Muslim Perceptions of Christian Chant in the Medieval Middle East: Preliminary Observations: ISM Fellows Lunch Talk with Marcel Camprubí

This work-in-progress talk presents preliminary observations from a new project on Muslim perceptions of Christian chant in the medieval Middle East. Christian monasteries were important sites of encounter across confessional lines. Arabic literary sources describe Muslim visitors attending monastic festivals, drinking at monastery estates, and listening to Christian liturgical music. Some anecdotal accounts even portray court musicians drawing inspiration from Christian chant. Music-theoretical writings offer another angle on these questions, preserving occasional but intriguing references to Christian musical practice. Drawing on a small and still-expanding corpus of Arabic sources, the project explores how Muslim authors described and understood Christian chant and what these accounts might reveal about listening across religious boundaries.

Free, but registration is required. Lunch will be provided.

Open to Yale Community only.

Contact: Katya Vetrov

Speaker bio:

Marcel Camprubí is a musicologist specializing in the intellectual and material history of premodern Arabic music. His research investigates how musical knowledge was theorized, transmitted, and transformed across linguistic, cultural, and religious communities, with a particular focus on ninth- and tenth-century Baghdad and al-Andalus. His work brings music-theoretical writings, manuscripts, notations, and diagrams into conversation with the social and cultural histories of musical practice.

Camprubí is working on his first monograph, tentatively titled The Unwritten Lesson: Music Theories and Notation Practices in Abbasid Baghdad. The book examines the emergence and development of Arabic music theory and notation in ninth- and tenth-century Baghdad, focusing on how written and oral forms of musical knowledge intersected in the activities of performers and theorists. Writing offered new tools for analysis, preservation, and circulation that reshaped Abbasid musical culture, but it did so without displacing the oral and embodied practices on which musical pedagogy, performance, and intellectual exchange continued to depend.

At the Yale Institute of Sacred Music, Camprubí is developing a new project on Muslim perceptions of Christian monastic sound in Abbasid Iraq. Focusing on monasteries around Baghdad in the ninth and tenth centuries, the project examines how Muslim visitors encountered Christian chant and ritual sound in settings that brought members of different religious communities together for festivals, hospitality, and leisure. By tracing these acts of listening, it explores how monastic soundscapes could both foster interreligious contact and reinforce religious difference.

Camprubí received his PhD in musicology from Princeton University in 2024 and holds a master’s in Medieval Studies from the University of Oxford. His dissertation received the International Musicological Society’s Outstanding Dissertation Award. His doctoral research was supported by the Alvin H. Johnson AMS 50 Dissertation Fellowship from the American Musicological Society, the SMT-40 Dissertation Fellowship from the Society for Music Theory, the E. K. Rand Dissertation Grant from the Medieval Academy of America, and a Harold W. Dodds Honorific Fellowship from Princeton University. Before joining Yale, he was Frances A. Yates Postdoctoral Fellow at the Warburg Institute, University of London, and Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Hamburg, with support from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD).