For more than a thousand years the musical styles of the Arabs and Jews have flourished and intermingled in the western Mediterranean region of southern Spain and North Africa. For nearly seven centuries at the Muslim courts of Cordoba, Sevilla and Granada in southern Spain the arts of poetry, music and architecture flourished. The music known as al’Ala l-Andalusia was born in this environment and can be traced to the early 9th century A.D. with the arrival of the Persian musician Ziryab at the court of ‘Abd er-Rahman II in Cordoba. At his court and those of subsequent Sultans throughout Andalusia music played an increasingly important role; Arab, Jewish and Christian musicians and poets were employed and performed together. As with most music of the time, poetry played an integral role as it does in Arab-Andalusian music to this day. Indeed it was in Andalusia that new styles of Arabic poetry evolved muwashshah and zajal. These forms, influenced by indigenous Iberian poetry, heralded a new era in which the Andalusian song cycles known as nubat were born. Each of the major cities of Muslim Spain had a variant (and competing) style. As conflict between the Christians and Moors increased, the music was carried to North Africa by the Moors and Jews as they emigrated from the late 12th century until their final expulsion in 1492.
Jews continued to play a seminal role in the performance of Arab-Andalusian music in North Africa, in particular in the Moroccan cities of Fes, Rabat and Tetouan, which became principal centers of the tradition. Early texts reveal Arabic poetry written in Hebrew letters reinforcing the close connection between Jewish and Arabic scholarship and culture.
In Morocco, as elsewhere in North Africa and the Middle East, the distinctions between classical, folk and popular musics are blurred. While al’Ala l-Andalusia is essentially a classical genre that developed at the Spanish courts, its current form took shape in North Africa where it acquired new instruments and influences from the indigenous Berbers and from the West as well as from Arab folk music. The violin has largely replaced the rebab, the traditional bowed lute of Morocco. Often the suisen, a pear-shaped skin faced lute, or the banjo is added, giving the music a more percussive timbre. Often West instruments such as the piano, accordion and even the saxophone are used in performing the Andalusian music of Spain’s Golden Age when Jews, Arabs and Christians lived together in relative harmony.
