DESCRIPTION:

The “Great Book on Music” (“Kitab al-musiqi al-kabir”) by Abu Nasr Muhammad al-Farabi, the eminent Islamic philosopher-encyclopedist and musical theorist (870–950), occupies a special place in musical historiography as the most extensive and systematic scholarly source on music from the “Muslim Renaissance” era. The monograph promotes the idea of philosophical origins of al-Farabi’s conception of music found in the treatise and explores it within the framework of his general scientific views. The key to exposing the essence and philosophical foundations of the conception has become a problem of “knowledge” (‘ilm) and its nature, techniques, and purposes – the core issue of al-Farabi’s rationalistic philosophy which is raised by the author with regard to the “science of music” (‘ilm al-musiqi). The profound links between this issue and the main spiritual and intellectual paradigms of medieval Islam point to the importance of cultural background in al-Farabi’s thought on music.

The book comprises of detailed analyses of al-Farabi’s teachings on music and its methodology, extensive annotated translations into Russian of extracts from the “Great Book on Music”, translations of the scholar’s biographies from medieval Arabic historiography (XII–XIII centuries) and a glossary of the terms and notions of music science by al-Farabi.