which the reader will find below:

The musician Kiesewetter, from the province of Moravia in Czechoslovakia, was the first to write on Arab music, in his book "The Music of the Arabs," which appeared in 1842 and will be spoken of in its place. He was followed by Father Collangettes, of the college of the Jesuit Fathers in Beirut, with two valuable studies on music published in the Journal Asiatique in 1904. Salvador Daniel wrote his work "La Musique Arabe" in 1879. And in 1899 the Lebanese scholar Mikhail Mashaqa com-posed "The Shihabi Epistle on the Art of Music," which made a great stir in the Arab countries and even in Europe. The British scholar Alexander Ellis mentioned it in his translation of the works of Helmholtz, the famous physicist, and in his commentaries upon them. As for the musical scale, Mashaqa adopted the theory of Aristoxenus the Trojan and divided the musical scale into twenty-four equal parts — though it should be known that this scale was rejected by the countrymen of the aforesaid philosopher, and that this same division was rejected by the Cairo Congress of Arab Music.

There lately came to me a letter from the Egyptian Ministry of Social Affairs stating that a committee has been formed there, under the chairmanship of the Honorable Muhammad Zaki Ali Pasha, to examine the questions relating to the Arab musical scale, the problem of Western musical instruments and their incorpora-tion into Arab music, and the relation of the latter to Western music, all in preparation for the convening of a general congress to settle these questions once and for all.

It is no secret that a modern renaissance has arisen in the European countries with respect to Arab music, the proof being the translation of the works of the Arab musicians of the Middle Ages into foreign languages. Of these books there have appeared so far the "Great Book of Music" of al-Farabi, the twelfth chapter of the "Book of Healing" of Ibn Sina, the "Sharafiyya" of Safi al-Din, and the "Fathiyya" of Abd al-Hamid al-Ladhiqi, trans-lated and annotated by Baron Rodolphe d'Erlanger, the great French orientalist.

The famous Russian orientalist Dr. Belyaev was kind enough to send me a letter through the Soviet embassy in Beirut; here is some of what it said: "The subjects you are treating in Lebanon are, for us, of the greatest importance: first, for the relation of these subjects to the questions of the study of the Eastern musical culture found in the lands of the Soviet Union.

"Secondly, for their relation also to the questions of the expansion of musical culture in western Europe and in the whole world. The subjects you treat give the musical scholars of the Soviet Union benefits of real importance, for their interest in the theoretical field is the relation of the tempered scale to the untempered scales among various peoples, and the study of national harmony. And the piece 'Mawtini' which you sent me permits the conclusion that the musicians of Lebanon are also thinking of creating the national harmonic method."

In Britain the well-known musi-cian Dr. Henry Farmer, the Scot, has arisen and taken pains to learn the Arabic language in order to study the old manuscripts and

everything relating to the music of the Arabs in the libraries of Europe and elsewhere. In 1940 he produced a book he called "The Sources of Arabian Music," which is an index of all the Arabic manuscripts extant and lost, and he is still searching out everything that relates to the music of the Arabs.

The Greeks wished to add an Eastern music to their own, desiring to give it a universal stamp; but they did not know that their national music already contained the seeds of that universal music. In the early age of Islam al-Farabi composed the "Great Book of Music," in which he turned the intervals of Greek music upside down, and thus came the major scale — as appears plainly in the twelve tables that we find in the third part of his aforesaid book — and this was the greatest event in the history of music.

Al-Farabi was not conscious of the importance of the work he had done, and so it seems to me that he did not foresee what conquest this work of his would achieve in the history of music. Al-Farabi, who conferred upon music the stamp of universal-ity, did not know — just as the Greeks before him had not known — that the individual, single-voiced method carried within it the roots of a universal art.

The Arabs, the completers of the Greeks, by turning upside down the whole body of the Greeks'

national signs, and by obtaining the major scale, and afterward the physical scale which Safi al-Din established, were likewise unaware that they had laid the foundation of a universal music.

The theorists of the West, in calling the individual Greek method the