al- Kindī

Abū Yūsuf Ya‘qūb al-Kindī was an Arab philosopher and theorist, a central figure in the early development of Islamic philosophy. He lived towards the end of the eighth century and the middle of the ninth (his dates of birth and death are given as approximate, as they are not known with certainty). His output covers a very wide range of subjects, and among them are several treatises on music, at least five of which have survived.

His father was governor of Kufa, and he was educated in Basra, a very active intellectual centre at the time. During the caliphates of al-Ma’mūn and al-Mu‘taṣim he became associated with the Abbasid court in Baghdad, where he came into contact with the scholars who were rendering Greek philosophical works into Arabic. Because of his interest in the Aristotelian, Neoplatonic and Pythagorean traditions, his writings on music are eclectic and address a wider range of topics than those of many later authors.

In analysing intervals and scales, he drew on Greek concepts such as the Greater Perfect System, but he expounded them by means of the strings and frets of the ‘ūd, the short-necked lute characteristic of the Arab tradition. Unlike other theorists, he did not regard the lute as a mere aid to theoretical demonstration: he described its construction in considerable detail and offered a kind of verbal tablature for an elementary exercise. On the other hand, he did not explicitly relate his scales to the modes of his own time, and he treated melody in an abstract manner, using images such as the ‘spiral’ or the ‘braid’. His definitions of rhythmic cycles, brief and somewhat elliptical, appear to be based on the musical practice of his day.

Another field of interest was musical cosmology, in which he established correspondences between numbers and phenomena such as the humours, the elements, the seasons and the cardinal points, assigned to the strings of the lute. This line of thought was followed by the Brethren of Purity (Ikhwān al-Ṣafā’) and by several later authors, while other theorists abandoned it.