Dwight Reynolds, professor of religious studies, University of California, Santa Barbara

Music historians have long known that musical trends and technologies passed between Muslims and Christians in medieval Iberia (present-day Spain and Portugal), and we have assumed that Europeans also brought new musical ideas back from their travels in the eastern Mediterranean during the era of the Crusades. Surprisingly little scholarship has addressed the details of this exchange, asking what Europeans absorbed from the musical practices of the Holy Land and what musical traditions they may have left behind. In this lecture, eminent ethnomusicologist Dwight Reynolds addresses the question of musical influence and exchange in the eastern Mediterranean during the era of the Crusades.

Dwight F. Reynolds is professor of Arabic language and literature in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of Heroic Poets, Poetic Heroes: The Ethnography of Performance in an Egyptian Oral Epic Tradition (1995) and Arab Folklore (2007), co-author and editor of Interpreting the Self: Autobiography in the Arabic Literary Tradition (2001), and co-editor of The Garland Encyclopedia of Word Music: The Middle East (2002). He has published numerous articles on Arabo-Andalusian music and has conducted research on these traditions in Spain, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Lebanon, and Syria.