The Andalusi nawba

The music of al-Andalus, carried to North Africa by those who left Iberia, lives on there in suites called nawba, each ruled by one mode, a tabʿ. Morocco calls it al-Ala, Algiers the sanʿa, Tlemcen the gharnati, Constantine and Tunis the maʾluf. This page gathers what our sources say about it.

The nubat and tubuʿ on the map of the modes →

One music, many names

Andalusi music grew in Muslim Iberia between the ninth and the fifteenth centuries and spread across the Maghreb, above all after the Reconquista. Each country of North Africa knows at least one style of it. In Morocco the secular, instrumental one is al-Ala and the religious one, without instruments, al-samaʿ wa-l-madih; Algeria has three, the gharnati of Tlemcen in the west, the sanʿa of Algiers and the maʾluf of Constantine in the east; in Tunisia and Libya it is the maʾluf.¹

The name itself is argued over. Muhammad al-Fasi held that «Andalusi music» is a European term: people called it al-Ala, the music of instruments, to tell it from the samaʿ, and Idris ibn Jallun al-Tuwaymi added that the name took hold only under colonial rule, denying the Moroccans their share in the nawba. «Andalusi» has prevailed all the same.²

In Algeria, Taoufik Bestandji finds «school» an imprecise word: Algiers, Tlemcen and Constantine show no difference of structure, only local colour.^3,4

From Córdoba to Fez

Ziryab (d. 857), born and raised in Iraq, court musician to Abd al-Rahman II in Córdoba, is sometimes credited with founding it: he set the order of a performance, from heavy melodies to light ones, with which singing and playing end. Ibn Bajja of Saragossa (d. 1139), al-Tifashi writes, «mixed the songs of the Christians with those of the East, and invented a style found only in al-Andalus». He lived some twenty years in Fez as a vizier, and is held the first to bring Andalusi melodies to Morocco.^1,2

Muslims and Sephardi Jews fleeing the Reconquista from Córdoba, Seville, Valencia and Granada carried the music south, not without change, and found earlier Andalusi communities waiting. After Granada fell in 1492 its style merged in Morocco with the older Valencian one; in Algeria the newcomers’ music took on local poems, rhythms and modes.^1,2,5

Its Jewish keepers

«In the Maghreb», Haïm Zafrani writes, «the Muslims and Jews have piously preserved the Spanish-Arabic music»; Jews were its ardent keepers. Ziryab’s colleague at the court of Abd al-Rahman II was Mansur al-Yahudi, Mansur the Jew. Many important Andalusi musicians of North Africa were Jews, and Moroccan Jewish communities in Israel keep Andalusi melodies and even song texts in their religious music; the Israeli Andalusian Orchestra plays the repertoire together with the piyyutim of the Sephardi Jews.¹

In Algiers, Cheikh Mohammed Sfindja, heir to the oral tradition, agreed after long talks with Edmond Nathan Yafil and Jules Rouanet to have the music written down; from 1899 to 1902 the three transcribed 76 airs. From the 1920s a wave of Jewish and Muslim musical societies, after El Moutribia (1912), spread what came to be called «Andalusi music».⁴

The nawba

The word means a turn: the musician waited behind a curtain until the curtain man, the sattar, told him it was his nawba, his turn to perform before the caliph. A nawba is a suite of instrumental and vocal pieces on poems, muwashshah in classical Arabic and zajal in the spoken tongue, whose favourite themes are love, nature and wine, though some pray for piety and mercy. One tabʿ rules it, with secondary modes beside, and its rhythmic sections, each called after its rhythm, grow faster as it goes.^3,6

Tradition says there were twenty-four nubat, one for each hour of the day. Algeria keeps sixteen, twelve whole and four incomplete; Tunisia thirteen; Morocco eleven, some of them in more than one mode, twenty-six modes in all. Each was meant for its hour of day or night: from midnight to one the nawba sings the beauty of humankind, from one to two the beauty of nature.^1,3,6

The ensemble has the ʿud, violins, the rabab, the nay, the qanun, the tambourine and the goblet drum, the darbuka; the players also serve as the chorus.⁶

The tabʿ

The tabʿ, plural tubuʿ, is the mode of Andalusi music. It sets not only the scale of a nawba but its melodic shape and the feeling it stirs, as the raga does; it hardly modulates, and sometimes marks out a pentatonic scale. Maghrebi art music uses an essentially diatonic scale, without micro-intervals.⁷

The four principal tubuʿ were at first maya, dhil, zidan and mazmum; their branches make 26 in Morocco today and 16 in Algeria. The word is first found in Lisan al-Din ibn al-Khatib (1313–1374). The jurist al-Wansharisi (d. 1548) wrote a poem on 17 tubuʿ used in Morocco, set on the four humours of the tree of modes: dhil with black bile and earth, mazmum with bile and fire, maya with blood and air, zidan with phlegm and water.^2,7

A shared name is no promise of a shared scale: raml al-maya and rasd are not built alike in the three countries, a sign that the modes were read anew in each local tradition.³

Morocco: al-Ala

The first known gathering of the repertoire is al-Buʿisami’s (d. c. 1738), who set the sung poems in order of their tubuʿ and tied the tubuʿ to human natures. The one that rules is the Kunnash of al-Haʾik of Tetouan, made at the end of the eighteenth century: it fixes the eleven nubat still sung, their modes, the order of their pieces and the inner shape of their movements.^2,8

The eleven nubat of al-Ala: Raml al-Maya رمل المايةIsbahan إصبهانal-Maya المايةRasd al-Dhil رصد الذيلal-Istihlal الاستهلالal-Rasd الرصدGharibat al-Husayn غريبة الحسينal-Hijaz al-Kabir الحجاز الكبيرal-Hijaz al-Mashriqi الحجاز المشرقيʿIraq al-ʿAjam عراق العجمal-ʿUshshaq العشاق

A Moroccan nawba has five mizan, each on its own rhythm: basit, qaʾim wa-nisf, btayhi, darj and quddam; al-Buʿisami knew four of them, not yet the darj. From the kunnash of al-Jamiʿi (1885) each mizan runs in three stages, muwassaʿ, qantara and insiraf. A complete nawba lasts six to ten hours and is never sung whole at one sitting; the anthology of the Moroccan amateurs’ association holds more than 132 hours.^1,2,8

Algeria: the sanʿa

Sanʿa means a work of craft: the masters of the music and of the medina’s crafts shared their words, and in both the master is a snayʿi. The Algiers nawba has five movements, from very slow to very light, each named for its rhythm: msaddar, btayhi, darj, insiraf and khlas.⁴

The Algerian nawba is rich in versions of one movement: in raml al-maya there are eighteen versions of the msaddar in Constantine, ten in Algiers and ten in Tlemcen, and of the insiraf twenty-eight, thirty-one and forty-one. Raml al-maya is probably the nawba most played and best loved.³

Algiers counts sixteen tubuʿ: seven fundamental, each defined by its own istikhbar, an unmeasured vocal and instrumental prelude, and nine derived from them. Each had its time: rasd, mazmum and sika in the afternoon, raml from six to eight in the evening, raml al-maya from eight to ten, hsin from ten to midnight, and so through the night to maya, from half past three to five.⁴

Mawwal and its branches: Mawwal الموالDil الذيلRasd al-Dil رصد الذيلMaya الماية
Zidan and its branches: Zidan الزيدانRaml الرملMjanba المجنبة
Raml al-Maya and its branch: Raml al-Maya رمل المايةRasd الرصد
ʿIraq and its branches: ʿIraq العراقHsin الحسينGhrib الغريبGhribat al-Hsin غريبة الحسين
On their own: Jarka الجاركاهSika السيكاهMazmum المزموم

Tunisia: the maʾluf

Tunisia’s thirteen nubat are said to have been ordered by the eighteenth-century aristocrat Muhammad al-Rashid, who is also credited with the twenty-seven instrumental pieces that open and divide them. They form one cycle with an ideal order, and a barwal, a poem in the nawba nawa, recites the order of the thirteen modes. The Tunisian nawba has seven movements, after a free opening, the istiftah: msaddar, abyat, btayhi, barwal, darj, khafif and khatm. Dhil, asbaʿayn, rast al-dhil and isbahan are the most played.^3,6