Who were Guillaume’s, tutors,
mentors, living and historic models, and references? What kind of cultural
sensitivities and grooming was he was exposed to? We might ask the same
questions about Alfonzo X, the Wise. Another decisive question: What level of
mastery in physical combat skills, military strategy, diplomacy, and art did
the patrons of the itinerant musicians attain, and to what extent did these
patrons depend on the experts at their courts? The Oriental and Occidental
world in classical, Medieval, and Renaissance times abounded with itinerant
court advisers, musicians, and skilled or learned people.
One characteristic of complete performance mastery is the integration
of virtuosity and emotional communication, recognizable as an inexplicable
visceral response by the listeners. The piece is not just interpreted—it comes
to life in front of their eyes and in their cognitive being. Levitin (2006)
writes of mastery in his book, This Is
Your Brain On Music, in the chapter titled, What Makes a Musician?:
…Ten thousand hours of practice is required
to achieve the level of mastery associated with being a word-class expert—in
anything. In study after study, of composers, basketball players, fiction
writers, ice skaters, concert pianists, chess players, master criminals, and
what have you, this number comes up again and again. Ten thousand hours is
roughly equivalent to three hours a day, or twenty hours a week, of practice
over ten years. Of course, this doesn’t address why some people don’t seem to
get anywhere when they practice, and why some people get more out of their
practice sessions than others. But no one has yet found a case in which true
world-class expertise was accomplished in less time. It seems that it takes the
brain this long to assimilate all that it needs to know to achieve true
mastery.
Levitin opens to us an
appreciation and understanding of the expertise accomplished musicians have,
and why a good one would have been rare, and in demand.
This also raises new questions:
first, did the aristocratic Troubadours themselves achieve a mastery of their
art by investing years of time and practice into their music? Or perhaps they
surrounded themselves with itinerant and resident musicians who devoted much of
their lives to rigorous practice. Perhaps the princes wrote what other
musicians sang. This may be the reason why the poetry has survived, but not
much of the music has. Did each itinerant musician sing the verses or accompany
the poets differently?
Troubadour Output, Parallels, and Possible Sources
Fin d’amour, courtly love as a cultural phenomenon, brought fresh
elements into the social sensibilities of the feudal Christian world of
medieval Western Europe. It provided the ecclesiastically dominated culture of
Europe with a poetic language for the experiences of love, both secular and
sacred.
The Troubadour’s attitude became
a significant factor in the augmented social role of women (Bogin, 1980). It gave women an image of
themselves—although uncomfortably idealized at times—and changed the role they
played in the male imagination. This shift was from a ‘sinful’ Eve to a Madona Inteligencia, as described by the
late Troubadour movement of Dante’s time, the Fedeli d’Amore.
Male bonding and the idealized woman
The fact that anyone could come
from anywhere and besiege your castle or town and claim your territory was an
unsettling reality of the middle ages. Brute force had to be met with brute force.
Military readiness was an imperative for survival. To use a cliché for the
moment, it seems that the male psyche loves the heroics of war. Apart from
physical fitness and martial skills, the male
bonding of soldiers is a significant characteristic—an atavistic
quality—that war, hunting, and navigation bring about. Karen Blixen, a Danish
writer, wrote that her uncle, a general, was both in love with his wife (as an
individual, Eros) and with his regiment (as a group, bonding).
It may be interesting to study
the relationship of the two dynamics—idealizing women and the bonding of
knights and soldiers—as a possible interdependent cultural loop: an expression
of ardor for Her sake among the
cohort of combatants.
One woman such as Eleanor of
Aquitaine (Markale 2007) could champion many knights simply by paying them some
small attention—no more than exchanging a meaningful glance, or attentively
watching their jousting display from the safe distance of her court. With their
imaginations aflame, they would valiantly fight side by side in some later
battle, next to their equally infatuated comrades. If you were not a poet,
philosopher, or a musician, the outlet for such passion—awakened by an
unattainable Lady—was expressed in the jousting games and in battle. Was not
the original Troubadour, Guillaume IX of Aquitaine, also one of the leaders of
the first Crusade?
The significant point of the
Troubadours’ contribution was the celebration of the personal experience
reflected in the direct knowledge of love—both of the male Troubadour for his
chosen lady, and of the Occitan women Troubadours, the Trobairitz, who sang about their champions.
Observing the Troubadours’
virtuoso writing and passion for the direct knowledge of a loved one leads us
to some parallel ideas. The temptation to jump straight into a Gnostic
connection is great, but we shall hold off from making any definite
conclusions.
Sophia
Perhaps the most haunting figure in the
Gnostic cosmology, Sophia is seen variously as the personification of divine
wisdom, as a female divinity equated with the Holy Spirit, as an allegory of
the soul separated from its true home, and as the inspiration for every old
story of a ‘damsel in distress’ (Clifton,
1998).
The
ambiguity of direct experience and knowledge of ‘I and Thou’ versus an
institutional sacrament, needing an ecclesiastical body, is probably one of the
reasons later Troubadours were suspected to be partners and accomplices to the
Cathars. As mentioned earlier, the last recorded Troubadours, the Fedeli d’Amore, had a Sophia of their
own: their Madona Inteligencia. Was
it that their aspiration for a direct relationship with their Sophia that made
them form a secret society to avoid the eyes of the Inquisition? The direct
experience of Sophia, as the feminine ideal, may explain why it was not too difficult for some of the poet-musicians—such
as Alfonzo X and his circle—to replace the Troubadours’ lady with the Virgin
Mary.
We are always thankful to Arab
scholars and intellectuals of the Middle Ages for keeping that connection to
Greek philosophy as a continued thread. MacLennan (2001) writes in his An Interpretation of Courtly Love, summarizing
Plotinus’s Neo-Platonic discourse about mind:
From this perspective the Nous, the Intellectual/Spiritual Principle,
emanates from the One, but is directed back toward it, in an eternal cyclic
living flow, by love (eros) of the Good (which is the One). In Neoplatonic
philosophy the Nous (Mind) is seen as
feminine and is identified with Wisdom (Sophia, Sapientia), Philosophy, Angel
of Knowledge, Lady of Thought, etc. (More precisely, each level is ‘feminine,’
i.e. receptive, with respect to the level above it, and ‘masculine,’ i.e.
active, with respect to that below.) In Christian Neoplatonism, Nous is often identified with the Holy Spirit
(traditionally feminine) or with the Virgin Mary (in which case the One is
identified with the Trinity). Henceforth I will call the Nous ‘Wisdom’ and use the feminine pronoun (MacLennan, 2001). [our emphasis]
Greek-speaking Jews of the Roman Empire
translated the Hebrew word for ‘divine wisdom,’ Hokhmah, as ‘Sophia.’ (Both
words are grammatically feminine in their respective tongues.) Although
fundamentally monotheistic, some Jews, particularly those living in Alexandria
and other areas away from Palestine and removed from the temple of Judaism,
developed what is called the ‘Wisdom Literature,’ a group of scriptures
portraying Wisdom personified (Clifton, 1998).
Clifton ends his essay with:
The Wisdom of Solomon states, ‘Wisdom is
radiant and unfading, and she is easily discerned by those who love her, and is
found by those who seek her’ (Clifton, 1998).
Ibn Hazm
There is a book that has always
created discussion among Troubadour scholars: Ibn Hazm’s Tawq al-hamama, The Ring of the Dove. This work is sometimes called
The Dove's Neck Ring. Ibn Hazm (994-1064), who
primarily wrote about law and theology, wrote about love in an attempt to
compose in an Arab-Persian mode of elegant
writing.
Arberry (1953),
translator of The Ring of the Dove,
in his description of the childhood and upbringing of Ibn Hazm, writes that
Hazm ‘…enjoyed a happy though secluded childhood, and the advantages of an
excellent education; he tells us that most of his early teachers were women.’
This tiny glimpse into Andalusia’s aristocratic practices of upbringing may
offer an imaginative leap of thinking about possible positions of learned and
highly educated women as early childhood teachers and mentors of future lords.
In some Islamic households, young boys are allowed into the confines of the
women’s quarters, and nurtured there.
The impact of
women who were philosophers, musicians, theologians, and storytellers, and who
also happened to teach, cannot be underestimated. Scheherazade and Hypatia of
Alexandria, are two examples. Hypatia (c.360-415), a Hellenized Egyptian, was a
mathematician and the head of the Platonic academy at the Serapeum in
Alexandria. She is credited for the invention, or significant improvement of,
the astrolabe, an instrument important in Arab navigation. Although almost
forgotten by history, she is a great model for imagining the early childhood
teachers of aristocrats in Andalusia and possibly Occitan. The impact of such
women gives us a hint of a feminine figure like the benevolent Sophia,
nurturing the young minds of future poets of either the elegant literature of
the Arab aristocrats and intellectuals, or of the Occitan Troubadours.
In his summary of Persian and
Greek influences on Arab culture, Arberry writes:
The Persians introduced them [Arabs] to the
idea of adab, a term most difficult
to translate; broadly speaking, adab
is a form of prose composition whose primary purpose is not religious but
secular, and which is intended not merely for instruction but also for
enjoyment. It was the Persians who taught the Arabs to appreciate and to write
elegant prose… and encouraged them to amorous adventures. From the Greeks the
Arabs learned science and philosophy, the art and the delight of discussion and
dialectic (Arberry, 1953).
Here he helps us see how,
organically, Greek thought lived in Arab and Andalusian writings. Also
noteworthy is his observation that poets
were the heroes of the numerous desert romances.
Leaman and Albdour (1998) write
of how The Dove’s Neck Ring deals
with the concept of love:
In it he [Ibn Hazm] analyses the concept and
differentiates between divine love, which is placed at the highest level, and
affection, which is the lowest. Clearly influenced by Plato's Phaedrus and
Symposium, he regards love as the coming together of otherwise incomplete
beings (Leaman & Albdour 1998).
As we follow the influences
crisscrossing the Mediterranean in time and geography, it becomes clear that
Occitan culture was in some way an exception, a precedent in the Christian
European world, just as Andalusia was in the Muslim world.
Hazm’s life was
such as precedent. He was born into an Andalusian aristocratic family, loyal to
the Umayyad dynasty as it was declining. He had a stormy political career, was
imprisoned three times, and banished from Cordoba on several occasions. In 1027
he was in Jativa, probably incarcerated, where he composed The Dove's Neck Ring (Arberry,
1953). He tried to stay away from politics for the rest of his life.
‘…But he by no means kept clear of trouble, for his religious views were in
conflict with the prevalent orthodoxy and his writings were publicly burnt in
Seville during his lifetime’ (Arberry,
1953)
Approximately
two centuries later, the Occitan and Provencal Troubadour phenomena suffered at
the hands of inquisition during the Albigensian Crusade against the Gnostic
Cathars (1209- 1229).
The Albigensian Connection
It is an interesting fact that
the territories and geography of the Troubadours and their patrons is very
close to most territories of the Albigensian
heresy. The Albigensians were a dualist sect that flourished in southern
France in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, though they may have been part
of an international movement. They were also called Cathars (from Greek katharos, “pure”). The Aristotelian
concept of catharsis—the effect of a
performance upon spectators—is derived from the same word. The Greek etymology
possibly points to the connection of the Cathars with the Byzantine empire:
they may have been connected to the Paulicans, who lived on the border between
the Byzantine empire and the Arab world (Armenia or Cappadocia), or with
Islamic Persia or other states on the Black Sea, or the Bogomils of the Balkans
(Bulgaria or Bosnia) at the western borders of the Byzantine Empire, bordering
the Catholic sphere of interest.
All
three—Paulicians, Bogomils, and Cathars—lived on the borders between Christian
and Islamic nations. Paulicians and Bogomils were often used as border guards
by the Byzantine Emperors. At times they fought against, and at others flowed
with, Islam and the Arab world. During times of persecution, initiated from
either Constantinople or Rome, some of them adopted Islam without great
difficulty—particularly the Bogomils of Bosnia and some Paulicians of the upper
Euphrates river. This may be due to the creed of Islam (paraphrased here by an
outsider, attempting to elicit an understanding of the general ideas): there is no other god but the One and that
Mohamed was his prophet. This may have been easier to adopt, as no carnal
human worship is implied in Islam. Islam may not have been contradictory to
their dualist beliefs and may also have offered a safety from persecution.
Although not free from strife and the military campaigns of feudal society—nor
from the literalness of religious belief—the plurality, multi-ethnicity, and
sophistication of the medieval Muslim world could absorb them.
The
Albigensian Crusade was a catalyst in the creation and institutionalization of
the medieval Inquisition as well as the Dominican Order. As we mentioned
earlier, itinerant musicians had to navigate all of the wars nobles waged over
land and dominion, and had to survive through ideological zones of favored or
persecuted beliefs. It seems that whoever is in power creates their own
ideological cleansing devices, and the culture workers have to navigate through
them.
Alfonzo X, el Sabio,
“The Wise,” and the Music
One of the most comprehensive manuscripts on medieval music,
The Cantigas de
Santa Maria, was commissioned, and possibly
partly composed by, Alfonso X (1221-1284).
Petersen (2006) the web page: A list of the works commissioned by Alfonso X beautifully articulates the collaborative quality of many
experts involved in the creation of the manuscript:
A large staff of by and large anonymous
musicians, scribes, calligraphers and artists was employed to compile and
illustrate the manuscripts, inscribe the captions that explain the scenes
depicted in the individual panels, and provide the musical accompaniment and
its notation. Each facet of the multimedia opus was a collaborative
undertaking. Alfonso, who considered himself a “trovador,” seems to have taken
immense pride in his musical ability. It is thought that as well as being
placed on display, the Cantigas were likely performed, thus reaching a wider
audience.
Alfonso X’s song cycle cannot be
overestimated as a unique and beautiful codex which is both a treasury of
poetics in Galician and a piece of nonverbal, documentary material evidence of
medieval music culture. The codex’s illustrations show Arab, Jewish, and
Christian musicians performing together on a remarkable variety of instruments.
It is a celebration of diversity, vitality, and mastery of professional—and
probably itinerant—musicians. Petersen (2007),
also beautifully describes the musical
qualities of the manuscript:
A corpus of considerable artistic unity, the 430 miracles
are interspersed at regular intervals with short lyrics in praise of the
Virgin. Of the wide variety of verse forms used, the "zéjel"
predominates. The melodies derive from both sacred (western chant, mozarabic
liturgical music) and popular music, although there is a large group said to
have no relation to chant whatsoever and that can't be analyzed according to
the western modal system. This variety would seem to be attested to in the
illuminations themselves. One codex depicts seventy-odd musicians, Christian
and Moslem, playing a variety of instruments of all types (wind, string,
percussion, etc.). Much debate revolves around the debt to Arabic models and
melodies (Petersen, 2007).
We do not have room in this paper
to analyze and reflect upon the remarkable translations from Arabic into
Castilian Spanish that Alfonso X commissioned, nor on the creation of new
material he encouraged. These manuscripts were works of encyclopedic interest,
and their subjects ranged from treatises on science, medicine, mathematics,
philosophy, and astronomy, to the books on law, courtly upbringing, etiquette,
games, and music. As a lawgiver, he wisely adopted the vernacular Castilian as
a seed of Iberian national identity but kept Galician as the language of poetry
and song. He sheltered many intercultural refugees from the Albigensian
Crusade, who added to his encyclopedic and cosmopolitan court.
Menocal (2002), in her book Ornament of the World, describes particular migration patterns
that led away from the site of the Albigensian Crusade, traversed by Jewish
thinkers and other practitioners of non-traditional belief systems. Their flight
may give us a sense of what the itinerant musicians of that geography and time
had to go through:
A
rich mystical tradition thrived among the communities of Jews who lived on
either side of the Pyrenees and who shared the vernacular often referred to as Provencal. During the eleventh and twelfth centuries,
this land, with its intimate ties to the still-Arabized Christian courts of
Catalonia and Aragon, had been the breathing ground of a whole stable of
institutional misfits. This was the native land of the first generation of
poets who attempted to replace Latin as a literary language with the vernacular
that within a few years would be poetically dubbed langue d’oc, “the language of yes.”
Young Alfonso X, by associating with and sheltering this
type of intellectual and artist, was,
unknowingly, alienating his court from the mainstream of the Roman Church.
Menocal helps articulate the relationship of Jewish Kabbalists to the
Albigensians:
It [the Occitan territory] was also the seat of the Jewish mystics and
esotericists we call kabbalist.
Culturally they were much like their Andalusian brethren, but spiritually they
were at odds with the Andalusians’ intellectual and philosophical visions of
faith. This “land of yes” seemed to specialize in nay-saying, and it was also
the breeding ground of the Cathar, or Albigensian, heresy, the resolutely
Manichean “Church of the Purified” that Rome began to come down on heavily by
the mid-twelfth century.
As he was doing with the church, Alfonso X was also possibly
alienating himself from established Jewish institutions flourishing in cities
like Toledo, which later turned against him. Menocal continues:
Prominent
among those who emigrated to the more congenial atmosphere of Oc-speaking
Catalonia, whose vernacular tongue was barely distinguishable from that spoken
just to the north of the Pyrenees, were Jews among whom Kabbalah had been
cultivated for years, alongside Cathars and troubadours alike. In places like
Gerona, a town no more than 120 miles from Cathar strongholds such as Toulouse,
and much closer to many smaller towns–all left ravaged in the last years of the
Albigensian Crusade.
By comparison (and without having enough historic material
at the moment to review possible contrasting theories), we can only openly
hypothesize that Alfonso X’s association with Arab wandering musicians was not
always pleasing to the institutionalized Islamic circles in Iberia either, as
they sided with his opponents toward the end of his life. Previously we cited
an example of that attitude when writing about the proto-Troubadour Ibn Hazm
(994-1064) and his book, The Ring of the
Dove. Music, devotional or secular, was not universally favored by all
clerics and had a very delicate relationship to established Islam, although
some Arab, and later Ottoman, courts encouraged and cultivated a music culture.
If not in the courts, then the institution of the caravanserai, the roadside inn, was a place of music making and the
exchange of songs.
Directly or indirectly, music,
musicians, and music centers may have been Alfonso X’s deep connection to the
kingdom of Morocco. This may have been the root of
his alliance with Abu Yusuf Yakub, the ruling Marinid sultan of Morocco, an
alliance which led to Alfonso X’s denouncement as an enemy of the faith by the church. Alfonso X, as a musician, may
have gravitated towards Morocco as would the fellow Troubadours of the
next generation, such as St. Francis of Assisi and Ramon Lull, in their
pre-conversion days. Were they looking for, and trying to connect to, a musical
tradition and schooling available there, rather than seeking any outwardly
religious or ideological movement?
The Iberia of Alfonso X gives us
a context to understand the precarious position of individual cultural workers
and groups of master performers, and may help us reflect and shed light on
itinerancy as a means of preserving cultural identity against spasms of ethnic
cleansing.
To contextualize further, in
closing this chapter, we shall recapitulate briefly the career of Alfonso X,
the Wise. He was the King of Castille, León, and Galicia from 1252 until his
death in 1284. He also was elected German King in 1257. He was the eldest son
of Ferdinand III of Castille and Elisabeth of Hohenstaufen, a daughter of
emperor Philip of Swabia. This gave him claim to the linage of Swabian Kings
and led to his becoming the Holy Roman Emperor in 1257.
As the king of the Germans, he
presumed to be entitled to the support of the
Roman Church. The title of the Holy Roman
Emperor triggered his vision of himself as a pan-European ruler, and this
ambition took him out of his Iberian wisdom into a political arena beyond his
means. As an aristocrat he did not understand the importance of a prosperous
middle class and peasantry, and he taxed them ruinously.
So, from the protector of
diversity, intellectual freedom, and a patron of the synthesis of Arab, Jewish,
and Christian art and thought, Alfonso X inadvertently became one of the early
catalysts for ethnic cleansing and religious fanaticism in late medieval and
Renaissance Spain. Not only the itinerant musicians, but also whole groups of
people—the ones who could not change their tune—had to move on and resettle in
another part of the Mediterranean.
Conquest and Exile: Migratory Patterns
The historic dynamics of the Iberian Peninsula are
exemplified by the cultural climate and politics of Alfonso X. This land,
wedged between Africa and Europe, the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean,
prospered in the Middle Ages through its connection to the Arab world’s
understanding of the sailing conditions of the Indian Ocean.
The geo-pulse between the Indian Ocean and Mediterranean Sea was
expressed through trade cycles and routes, and gave birth to the refinements of
the pre-Inquisition era and culture of early medieval Europe. The more
documented geo-pulse that occurred between
the Atlantic and Mediterranean during the Renaissance and the Age of Discovery
brought about new migratory patterns and resettlements of great numbers of
people.
Lunde (2005), whom we quoted in the previous section on Mediterranean
trade in the Middle Ages, writes about the
1415 Portuguese capture of Ceuta, on the Moroccan coast opposite Gibraltar. He
continues by saying that Ceuta was the port from which the Muslim invasion of
Spain had been launched in 711; its capture marked the beginning of the
Portuguese push around Africa that culminated in the discovery of the sea route
to India:
Azurara, the official chronicler of the capture of Ceuta,
painted a glowing picture of the town, which he called “the key to the whole
Mediterranean Sea.” The city astonished the Portuguese soldiers, who were
amazed at its fine houses, the gold, silver and jewels in the markets and the
cosmopolitan population. They saw men “from Ethiopia, Alexandria, Syria,
Barbary, Assyria… as well as those from the Orient who lived on the other side
of the Euphrates River, and from the Indies.” Azurara clearly states that one
of the motives of the expedition was to seize control of the African gold
trade: Forty years later, with the establishment of the fortress of São Jorge
da Mina on the Guinea coast, 25 to 35 percent of the gold that had formerly
made its way across the Sahara to North African markets and to Mamluk Egypt now
passed into the hands of the Portuguese instead.
Pearson (2007), in his article “Ceuta
and Melilla—Two Spaniards in Africa,” writes:
There are two small places in North Africa, within Moroccan
boundaries, situated on the northern coast of the Maghreb, on the southern
coast of the Mediterranean Sea, Ceuta and Melilla, that to you and me seem like
integral geographical parts of the Kingdom of Morocco, when in fact they aren’t.
They actually belong to Spain. Ceuta and Melilla are two Spanish exclaves in
North Africa.
A contemporary musician arriving with a guitar or cora, an instrument resembling a lyre,
at the border of those two towns, besieged by immigration requests, may find it
more difficult to enter than a troubadour of the Middle Ages who may have
gained entry simply by demonstrating his mastery.
Pearson (2007) describes how,
after re-conquest of the last bastion of Al-Andaluz—Granada—Spain decided in
1497 that the Port of Melilla in North Africa would be of extreme strategic
importance. Melilla was taken in retaliation for the long occupation of Spain.
Strategically important, Ceuta had a different history: A Portuguese town from 1415-1580,
the Spanish acquired it after Spain’s King Felipe II succeeded to the throne of
Portugal in 1580. Both cities were free ports before 1986 when Spain joined the
European Union. Pearson continues:
The Government of Morocco has called for the integration of
Ceuta and Melilla, along with uninhabited islands such as Isla Perejil, into
its national territory, making references to Spain’s territorial claim to
Gibraltar. But the Spanish government, and both Ceuta’s and Melilla’s
autonomous governments and inhabitants, reject such a comparison on the grounds
that both, Ceuta and Melilla, are integral parts of the Spanish state.
We include these territorial examples not for reasons of
forwarding an opinion of right and wrong about geopolitics, but to point to
remnants and contradictions of the very large migratory patterns of displaced
peoples. The land, with its chain of displacements, may carry contradictory
memories for the different populations that inhabit it. Reflecting on the
displacement of people in a paper on the dynamics of musical migrations may
help us understand a bit more about the issues of resulting cultural
preservation, shifts of values, tensions, and the collective pain that
ethnic and political refugees experience
and hold.
Thessalonica
The history of Thessalonica in northern Greece is a poignant
example of shifts of population. Stefanos (2004), in his web article Thessaloniki, talks about the city’s
survival. After giving the list of invaders, such as Crusaders, Normans,
Saracens, Slavs, Avars, Catalans, he writes: “Byzantine Thessaloniki flourished
in spite of wars in the region. Its population exceeded 100,000 inhabitants in
the middle of the 12th century.”
Stefanos continues by listing looting, massacres, enslavement, and deportations
that occurred in 1430 when the Ottoman Turks occupied Thessalonica, resulting
in a mass exodus and desertion of the city.
The city’s population fled deeper into Macedonia, and there
appear to be a number of families and groups of people there today who trace
their history to the devastation of Thessalonica. As elsewhere in the Balkans,
the national identities of certain populations is largely based on the shift of
power from the Byzantine Empire to the Ottoman Empire, who ruled the Balkans
afterward for five hundred years.
Lord (2000), in his The
Singer of Tales, a seminal research on epic oral singing carried out
in1933-35 in the Balkans, reminds us indirectly of a relationship of heroic
song to national identities—from as far back as Homer’s characters to insurgent
heroes of Ottoman Empire. Most of the
heroic oral songs mirror the profound articulations of Stănilă (2006) in The Myth Of The Rebel Hero: Identity Issues
In The Balkans:
The courage and exemplarity of otherwise marginal heroes stand for
their irrepressible desire to experience the center, under the guise of a
permanent revolt that gave birth to the prototype of the rebel hero.
All of this identity strife, particularly since 19th
century western European interest in Mediterranean hegemony, paints the Ottoman
Empire as unsophisticated and brutal, in a way very similar to the portrayal and
memory of Arab Spain after the re-conquest.
Like any other large society, the Ottoman Empire was a complex intercultural
system, where violence was counterbalanced by the amenities of urban life and
the patronage of the arts and sciences, along with a certain level of
inter-religious coexistence.
But the wound would not heal, and Thessalonica declined for
almost sixty years after the Ottoman conquest of 1430. The next sultan, Bayezid
II, invited a whole new group of people to settle in Thessalonica—Jewish
refugees from Spain—who brought prosperity to the city for the next four
hundred years.
Ojalvo (2005) in the commemorative
book of the Quincentennial Foundation of Istanbul, writes of the pressure the
Catholic church placed on Ferdinand and Isabella, forcing them in 1492 to sign
the Alhambra Decree, which expelled the Jews from Spain. Ojalvo continues:
The last lot of Jews gathered in the port of
Cadiz faced a dilemma: Those who left port were attacked by the pirates, those
who went on land were burned at the stake by the inquisition. About a thousand
people waited in anguish. At the last minute arrived a small fleet manned by
the Turkish admiral Kemal Reis, who took the refugees under his protection,
thus organizing a convoy of Jewish immigrants towards the Ottoman empire.
Musicologists
and eminent practitioners of early Spanish music, such as Jordi Savall, have
traveled to Izmir, Sarajevo, Fez, and Thessalonica, seeking songs from the once
rich Arab-Andalusian music tradition of the Iberian Peninsula (La Lira d’Esperia, CD.1995)
So we could summarize with the thought that nearly anywhere where
there are crowds of refugees, long lines of deportees and stranded migrants,
there is, over and over again, someone—often an anonymous musician, with or
without an instrument—beguiling the crowd. In the theater piece Tarantella,
Tarantula (Paich, 2006), about Italian immigration to America at the turn
of the 19th and 20th centuries, the main character is one such anonymous
musician. The narrator describes her like this:
On the ship, Giovannina assisted passengers who were seasick. She also helped clean the steerage quarters from vomit and the mess left after meals. There were so many rats on board. Giovannina also lifted their spirits by singing familiar songs as she did back home in the village square. She had a special gift: not only to understand the needs of the individuals, but she could read and console a familiar crowd with the right song for the moment.
Conclusion
Two days ago, [17 August 2007] Spanish
mountaineers met a 27-year old immigrant from Mali at an altitude of 3,392 m in
the Spanish Sierra Nevada, near Granada, Andalucía. When they reported the
young man to the police, he had already climbed up to 3,428 m before he was
found and arrested by the Spanish Guardia Civil. He had no food or water
provisions with him. He stands a good chance of being deported, back to Africa
(Pearson, 2007).
This piece of contemporary news
about the unbelievable individual achievement of an informal representative of
his people, an inadvertent explorer and survivor, may help us imagine the
achievements of itinerant musicians, as well as other travelers and explorers
throughout Mediterranean history.
The Umayyad prince Abd al-Rahman
I, the Falcon of Andaluse (731-788), was the only survivor of the royal
massacre in Damascus. He escaped and traveled for four years until he reached
his relatives in Morocco and Spain. There, he claimed his domain and fathered
one of the most advanced cultures in the Mediterranean basin at that time.
It may have bean equally
unbelievable to see a traveler from Constantinople, with a small kamase, a predecessor of the violin,
playing in the evening at some roadside in Provance, far away from his intended
destination, in search of an aristocratic patron, hoping to be invited to
someone’s home. Or equally disconcerting: the presence of a European
Troubadour, such as St. Francis, singing at the gates of Damascus until he
sings the sultan’s or guards’ favorite song, and is received. Perhaps he
learned it on his travels through Spain a few years earlier.
Now let us look at the
transmigration of music from another angle. The album from Tekameli, Chants Religieux Gitans, is a recording
of the contemporary religious singing of Roma People [Gypsies] from Perpignan
in the south of France. The insert’s text describes their relationship to the
language they sing in:
The usual language of the Gitans of
Perpignan is Catalan. Spanish is usually the language reserved for music
(French is used to communicate to ‘payos’ [non Gypsies] who do not speak
Catalan). The members of the Espinas–Cargol family [Tekameli], following the
Gitan tradition, use Spanish to sing, yet Spanish is almost a foreign language
to them (Escudero, Bertrand, Moreno & Beattie G. 2008).
This
contemporary example, from the same general geography of the Troubadours, is an
illustration of the migration of music, ideas, and linguistic conventions. It
is reminiscent of Alfonso X, proclaiming Galician, a close relative of Occitan,
‘a language of poetry.’ In the same way, Spanish, in the case of the
contemporary Roma singers in France, has become the lingua franca of art and devotion. The music of Tekameli combines Arab-Andaluse devotional
inflections, which survive in Flamenco with Catalan Rumba and Cuban Salsa, and
folds these modalities into the religious songs of French Gypsies who sing in
Spanish. Their passionate, sensuous music is a living example of transmigration and the adaptability of
music as a cultural phenomenon.
The paradox of sensuality in some religious devotional
songs to the saints—in particular Mary—and the de-materialization and idealization
of love songs directed towards a real or imaginary lover is a central pivot for
reflecting upon the role of itinerant musicians in Mediterranean cultures and
culture in general. The musicians can be described almost as messengers of
fecundity and as carriers of solace for the yearning and brooding of human
complexities
.
C. G. Jung, who
was both a medical doctor and a psychologist, explored these same tensions of concrete, manifested, and sublimated expression when describing
the work of the itinerant medic, the father of modern medicine, Paracelsus:
Paracelsus carefully avoids the
ecclesiastical terminology and uses instead an esoteric language, which is
extremely difficult to decipher, for the obvious purpose of segregating the
‘natural’ transformation mystery from the religious one and effectively
concealing it from prying eyes (Jung, 1983).
Jung continues to reflect on how
Paracelsus’ work was in some way opposed to the established religious
understanding of mystery, because the
ambiguities of Eros were also included in it. In the same paragraph he
continues:
…a more cogent motive was his experience as
a physician who had to deal with man as he is and not as he should be, and
biologically speaking, never can be. Many questions are put to a doctor which
he cannot honestly answer with ‘should’ but only from his knowledge and
experience of nature (Jung, 1983).
The lyrics of the
Troubadours and Trouveres may, in the same way, carry messages from the
authors’ deeply sensual, or conventionally religious personal experiences.
Their aesthetic grew beyond both the vernacular love song and the devotional
ecclesiastic one, and pointed in both directions: from vernacular to sacred,
and from sublimated to real.
Our final
example may plunge us into some of the complexities we have touched upon before
and help us make some concluding open-ended observations.
Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer,
in the south of France, is situated at the estuary where the Rhone meets the
Mediterranean. The town is like a miniature medieval sister, perhaps a port of
call for ships from Alexandria or Tyre, or a smugglers’ enclave, on the other
side of the Mediterranean world.
The town, with
its fortified Romanesque church, is home to three sculptures depicting
political refugees of high rank: survivors of an expulsion and a perilous
journey. After the crucifixion of Christ and disappearance of his body from the
tomb, it is believed—particularly by the Roma people—that Mary Magdalene,
Marie-Salome, Marie-Jacobe, Lazarus, and several other disciples were forced,
in 45 AD, to flee Palestine by boat, crossing the Mediterranean Sea.
They landed near the present-day
village of Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer (Marre, 1992). Marie-Salome and
Marie-Jacobe, became, in time, worshiped by the local people and pilgrims,
while Mary Magdalene was celebrated in the environs of Marseille. But in
Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer there is a third sculpture, of Sara-la-Kali, venerated by the gypsy pilgrims every year.
Not much is known about the black
Egyptian woman represented by the sculpture. Each year on May 24 and 25, the
three statues of the women, those strangers from far across the sea, become the
destination of the ‘Pilgrimage of the Gypsies’ (Marre, 1992). Marre, describes
the ceremony:
As a dozen nationalities from all over
Europe accompanied the service with music and song, an ornately painted box was
lowered from the church roof, containing the remnants of Saint Sarah, gypsy
patron saint of travel. To gypsies, she is known as Sara the Egyptian, because
they believe she traveled here from Egypt. A huge queue formed to touch and
kiss the face of the black Madonna. As the box was slowly lowered by ropes in
the congregation, their hands reached up above the flickering candles to touch
and be blessed by her presence. In Romany, her name is not, in fact, Sara
the Egyptian but Black One or Kali. Kali is the name of the
Indian Goddess of time [sic] (Marre, 1992).
In the continuum from goddess to
real woman and back, the adoration and act of being adored is probably an
important part of culture making, a motivator. Maybe our collective poetic,
symbolizing capacities are ignited by, and make elaborations for, Eros’s sake.
The enduring need for, and power of, music and sung poetry energizes the
fertility of both imagination and biology. Fashion is an example of poetic
elaborations for Eros’s sake. The symbol and sign-making faculty of humans is, possibly,
a response to a primal need for the creation of a shared, tangible—but also
intangible—space of cultural experience.
William Hans Mille, the author of
The Symbolic Species: The Co-Evolution of
Language and the Brain, reviews the work of the UCLA neuro-anatomist and
psychologist Harry Jerison, where he writes:
The more we understand about the nature and origin of our symbolic
capacities, he claims, the better we can regulate our enormous cognitive
potential. He [Jerison] wrote his ‘mystery novel,’ as he calls it, with this
goal of increasing our understanding about how symbol reference and language
came about, and ultimately, of who we are (Mille, 1997).
The Troubadour paradox of singing
both to a symbolic and to a real lady is, possibly, a glimpse and approach
toward understanding the essential human desire for continuity. This desire is
not only for the continuity of biology, progeny, and the species, but is also a
desire for the continuity of the elusive cognitive and symbolizing elements—the
very elements that characterize the existence of language and consciousness.
This needs for continuity of all
the aspects of human existence—the body and the
yearning soul—manifest as culture. In return, the culture contains
aspirations, drives, and the finest expressions. The fin d’amour of the
Troubadours is an example. In spite of, and in contrast to, an atmosphere
of continuous strife and war, this process of culture-continuing allows for a development of ideas within some
kind of agreed upon stability—even if that stability lasts only for a
generation, or manifests in a single geographic area.
Significant aspects of this
process are the songs and dances, and their continuity through the transmigration of music—from musician to
musician, place to place, from one century to the next. And in the end,
everyone in the world, professional or lay, has a favorite song—and some can
even sing it. The Mediterranean has been an intriguing and fascinating field
for all of these confluences to mutate, mature, contradict, flourish, and
continue.
