Towards a dialogue of souls


One of the earliest warning of the humanitarian crisis that is now engulfing Europe came in 2011 from Jordi Savall. His Mare Nostrum book/CD project contained an essay by Catalan author Rossend Domènech titled 'The Sea of Death: The Challenge of Immigration - The Human Drama', and the project shared its title with the Italian maritime rescue operation that saved the lives of thousands of refugees in the Mediterranean before being shut down in October 2014. Many of those currently perishing in the Mediterranean are fleeing from the civil war in Syria, and more recently Jordi Savall gave voice to his humanitarian concerns about that conflict in 'Orient-Occident II: Homage to Syria'. In his preface to the recording Jordi quotes the Lebanese/French novelist Amin Maalouf's assertion that: "If we are to restore some hope to our disoriented humanity, we must go beyond a mere dialogue of cultures and beliefs towards a dialogue of souls. As we stand at the beginning of the 21st century, that is the irreplaceable mission of art".

Singing and playing the oud on that homage to Syria, and also on Jordi's acclaimed 'Bal•Kan: Honey and Blood' project was the young Syrian Waed Bouhassoun. She now lives in France and recently released her second solo album titled 'L'Âme du luth' (Soul of the oud); all the compositions are her own, two for solo oud are coupled with nine songs with mystical themes. Sufism in Syria has been targeted by the dark forces of fundamentalism, and all Waed Bouhassoun's settings pay homage to this liberal and mystical strand of Islam.

Ibn 'Arabi is represented by his famous text "I believe in the religion of love, whatever way its camels may take", while the tenth-century Sufi martyr Manṣūr Al-Ḥallāǵ's heretical declaration "I am the one I love and the one I love is me" is also set. Among the other poets chosen by Waed Bouhassoun is the twelfth-century Shihab al-Din al-Suhrawardi who combined early Sufism with Zoroastrianism and Platonism; her setting of al-Suhrawardi can be sampled via this link. Modern poetry is represented by the Syrian poet and essayist Adonis who proposed that the movement towards Sufi mysticism came about because neither religious orthodoxy nor science could answer many of the profound questions posed by man. That latter observation has a particular relevance as the dreadful human tragedies in Syria and on the borders of Europe are not being solved by either religio-political orthodoxy or scientific pragmatism derived from the Enlightenment.

No freebies involved in this post. Any copyrighted material is included as "fair use" for critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Also on Facebook and Twitter.

Comments

Post a Comment

Recent popular posts

Does it have integrity and relevance?

Image
Shortly after it was released I bought the young Finn  Klaus Mäkelä's new complete cycle of Sibelius symphonies recorded for Decca. Sibelius symphonies are very well represented in my large CD collection , in fact I have more Sibelius symphony cycles than for any other composer. Yet I have returned to Mäkelä's interpretations a surprising number of times. No, they will not replace the accounts of Sanderling , Colin Davis,  Barbirolli , and others. But they are not worse or better: because subjective dualist judgements of better or worse, like or dislike, good and bad, definitive or otherwise, etc etc no longer mean anything to me . There is no concrete reality in a music performance, only what we individually perceive as reality. A performance is an endless flow of constantly changing conditions. The score is not the performance, and the performance is not the score. Between score and performance lie an infinite number of overlapping variables - tempi, dynamics, performanc
Read more

The Berlin Philharmonic's darkest hour

Image
Wilhelm Furtwängler was born on 25th January 1886. He was Music Director of the Berlin Philharmonic from 1923 to his death in 1954, and held this position for the twelve years that Hitler was in power. In January 1945 he was conducting in Vienna, and fled from there to Switzerland where he remained until the Battle of Berlin ended in the defeat of the Nazis. The musicians of his orchestra remained in Berlin during its darkest hour. Here is their story: On 28th March 1945 the Russian forces commanded by Marshal Georgy Zhukov were just twenty miles to the east of Berlin. A month previously Albert Speer had been replaced as Nazi armaments minister after trying to persuade Hitler that defeat was inevitable. Speer now turned his energies to preventing the musicians of his adored Berlin Philharmonic from perishing in the inevitable final battle. Reich Commisioner Dr Joseph Goebells, who was in charge of the defence of Berlin, had ordered the entire orchestra to be drafted into the Vol
Read more

Why new audiences are deaf to classical music

Image
One important reason why classical music is failing to attract a new young audience is being ignored - today's much sought-after digital natives are fast becoming tomorrow's hearing loss natives. As the Clínic de Barcelona explains , until recently, hearing loss had always been related to age: the older you are, the worse your hearing is. This situation, however, has changed in recent years, as increasingly younger people are suffering from hearing loss. There are many reasons for this widespread hearing loss. There are now high levels of ambient noise - for instance the average daytime ambient noise  without PA announcements inside a US airport terminal is 66 decibels which approaches that of a a washing machine. Then there is the noise from the headphones, earbuds, etc used for long periods with digital devices. In addition the overlooked widespread  use of ototoxic drugs , including macrolide drugs and non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs), contributes to hearin
Read more

Colin McPhee - East collides with West

Image
'It seems to me certain that future progress in creative music for composers of the Western world must inevitably go towards the exploration and integration of elements drawn from more than one of the world's cultures. ' This remarkably accurate prophecy was made by Henry Cowell in 1947, and was prompted by a radio broadcast of Colin McPhee's gamelan inspired Tabuh-Tabuhan which had received its first performance eleven years earlier. Carol J. Oja's exemplary biography (jacket below) describes Colin McPhee as a 'composer of two worlds'. He was born in Toronto in 1900, and established a dual career of pianist and composer at an early age. He started his studies at the Peabody Conservatory in 1918, and spent two years studying in Paris before settling in New York in 1926. He quickly established himself as a one of a new generation of American composers, and his music was presented at a concert of Edgard Varèse's International Composer's Guild. At
Read more

Classical music has many Buddhist tendencies

Image
With 376 million followers Buddhism is the fourth largest belief system in the world. Its core teachings of compassion and non-violence are well-known; but the wider cultural impact of those in the creative community exhibiting what the composer Jonathan Harvey described as "Buddhist tendencies" is underappreciated. Sri Lanka's state religion is Theravada - doctrine of the elders - Buddhism , and it may not be a coincidence that in 1960 elected Sirimavo Bandaranaike , the world's first woman prime minister. The island has been a center of Buddhist scholarship and practice since the introduction of Buddhism in the third century, and the country played a leading role in the preservation of the Pāli Canon of Buddhist teachings. I took the accompanying photos on a recent pilgrimage to Buddhist shrines in Sri Lanka, and to illustrate the influence of Buddhism on classical music I have juxtaposed them with cameos of music with Buddhist tendencies that provided the iPod so
Read more

Vonnegut gets his Dresden facts wrong

Image
In 1968, the year I wrote Slaughterhouse Five, I finally became grown up enough to write about the bombing of Dresden. It was the largest massacre in European history. I, of course, know about Auschwitz, but a massacre is something that happens suddenly, the killing of a whole lot of people in a very short time. In Dresden, on February 13, 1945, about 135,000 people were killed by British firebombing in one night. It was pure nonsense, pointless destruction. The whole city was burned down, and it was a British atrocity, not ours. They sent in night bombers, and they came in and set the whole town on fire with a new kind of incendiary bomb. And so everything organic, except my little PoW group, was consumed by fire. It was a military experiment to find out if you could burn down a whole city by scattering incendiaries over it. Kurt Vonnegut's 1968 novel Slaughter-house Five is an essential part of the literature of the bombing of Dresden. In his new book A Man Without a Country: A
Read more

Master musician who experienced the pain of genius

Image
On that sleeve for his 1985 recording of the Goldberg Variations , Scott Ross is seen standing in the grounds of Château d'Assas in Languedoc. It was here that many of the harpsichordist's great recordings were made. Then, as today, the château dwelt in the twilight zone between grandeur and dereliction, and thirty years ago the recording sessions were regularly interrupted by the sound of rats scurrying across the floor. Scott Ross was born in Pittsburgh in 1951, and moved to France with his mother following the death of his father in 1964. He studied at the conservatoires in Nice and Paris, and first came to Château d'Assas in 1969 to give music lessons to the grandson of its owner Mme. Simone Demangel . When an early music academy was established at the Château d'Assas, Scott Ross gave masterclasses and became a frequent visitor. At first he stayed in a room in one of the towers, but from 1983 he rented a small house across the road from the château. The photos b
Read more

In search of 'le point vierge'

Image
That icon of the Virgin Mary and baby Jesus was photographed by me last week at the Coptic monastery of Dayr Mar Girgis in Upper Egypt. The Trappist monk, mystic and author Thomas Merton wrote of le point vierge - the virgin point - and described how there is "at the center of our being a a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God... which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will". Le point vierge is found in different forms in the great wisdom traditions, particularly in Sufism, and it is from this tradition that Thomas Merton developed his vision of a point of pure truth. This vision is also found in popular culture: for instance in John Lennon's Imagine, which - in an unashamed hymn to le point vierge - implores us to "imagine there is no heaven.. no religion... no countries.. no possessions". This search for a poi
Read more

Elgar and the occult

Image
Aleister Crowley was a practicioner of the occult, ceremonial magician and recreational drug experimenter. Sir Edward Elgar was Master of the King's Music, practising Catholic and composer of Land of Hope and Glory . A connection between the two may seem highly improbable. But this post explores a little known path linking Elgar to Crowley's world of the occult. In 1915 the actress Lena Ashwell asked Elgar to write the incidental music for a play she was producing. The Starlight Express was based on the recently published novel A Prisoner in Fairyland and the adaption was by the books' author Algernon Blackwood and Violet Pearn. Elgar's original intention was to reuse music from his early composition The Wand of Youth, but as the project progressed he added a substantial amount of new music to the score. The Starlight Express opened in London on 29th December 1915 to mixed reviews. The critical consensus was that the play was too long and the staging inappropriat
Read more

If classical music is not live it is dead

Image
'We are the children of our landscape; it dictated behaviour and even thought in the measure to which we are responsible to it. I can think of no better identification' - Lawrence Durrell writing in Justine Over the years I have been fortunate to travel extensively, but my recent extended visit to Morocco was the longest time I have spent on a different continent and in a different culture. With me went an iPod loaded with an eclectic mix of classical, world, jazz and folk music, plus high quality headphones and a pair of the wonderfully portable XMI X-mini II speakers . Now here is the interesting point - as my trip progressed and as I became more atuned to both the physical and cultural landscape of North Africa, I found myself listening to less and less western classical music, and to more and more from other genres. There were exceptions, most notably Bach who transcended landscape. But I was surprised at the change in my listening pattern, and it was a change that had no
Read more