(b ?c801; d ?c866). Arab philosopher and theorist. He was a figure of great importance in the early development of Islamic philosophy. His father was the governor of Kufa, and he was educated at Basra, a lively intellectual centre at the time. During the reigns of al-Ma’mūn (818–33) and al-Mu‘tasim (833–42) he was attached to the Abbasid court in Baghdad, coming into close contact with the scholars who were beginning to make Greek philosophical works available in Arabic. Known as the ‘philosopher of the Arabs’, he was a prolific author with wide-ranging interests, and his works include a number of short treatises on music, at least five of which have survived. Reflecting his general receptiveness to the Aristotelian, neo-Platonic and Pythagorean traditions, they are eclectic in approach and cover a rather wider range of subjects than many later writings.
His analysis of intervals and scales uses Greek concepts such as the Greater Perfect System, but the presentation is in terms of strings and frettings on the indigenous ‘ūd (short-necked lute), a pattern followed by all the other major theorists. Unlike them, however, he did not regard the lute as a mere adjunct to theoretical demonstration, and he also provided both a fairly detailed description of it and the verbal equivalent of a tablature for an elementary exercise. No explicit link is made between the scale structures he presents and the contemporary modes, and melody is discussed in the abstract, invoking visual images such as ‘spiral’ and ‘braid’; on the other hand, current practice is evidently the source for his pioneering, but brief and somewhat elliptical, definitions of rhythmic cycles.
Another important area of concern for al-Kindī was musical cosmology. In this he was to be followed by the Ikhwān al-Safā’ and several later writers, but other important theorists tended to downgrade or ignore the topic. He laid emphasis on sets of associations in which number and numerical relationships provided the chief common factors. On to the four strings of the lute were mapped sets of four such as humours, elements, seasons and points of the compass as well as more arbitrary selections from disparate phenomena such as colours and perfumes.
Al-risāla al-kubrā fī al-ta’līf [Grand treatise on composition]; ed. Z.
Yūsuf in Mu’allafāt al-Kindī al-mūsīqiyya [Al-Kindī’s musical works]
(Baghdad, 1962)
Mukhtasar al-mūsīqī fī ta’līf al-nagham wa-san ‘at al-‘ūd [Summary on music with regard to the composition of melodies and lute making] (MS, D-B 5531); ed. Z. Yūsuf (Baghdad, 1962); ed. A. Shiloah: ‘Un ancien traité sur le ‘ūd d’Abū Yūsuf al-Kindī’, Israel Oriental Studies, iv (1974), 179–205
Risāla fī ajzā’ khabariyya fī al-mūsīqī [Treatise in informative sections on the theory of music] (MS, D-B 5503); ed. Z. Yūsuf (Baghdad, 1962)
Risāla fī al-luhūn wa-’l-nagham [Treatise on melodies and notes]; ed. Z. Yūsuf (Baghdad, 1965)
Risāla fī khubr sinā‘at al-ta’līf [Treatise concerning inner knowledge of the art of composition] (MS, GB-Lbl Oriental 2361, fol. 165–8); ed. C. Cowl: ‘The Risāla fī hubr ta’līf al-alhan of Ja‘qūb ibn Ishāq al-Kindī’, The Consort, no.23 (1966), 129–66, ed. Y. Shawqī with Eng. trans. (Cairo, 1969)
EI2 (J. Jolivet and R. Rashid)
H.G. Farmer: Sa’adyah Gaon on the Influence of Music (London, 1943), 17ff
B. Reinert: ‘Das Problem des pythagoräischen Kommas in der arabischen Musiktheorie’, Asiatische Studien, xxxiii (1979), 199–217
E. Neubauer: ‘Der Bau der Laute und ihre Besaitung nach arabischen, persischen und türkischen Quellen des 9. bis 15. Jahrhunderts’, Zeitschrift für Geschichte der arabisch-islamischen Wissenschaften, viii (1993), 279–378
E. Neubauer: ‘Die acht “Wege” der Musiklehre und der Oktoechos’, Zeitschrift für Geschichte der arabisch-islamischen Wissenschaften, ix (1994), 373–414
O. WRIGHT