(Arab.: ‘happy noise’, ‘song’; Sp. zéjel).
A kind of strophic song with refrain (see Arab music, §II, 3(ii)). This use of the word goes back at least as far as the 12th century, being found in the zajal texts of Ibn Quzmān (d 1160); it probably originated in Muslim Spain. Since about 1912 it has been used by European scholars in discussing the origins of medieval Iberian poetry: the Mūwashshah has usually five but sometimes up to six strophes, the zajal sometimes even more. A characteristic verse form for the zajal was AA bbba ?AA, and for the mūwashshah AA bbb AA as well as others such as AB cccb AB and even extreme elaborations such as ABCABC defdefdef ABCABC. These songs differed from other early refrain songs such as the villancico in that the stanza always contained a three-line monorhyme (bbb, ccc, etc.) or other tripartite rhymes (bcbcbc, defdefdef, etc.). In the case of the zajal, both refrain and stanza were usually in vernacular Arabic, but the refrain (kharja, jarcha, etc; Arabic: ‘end-piece’) could be in corrupt Spanish. There were also, in Spain and elsewhere, Hebrew imitations of zajal verse forms. Ribera’s thesis (see Cantiga) that these types of songs served as early models for Iberian and other European refrain songs is now less favoured than the contrary view (see Le Gentil, Frenk Alatorre) that they were modelled on a form of refrain song pre-existent in Europe. In either case, they provide vital evidence of an early type of traditional or troubadouresque song. Early sources suggest that zajal music did not always correspond in scheme to the verse form. The oldest surviving music in zajal form comes from the 13th-century Cantigas de Santa María of Alfonso el Sabio, though extant texts of other poems date from the 11th century. Most (about 360) of these cantigas are in rhyme schemes of zajal type such as AA bbba AA, AA bcbcbcba AA, AB aaab AB, ABAB cccb ABAB, etc., yet only a few (e.g. nos.8, 27, 86, 88 and 96) could be said to be in musical forms (such as AB AAAB AB and ABCD CDCDADCD ABCD) bearing any resemblance to zajal rhyme schemes; most are set as virelais (AB CCAB AB, etc.). However, of some 70 poems in zajal form in the Cancionero musical de palacio (c1500), about half are set in a corresponding musical form (notably AB CCCB AB), the other half again being set as virelais or villancicos. Like the mūwashshah, the zajal survives today in oral tradition.
See also Lebanon, §III, 3.
P. Le Gentil: Le virelai et le villancico: le problème des origines arabes (Paris,1954)
J. Chailley: L'école musicale de Saint-Martial jusqu'à la fin du XIe siècle (Paris, 1960)
R.J. Taylor: Die Melodien der weltlichen Lieder des Mittelalters (Stuttgart, 1964)
J.T. Monroe: ‘The Muwashshahāt’, Collected Studies in Honour of Américo Castro's Eightieth Year, ed. M.P. Hornik (Oxford, 1965), 335–71
J. Romeu Figueras: Cancionero musical de palacio, iii/a, MME, xiv/1 (1965), 134–5, 185, 197–8
E. García Gómez, ed.: Todo Ben Quzmān (Madrid, 1972)
M. Frenk Alatorre: ‘El zéjel: ¿forma popular castellana?’, Studia iberica: Festschrift für Hans Flasche, ed. K.-H. Körner and K. Rühl (Berne and Munich, 1973), 145–58
J.M. Solá-Solé: Corpus de Poesía mozárabe: las hargas andalusíes (Barcelona,1973)
E. García Gómez: Métrica de la moaxaja y métrica española (Madrid, 1975)
S.M. Stern: Hispano-Arabic Strophic Poetry (Oxford, 1974)
R. de Zayas: ‘Musicology and the Cultural Heritage of the Spanish Moors’, Musical Repercussions of 1492: Washington DC 1988, 129–48
A. Haydar: ‘The Development of Lebanese Zajal, Genre, Metre and Verbal Duel’, Oral Tradition, iv/1–2 (1989), 189–212
J.T. Monroe: ‘Which Came First, the Zajal or the Muwashshah? Some Evidence for the Oral Origins of Hispano-Arabic Strophic Poetry’, Oral Tradition, iv/1–2 (1989), 38–64
D. Cohen and R.Katz: ‘Musico-Poetic Arabic Traditions: a Comparison between the Oral Palestinian and the Medieval Spanish’, RdMc, xvi (1993), 1917–29
O. Zwartjes, ed.: The Andalusian ‘Xarha's’: Poetry at the Crossroads of Two Spanish Systems (Nijmegen, 1995)
R. Davis: ‘Arab-Andalusian Music in Tunisia’, EMc, xxiv (1986), 423–38
Popular Music, xv/3 (1996) [Middle East issue, ed. J. Fairley, R.F. Davies and M. Stokes]
L.P. HARVEY, JACK SAGE/SUSANA FRIEDMANN