Thomas Binkley and the Studio der Fruhen Musik: challenging 'the myth of Westernness'

Abstract

ARGUABLY the most unusual and acclaimed of the performances by Thomas Binkley and the Studio der Frühen Musik in the 1960s and early 1970s were those of songs from the Carmina Burana manuscript and troubadour and trouvère chansonniers.1 These performances developed the Studio's signature ‘Arabic style’ through the use of ‘oriental’ instruments, Arab-inflected ornamentation and embellishment of musical lines, and the use of elaborate instrumental improvisations and accompaniments following Arab-Andalusian traditions still at work in North Africa.2 The Studio's justification for incorporating Arabic musical instruments and traditions hinged on knowledge that there had been Muslim rule in the Iberian peninsula for 700 years. During the Middle Ages, many formerly ‘Spanish’ cities—Seville, Toledo, Granada and Cordoba among others—had been sites of a flourishing Arabic culture. And Al-Andalus, the Muslims’ term for their Spanish territory, soon became a region where Arabic culture was the dominant, prestige culture. Orientalists, Arabists and Hispanists had long argued that cultural interaction between Arabs in Spain and Caucasians in France and Italy was fostered by the travelling and migration of peoples from and into different regions, and that Arab musicians had interacted with non-Arab musicians in Spain and beyond, spreading Arabic poetic forms and musical instruments.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 13 citations exist upstream.