Islamic expansion and Islamicate music
Islam as catalyst...
- Rapid expansion: powered by Islamic ideology, drive for wealth and control, and enabled by weakness of prevailing powers at the time (Sassanian and Byzantine)
- Inward flow towards center: assimilation, cultural fusion via openness to learning and multiculturalism (especially Persian arts and sciences)
- Accumulation of financial capital
- Opulent courts (Madina, Damascus, Baghdad, Cordoba, Granada, Istanbul, Delhi, Isfahan...)
- Development of leisure class
- Patronage of music and singing
- Professional class of musicians
- Accumulation of intellectual/artistic capital
- Bayt al-Hikma translation movement (Abbasids), including Greek treatises relating to music (Aristoxenus, others)
- Music theory as philosophy (music as among the "mathematical sciences", with geometry, arithmetic, astronomy)
- Development of musical arts
- Accumulation of financial capital
- Outward flow from center: cultural diffusion, as Islam provides political/cultural/linguistic/religious "lingua franca"
- Fragmentation of Islamic empire in 10th c, corresponding fission in Islamicate forms, which nevertheless remained linked