Program Notes Archeologists and historians have found evidence of early Celtic and Basque settlements in the Iberian Peninsula dating to the dawn of recorded history. The region was an integral part of the Mediterranean trade route plied by Phoenician merchants well before Rome planted its Eagles there and its citizens began to homestead in the 2nd century, BCE. Emperor Augustus officially annexed the province as Hispania in 17 BCE. The Emperors Trajan and Hadrian, and intellectual luminaries such as Seneca, Lucian, and Quintilian, were born there. Roman musical practice was mainly a servile activity, though philosophical and mathematical interest in music was broadly known to well-educated pagans throughout the Empire. In the year 410, Germanic tribes including the Visigoths sacked Rome and ended the Western Empire; they also conquered Hispania and ruled it for the next four centuries. Singing and instrumental music was part of everyday life for these early Christians. They developed their own "Mozarabic" chant in their church services, an offshoot of the Roman/Gregorian rite. In his Etymologies, Isidore, Bishop of Seville (6th c.), gave a brief summary of Pythagorean ideas of music similar to those transmitted into the Roman world by the North African scholar, Martianus Cappella (5th c.), and the Roman patrician writers Cassiodorus (c.485 - c. 585) and Boethius (480 - 520) as well as providing practical information about the various instruments including the psaltery, Kithara, Lyre, trumpets, drums, cymbals, and their usage in Visigothic Spain. When invading Umayyad Muslim forces led by Tariq ibn Zayd crossed into Hispania at the Pillars of Hercules in 711, they brought with them a diverse group of warriors including North African Berbers. The Visigoths were slaughtered, their towns burned, and citizens murdered or put in chains; resisting bands were driven to small mountain kingdoms to lick their wounds. After conquering the one-year king Roderic (Rodrigo), of the Visigoths, they established their Emirate, and later, an Islamic Caliphate, ruling their newly renamed land of Al-Andalus. Once the dust settled, the Emirs permitted Jews and remaining Visigothic Christians to practice their religion and live under circumscribed limits as dhimmis (protected peoples), so long as they submitted to their Muslim superiors and did not proselytize or disturb the peace. Tolerance meant living side-by-side, especially in terms of commerce, and Jews were often given official roles in the bureaucracy. While some Visigoth nobles decided to accept the terms imposed upon them and keep their territory as vassals, the northwestern lands of Asturias became a refuge for the Visigoths who refused to submit to Moslem rule. Christians began to gain back territory by winning the battle of Corvadonga in 722, led by Pelayo, King of Asturias. The Caliphate continued to head northward across the Pyrenees, and the Franks stopped their progress into Aquitaine by winning key battles including Poitiers and Toulouse. Charles Martel soundly defeated the invaders at their northernmost incursion into Burgundy, halting the Islamic conquest of Provence and France in 739. But the struggle continued, and in 822, French and Spanish forces were defeated soundly at the mountain pass of Roncesvalles; on that day, the poet of the Chanson de Rolande writes, Roland and his men watched the shining helmets and lances of their foes charge the pass; in one telling of the story, Roland felt calling Charlemagne's army back would show cowardice, and instead of dying at the hands of the "infidel" (equivalent terms were used on both sides of the conflict), fell upon his sword. The early Emirate of Cordova ruled five provinces and established a cultural hold over most of the peninsula. Arabic music in Al-Andalus was itself a mixture of many influences, the caravan songs of the African Berbers to the finely-wrought songs of the professional singers trained in faraway Medina (in modern Saudi Arabia), and from later musicians trained in Baghdad. In the Abbasid revolt of 750, the Umayyads were overthrown in the Mashriq (the Islamic East centered in Medina, Arabia) though the last survivor of the dynasty, Abd al- Rahman I (d. 788), escaped through the Maghreb (Islamic N. Africa) to Cordova in Al-Andalus, establishing himself as the Umayyad Emir of Al-Andalus. The rule of his descendant, Abd-al-Rahman Ill, is considered the beginning of the Caliphate in Al-Andalus, a golden age that lasted nearly a century from his assumption of the office in 929 until the breakup of the Caliphate in 1031. Translation of ancient sources was an important task, and Toledo and other Islamic cities produced copies of Aristotle and other ancient texts lost to the Latin West. A similar center of translation was Islamic, and later, early Christian Sicily. Andalusian music theory, monophonic in nature then as now, was highly complex, and was influenced from the harmonics manuals of Ancient Greek writers like Claudius Ptolemy and Aristoxenos; as the Islamic Caliphate pushed eastward into Persia and Iraq, their complex modal maqqamat (modal system) were expanded and rhythmic patterns (iqa) became part of their musical practice. Treatises on music were written by AI-Kindi (801 - 873), AI-Farabi (870 - 950), including a treatise on the tuning and placing of frets upon the early oud (lute). ln Al-Andalus, the most famous musical figure was the blind, African/Arabic lutenist and singer Ziryab (c. 789 - c. 857), a court musician about whom many stories were told, most of them apocryphal.
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