Gambia is the smallest country on the African continental mainland and is bordered to the north, east, and south by Senegal, with a small coast on the Atlantic Ocean in the west.
Flowing through the center of the country and emptying into the Atlantic Ocean is the Gambia River.
The first written accounts of the region come from records of Arab traders in the ninth and tenth centuries.
Gambia - Lambango (Harp)
The harp is a stringed instrument which has the plane of its strings positioned perpendicular to the soundboard. All harps have a neck, resonator and strings. Some, known as frame harps, also have a forepillar; those lacking the forepillar are referred to as open harps. Depending on its size (which varies considerably), a harp may be played while held in the lap or while stood on the floor. Harp strings can be made of nylon (sometimes wound around copper), gut (more commonly used than nylon), wire, or silk. A person who plays the harp is called a harpist or a harper. Folk and Celtic musicians often use the term "harper," whereas classical/pedal musicians use "harpist."
Various types of harps are found in Africa, Europe, North, and South America, and a few parts of Asia. In antiquity harps and the closely related lyres were very prominent in nearly all musical cultures.
[7820 Musica Enchiriadis / 7800 Gambia / 7800 Charlemagne]
Charlemagne (Latin: Carolus Magnus or Karolus Magnus, meaning Charles the Great) (747 – 28 January 814) was King of the Franks from 768 to his death. He expanded the Frankish kingdoms into a Frankish Empire that incorporated much of Western and Central Europe. During his reign, he conquered Italy and was crowned Imperator Augustus by Pope Leo III on 25 December 800 as a rival of the Byzantine Emperor in Constantinople. His rule is also associated with the Carolingian Renaissance, a revival of art, religion, and culture through the medium of the Catholic Church. Through his foreign conquests and internal reforms, Charlemagne helped define both Western Europe and the Middle Ages. He is numbered as Charles I in the regnal lists of France, Germany, and the Holy Roman Empire.
[France - Bombardes et Binious de Bretagne - Marches et Dans-Tro-Plin]
[Charles the Great and Pippin the Hunchback, 830]
The son of King Pippin the Short and Bertrada of Laon, he succeeded his father and co-ruled with his brother Carloman I. The latter got on badly with Charlemagne, but war was prevented by the sudden death of Carloman in 771. Charlemagne continued the policy of his father towards the papacy and became its protector, removing the Lombards from power in Italy, and waging war on the Saracens, who menaced his realm from Spain. It was during one of these campaigns that Charlemagne experienced the worst defeat of his life, at Roncesvalles (778). He also campaigned against the peoples to his east, especially the Saxons, and after a protracted war subjected them to his rule. By forcibly converting them to Christianity, he integrated them into his realm and thus paved the way for the later Ottonian dynasty.
Today he is regarded not only as the founding father of both French and German monarchies, but also as the father of Europe: his empire united most of Western Europe for the first time since the Romans, and the Carolingian renaissance encouraged the formation of a common European identity.
Pierre Riché reflects:
“ . . . he enjoyed an exceptional destiny, and by the length of his reign, by his conquests, legislation and legendary stature, he also profoundly marked the history of western Europe."
***
R[abanus Maurus (left), supported by Alcuin (middle), presents his work to Otgar of Mainz]
Alcuin of York (Latin: Alcuinus) or Ealhwine, nicknamed Albinus or Flaccus (c. 735 – May 19, 804) was a scholar, ecclesiastic, poet and teacher from York, Northumbria. He was born around 735 and became the student of Egbert at York. At the invitation of Charlemagne, he became a leading scholar and teacher at the Carolingian court, where he remained a figure at court in the 780's and 790's. He wrote many theological and dogmatic treatises, as well as a few grammatical works and a number of poems. He was made abbot of Saint Martin's at Tours in 796, where he remained until his death. He is considered among the most important architects of the Carolingian Renaissance. Among his pupils were many of the dominant intellectuals of the Carolingian era.
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[St. Matthew from The Gospel Book of Charlemagne, 800]
The Carolingian Renaissance was a period of intellectual and cultural revival occurring in the late eighth and ninth centuries, with the peak of the activities occurring during the reigns of the Carolingian rulers Charlemagne and Louis the Pious. During this period there was an increase of literature, writing, the arts, architecture, jurisprudence, liturgical and scriptural studies. The period also saw the development of Medieval Latin and Carolingian minuscule, providing a common language and writing style that allowed for communication across most of Europe.
The use of the term renaissance to describe this period is disputed due to the majority of changes brought about by this period being confined almost entirely to the clergy, and due to the period lacking the wide ranging social movements of the later Italian Renaissance.
Instead of being a rebirth of new cultural movements, the period was typified more as an attempt to recreate the previous culture of the Roman Empire.
The lack of literate persons in eighth century western Europe caused problems for the Carolingian rulers by severely limiting the number of people capable of serving as court scribes. Of even greater concern to the very pious rulers was the fact that not all parish priests possessed the skill to read the Vulgate Bible. An additional problem was that the vulgar Latin of the later Western Roman Empire had begun to diverge into the regional dialects, the precursors to today's Romance languages, that were becoming mutually unintelligible and preventing scholars from one part of Europe being able to communicate with persons from another part of Europe.
To address these problems, Charlemagne ordered the creation of schools. A major part of his program of reform was to attract many of the leading scholars of his day to his court. Among the first called to court were Italians, Peter of Pisa who from 776 to about 790 instructed Charlemagne in Latin and Paulinus of Aquileia from 776 to 787 and whom Charlemagne nominated as patriarch of Aquileia in 787. In 782, the Italian Lombard Paul the Deacon was brought to court and remained until 787 when Charles nominated him abbot of Montecassino. Theodulf of Orleans was a Spanish Goth who served at court from 782 to 797 when nominated as bishop of Orleans. Theodulf had been in friendly competition over the standardization of the Vulgate with the chief among the Charlemagne's scholars, Alcuin of York. Alcuin was a Northumbrian monk and deacon who served as head of the Palace School from 782 to 796, except for the years 790 to 793 when he returned to England. After 796, continued his scholarly work as abbot of St. Martin's Monastery in Tours.
Among those to follow Alcuin across the Channel to the Frankish court was an Irishman, one Joseph Scottus, who left some original biblical commentary and acrostic experiments. After this first generation of non-Frankish scholars, their Frankish pupils, such as Angilbert, would make their own mark.
The later courts of Louis the Pious and Charles the Bald had similar groups of scholars. Among the most important was John Scotus Eriugena.
One of the primary efforts was the creation of a standardized curriculum for use at the recently created schools. Alcuin led this effort and was responsible for the writing of textbooks, creation of word lists, and establishing the trivium and quadrivium as the basis for education.
Other contributions from this period was the development of Carolingian minuscule, a "book-hand" first used at the monasteries of Corbie and Tours that introduced the use of lower case letters. A standardized version of Latin was also developed that allowed for the coining of new words while retaining the grammatical rules of Classical Latin. This Medieval Latin became the common language of scholarship and allowed administrators and travelers to make themselves understood across Europe.
Carolingian art spans the roughly 100-year period from about 800–900. Although brief, it was an influential period — northern Europe embraced classical Mediterranean Roman art forms for the first time, setting the stage for the rise of Romanesque art and eventually Gothic art in the West. Illuminated manuscripts, metalwork, small-scale sculpture, mosaics and frescos survive from the period.
Carolingian architecture is the style of North European architecture promoted by Charlemagne. The period of architecture spans the late eighth and ninth centuries until the reign of Otto I in 936, and was a conscious attempt to create a Roman Renaissance, emulating Roman, Early Christian and Byzantine architecture, with its own innovation, resulting in having a unique character.
In Western culture, there had been an unbroken tradition in musical practice and theory from the earliest written records of the Sumerians (c. 2500 BC) through the Babylonians and Persians down to ancient Greece and Rome. However, the Germanic migrations of the 400s AD brought about a break with this tradition. Most in western Europe for the next few centuries did not understand the Greek language, and thus the works of Boethius, who saw what was happening and translated ancient Greek treatises into Latin, became the foundation of learning during this period. With the advent of scholarly reforms by Charlemagne, who was particularly interested in music, began a period of intense activity in the monasteries of the writing and copying of treatises in music theory -- the Musica enchiriadis is one of the earliest and most interesting of these. Charlemagne sought to unify the practice of church music by eliminating regional stylistic differences.
There is evidence that the earliest Western musical notation, in the form of neumes in camp aperto (without staff-lines), was created at Metz around 800, as a result of Charlemagne's desire for Frankish church musicians to retain the performance nuances used by the Roman singers.
Western musical practice and theory of today can be traced in an unbroken line from this time to the present, thus it had its beginnings with Charlemagne.
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Neumes are the basic elements of Western and Eastern systems of musical notation prior to the invention of five-line staff notation. The word neume is a Middle English corruption of the ultimately Greek word for breath (pneuma).
The earliest neumes were inflective marks which indicated the general shape but not necessarily the exact notes or rhythms to be sung. Later developments included the use of heightened neumes which showed the relative pitches between neumes, and the creation of a four-line musical staff that identified particular pitches. Neumes do not generally indicate rhythm, but additional symbols were sometimes juxtaposed with neumes to indicate changes in articulation, duration, or tempo. Neumatic notation was later used in medieval music to indicate certain patterns of rhythm called rhythmic modes, and eventually evolved into modern musical notation. Neumatic notation remains standard in modern editions of plainchant.
Although chant was probably sung since the earliest days of the church, for centuries they were only transmitted orally.
The earliest systems involving neumes are of Aramaic origin and were used to notate inflections in the quasi-emmelic recitation of the Christian holy scriptures. As such they resemble functionally a similar system used for the notation of recitation of the Qur'an, the holy book of Islam. This early system was called ekphonetic notation, from the Greek ekphonesis meaning quasi-melodic recitation of text.
Around the 9th century neumes began to become shorthand mnemonic aids for the melodic recitation of chant proper. A prevalent view is that neumatic notation was first developed in the Eastern Roman Empire (see Byzantium and Byzantine music). This seems plausible given the well-documented peak of musical composition and cultural activity in major cities of the empire (now regions of southern Turkey, Syria, Lebanon and Israel) at that time. The corpus of extant Byzantine music in manuscript and printed form is far larger than that of the Gregorian chant, due in part to the fact that neumes fell in disuse in the west after the rise of modern staff notation and with it the new techniques of polyphonic music, while the Eastern tradition of Greek Orthodox church music and the reformed neume notation remains alive until today.
Slavic neume notations ("Znamennoe singing") are on the whole even more difficult to decipher and transcribe than Byzantine or Gregorian neume notations.
The earliest Western notation for chant appears in the 9th century. These early staffless neumes, called cheironomic or in campo aperto, appeared as freeform wavy lines above the text. Various scholars see these as deriving from cheironomic hand-gestures, from the ekphonetic notation of Byzantine chant, or from punctuation or accent marks.
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Cheironomy (or Chironomy) is the use of hand signals to direct vocal music performance. Whereas in modern conducting the notes are already specified in a written score, in cheironomy the hand signs indicate melodic curves and ornaments.
Early music (vocal church music), as far back as the 5th century, required some central direction from a leader in the coordination of singers in their delivery of melodic lines of mostly free rhythm. Traced back to early Egyptian performances through hieroglyphic documentation (etchings in stone depicting a leader employing hand signals to indicate pitch and rhythm details for wind instrument players), this form of conducting seems to predate Guido of Arezzo's designation of joints of the fingers for indicating pitches, and seems to have offered more than limited pitch instruction. These early leaders, or cheironomers, though possessing none of the modern conducting skills developed in the 17th century, using a form of choreographed hand signals, adeptly controlled the movement of the melodic lines, producing incredibly well-synchronized performances.
Cheironomy, though not a commonly used term in today’s reference to conducting, serves, as it did in early music, as the model for the motions necessary to direct some modern music which require individualized direction to specific players, within less metrically structured musical compositions. It is still in use the liturgy of the Roman Catholic Church (despite a decline of chant in the late twentieth century), of some Middle Eastern sects and in synagogues to direct the singing of liturgical songs (Hebrews probably learned cheironomy with Egyptians), and, more rarely, in some ancient Western religions.
The Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians comments that the method is particularly developed in traditions lacking a written notation, including Vedic, Byzantine and Roman chants.
Jewish religious cheironomy can also be found as mnemonic signs in printed Hebrew Bibles, hanging above the text to be sung, in order to guide the cantor in his rendition of Biblical readings: see Cantillation.
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A single neume could represent a single pitch, or a series of pitches all sung on the same syllable. Cheironomic neumes indicated changes in pitch and duration within each syllable, but did not attempt to specify the pitches of individual notes, the intervals between pitches within a neume, nor the relative starting pitches of different syllables' neumes.
There is evidence that the earliest Western musical notation, in the form of neumes in camp aperto (without staff-lines), was created at Metz around 800, as a result of Charlemagne's desire for Frankish church musicians to retain the performance nuances used by the Roman singers.
Presumably these were intended only as mnemonics for melodies learned by ear. The earliest extant manuscripts (9th-10th centuries) of such neumes include:
The abbey of St. Gall, Switzerland
Messine neumes (from the monastery of Metz in northeast France)
Aquitanian neumes (southern France, also used in Spain)
Laon, Chartres, Montpellier
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Matters of Charlemagne's reign came to a head in late 800.
In 799, Pope Leo III had been mistreated by the Romans, who tried to put out his eyes and tear out his tongue. Leo escaped, and fled to Charlemagne at Paderborn, asking him to intervene in Rome and restore him. Charlemagne, advised by Alcuin of York, agreed to travel to Rome, doing so in November 800 and holding a council on December 1. On December 23 Leo swore an oath of innocence.
At Mass, on Christmas Day (December 25), when Charlemagne knelt the altar to pray, the pope crowned him Imperator Romanorum ("Emperor of the Romans") in Saint Peter's Basilica. In so doing, the pope was effectively attempting to transfer the office from Constantinople to Charles. Einhard says that Charlemagne was ignorant of the pope's intent and did not want any such coronation:
[H]e at first had such an aversion that he declared that he would not have set foot in the Church the day that they [the imperial titles] were conferred, although it was a great feast-day, if he could have foreseen the design of the Pope.
Many modern scholars suggest that Charlemagne was indeed aware of the coronation; certainly he cannot have missed the bejeweled crown waiting on the altar when he came to pray. In any event, he would now use these circumstances to claim that he was the renewer of the Roman Empire, which had apparently fallen into degradation under the Byzantines. However, Charles would after 806 style himself, not Imperator Romanorum ("Emperor of the Romans", a title reserved for the Byzantine emperor), but rather Imperator Romanum gubernans Imperium ("Emperor ruling the Roman Empire").
The Iconoclasm of the Isaurian Dynasty and resulting religious conflicts with the Empress Irene, sitting on the throne in Constantinople in 800, were probably the chief causes of the pope's desire to formally acclaim Charles as Roman Emperor. He also most certainly desired to increase the influence of the papacy, honour his saviour Charlemagne, and solve the constitutional issues then most troubling to European jurists in an era when Rome was not in the hands of an emperor. Thus, Charlemagne's assumption of the imperial title was not an usurpation in the eyes of the Franks or Italians. It was though in Byzantium, where it was protested by Irene and her successor Nicephorus I — neither of whom had any great effect in enforcing their protests.
The Byzantines, however, still held several territories in Italy: Venice (what was left of the Exarchate of Ravenna), Reggio (Calabria, the toe), Brindisi (Apulia, the heel), and Naples (the Ducatus Neapolitanus). These regions remained outside of Frankish hands until 804, when the Venetians, torn by infighting, transferred their allegiance to the Iron Crown of Pippin, Charles' son. The Pax Nicephori ended. Nicephorus ravaged the coasts with a fleet and the only instance of war between the Byzantines and the Franks, as it was, began. It lasted until 810, when the pro-Byzantine party in Venice gave their city back to the Byzantine Emperor and the two emperors of Europe made peace: Charlemagne received the Istrian peninsula and in 812 Emperor Michael I Rhangabes recognized his status as Emperor.
The Bedouin, (pl. badū), are a desert-dwelling Arab nomadic pastoralist, or previously nomadic group, found throughout most of the desert belt extending from the Atlantic coast of the Sahara via the Western Desert, Sinai, and Negev to the Arabian Desert. Non-Arab groups as well, notably the Beja of the African coast of the Red Sea are sometimes called Bedouin.
The first recorded settlement of Bedouins dates back at least to c. 5000 BC.
The Bedouins were divided into related tribes. These tribes were organized on several levels - a widely quoted Bedouin saying is "I and my brothers against my cousins, I and my brothers and my cousins against the world." The saying signifies a hierarchy of loyalties based on closeness of kinship that runs from the nuclear family through the lineage, the tribe, and even, in principle at least, to an entire ethnic or linguistic group (which is perceived to have a kinship basis). Disputes are settled, interests are pursued, and justice and order are maintained by means of this organizational framework, according to an ethic of self-help and collective responsibility The individual family unit (known as a tent or bayt) typically consisted of three or four adults (a married couple plus siblings or parents) and any number of children.
When resources were plentiful, several tents would travel together as a goum. These groups were sometimes linked by patriarchical lineage but just as likely linked by marriage (new wives were especially likely to have male relatives join nealogies to take in new members). The largest scale of tribal interactions is of course the tribe as a whole, led by a Sheikh (literally, "elder"). The tribe often claims descent from one common ancestor — as mentioned above, this appears patrilineal but in reality new groups could have genealogies invented to tie them in to this ancestor. The tribal level is the level that mediated between the Bedouin and the outside governments and organizations.
Bedouins traditionally had strong honor codes, and traditional systems of justice dispensation in Bedouin society typically revolved around such codes. The bisha'a, or ordeal by fire, is a well-known Bedouin practice of lie detection. See also: Honor codes of the Bedouin, Bedouin systems of justice
Bedouins are well known for practicing folk music, folk dance and folk poetry.
Bedouin Coffee Grind
Coffee is a widely-consumed stimulant beverage prepared from roasted seeds, commonly called coffee beans, of the coffee plant. Coffee was first consumed in the 9th century, when it was discovered in the highlands of Ethiopia.
From there, it spread to Egypt and Yemen, and by the 15th century had reached Armenia, Persia, Turkey, and northern Africa. From the Muslim world, coffee spread to Italy, then to the rest of Europe and the Americas.
Coffee berries, which contain the coffee bean, are produced by several species of small evergreen bush of the genus Coffea. The two most commonly grown species are Coffea canephora (also known as Coffea robusta) and Coffea arabica. These are cultivated in Latin America, Southeast Asia, and Africa. Once ripe, coffee berries are picked, processed, and dried. The seeds are then roasted, undergoing several physical and chemical changes. They are roasted to varying degrees, depending on the desired flavor. They are then ground and brewed to create coffee. Coffee can be prepared and presented by a variety of methods.
Coffee has played an important role in many societies throughout modern history. In Africa and Yemen, it was used in religious ceremonies. As a result, the Ethiopian Church banned its consumption until the reign of Emperor Menelik II of Ethiopia.
The English word coffee first came to be used in the early- to mid-1600s, but early forms of the word date to the last decade of the 1500s.
It comes from the Italian caffè. The term was introduced to Europe via the Ottoman Turkish kahveh which is in turn derived from the Arabic: قهوة, qahweh.[9][10] The origin of the Arabic term is uncertain; it is either derived from the name of the Kaffa region in western Ethiopia, where coffee was cultivated, or by a truncation of qahwat al-būnn, meaning "wine of the bean" in Arabic. In Eritrea, "būnn" (also meaning "wine of the bean" in Tigrinya) is used.
Coffee use can be traced at least to as early as the 9th century, when it appeared in the highlands of Ethiopia.
According to legend, Ethiopian shepherds were the first to observe the influence of the caffeine in coffee beans when the goats appeared to "dance" and to have an increased level of energy after consuming wild coffee berries.
The legend names the shepherd "Kaldi." From Ethiopia, coffee spread to Egypt and Yemen.
It was in Arabia that coffee beans were first roasted and brewed similarly as they are today.
[7800 Charlemagne / 7800 Bedouin / 7800 Arabian Nights]
One Thousand and One Nights is a collection of stories collected over many centuries by various authors, translators and scholars in various countries. These collections of tales trace their roots back to ancient Arabia and Yemen, ancient India, ancient Asia Minor, ancient Persia (especially the Sassanid Hazār Afsān Persia, lit. Thousand Tales), ancient Egypt, ancient Mesopotamian Mythology, ancient Syria, and medieval Arabic folk stories from the Caliphate era. Though the oldest Arabic manuscript dates from the fourteenth century, scholarship generally dates the collection's genesis to somewhere between AD 800-900.
What is common throughout all the editions of Nights is the initial frame story of the ruler Shahryar (from Persian: king or sovereign) and his wife Scheherazade (from Persian: townswoman) and the framing device incorporated throughout the tales themselves. The stories proceed from this original tale; some are framed within other tales, while others begin and end of their own accord. Some editions contain only a few hundred nights, while others include 1001 or more "nights."
The collection, or at least certain stories drawn from it (or purporting to be drawn from it) became widely known in the West during the nineteenth century, after it was translated - first into French and then English and other European languages. At this time it acquired the English name The Arabian Nights' Entertainment or simply Arabian Nights. The best known stories from The Nights include Aladdin's Wonderful Lamp, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, and The Seven Voyages of Sinbad the Sailor. Ironically these particular stories, while they are genuine Middle Eastern folk tales, were not part of the Nights in its Arabic versions, but were interpolated into the collection by its early European translators.
The main frame story concerns a Persian king and his new bride. The king, Shahryar, upon discovering his former wife's infidelity has her executed and then declares all women to be unfaithful. He begins to marry a succession of virgins only to execute each one the next morning. Eventually the vizier cannot find any more virgins. Scheherazade, the vizier's daughter, offers herself as the next bride and her father reluctantly agrees. On the night of their marriage, Scheherazade tells the king a tale, but does not end it. The king is thus forced to keep her alive in order to hear the conclusion. The next night, as soon as she finishes the tale, she begins (and only begins) another. So it goes for 1,001 nights.
The tales vary widely: they include historical tales, love stories, tragedies, comedies, poems, burlesques and various forms of erotica. Numerous stories depict djinn, magicians, and legendary places, which are often intermingled with real people and geography; the historical caliph Harun al-Rashid is a common protagonist, as are his alleged court poet Abu Nuwas and his vizier, Ja'far al-Barmaki. Sometimes a character in Scheherazade's tale will begin telling other characters a story of his own, and that story may have another one told within it, resulting in a richly-layered narrative texture.
The different versions have different individually detailed endings (in some Scheherazade asks for a pardon, in some the king sees their children and decides not to execute his wife, in some other things happen that make the king distracted) but they all end with the king giving his wife a pardon and sparing her life.
The narrator's standards for what constitutes a cliffhanger seem broader than in modern literature. While in many cases a story is cut off with the hero in danger of losing his life or another kind of deep trouble, in some parts of the full text Scheherazade stops her narration in the middle of an exposition of abstract philosophical principles or complex points of Islamic philosophy, and in one case during a detailed description of human anatomy according to Galen -- and in all these cases turns out to be justified in her belief that the king's curiosity about the sequel would buy her another day of life.
The tales in the collection can be traced to the Indian, Persian, Egyptian, and Arab ancient storytelling traditions.
Many stories from Indian and Persian folklore parallel the tales as well as Jewish sources.
These tales were probably in circulation before they were collected and codified into a single collection. This work was further shaped by scribes, storytellers, and scholars and evolved into a collection of three distinct layers of storytelling by the 15th century:
Persian tales influenced by Indian folklore and adapted into Arabic by the 10th century.
Stories recorded in Baghdad during the 10th century.
Medieval Egyptian folklore.
The Indian folklore is represented by certain animal stories, which reflect influence from ancient Sanskrit fables.
The influence from the folklore of Baghdad is represented by the tales of the Abbasid caliphs; the Cairene influence is made evident by Maruf the cobbler. Tales such as Iram of the columns are based upon the pre-Islamic legends of the Arabian peninsula; motifs are employed from the ancient Mesopotamian tale of Gilgamesh. Possible Greek influences have also been noted.
The first European version of the Book of the Thousand and One Nights (1704-1717) was translated into French by Antoine Galland from an Arabic text and other sources.
This 12-volume book, Les Mille et une nuits, contes arabes traduits en français (Thousand and one nights, Arab stories translated into French), included stories that were not in the original Arabic manuscript. Aladdin's Lamp" and Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves appeared first in Galland's translation and cannot be found in any of the original manuscripts. He wrote that he heard them from a Syrian Christian storyteller from Aleppo, a Maronite scholar whom he called "Hanna Diab."
Galland's version of the Nights were immensely popular throughout Europe, and later versions of the Nights were written by Galland's publisher using Galland's name without his consent.
A well-known English translation is that by Sir Richard Francis Burton, entitled The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night (1885). Unlike previous editions his ten-volume translation was not bowdlerized. Though printed in the Victorian era it contained all the erotic nuances of the source material replete with sexual imagery and pederastic allusions added as appendices to the main stories by Burton. Burton circumvented strict Victorian laws on obscene material by printing a private edition for subscribers only rather than publicly publishing the book. His original ten volumes were followed by a further six entitled The Supplemental Nights to the Thousand Nights and a Night, which were printed between 1886 and 1888.
Husayn al-Azami - The Passion of 1,001 Nights: Maqam Awj
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The Iraqi mâqâm is a style which is peculiar to Iraq, and inherited from the Court of the Abasside Califes, of Baghdad (.c 800), one of whom was the universally famous Haroun Al-Rachid, a central character in The Arabian Nights.
It descends from a complex Arab tradition blending a number of influences : Turkish, Persian, Kurd, and even Indian. Each mode, each sigh, has its coloring and mood, calling on synaesthesia, magic and faith, in a charismatic and apocalyptic framework. The harmony thus obtained is called insiâm and can only be reached in a state of internal mystical exaltation.
The artists call this form al-mâqâm al-iraqi (modale composition of Iraq) which is also played at festivals and private concerts. There is no clear separation of profane and sacred in this melody mode and it can be found in most religious music of Mesopotamia.
The traditional ensemble (Tshalghi Baghdadi) is made up of a santûr (zither, strings are struck) or a qânûn (zither, strings are plucked), a jôza (rebec or spike fiddle), a clay drum (tabla) or kettle drum (naqarât) and a tambourine with cymbals (duff zinjârî).
This music is also generally characterised by the tragic modulation of the vocal parts, high-pitched voices, strictly coded sobbings, intervals, rhythms, specific instruments, a poetic repertory in classical, median and dialectical Arab, distinct from the legendary Arab-Andalusian heritage.
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Later settings:
In 1888, Russian composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov completed his Op. 35 Scheherazade, in four movements, based upon four of the tales from the Nights: The Sea and Sinbad's Ship, "The Kalendar Prince, The Young Prince and The Young Princess, and Festival at Baghdad.
Kismet is a musical, with music and lyrics written in 1953 by Robert Wright and George Forrest, adapted from the music of Alexander Borodin, and produced by Charles Lederer, who in 1954, won three Tony Awards for it.
1990 saw the premiere of La Noche de las Noches, a work for string quartet and electronics by Ezequiel Viñao (based on a reading from Burton's Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night).
Aladdin, with music by Alan Menken,is an Academy Award-, Golden Globe- and Annie-Award winning 1992 animated feature produced by Walt Disney Animation Studios, and released by Walt Disney Pictures on November 25, 1992.
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