Music and Performance at Timurid Courts

At the late-fifteenth-century court of Sultan Husayn Bayqara in Herat, western Afghanistan, musicians gained notice as composers and skilled performers. Babur (1483–1530), a Timurid prince and memoirist, describes how the courtier and poet Ali-Shir Nava’i supported named musicians and how players tested their ability before patrons and peers. Court music formed part of a wider Timurid culture and arts that also included ceremony and learned writing.

Music at Timur’s 1404 feast

On 18 October 1404, Timur summoned the Spanish embassy to a feast at his camp near Samarkand, in present-day Uzbekistan. The pavilion and enclosed tents arranged the gathering around the ruler. During games that included elephants, drums sounded loudly; jugglers performed near the pavilion while the ruler, his relatives and guests watched. The drums marked the games with a forceful public sound, part of an event where entertainment and court ceremony shared the same space. Ruy González de Clavijo’s account of the feast describes the scene as an envoy attending the Timurid court.

Instrumentalists and their craft

In his memoir, Babur credits Nava’i with supporting musicians Qul-i Muhammad, Shaikhi and Husain. Qul-i Muhammad played the lute and a ghichak, a bowed fiddle, and added three strings to the latter. Babur also praises his many preludes. A bow drawn across strings sustains their vibration; a lute instead sounds when its strings are plucked. A medieval Central Asian ghijak was a bowed fiddle with two silk strings; a player of the instrument performed at Bayqara’s Herat court in 1506.

Babur calls Shaikhi a flautist and reports that he had played the flute since age twelve or thirteen. At an assembly held by Prince Badiʿ al-Zaman, Shaikhi played an air on the flute. Qul-i Muhammad could not repeat it on the ghichak and called the instrument worthless; Shaikhi then took it and played the same air accurately. The episode gives a practical measure of musical command: Shaikhi carried a tune from a wind instrument to bowed strings, and Babur says that he could recognize an air after hearing it once.

The memoir also separates composing from performing: Babur describes Mir Azu as a composer who did not perform, while Bina’i both composed and played and sang his own works. One winter, when Sultan Husayn and Nava’i went to Merv in present-day Turkmenistan, Bina’i stayed in Herat to study music. Before the warm season he had composed several pieces; when the court returned, he played and sang them with variations, and Nava’i praised the result. Study, composition and performance could therefore involve distinct skills.

Musical theory and sung forms

ʿAbd al-Qādir Marāghī, a musician and theorist who died in 1435, wrote about instruments, tunings and musical forms. His writings describe a two-string lute’s tuning and catalogue several types of instrument. Tuning sets the strings to chosen pitches before performance; these instructions made an instrument’s setup part of musical expertise. Marāghī also travelled from Azerbaijan to Herat, connecting his learned work to one of the Timurid court cities.

Marāghī described a nawba, a four-part musical suite: an Arabic qawl (sung poem), a Persian ghazal (lyric poem), a tarana based on a quatrain in either language, and a final movement of Arabic verse. This sequence joined sung poetry in Arabic and Persian into a planned performance.