ReSIA presents Prof. Owen Wright

Convenor: Professor Anna Contadini

Room RG01, SOAS, University of London

If you live outside of London and would like to watch online please email Matty Bradley at mb@royalasiaticsociety.org to receive the zoom link.

Past and future ReSIA talks can be found on our Youtube channel:

ReSIA SOAS YouTube Channel

We may be tempted to think of music as an exclusively aural phenomenon, one that cannot be smelt, felt, or seen. But it is socially grounded, and its participants, listeners, singers, instrumentalists, and dancers can be observed and represented. It is also an object of thought, so that various aspects of it can be shown schematically, for example in the form of diagrams, or expressed through metaphors; and for performers it can be represented symbolically, translated into visual code to provide an aide-mémoire. Some of these various approaches and techniques will be explored, drawing especially upon representations in paintings and in theoretical texts.

Owen Wright took his first degree in French (at Leicester University) and a second BA in Arabic at SOAS University of London, where he also completed his PhD in musicology and pursued his academic career. He was appointed Lecturer in Arabic, then Reader in Arabic and finally Professor of Musicology of the Near and Middle East and was at various times Head of the Department of the Near and Middle East and Chair of the Centre of Music Studies. His research concentrates on the historical development of the art-music traditions of the Islamic world, with at its core an engagement with both the theoretical literature, initially in Arabic and subsequently also in Persian and Turkish, and the extant documentation of practice as recorded in notations and song-text collections.

A publication in his honour appeared in 2018: Theory and Practice in the Music of the Islamic World. Essays in Honour of Owen Wright, edited by Rachel Harris and Martin Stokes, Routledge. Prof. Wright is the recipient of the 2025 British Academy Derek Allen Prize for Musicology.

His latest publications include: The Ottoman classical repertoire in historical perspective. Abingdon and New York: Routledge (in press); ‘The modal road: Bokhara – Baghdad – Cairo’, Zeitschrift für Geschichte der Arabisch-Islamischen Wissenschaften 2024; ‘Persian perspectives: Chardin, Kaempfer and De la Borde,’ Rast Musicology Journal, Special Issue 2019/7(2): 2050-83; Music theory in the Safavid age. The taqsīm al-naġamāt wa-bayān al-daraj wa-’l-šu‘ab wa-’l-maqāmāt. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2019; ‘The peregrinations of panjgāh’, Annali di Ca’ Foscari 55, 2019: 73-119; ‘Bridging the Safavid-Ottoman divide’, in Reinhard Strohm (ed.), The music road. Coherence and diversity in music from the Mediterranean to India (Proceedings of the British Academy 233), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019, pp. 168-93.

Image caption: Nizami, Khamsa, dated 1509-10.Chester Beatty Library, Per. 182, fol. 256r.