Mikha'il Mishaqa: virtual founder of the twenty-four equal quartertone scale.

• Author: Maalouf, Shireen

When Mikha'il Mishaqa (1800-1888) (1) traveled to Damascus in 1820 to receive instruction from the renowned scholar Sheikh Muhammad al-'Attar, (2) the Ottoman empire was ruling over Lebanon and Syria and had Istanbul as its principal cultural center. Seated at the gate of Europe, Istanbul began during the first half of the eighteenth century to differentiate itself culturally from neighboring provinces, especially Arabic and Persian, by sustaining an attraction towards European models. (3) This led to a reform in 1839 which introduced a European-inspired jurisdiction. (4) Likewise in music, the nomination of Guiseppe Donizetti as conductor of the imperial orchestra in 1826 came to confirm European influence on Turkish music. (5)

Besides, Safi '1-Din al-Urmawi's scale with no quartertones was integrated in Turkish music during the end of the eighteenth century. This helped to distinguish Turkish music from Arabic music, insofar as the former became solely based on natural intervals while the latter included quartertones. (6) In other words, the Turkish musical scale made a definitive shift from a system with neutral (2.5 comma) tones to a broader system featuring single comma tones. (7) Subsequently, additional scale degrees led to the gradual expansion of the scale beyound its seventeen intervals as originally formulated by Safi '1-Din al-Urmawi in the thirteenth century.

The consolidation of a distinctly Ottoman scale and repertory in the court music of Istanbul probably created or reinforced differences between it and other practices in the regions, (8) particularly Arab musical practice. Musicians may have been attracted to Istanbul and adopted the Turkish scale (which excluded quartertones), but others, such as Sheikh Muhammad al-'Attar (1764-1828) sought a theoretical scale in Arabic music that included quartertones.

Very little is known about al-'Attar's life and work. But in his Essay on the Art of Music for the Emir Shihab (al-Risala al-shihabiyya fi 'l-sina' a al-musiqiyya), (9) dedicated to the division of the octave into twenty-four equal quartertones, Mishaqa reports that he was present when his teacher al-'Attar discussed that topic on several occasions. (10)

However, a misreading of the Essay on the Art of Music, found in an extensive literature on the theory of Arabic music, led to the commonly-spread belief that Mishaqa was the founder of the twenty-four equal quartertone scale. The translation of the essay in Arabic, French, and English seems not to have helped reduce the recurrence of this misreading. Instead, it seems to have encouraged it in different languages, as is observed in the following quotations selected from the period after the 1880s.

J. P. N. Land wrote: "With Mishaqa, we witness something, so far unencountered, which is analogous to our system of equal semi-tones. The whole octave is divided into twenty-four intervals called quartertones." (11)

Rodolphe d'Erlanger commented: "The fundamental idea of the system promoted by this reformer [Mishaqa] consists of attributing a uniform value to all of the twenty-four intervals in the octave." (12)

Habib Hassan Touma noted that "not until the nineteenth century ... did an original theoretical work on music that reinvigorated the field of Arabian music theory once again appear. In this work, the Lebanese author Mikha'il Mishaqa (1800-1889) presented the division of the octave into twenty-four equal parts." (13)

Owen Wright in The New Grove Dictionary says: "At the beginning of the 19th century the Lebanese theorist Mikha'il Mishaqa, in his Risala al-shihabiyya fi al-sina'a al-musiqiyya ('Treatise on the art of music for the Emir Shihab'), introduced a new system for analyzing scale, which is now accepted in much of the Near East. In this system an octave is divided into 24 intervals of approximately a quarter-tone (each about 50 cents)." (14)

The reason for this false ascription...