The Music I Love — Is Music Something We Can Do Without? No! Then Why Have We Neglected Its Cultivation?

In old Chinese literature it is told that when the painter Lao Keng felt his end drawing near, he called his pupils to him, to take delight in the sight of them, to bestow upon them his last blessing, and to bid them farewell before setting out on that journey from which no one returns.

The pupils flocked to him and found him in his room, seated at his table, though he no longer possessed strength enough to lift the brush. They pressed him to return to his bed and seek rest, but he shook his head in refusal and said: I find no escape — these pigments and brushes having been my companions through all my days — from being among them at the hour of my departure from them.

The pupils knelt before him, expecting to hear what he wished to impart to them; but many of them could not contain themselves for grief, and they wept and sobbed. Lao Keng looked at them in astonishment and said: Why do I see you shedding tears, instead of rejoicing and making merry at this banquet to which I have invited you, that you might share in the most delightful thing man enjoys in this life?

Then he smiled into their faces. His pupils dried their tears on the bands of their long silken sleeves, and one of them spoke and said:

Beloved master, forgive our weakness. We wept just now because our hearts are filled with sorrow at what we see of the smallness of your portion of this life's blessings. You have no wife to weep for you, and no sons to carry you to the grave and offer the gods gifts for your soul. You have spent all the days of your life laboring at your work, its bondsman from the hour of dawn until after sunset, while we find that the least of the money-changers in our black markets has amassed more wealth than you were able to earn. You have given mankind gifts with both hands full, and they accepted what you gave — yet without heeding your want, or thinking it needful to supply your need. Have the gods, then, shown you mercy? We, who shall follow in your footsteps after your departure from us, wish to put to you one question: was your attainment of the summit of art worth all these great sacrifices of yours?

Here the old man slowly raises his head, and there flashes in his face a gleam like that which glitters in the face of a warrior at the hour of his greatest victory; then he says:

Yes — my sacrifice has received more than its worth in recompense, for I have been rewarded for it beyond what I ever expected. You spoke the truth, man: I have no wife and no child; and moreover most of my days were passed in hunger, and today, when I am close upon a hundred years, were it not for the generosity of certain friends I should have neither shelter nor clothing. That is because I banished from my mind every hope of gain, so that I might consecrate myself to my art alone. And how should I not turn my face away from the love of owning and acquiring, when I hate, among men, to answer trickery with trickery and greed with greed? And in obeying the call of the heart — that hidden voice which commanded me to walk my road alone — I have won the loftiest aim to which man can aspire in this life.

At this the eldest of the pupils answered: Beloved master, will you make your parting blessing to us the explanation of what you have called "the loftiest aim to which man can aspire in this life"?

Here the master's eyes shine with a strange light; then he rises from his seat and walks with slow, trembling steps toward a wall on which hung the painting dearest of all to his heart, showing a blade of grass, set down by the strong strokes of his brush in loud pigments speaking with life. Yet the picture of this blade was a very revelation of inspiration: the grass in it seemed a living thing that almost breathed. It was not a drawing of grass only; it enfolded within its depths the spirit enfolded in every blade of grass like it that has grown upon the face of the earth since the beginning of creation.

Pointing to the painting, the master said: There is my answer to your question. In creating this painting I made myself the equal of the gods, for I too, like them, was able to touch the fringe of immortality. And here he blessed his pupils; they carried him to his bed, and he gave up the ghost.

And I too love in music that which holds such a spirit as that by which Lao Keng was able to touch the fringe of immortality. Better for a man to spend his life creating even the most trifling of things than to live without the longing for creation ever leaping in his heart.

Every artist of genius whose paintings the museums have treasured up, or the choicest of whose works — all of them worshippers of beauty, who composed their poems to it, carved their statues for it, sang it their melodies, and excelled in their dances for it — all were expressing it as a beautiful expression of a sincere

feeling for all the joys and pains that stir in the heart of life.

I love in music that in which visions take shape — and there are no visions except where the performance is fine. I listen to the notes of the piano, that powerful and gentle instrument invented only some two centuries and a half ago, and I fancy the waterfall of Nab' al-Safa pouring before my eyes, or the waters of al-Fijeh tumbling down the bends of the Barada among the thickets and gardens, or the foam of the waves showering the rocky shores with its slaps.

In the rababa and its sisters I see the nightingales calling to one another in the trees of the Ghouta, clothed in her spring dress embroidered with white blossom, swaying with it upon her moist green carpet; or the calls of the doves in the nay and its troop; or the sprinklings of rain upon the marble lakes of Damascus; just as the rustling of the cedars on the slopes of Fam al-Mizab appears to me in the qanun of Muhammad Atiyyah — that is, if I shut my eyes to the flutter of wings at the mouths of the grottoes and caves.

So too Heinrich Heine, the German poet: after listening to the playing of one of the great masters of the violin, he drew four narrative scenes that have been counted among the masterpieces of prose and eloquence.

Yes, I love in music that which addresses our spirits — not that kind at which souls sicken for the languor and self-admiration it betrays.

But I find this sincere spirit only in religious chanting, or in the celebration of nature and beauty. The Prophetic odes and the old muwashshahs are, to my mind, the best of all that is heard on Arabic radio without exception, for their fine delivery, their lofty expression, their warm feeling, and the charm of their words and meanings.

That is because the companies of religious chanters choose their voices well — they are usually sheikhs and deacons, and most of them join to their own voice the voice of the heart. So too the muwashshahs: they are immortal for all their great age, for what they recall to us of the glories of the days of Arabdom in Andalusia and Baghdad, and because the worship of beauty in them is warm and sincere, without imitation and without affectation.

A Jewish girl in Damascus said: The bell of the Orthodox cathedral never rings to call the people to a funeral but bells of joy ring in my heart. I asked her why. She said: That I may listen to the voice of Deacon So-and-so walking behind the bier, chanting and intoning...

A great deal has been said in definition of art. To my mind the best definition of it is this: mastery of craft — and something else. And what is this something else?

It is the spirit that beats in the folds of every heart, and to which Beethoven gave the name of fire.

Someone has said: whoever writes or composes or sings without being driven to it by the fire within him — that is, without feeling the emotion he describes — had better say nothing at all; otherwise his speech or his song will be artificial and false.

As for the apostrophe to the night at the opening of the mawwal, I can seldom bear it, for the cry of "ya layl" calls up before me nothing but the camel-driver journeying by night through the desert, his heart torn by the pain of parting, beguiling his hunger and thirst with the nearness of dawn. And in the motorcar and the airplane we have today no more need of camels, nor of the misery, hardships, and terrors that attend their journeys.

Yes, I love in music what I love in the other arts: the choosing of those stamped by nature for art.

Ma'bad said: I was a slave boy belonging to the family of Qatan, client of the Banu Makhzum. They were merchants, and I carried on trade for them; and I would come to a rock in the Harra, lying there at night, and lean against it, and in my sleep I would hear a melody running in my ears; then I would rise from sleep and reproduce it.

And though Sultan Selim I has the merit of gathering the Eastern melodies — by summoning the singers from every land Turkey had seized, besides the Persians and the Kurds — most Turkish melodies are to my mind nothing but wailing or dance.

One of the English prisoners in Turkey in the First World War said that, passing once through one of the streets of Istanbul, he heard a playing upon a rababa that made him imagine its source to be a nation upon its knees. Had he heard Turkish music today, he would have changed his opinion of it.

And what adds to the disfigurement of our modern song is that the secondary members of the troupe are for the most part without sensibility, feeling, or fine voice; and it seems to me, when I listen to them — though I love this kind of chanting in company — that I am listening to the voices of demonstrators protesting against French or Zionist colonialism.

I say this though I know that the melody is democratic: whoever wishes has the right to sing it and to carry it with him wherever he goes.

As for the visions I picture in most of our present songs, they amount to no more than the movement of the dancers' feet, their bare arms, the quiverings of their haunches, and the features of their faces, immodest for the most part. If our music remains an imitation of moaning, or of listless dance, it will have created nothing new in itself — and this though art and personality are one. The art of the cinema and of painting has overcome the art of song.

When, then, will it rise in these lands?
I think it will not, until the Arab governments have the wit to choose students worthy of entering the musical institutes of Europe, after they have first drunk deep at the springs of the old Arabic song — the greater part of which, alas, we have lost for want of notation!
Then too, I find that playing has become, in Egypt, finer than singing — despite what someone has said, that the most ravishing of sounds are three: the voice of man, the murmur of water, and the ring of gold. Or the rustle of paper, now that money has come to be confined to paper..
It has been said that nations are like children: distribute among a group of them a quantity of piasters, and one will buy chocolate with his share, a second will purchase a wheel, a third will ask for a picture or a doll, another will buy a pipe, and so on.
Statistics have shown that we are a musical nation; so it is a wonder of wonders that those who have not mastered singing should venture to sing on the radio. Upon my life, in some of the folk songs — even the village ones — there is a fire more sincere than that which is credited to those who boast of their imitative art, joining the melodies of the Arabs to the melodies of the Greeks before history, or to the artless modern melodies of Europe, in a discordant fashion — the very same followed by certain singers in the sixteenth century. For one of them undertook in those days to create a lullaby resembling one that goes by the name of "Three Blind Mice," and he turned its tune about, as though you were to say "Blind Mice Three"; then another ventured upon what he had done, and made the end of the tune its beginning and its beginning its second part, as though you were to say "Blind Three Mice"; and a third, priding himself and wishing to prove his skill in composition, made the middle of the tune its beginning, as though you were to say "Mice Three Blind."
And this manner of mixing the Arab melodies with the Western — above all those of them remote from our tastes, like the discordant cries of the peoples of frozen northern Europe — is like the translation of a journalist who has fitted himself for journalism with nothing but a capacity for translation that cannot do its office, being neither correct nor well-wrought.
So have mercy on the spirits, O you who address the spirits! Yet all these innovators do not rise to the level of what Abduh al-Hamuli attained in his adwar.
And if there is to be no renewal but this, then let us content ourselves with Abu al-Zuluf and the 'Ataba, immortal as long as God wills.