Between My Grandmother and Me...

My grandmother said to me, sorrow flooding her face:

"What perfect luck is ours! Your brother is preparing himself to be a musician, an alati, who understands nothing of his world but tunes and melodies. God's mercy on your grandfather and on his broad hopes for his grandson's future — for he hoped he would be a great physician, or an able lawyer, or a great commander."

I said to her: Have mercy on my brother, grandmother, for he is in the bloom of his hopes and the flower of his youth; his feelings surge with loftiness, and sublimity plays upon his senses. He has loved that music which never once knocked at your ear, and toward which your inclination never turned — so that you have remained ignorant of it with an inexcusable ignorance.

She answered me, mockery filling her tones: "And what might this music of his be?"

I said to her: Grandmother, I know no more of it than you do, for in the institutes of learning I found no way open to it. Those in charge of our minds polished them with books; those who watch over our souls filled them with religion; those who keep vigil over our health set it right with nourishment — but the artistic tastes in our depths have remained captive to our ignorance. So we have read philosophy and literature, we have tried to understand the Koran and the Gospel, and we have learned many of the rules of health; yet we still yearn to hear the taqasim and to echo sighs after every hoarse, strangled voice... But the music my brother wants as a profession for life is another world, far from our world, a realm of thought and release that shrinks from our realm.

She turned her head aside and said: And is this music fit to be your brother's profession? Or would you be content to have it said of you tomorrow: this is the alati's sister? What is the matter with you — have you gone mad?

I said: Grandmother, you are right in what you see, for I would not be content to have it said of me that I am the alati's sister, so long as the alati is a deformed caricature of music in the lands of the earth. But in my brother's endeavor there is a breaking free from the conventions accepted among our artists, and a bold advance toward standards that have become absolute rules of art and beauty together.

What shame can touch one whose brother is a musician, when in the heart of Germany the statues of musicians stand erect in its greatest cities; when in the land of the Russians the citizen takes pride that from among his people came the geniuses of music; when in America they labor to create the fostering spirit that welcomes the world's production, so that it may itself strive toward a new artistic creation... and when in Italy an ancient cradle drowses upon melodies from the oldest of ages...

My grandmother started up, saying: But we are here, in the East, my daughter, and in the land of the Arabs! What is the matter with you, wandering in the wildernesses of the earth, and then bringing examples from nations like those nations? Come, tell me who today turns to music — even among our educated people — and seeks it as a spiritual need not to be escaped; nay, count for me that wakeful few among the people who can even relish it.

I said: Grandmother, what we see in our today opens our hearts with glad tidings for our tomorrow. Our standards in thought and morals rise today with a new light we did not know before; how much more, then, the standard of art, which is more graceful still — tomorrow it will answer the call of the dawn in the coming renaissance. For we did not build our music upon the rules of science, nor establish its foundations by research and investigation; we have no musical history that recounts the story of our first melodies. We simply followed along with whatever the fancies of composers toyed with, until we had formed for ourselves what we suppose to be "music," which does not rise much above the level of our singing — a singing that stirs in our souls not a single tremor of release.

But my grandmother huffed and said: Is this how you forget our efforts on your brother's behalf? Do you not object that he should go off to study music in the lands of the West for long years, and then come back with something whose wage will pay no one?!

I said: Grandmother, would that I had of your wisdom what would show me things as you see them. But I adjure you by that very wisdom to tell me how it is that people demand of the physician that he obtain a degree in medicine before he practices his profession upon ailing bodies, yet do not trouble to demand of the musician a degree in his art, entitling him to play upon the stirrings of their hearts and upon the subtlest meanings of their souls.

And only yesterday the voice of Mustafa Kemal echoed in Turkey, saying, with a wisdom he never uttered in all his political judgments: "Give me a musician, and with him I will change the face of the East."

Why, then, should I not pray to God in earnest that He send us that awaited one!
Whereupon my grandmother said: Mercy upon us, O Lord! Let not that musician be our son!