Safī al-Dīn

Safī al-Dīn al-Urmawī (died in Baghdad in 1294) is one of the most important figures in Islamic music theory. He was the first major theorist after Ibn Sīnā (980–1037) and Ibn Zayla (d. 1048) whose works have survived intact. Probably of Azerbaijani origin, his career spanned the final years of the Abbasid caliphate and Mongol rule.

He first made his name as a calligrapher, but he soon became a notable musician at the court of the last Abbasid caliph, al-Musta'sim (1242–1258). He survived the sack of Baghdad in 1258 and entered the service of the Mongol Ilkhans, attaching himself to the Juwaynī family. After that family fell from favour in 1286 he lost royal patronage and died imprisoned for debt. No further details about the circumstances of his death are known with certainty.

His two treatises, the Kitāb al-adwār ("Book of Cycles") and the later and more extensive Risāla al-sharafiyya ("The Sharafian Treatise"), synthesised earlier tradition and dominated thought for the next two centuries. His most influential contribution was a scale system derived from a division into tetrachords attributed to al-Fārābī and applied to the frets of the tunbūr jurāsānī. It integrated the neutral intervals of practice into a symmetrical extension of the Pythagorean scale, allowing them to be approximated to just intervals. He divided the octave into 17 intervals, although its relationship to actual intonation is in some respects indirect.

He offered a complete list of the twelve shudūd and six āwāzāt, and described two further modes derived from some of them. This is the first occasion on which the modal system of Islamic art music was studied in detail.

His scope was deliberately limited: he did not treat musical form or instruments, although he is credited with inventing the nuzha and the mughnī, and he removed from his Kitāb al-adwār a section on the tuning of the qānūn and the jank. His notation examples are brief and illustrate technique rather than transcribe representative works.

His treatment of rhythm, perhaps less original than his work on scales, was equally influential: he described the rhythmic cycles in use through inherited syllabic definitions and represented them with circles. As a composer he enjoyed great renown; one of his songs was noted down by Qutb al-Dīn, and his pupils disseminated many of his compositions, numerous in the cyclic nawba form. His fame endured, as attested by the collections of song texts from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that attribute works to him.