Professor Andrew Hicks, Assistant Professor of Musicology at Cornell University, will give the second talk in the 2015-2016 CMRS Lecture Series. The talk will be preceded by an informal "open forum" to be held in 455 Hagerty Hall at 2:30 p.m. and followed by a roundtable discussion and reception.
Abstract: In medieval Perso-Islamic culture, metaphors of music and musical experiences were employed as vehicles to convey a variety of mystical concepts. For many Persian poets, Sufis in particular, the ethereal modes through which music communicates with its listeners embodied the paradoxically disembodied “taste” or unmediated experience (ẕauq) of the divine realities. Through an almost Heideggerian dialectic of revelation and concealment – or in the Quranic terms often employed by the Sufis, ẓāhir and bạ̄tin, manifest and hidden, exoteric and esoteric – proper musical experience (samā‘) becomes a conduit for the very transcendence of music itself. Hearing is not delimited by the audible range of the material ear, for this external sense (ḥiss-e ẓāhir) must yield to an internal sense (ḥiss-e bāṭin), signified by the auricular metaphors gūsh-e jān and gūsh-e dil, the “ear of the soul” and “ear of the heart.” These in turn are poetic evocations of a deeply Pythagorean, but specifically Persianate reinterpretation of Greek harmonic theory, one not grounded in the rationality of mathematical ratios, deduced through controlled experimentation, but modeled instead upon Pythagoras’ ethereal auditory powers, bestowed through ritual purity. My argument proceeds in three stages: first, I offer some general background on samā‘ (spiritual audition) in medieval Persian Sufism; second, I trace the philosophy of audition through the soundscapes of philosophical Sufism, particularly Shihāb al-Dīn Suhrawardī (d. 1191) and his commentators; third and finally, I conclude with a reconsideration of musical play and metaphor in Persian poetry, particularly Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī (d. 1273).
For the full list of 2015-2016 lectures, please visit http://cmrs.osu.edu/events/2015-2016-lecture-series.
