When the acclaimed American music historian Ted Gioia decided to write a history of love songs, back in the 1990s, he was envisioning a relatively straightforward research project. The process proved quite demanding, however, and it is only this week, more than 20 years on and just in time for Valentine’s Day, that his work will be published.
Now he awaits the fallout.
"This is an unwritten chapter in western music, that the love song as we know it today was invented in the Muslim world," says Gioia. "I had various ideas in my head [about] who had been the innovators, but a few years into the research I found that the history books are all wrong. At a certain point, the book became Love Songs: The Hidden History, because even though this is the most common kind of music for the last 1,000 years, we still don't understand it."
We hopefully will understand it a little better now. The author, who was raised in California and is now based in Texas, has already taken on books about work songs and healing songs, but encountered an anomaly with the final part of that trilogy. Prevailing academic thinking insists that western noblemen were the original creative forces behind what became modern love songs, but that theory jarred with Gioia.
“We take it for granted now that when you sing about love you sing about being enslaved and in servitude to the person you love,” he says.
He offers two varied examples from 1960s soul: the bitter Chain of Fools and the melancholic I'm Your Puppet. But can we really trace such sentiments back to medieval rulers?
“These nobles begin singing songs, acting as if they’re in servitude, which is puzzling,” he says. “But it makes perfect sense when you realise that they’re imitating songs by women who actually were enslaved.”
Gioia’s own theory suggests that the real originators were “the qiyan, the elite female singing slaves of the Abbasid era” – the Baghdad-based dynasty that ruled diminishing portions of the Middle East from 750 to 1258.
Their songs eventually migrated to Islamic-controlled areas of the Iberian Peninsula, then elsewhere in Europe.
Not that the history books reflect this. “Mysteriously enough, in Provence, which is just at the border of the Muslim-controlled territory, these noblemen start singing very similar love songs to the ones these Muslim slaves were singing. But the nobles get credit for it.”
Love Songs offers extensive evidence of similarities between those slave-performed songs and modern styles, and the argument is compelling. The book also cites several experts from the 19th century who previously linked Arab and western music and were met with "hostility and derision". Gioia, too, has caused some consternation.
“You start saying that the history of western music over the last 1,000 years is based on incorrect supposition and you’re going to get pushback,” he says. “I had to go to dozens and dozens of scholars and confront them with my radical ideas, and then get attacked in turn with the sources they told me to check. Almost every paragraph of this book had to be researched and double-checked. I had to get into very deep levels of scholarship.”
Not that the result is at all stuffy – some fascinating characters emerge. Ziryab, for example, was a singer and teacher famed for mastering 10,000 songs, who migrated from Baghdad to the Spanish city of Córdoba and inspired numerous music schools. He also found time for wider pursuits. “It’s a great subject: he invented toothpaste, brought over chess,” says Gioia. “He was exiled because he became too popular.”
The qiyan's compositions occupy one chapter of Love Songs, but similarly intriguing tales emerge elsewhere in the book, of captives inspiring their captors. Perhaps slaves are less restricted by creative norms, Gioia suggests, and hence more inclined to innovation.
“It happened in the United States, it happened in Europe, it happened in the Muslim world, it happened in ancient Rome. Writing the book, you see the pattern: this is happening over and over,” he says.
This seemingly harmless genre clearly has a complex history; indeed, having been introduced into Europe, the love song was virtually banned for hundreds of years. Such intense individual emotion was deemed “dangerous”, says Gioia, which helps explain why those noblemen are often given the glory. Common folk were discouraged from public performance, “but when the prince of the realm decides that he wants to sing them, it’s different”, he says. “So they do deserve credit for disseminating it. And by the time you get into the late medieval period, everybody is singing love songs.”
And we still are. Two decades after beginning his research, then, Gioia is about to offer the results for global scrutiny, and a little trepidation is understandable. “I believe that I’ve documented this very persuasively, but we’ll see,” he says. “I’m curious to see how this plays out.”
Love Songs: The Hidden History (Oxford University Press) is out on February 10, via Oxford University Press. For more information, visit www.tedgioia.com