Skip to main content

Ziryab: The World's First Guitarist

Related image
Ziryab, inventor of the guitar.




Perhaps the most influential musician whom few people have heard of is Abu al-Hasan, better known as Ziryab.  Ziryab was a black slave born in Baghdad in the late 8th century.  He was a gifted musician, and by all accounts, a sweet and charming man.  This is how he earned his nickname, which means “blackbird”.  In the Arab world of the early 9th century, it was possible to advance out of slavery, unlike in the later slave economies of North America.  (Not that this justifies slavery; it’s just important to establish Ziryab’s roots and just how high he rose.) 

It didn’t take Ziryab long to earn the attention of the caliph’s court musician, who took him under his wing and helped him develop his talents.  Soon, Ziryab surpassed even the court musician, and stunned the caliph himself.  Ziryab gave the maiden performance of a song he’d written for the caliph right there in his court, and immediately the caliph was enchanted.  The problem for Ziryab was that the performance was too good.  The court musician wrote him a letter afterward, warning him that he’d denounce and ruin Ziryab because he couldn’t stand to have such talented competition in the same city, and strongly suggested that he get out of town.  So that’s just what Ziryab did.

I should note that the performance he gave was on his own oud (which is much like the lute that was commonly played in Europe).  The oud and the lute have been around since ancient Greece, dating back to about 1500 BCE.  The idea behind the oud is that it’s got four strings, each one representative of the body’s four humors.  Music, it was said, could help someone get their humors in balance, and fight illness; the four strings were designed to do that.  Ziryab, a very religious man, designed his own lute, adding a fifth string, which he said represented the heart, or the soul.  This five-stringed lute he developed, which was shaped a little differently and about one-third as heavy, later came to be known by a different name: the guitar.

When Ziryab got out of town, he headed west, to Cordoba, in Spain.  There he found work in the court of the local emir, where he became one of the most celebrated musicians in the world.  Musicians from all over Europe and north Africa traveled to Cordoba to meet with Ziryab, and were still coming there to study his compositions over a century after his death.  Besides inventing the guitar, he invented other instruments, like the oboe, the trombone, the harp and a precursor to the zither, as well as different kinds of flutes.  Music as we know it would certainly have evolved if it weren’t for Ziryab, but it likely wouldn’t resemble what it is today at all.

One thing about Ziryab is that music is just the tip of the iceberg with him.  He also influenced European and Arab manners, fashion, food, hygiene and customs in ways that are still reflected in modern cultures.  I would go on about this man’s broad, enduring influence, but this has gone on plenty long enough!

Comments

Unknown said…
Yeah, why has no one (except you) heard of him?
Kurt Kaletka said…
Because I'm hip. I'm into guitar music from before it was cool.

Popular posts from this blog

How the Lemon was Invented

Lemons How do you make a lemon?  Silly question, isn’t it?  You just take the seeds out of one and plant them, and wait for the tree to come up, right?  That’s true, but it hasn’t always been that easy.  Lemons today are a widely cultivated citrus fruit, with a flavor used in cuisines of countries where no lemon tree would ever grow.  You might think that it was just a matter of ancient peoples finding the trees, enjoying their fruit and growing more of them, but that’s not true.  The lemon is a human invention that’s maybe only a few thousand years old. The first lemons came from East Asia, possibly southern China or Burma.  (These days, some prefer to refer to Burma as Myanmar .  I’ll try to stay out of that controversy here and stick to fruit.)  The exact date of the lemon’s first cultivation is not known, but scientists figure it’s been around for more than 4,000 years.  The lemon is a cross breed of several fruits.  One fruit is the bitter orange, best known in the west for

Origins of the Word Hoser, eh?

Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas as cultural icons Bob and Doug McKenzie These days we often hear Canadians referred to as “Hosers”.  It’s a strange word, and it sounds a little insulting, but it’s sometimes used more with affection than malice.  Any such word is difficult to use correctly, especially if you don’t belong to the group the word describes.   I can’t say I feel comfortable throwing the word around, myself, but I can offer a little information about it that might shed some light on what it means. First off: is it an insult?  Yes… and no.   The word hoser can be used as an insult or as a term of endearment; the variation hosehead , is certainly an insult.  It’s a mild insult, meaning something like jerk or idiot or loser .  Its origin is unclear, and there are several debatable etymologies of the word.  One claims that it comes from the days before the zamboni was invented, when the losing team of an outdoor ice hockey game would have to hose down the rink in or

The Whoopie Cap

What can you do with your father’s old hats?  If you were born after, say, 1955, the answer is probably “Not much.”  Men were still wearing fedoras in the 1970s and 1980s, but by 1990, fashion had turned to the point where unless you were Indiana Jones, the hat didn’t look right.  Some blame Jack Kennedy for starting it all, strutting around perfectly coiffed and bare-headed in the early 1960s.  In 1953, Harry Truman, a haberdasher by trade, stepped out of office, and just eight years later we had a president who didn’t care for hats?  The times, they were a-changin’. If you set the WABAC machine to the 1920s or 1930s (when Indiana Jones was supposed to have lived), you would see the fedora was still very much in style.  Men just didn’t leave the house without a hat of some kind, and for what remained of the middle class, the fedora was the topper of choice.  But like any other piece of clothing, hats wear out, too.  When that happened, you’d just throw it away.  Though if there were