In his Truth and Method, Hans-Georg Gadamer argues that during the Enlightenment period, under the influence of Kantian ethics and aesthetics, European intellectuals came to understand aesthetic judgment, or “taste,” as something other than “truth.” Kant, Gadamer continues, legitimated a subjective universality of aesthetic taste that was devoid of any true knowledge of the object. In doing so, he made it impossible to acknowledge the truth claims of the “human sciences.” The consequences of this move, Gadamer points out, were far-reaching, removing all bodies of knowledge not based on “natural science” methodology from the domain of objective knowledge and casting them into the realm of subjective opinion. What is important for Gadamer here is the catastrophic impact of Kant’s analysis on the veracity of ethical truth claims. For me, however, what is interesting is its implications for aesthetic judgment itself. It meant that, for instance, aesthetic judgments about good and bad music – consonance and dissonance – were no longer statements of truth and by extension, no longer scientific. Rather, consonance and dissonance – and music in general – became matters of subjective opinion. For the medieval scholars whose works I have examined in this book, however, Kantian analysis meant nothing. Free from its restrictions, they understood music to be science, and aesthetic judgments of consonance and dissonance to be valid truth claims. At the outset of this book, I posed a series of questions about medieval Islamic understandings of science. Now that I have concluded my examination, it is pertinent to provide answers to those questions.

Chapter 5 starts with the definitions of the note and the acoustics of sound production. Here, I first examine the acoustical underpinnings of the classical Greek writings on the subject and the impact they had on how the musical note was conceptualized. I then demonstrate that scholars of the medieval Islamic world approached their received wisdom with a skeptical eye and occasionally disagreed with their intellectual masters. These disagreements resulted in illuminating conversations about the nature of a musical note, how it should be differentiated from mere sound, and what role do acoustics of sound production play in these discussions.

Chapter 1 will examine the ontological and epistemological questions surrounding music in the knowledge system of the medieval Islamic world by exploring the philosophical system of Ibn Sina and his later followers, all of whose works laid the foundations for scholars of music in the centuries to come. In particular, I will address how mathematics was conceptualized vis-à-vis the cosmology of the falsafa tradition as the discipline that examined the existents whose existence was dependent on physical matter but could be conceptualized without the said matter. Through this conceptualization of music and mathematics, scholars of music were able to broaden their subject matter to cover topics from the melodic modes in vogue in their time to the poetics of music. At the same time, since everything in the universe was connected to one another, music was linked with many other scientific disciplines such as astronomy and medicine.

Chapter 6 discusses the definitions of ratios and intervals as different ways of conceptualizing the relationship between musical notes. Here, the author’s main interest lies in the two different ways in which the ancient Greek scholars of music, the Pythagoreans and the Aristoxenians, conceptualized the relationship between any given two notes. While the former understood notes as equal to numbers and thus conceptualized the relationship in the form of a numerical ratio, the latter understood them as points on a continuum and thus perceived the relationship as a geometrical distance between the two points on a scale. A third group of Greek scholars, the later Neoplatonic scholars, tried to reconcile the two approaches into a synthesis. It was this synthesis that Islamic scholars inherited during the medieval period.

Chapter 7 will examine the question of consonance and dissonance of musical ratios and intervals in the medieval Islamic world and the growing importance of the human soul in the discussions pertaining to this question. The Pythagoreans, having conceptualized the relationship between two notes as a numerical ratio, insisted that the key to consonance and dissonance lay in the mathematical neatness of these ratios. The Aristoxenians, however, insisted that consonance and dissonance were a matter of human experience. A third group of synthesizers emerged that aimed at reconciling the two approaches: Neoplatonic philosophers. Inheriting the works of these philosophers, scholars of music in the Islamic world set about the task of explaining the mechanisms of apprehension of consonance by human ears according to mathematical rules. In this process, the role of the soul as the link between humanity and the cosmos – with its mathematical underpinnings – gradually grew in emphasis.

Chapter 3 will look into the sociocultural and intellectual conditions of Baghdad before and after the Mongol conquest of the city in 656/1258 as the locus of the production of al-Urmawi’s treatises on music. While not dismissing the damage that the city suffered during the conquest, this chapter will focus on the impact of the arrival of the newcomers on Baghdad’s intellectual environment. In particular, I will focus on the role of the Juwayni family, the rulers of the city in lieu of the Mongols as well as al-Urmawi’s patrons, in reviving the scientific spirit of the Baghdadi society.

Chapter 2 will begin by emphasizing the role of elite patrons in the production of educational treatises on the science of music. The chapter will then provide an analysis of the relationship between learning the science of music, and musical practice, including performance, poetic skills, and listening to music. After providing some medieval philosophical arguments regarding the necessity of learning the science of music in order to better appreciate music performance, the chapter pivots toward presenting the sociocultural benefits of learning the science itself, especially among the elite of the city of Baghdad between third/ninth–seventh/thirteenth centuries. Through aphorisms and entertaining anecdotes by famous Baghdadi literati such as Ibn Khurdadhbih, al-Sarakhsi, and al-Tawhidi, I demonstrate how knowledge about music – as opposed to art-music itself – was used by the elite as a social currency to gain access to certain social circles that would have otherwise remained inaccessible to them.

Chapter 4 considers another major actor in the learning of musical knowledge, besides the patrons: professional scholars. While it is true that musical treatises were for the most part commissioned for the elites, once a text was out in the market, anyone with an interest in the subject and a small amount of money in their pocket could acquire a copy. Professional scholars pursued music as a part of their training in mathematics. I center my discussion around the studies of one such scholar of music at the madrasa of Mustansiriyya, who was a student of al-Urmawi himself. I analyze a rare manuscript that contains marginal notes written by this scholar who studied the subject matter under the master. This rare manuscript grants us a unique perspective into how scholars actually went about learning their subject matter.

Widely considered to be an art today, music in the medieval Islamic world was categorized as a branch of the mathematical sciences; in fact, some philosophers and scholars of music went as far as linking music with medicine and astrology as part of an interconnected web of cosmological knowledge. Focusing on the science of music this book discusses how a non-European premodern intellectual tradition – in this case, the Islamic philosophical tradition – conceptualized science. Furthermore, it explores how this intellectual tradition produced “correct” scientific statements and how it envisioned science’s relationship with other bodies of knowledge. Finally, it investigates what made music a science in the medieval Islamic world by examining the ontological debates surrounding the nature of music as a scientific discipline as well as the epistemological tools and techniques that contributed to the production of musical knowledge during the medieval period (third/ninth–ninth/fifteenth centuries).