieures de la Renaissance. Turnhout: Brepols, 2012, 119-33
Greek Musical Instruments: Inquiries into art and literature (2000 BC - 2000 AD, edited by Alexandra Voutira, 2012
Imago Musicae 23 (2010): 47-77
Quomodo cantabimus canticum: Studies in honor of Edward H. Roesner, edited by D. B. Cannata, G. Ilnitchi Currie, R. Charnin Mueller, and J. L. Nádas. The American Institute for Musicology. Middleton, Wisconsin: A-R Editions, Inc., 2008, 15-35
Balkan popular culture and the Ottoman ecumene: music, image, and regional political discourse(s), edited by Donna Buchanan. Europea, series edited by Martin Stokes and Philip Bohlman. Lanham, Maryland and London: Scarecrow Press, 2007, 193-224
Early Music History 21 (2002): 37-74
Talks by Gabriela Currie
Musica nei racconti di viaggio: testi e immagini. Padua (Italy), November 2019, 2019
International Musicological Society Intercongressional Symposium. Lucerne (Switzerland), July 2019, 2019
The 47th Medieval and Renaissance Music Conference. Basel (Switzerland), July 2019, 2019
Iberian musical crossroads through the ages: Images of music-making in their transcultural exchange: The Fifteenth Symposium of the ICTM Study Group on Iconography and the Performing Arts & Society (Societat Catalana de Musicologia & Institut d’Estudis Catalans). Barcelona, , 2018
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Books by Gabriela Currie
Articles by Gabriela Currie
times participated in, music making during their Persian peripatetics, and their
testimonies populate the numerous travelogues published in Europe in the aftermath
of their journeys. Many of these visitors approached the sound and sights
they encountered from an experiential angle and, in most cases, were apparently
determined to gather empirical knowledge and describe what they witnessed accurately.
Some of them seem to have observed, noted, and published their observations
at times in versions faithful to their original experiences, and at other
times in forms altered for reasons of self- or outside censorship. While the sense
of exotic or the antiquarian penchant often mark their reactions to the sounds,
objects, and cultural contexts of musical events they record, there is also an inclination
to appreciate difference and often to forgo any overt projection of cultural
superiority on their part. The musical vignettes chosen from primarily from
the writings of Don García de Silva y Figueroa, Raphaël du Mans, and Adam
Olearius, while they yield organological and performative details that capture
glimpses of the Safavid musical world through the eyes of Europeans, stand witness
to the wide variety of musical phenomena different travelers found interesting,
the musical shapes, materials, sounds, and performances that seized their attention,
and also determined both the level of their ethnographic engagement
and the preferred modes of processing their field-data for the benefit of their
readers. Moreover, these vignettes demonstrate that many of these writings are
documenting not only the Persian musical traditions and perceptions of European
music, but also certain noteworthy aspects of European musical practices
overlooked by other contemporaneous documentation. ultimately, this essay
suggests that seventeenth-century travel writing on Persia embodies the epistemological intersection of two musical worlds or roughly commensurate sophistication if not always cross-cultural appeal.
chosen modes and corresponding melodic constructs can affect a listener’s mood, character, and even state of consciousness. At the center of the present essay stands the archetype of such magical musicianship within the literary space of the Persianate world, as manifest in the literary and visual personas of two different protagonists who belong to two different, albeit related works: Plato, from the early thirteenth-century Iskandarnama of Nizamı Ganjavı, and Aristotle, from the early seventeenth-century Resale i-musiqi of Darvısh ‘Alı Changı. In manuscript miniatures accompanying Plato’s magical acts, each of the illustrating artists expands the story’s range of meanings and possible interpretations, through specific music-iconographical choices showcasing a diverse and at times incongruous collection of musical objects and symbols. At the same time, in Aristotle’s legend, text and visual representation engage in a different relation, one that places the
reader, rather than the visual artist at the center. This essay proposes that both artists and readers took advantage both of deftly deployed terminological ambivalence and of evoked mental schemas embedded in the literary text, and thus privileged certain options by contextually re-framing (historically or otherwise) said terminology and its corresponding organological or symbolic meanings.
similar provenance currently part of the Pelliot Collection at Musée Guimet in Paris. Together, these objects form a relatively homogeneous group of archaeological artefacts, both significant and thought-provoking from the standpoint of organological and music-iconographical analysis.
A reading of their decorations in conjunction with representations of musicians and musicmaking featured in the murals at Kizil, near Kucha, aords a unique perspective in deciphering some of the cultural practices in the ancient kingdom of Kucha during the sixth and seventh centuries CE. Furthermore, it enlists them as potential witnesses to the various processes of synthesis and diffusion representative of Eurasian transcultural commerce in the first millennium. More specifically, this article argues that the organological and music-iconographical elements
under discussion belong to a system of signs that distinguish Kuchean musical culture during this period in two capacities: as having reached maturity through the interweaving of strands spun from diverse cultural geographies, particularly Indian and Persian; and as becoming an agent in the eastward transmission of new Central Asian cultural syntheses.
Creation miniature in the London Histoire universelle (c. 1250).The miniature’s decorative border is iconographically reminiscent of Fatimid ivory frames and, like the Fatimid frames, it shows a number of musicians and dancers dressed in Levantine garb and handling Middle Eastern instruments.In the present essay,I argue that the presence of musical instruments and performance practices associated with Levantine Islamic societies in miniatures of manuscripts produced in crusader’s lands of the Latin East should be considered in the context of the specific Mediterranean pre-modern cultural dynamics. In part, they are the consequence of choices made by artists steeped not only in Western, but also Byzantine and Islamic music-iconographic traditions. Mostly, however, they reflect ideologies of acculturation that took place locally despite religious, ethnic, or class barriers – self – or otherwise enforced. As such, I would argue, they put forth a local cultural alternative and function as expressive objects that, through their world of imaged sound, embody complex local cultural negotiations and set the artistic world of the Outremer at odds with some of the ideological models current in contemporaneous Frankish lands.
Talks by Gabriela Currie
times participated in, music making during their Persian peripatetics, and their
testimonies populate the numerous travelogues published in Europe in the aftermath
of their journeys. Many of these visitors approached the sound and sights
they encountered from an experiential angle and, in most cases, were apparently
determined to gather empirical knowledge and describe what they witnessed accurately.
Some of them seem to have observed, noted, and published their observations
at times in versions faithful to their original experiences, and at other
times in forms altered for reasons of self- or outside censorship. While the sense
of exotic or the antiquarian penchant often mark their reactions to the sounds,
objects, and cultural contexts of musical events they record, there is also an inclination
to appreciate difference and often to forgo any overt projection of cultural
superiority on their part. The musical vignettes chosen from primarily from
the writings of Don García de Silva y Figueroa, Raphaël du Mans, and Adam
Olearius, while they yield organological and performative details that capture
glimpses of the Safavid musical world through the eyes of Europeans, stand witness
to the wide variety of musical phenomena different travelers found interesting,
the musical shapes, materials, sounds, and performances that seized their attention,
and also determined both the level of their ethnographic engagement
and the preferred modes of processing their field-data for the benefit of their
readers. Moreover, these vignettes demonstrate that many of these writings are
documenting not only the Persian musical traditions and perceptions of European
music, but also certain noteworthy aspects of European musical practices
overlooked by other contemporaneous documentation. ultimately, this essay
suggests that seventeenth-century travel writing on Persia embodies the epistemological intersection of two musical worlds or roughly commensurate sophistication if not always cross-cultural appeal.
chosen modes and corresponding melodic constructs can affect a listener’s mood, character, and even state of consciousness. At the center of the present essay stands the archetype of such magical musicianship within the literary space of the Persianate world, as manifest in the literary and visual personas of two different protagonists who belong to two different, albeit related works: Plato, from the early thirteenth-century Iskandarnama of Nizamı Ganjavı, and Aristotle, from the early seventeenth-century Resale i-musiqi of Darvısh ‘Alı Changı. In manuscript miniatures accompanying Plato’s magical acts, each of the illustrating artists expands the story’s range of meanings and possible interpretations, through specific music-iconographical choices showcasing a diverse and at times incongruous collection of musical objects and symbols. At the same time, in Aristotle’s legend, text and visual representation engage in a different relation, one that places the
reader, rather than the visual artist at the center. This essay proposes that both artists and readers took advantage both of deftly deployed terminological ambivalence and of evoked mental schemas embedded in the literary text, and thus privileged certain options by contextually re-framing (historically or otherwise) said terminology and its corresponding organological or symbolic meanings.
similar provenance currently part of the Pelliot Collection at Musée Guimet in Paris. Together, these objects form a relatively homogeneous group of archaeological artefacts, both significant and thought-provoking from the standpoint of organological and music-iconographical analysis.
A reading of their decorations in conjunction with representations of musicians and musicmaking featured in the murals at Kizil, near Kucha, aords a unique perspective in deciphering some of the cultural practices in the ancient kingdom of Kucha during the sixth and seventh centuries CE. Furthermore, it enlists them as potential witnesses to the various processes of synthesis and diffusion representative of Eurasian transcultural commerce in the first millennium. More specifically, this article argues that the organological and music-iconographical elements
under discussion belong to a system of signs that distinguish Kuchean musical culture during this period in two capacities: as having reached maturity through the interweaving of strands spun from diverse cultural geographies, particularly Indian and Persian; and as becoming an agent in the eastward transmission of new Central Asian cultural syntheses.
Creation miniature in the London Histoire universelle (c. 1250).The miniature’s decorative border is iconographically reminiscent of Fatimid ivory frames and, like the Fatimid frames, it shows a number of musicians and dancers dressed in Levantine garb and handling Middle Eastern instruments.In the present essay,I argue that the presence of musical instruments and performance practices associated with Levantine Islamic societies in miniatures of manuscripts produced in crusader’s lands of the Latin East should be considered in the context of the specific Mediterranean pre-modern cultural dynamics. In part, they are the consequence of choices made by artists steeped not only in Western, but also Byzantine and Islamic music-iconographic traditions. Mostly, however, they reflect ideologies of acculturation that took place locally despite religious, ethnic, or class barriers – self – or otherwise enforced. As such, I would argue, they put forth a local cultural alternative and function as expressive objects that, through their world of imaged sound, embody complex local cultural negotiations and set the artistic world of the Outremer at odds with some of the ideological models current in contemporaneous Frankish lands.
In the present paper I will outline the manner in which musical customs of Iran are cast in the context of narratives and images of music found in various travel writings by authors such as Adam Olearius, Pietro Della Valle, Jean Thavenot, Jean Chardin, and Engelbert Kaempfer, among others. I contend that these accounts, despite their biases and their ulterior motives, inscribed Iran in the European artistic and musical imagination in ways that notably do not project the post-Enlightenment Orientalist notions of European inherent cultural superiority.
In the present paper I will outline the manner in which musical customs of the Safavids and Ottomans are cast in the context of narratives and images of music found in various writings by seventeenth-century European travelers. I contend that these accounts, despite their biases and their ulterior motives, inscribed starkly contrasting perceptions of the Persian and Ottoman cultures into the European artistic and musical imagination, which in the case of the former notably did not project post-Enlightenment Orientalist notions of European inherent cultural superiority, as they did in the case of the latter. This remarkable discrepancy in early proto-colonialist discourses attests to the fluidity of emergent global power relations as reflected in the Western contact with its Eastern other.
In the present paper I suggest that the manner in which stories and images about Pythagoras and Orpheus are mixed in various Eurasian pre-modern narratives and iconographies attest to their participation in a shared cultural memory, predicated upon the fluid circulation and continuous variation of philosophical and performative musical tropes of the Greek antiquity.