not try to revive their old traditions and their time-honored artistic heritage of dance and song, which is far more beautiful than the arts of others???

And the first of the Lebanese dances we take care to bring back to life is the popular Lebanese dance known as the "dabke"!...

The Lebanese dabke comes in many varieties... more than fifteen of them...

We try to teach our students each variety by itself... and when we feel they have mastered it, we form a troupe and go on an excursion to the place known for that variety of the dabke... and spend a whole day there... getting to know its villages, its landmarks, and its people... then we dance with them their beloved dance and gather from them something of its history, and whatever of its origins may have escaped us...

The Amateur Ensembles

And besides this... the institute has its "Amateurs' Ensemble"... These ensembles play in the schools, the sanatoriums, and the homes...

In the schools they refine the taste of the students, and we train them to appreciate true music; in the sanatoriums they cheer the sick and the feeble-minded. And in the homes they work to polish the family's taste with the fine, elevated musical pieces they play for them...

A Beautiful... Hour

Beautiful was that hour I spent at the Ras Beirut Institute of Music and Drawing...

And beautiful is this provision I carried away with me from there,

gathered from the lips of its head, the artist Salibi...

And more beautiful than all of this were those stumbling notes and confused strokes that reached my ear from moment to moment... from beginners knocking at the beautiful door...

Those strokes and notes and stumbles... had an effect matched in beauty only... by the effect of

the loveliest musical piece from the most famous of players...

I knew perfectly well that those small, stumbling fingertips... would come out of the institute... grown... bold... confident...

after the institute had polished the ear... refined the taste... passed a hand of light over the eyes... and cast magic into the fingertips...!