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 disfig-urement 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,