Why music is called the divine art


Philip Glass, Karol Szymanowski, John Tavener and Jonathan Harvey are among the composers who have set the poetry of Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī. Books of Rumi's poetry as reimagined by Coleman Barks have sold more than half a million copies, and in 1994 Publishers Weekly announced that Rumi was the bestselling poet in America. But the marketing of Rumi to Western audiences all too often severs him from Islam, and Stephen Schwarz has lamented the reduction of the Sufi master's metaphysics to the idiom of a gift card. Other less sanitised settings of Rumi that have featured On An Overgrown Path over the years include Ali Reza Ghorbani's Songs of Rebirth, the Firebird ensemble's L’Oiseau de Feu, Doulce Mémoire's Laudes, Ali Keeler's Ruh, Sheikh Hassan Dyck's The First and the Last and Trio Chemirani's Dawâr.

Rumi is, of course, celebrated as the founder of the Mevlâna Order of Whirling Dervishes. My header photo shows Julien 'Jalal Eddine' Weiss (extreme right) and his Ensemble al-Kindī performing at a Sufi Sema. Born in Paris in 1953, Julien Weiss studied classical guitar and spent time on the fringes of the counterculture. In the 1970s he began studying the oud and then the qanûn (Oriental zither). He became a virtuoso of the qânun and an authority on Arab classical music, and in 1983 he converted to Islam and took the name Jalal Eddine in homage to Rumi. His conversion to Islam was by his own refreshingly candid admission "partly social - I wanted to be more than an outsider and become part of the Sufi community...". In a Telegraph profile Peter Culshaw wrote of divorcee Weiss that "While he may not be the most devout Muslim (expecting a Frenchman to give up women and wine would perhaps be a tall order), Weiss's spiritual path is through music".

Julien Weiss made his home in a 14th century Mamelouk residence in the then important Arab cultural of Aleppo in 1995. It was in Aleppo that he recorded the influential Ensemble al-Kindī albums such as 'Aleppian Sufi Trance' and 'Whirling Dervishes of Damascus' that shrewdly combine rigorous musicology with Western-friendly titles. It is a mixed blessing that he did not live to see the tragic wanton destruction of Aleppo in the Syrian civil war. He succumbed to cancer in 2015 aged just 61 and is buried alongside many other great musicians in Paris' Père Lachaise cemetery. His last concert in the UK was in October 2013, where he played solo at the genre-busting Aberdeen Microtonal Festival after his Syrian musician were denied UK entry visas.

On December 17th, 1273 CE Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī died in Konya, and the day is known as his Sheb-i Arus - Wedding Night - in recognition of his union that day with his Beloved. Each year around the world Semas are held on December 17th to celebrate Rumi's Wedding Night. As a small contribution to the celebrations I am posting a video of a complete performance of Julien 'Jalal Eddine' Weiss' last major project*, his homage to the Muslim and Christian Mary Stabat Mater Dolorosa. In this performance at the 2008 Fès Sacred Music Festival Julien Weiss at the qanûn drives the music forward like a mystic DJ working his turntables at a dance club. As a result this is music that transcends genres and cultures to confirm Sufi master musician and teacher Hazrat Inayat Khan's assertion that:
Why is music called the divine art, while all other arts are not so called? We may certainly see God in all arts and in all sciences, but in music alone we see God free from all forms and thoughts. In every other art there is idolatory. Every thought, every word has its form. Sound alone is free from form. Every word of poetry forms a picture in our mind. Sound alone does not make any object appear.


Julien Weiss' Stabat Mater Dolorosa has not been released as a commercial recording. The sound quality on the professionally produced YouTube video from Fès is good, so let's hope Weiss' record label Le Chant du Monde posthumously issue it as a CD together with material from his unfinished solo qanûn project. No review samples used in this post. Any copyrighted material is included as "fair use" for critical analysis, 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

The Perfect Wagnerite

Image
The qualities in him that specially appealed to youth were his irreverence for tradition and office, his indifference to vested interests and inflated reputations, his contempt for current morality, his championship of unpopular causes and persecuted people, his vitality and humour, and above all his inability to take solemn people seriously. Hesketh Pearson on George Bernard Shaw (above), who was born on July 26, 1856. GBS trivia -he is the only person to have been awarded both the Nobel Prize for Literature (1925) and an Oscar (1938). These were for his contributions to literature and for his work on the film Pygmalion , respectively. Shaw on Elgar here. Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk
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

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

I am not from east or west

Image
The ranking of the Muslim Rumi as America's best-selling poet is, like the embrace of vinyl by a hard-core digital culture, one of the paradoxes of recent times. Rumi's inclusive message of joy and love explains his universal but still surprising appeal , and in populist interpretations by Coleman Barks and others this message resounds in verses such as "I am neither Christian nor Jew, neither Zoroastrian nor Muslim, I am not from east or west" and "I am a drunkard from another kind of tavern. I dance to a silent tune. I am the symphony of stars". Rumi's life-affirming poetry has been set to music by notable figures including Philip Glass , John Tavener , Jonathan Harvey , R. Murray Schafer and Karol Szymanowski , while takes on Rumi by rock musicians have included the 1996 album Three Fish by the eponymous band led by Pearl Jam 's Jeff Ament. All of these settings of Sufi poetry use translations of varying accuracy of Rumi's original vers
Read more

The paradox of the Dalai Lama

Image
The Paradox of Our Age , a short but powerful essay credited to the present Dalai Lama, is widely available in Ladakh in northern India, a region known as 'Little Tibet'. The text ends with the observation that: 'These are times of fast foods but slow digestion/Tall men but short characters/Steep profits but shallow relationships/It’s a time when there is much in the window but nothing in the room'. Tibetan Buddhism is widely viewed as an appealing alternative to materialistic Western society, so, not surprisingly, The Paradox of Our Age is widely circulated on the internet and Twitter - see photo tweet below . I bought The Paradox of Our Age on an exquisitely printed little scroll in the Tibetan refugee market in the regional capital of Leh, where I had travelled overland from Delhi in July to observe the Kalachakra teachings given by the Dalai Lama. My accompanying photos capture that intensely moving spiritual event; but they also capture a great spiritual tra
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

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

Why cats hate Mahler symphonies

Image
My recent post ' Your cat is a music therapist ' was well appreciated judging by site traffic. So here is a codicil which raises some interesting points about synaesthesia. Reportedly Alexander Scriabin, Jean Sibelius, Olivier Messiaen, György Ligeti and Franz Liszt were among the classical composers who experienced cross-over between sensory channels. The impact of narrowing sensory bandwidth as music moves from a live to a recorded environment, and then from analogue to lossy digital formats is little understood and little researched.But it may have important implications for classical music's attempts to reach a new audience, and, topically, it may be very relevant to the post-COVID experience of Zoom concerts and live music in socially distanced auditoriums . I will discuss how what we see influences what we hear in a forthcoming post. Meanwhile here is an extract from Akif Pirinçci and Rolf Degen ’s book Cat Sense which explains the synaesthetic impact of a Ma
Read more