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COMMENTARY
November 22, 2006
Music; Lebanon
Music is among the subjects I should like to write about more often in these columns. What stops me is not the editors of this newspaper, who have been admirably indulgent through nearly a decade -- though I imagine after a few weeks of writing exclusively about music, they would quietly move my column to some other page. It is instead sheer ignorance and incapacity that stays my hand.Among the lamentable gaps in my education, I was never taught to sing, read music, or play the piano. Well, a delightful lady, by name Promela, tried to teach me piano once, when I was a little boy in Lahore. But although one of nature’s optimists, she soon gave up on me, abandoning her previous dogmatic position that, “Anyone can be taught to play the piano.” It is possible to love things you don’t understand -- wine, women, and song come to mind -- and the mystery of “how music works” has never interfered with my delight in it. I might love it more, if I could play something, but even as pure consumer, supplied with nothing better than a mountain of CDs, I am kept happy. I do not play them for background music, nor listen to a radio in this way. My brain is so wired, that background music will distract me from any foreground activity -- and there are things like deadlines to be met. Instead, I listen as an end in itself, often through headphones, and following the programme in the album notes. Today is the feast of St Cecilia, the patron of music; and such fine musical odes have been written for her as that most famous one of 1692 by the Englishman, Henry Purcell -- with its sublime treble and chorus on the words, “Thou tun’st this world, this world below; the spheres above. Who, in the heavenly round, to their own music move!” Listen to it, if you wished to be reminded what is meant by, “the music of the spheres”. It is by such music, that we are raised above thugs. St Cecilia was, by legend, some early Christian maiden and martyr, possibly the foundress of a church at Rome. But even her association with music is for reasons now impossibly obscure. The story of her life is unhistorical. Yet she looms large in the consciousness of Christian musicians. Call it paganism if you wish: many beautiful streaks of paganism enhance the beauty of the Church. Beauty was from our beginnings recognized as cognate with the Good and the True. And while music can express malice and evil (as so much contemporary pop music does) -- as it can excite the wanton, to lust and violence -- so also can it express the divine, and what is most lovable in the human. As Martin Luther did not say (really it was the London pastor, Rowland Hill): “The devil should not have all the best tunes.” * It is certainly not the feast day for Our Lady of Lebanon. As part of the current power play to install the terrorist Hezbollah and its allies in power at Beirut, under Syrian and Iranian sponsorship, yet another prominent Christian politician has been assassinated. Pierre Gemayel, 34, was the fifth in a series, counting from the car-bombing of the former prime minister, Rafik Hariri, in February last year. Gemayel, murdered on his way from church, was the scion of one of Lebanon’s leading political families, and among the Christians’ and democrats’ chief hopes for the future. The message in his killing is obvious to all: that opponents of fanatical Islam, and of the ambitions of the ayatollahs in Iran, must die ignominiously. From St Joseph’s Hospital in Beirut, where Gemayel died, his shaken father, Amin Gemayel, begged his followers not to seek reprisals against the killers of his son. Embedded in that statement was the music of the spheres. Here is a country that was once a little citadel of Christianity -- the last "Crusader kingdom", if you like -- and, only a few decades ago, by far the most economically advanced, the most free, and most liveable country in the Middle East (excepting Israel). Beirut was the entrepôt, through which commercial prosperity passed into many Arab lands. It was incidentally the centre for Arab music, as well as publishing, and the like -- the one place in the whole vast, squalid, backward region where, regardless of his religion, an Arab artist or intellectual could enjoy freedom of expression. It melts now in the hellfire of radical “Islamism”, and the exodus of its once-majority Christians is accelerating. The Cedar Revolution, that briefly promised a restoration of freedom and democracy, is coming to an end. Tyranny and death will now call the tunes. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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