Music was the Homage the creation paid to The Lord, when The Law and the Dimensions, the Elements and the cosmii, the worlds and their prophets, bowed of joy and awe of the The Grandeur and The Majesty of The Lord; they all submitted willingly, for The Lord’s Might is beyond the grasp of His Creation,

Music, the echo of which is still in every being’s heart, yearning to be heard again,

So all sing, to relive moments which are too high to reach, and how many composers of music died frustrated, because they knew they could not come close to that moment, and they never will.

Humans sing, animals sing, trees and natural phenomena, the elements, and indeed the galaxies and the planetary systems and their planets sing in harmony,

Those who can eavesdrop to the music of the skies are in euphoria before and after,

The scales to which you sing and play your music are being sung by the stars; their originals are by far more beautiful than what your musical skills can replicate, and were brought down to you by those who could hear them: in India and China, in Egypt and Canaan, and in Persia and Greece.

Music of ancient times was played and sung for the aim of helping those on the Way to peak in the mind,

It was sung and played by the believers in their places of retreat.

But the music was overheard by darkened people, thus it was stolen, and the lyrics of transcendence were turned to sensuality, and the joy of existence to revelling, by those who do not discern.

And folk music was meant to be performed and enjoyed by all, it, too, can reach high peaks in the hearts which are still alive, with its simple repeating tunes, descended from the heavens, and its simple rhythms,

Its lyrics inflame the love of virtue: of heroism and sacrifice, of the admiration of nature and its bounties and the seasons, of hard work and dedication, of faithful love…

But folk music too was usurped by the people of darkness, and used to inflame anger, heedlessness, drunkenness, bigotry, licentiousness, masqueradery and mockery…

 Music comes out spontaneously in the brass markets of the Middle East, or wherever this or a similar craft is practised: where the rhythms of the hammering and their notes synchronise and harmonise, and a torrent pours down from the heavens unto those who have ears which hear;

Also when the members of an orchestra tune their instruments in preparation for a performance, and suddenly the deity of music descends, to send the listeners who are tuned;

And the synchronised hand-clapping of the Arabian Gulf countries, sparkles the beat of prodigal percussion, rocking smoothly on the tidal waves of the Persian sea;

And in some moments of the music of Igor Stravinsky, where he attempted to create spontaneous sounds, as in his Petrushka and Rite of Spring and other works of that period, Stravinsky seemed to have a passion for spontaneity and steered away from implicitness.

And this is quite a different direction from the one Brahms took before, where a tune, tortured by harmony, failed to eventuate, but was heard as a far echo in one’s head, or in the background of the orchestra or on the many keys of the piano.

As though, the purpose of the composers in both cases, was to say: what I have playing in my head is too big, I can only hint, and you do the rest of the work.

The language and the nuances of music are limitless, and civilisations were often inspired by great works of music.

Music precedes language.

But is all of the sound experience of the mind a remembrance of the Letters which were written, where there was only light?

When the letters were said, and the line curved or bent spontaneously exhibiting the sound?

The two seem to overlap, but there is a sound which has no letter: the pure note,

And its frequency, physics tells us, corresponds to a number,

So numbers and music overlap too, and not to anyone’s surprise,

And musical time is none but numbers.

In the end, Time which we call the Space of the Mind, if space is for the eye:

Has motion: of image and sound,

Music and language are a form of Motion, and Motion is the seam between Mind and expression of mind, expression that is to the senses of vision or hearing in linearity,

And all forms of expression of mind give an experience of euphoria of mind, along its routes of logic, musical notes, passages of literature and poetry… and even still images: which are not still in the mind, as your eyes journey in them,

Time, Image and Motion are the three radii of the Mind, alluded to in the Ghita as being: the Creator, the Protector and the Destroyer.

Spontaneous music thrills the mind with a zest of existence,

And tunes of music make their way to the heart.

Radiant and dark prophets and philosophers have composed music in the last centuries of Europe, driven by different motives,

Radiant ones compose to invite you to a magnamoment in which they were, when the music descended to them, longing to that which they cannot grasp,

Magnamoments which are windows to Reality for their listeners, and a reminiscence of the joy of being, eager for an encounter;

And the dark ones compose the music to express the pleasures or the sorrows of their lives, and if their listeners are daunted or frightened or saddened, they have no qualms.  

And what we say sounds subjective and perhaps of no value,

How can the music be measured, by any measure, this illustrious and illusive deity, born in beauty, even in its freest or most vulgar forms?

But perhaps if some principles are followed, music can be protected from intruders;

The money factor should be taken out of the music completely, so it stops being an incentive for musical composition or performance,

And this sounds impractical in today’s world which measures everything by a number of dollars on a printed piece of paper or on a computer screen,

And many will argue that the production and performance of music will diminish by quantity and perhaps by quality.

We argue that to the contrary, the quality of music will improve; as for the quantity, it should not be of any concern.

What you have today, all around the world, popular music of the world being commercialised, and the markets being flooded by recordings, promoted by corporations, business men and self-proclaimed experts: all of which have only one objective: and that is the making of money.

Rarely can you pick up one recording, out of the piles and the stacks, that is of value.

Governments, the clergy and the academics do not see any wrong in this, but to the contrary, it is seen as a positive thing: contributing to the generation and consumption of goods and services, hence a contribution to “growth”.

Thus they are blinded to the damage that has been done to the human spirit.

So they run their surveys to come to the conclusions that they have wanted to come to: that it is not distasteful music and its vulgar lyrics that have contributed to the decline of societies: the spread of mental illnesses of aggressiveness, addiction and drunkenness, depression and hopelessness…

This is a sensitive issue for the whole world today, and particularly the Western world, which, rightly, rejects the concept of music, or any form of human expression, being censored or checked by governments and their agencies,

And who can perform such checks anyway, and who is to set the standards in the first place, they will ask.

Yet the Western world today has gone to another extreme: of handing a lot of human activity to business: under the pretext that it is business that creates the wealth of the nation,

So it is business now that dictates the quality and the quantity of music being released,

And if you think that this is not a form of censorship or a quality check, think again,

Because it is in the hands of the individuals who manage giant recording companies to promote a particular composition or to kill it, and it is in the hands of show business to promote a particular performance or to suppress it.

And while this does not apply to the same extent to classical music, it does apply totally to popular music, and this is the music that is most widely listened to.

It is not surprising that music in the Western world is referred to as: the music industry.

Where music belongs is high above the realms of the intellect and empirical science; they will fail to capture it and chain it to some chemicals or wirings in their brains, or some definition of business.

Music makes its way into your deep consciousness unimpeded, the servants of darkness have known this, and they have loaded it with the darkest feelings and emotions:

Of helplessness, despair and sadness: in religion;

Of superiority and bigotry: in politics and nationalism;

Of sensuality and attachment to material life and consumerism: in popular music and commercial advertising.

The verses of the Qur’an which convey an ecstasy of existence: are recited to the most depressing scale of Saba, bereaving the listener from their light,

And all religions sob to the most lugubrious tunes; if they believe that their prophets suffered in the way of God and for humanity’s sake, they should celebrate their memories happily,

And out of the houses of worship come the ugliest noises of the suffering of Satan in hell.

Understandably, solemn moments are worthy of solemn music, and sad moments are not avertable in one’s life, but it is the exacerbation of sadness and the exploitation of it by the religious institutes that is wrong.

Perhaps there is no better example of how solemnity can be examined and experienced, than the second movement of Beethoven’s Eroica,

When sombreness invites a jovial Waltz, to revert shortly after to sombreness…

But in the last movement, a vibrant tempo comes with exuberant tunes.

And who can forget Frederique Chopin’s march of death, which in fact marches the human spirit to overtake death,

And after, as Edward Elgar, he wrote an orchestral version of it,

Neither a demon and nor a human, his musical talent is of great significance.

And Beethoven’s symphonic music is miraculous in every way,

Satan bowed in awe of it, and tried vainly to outdo it, and could not come anywhere near it,

When Richard Wagner composed his music to flare up German nationalism and convey his view of a new world order.

And today’s brain scientists have a major difficulty in explaining how musical genius can be explained by their theories about the evolution and the working of the brain,

For, music is creation, creation that is not based on observation,

And this is not the only big hole in their theory, and if they were honest to their scientific integrity, it should have been sufficient for them to discredit their theory.

In the Christian world, Christmas is a marketing extravaganza, and a fake man wearing a fake beard, carries material gifts from a fake heaven:

To gullible children!

A lie of this proportion shuts the doors of faith in the tender hearts; they grow up to take one of two opposing ideologies: atheism or surrender to irrationality.

In either, they are bewildered and have no faith in anything except tangible matter.

Truth cannot be shown or introduced to by lies.

So the celebrations of Christmas nowadays: although they get families and friends together, in a break away from the pressing routine of daily life, they have a dark side which goes unnoticed, a very dark side:

To those who are persuaded by commercial advertising to buy what they cannot afford to buy;

To those to whom Christmas is just a time for excessive partying and inebriation;

And to all, who feel inundated by senselessness.

And one cannot but wonder, why the pedagogic institutes and the psychologists and the other experts have no interest in examining the repercussions of the Santa-Claus lie in the minds and the characters of people;

Unlike myths and fairly tales which are read out of books, Santa is a real person, but not quite;

This can twist children’s minds and drive them to mistrust their own selves.

And again the authorities of politics and religion and business cannot tolerate any inquisition into their foundations; it is pathetic that such a myth has made its way to the foundations of Western culture, and need we say that it has nothing to do with Christianity?

Yet, there is a bright side of the Christmas celebrations: and that is the music of it: the Christmas songs and carols,

Music of joy and hope that was composed over centuries in Europe and America;

And same can be said about the Diwali festivities of India.

So when the subject of music is brought up, everything else jumps in; for, music is in the heart and mind of humanity, and when we alluded to its role in the development of mankind we were very serious,

But darkened people reckon they can rule the world by their laws; their laws have brought lawlessness that has left the world in a state that is beyond repair,

And in the current desperate situation, they have taken their laws and measures to extremes, only to make the bad situation worse.

And no lessons are learnt, and an examination of their core beliefs and their methods is out of question,

So we call on those who have a shimmer of light in themselves to get out of hell as quickly as they can, because luck is running out.

 Music is a new challenge for humanity: composed in the last centuries by radiant as well as dark prophets, it has been hard to differentiate between their works,

On what basis can the music of Mozart be dismissed for being dark? One might say that it cannot reach the highs of Beethoven’s, Schubert’s, Brahms’, or even Rachmaninoff’s,

Yet this cannot be quantified;

Personal experiences of music remain personal, until they are expressed, then one can perhaps say that the music has been an inspiration.

So Wagner’s music inspired Hitler who committed the most evil of crimes;

Wagner was able to vision Hitler’s arrays of armies, and Hitler was able to vision himself writing those musical notes, but both could not comprehend what they saw;

Events exist as a spirit within a framework, within which they have components, and how they materialise is dictated by the choices which people make, and only when choices are made that their outcome becomes inevitable.

The large sounds of Wagner’s music are daunting and imposing and have an air of fatalism,

But this does not mean that if one finds them beautiful one should force oneself to dislike them: it does not work this way;

And neither does it mean that everyone who loves Wagner’s music is going to develop a hatred of humanity and a passion for destruction.

And to many it is very beautiful,

But shall we say how we see it: it conjures up images in a dim brownish colour, or metallic white, similar to fluorescent tubes’ light, if this makes sense.

As for Mozart, his rudeness and vulgarity aside, how can one reject his music altogether,

For, Mozart is the son of man.

His clarinet concerto is one of the best of his works, and so are his serenades for wind instruments; genius is in those sounds and notes.

And if we are to compare the music of Mozart with the music of Joseph Hayden, which falls short of the entertaining qualities and the richness of melodies of Mozart’s, we say that Hayden’s music has more depth, is brighter and goes to higher peaks;

As for Robert Schumann: Martin Luther: al-Nusayry: Abu Nuwas, the most romantic of all the romantics, and a German spirit, how can one not fall in love in his piano works.

And Brahms had heated arguments with his fellow musicians of his time, over the direction that music should take; he saw himself as the continuation of the line of Bach, Hayden, Beethoven and Schubert: the composers who took the composition of music as a mission: to descend heavenly joy and longing, onto the minds of the people, and not just to entertain their hearing and brighten up their soirées.

It is as if The Law is telling humanity that humanity has to accommodate darkness for a while, for darkness to give all it can,

Yet the spirit of darkness cannot become radiant, and even when darkness is lit up, its spirit does not quit,

And it is in a very subtle way that the spirit of darkness expresses itself in the light,

The early memories of darkness and light have come to humanity once more,

No intellectual argument, no analysis of any kind, can accurately and sharply separate darkness from light: it is only in one’s vision,

And how capable one is to discriminate between darkness and light depends on ones earliest experiences and resonance with each,

To transcend all the activity of light and dark, be it music or language, to the Reality of light and dark.

In the Middle East, some of the psalms of David are still being sung in their original tunes and even lyrics: turned up-side-down, from transcendence to egotism, in the dark minds who stole them;

In Lebanon and Syria, the Abu Zzuluf tune and Arabic translated lyric is a psalm, that was sung in the days of King Solomon and prophet Nathan, whom we shall call: David,

David psalmodized, and to his transcendence Mount Lebanon swayed of joy, and still does to those who look,

He heard the glorious scale of Sika being sung by the skies, and he passed it to his disciples, and they used to sing it to those lyrics:

Hail, hail Lord of the gardens,

My eye, O my Lord,

The bridge of the Psalmist I crossed,

By a single look of Thine,

Hail, hail Lord of the Gardens,

My eye O my Lord,

How sweet is Thy peaking my peaking,

How sweet is abidancehood.

(hay hat ya boo zzuluf

3ayny ya mawlaya

Jisr l7adeed nqata3

Min nadhritak lyya

Hay hat ya boo zzuluf

3ayny ya mawlaya

Ma7laa lwamaa bi lwamaa

Ma7laa l3uboodyyah)

Joy to them, who can eavesdrop to the stars to sing along with them.

And let us not forget the Muwasshah: the veiled ones; so that their meanings remain secret to those who do not discern,

Many where written in Andalus, where there was a secret philosophical awakening, and secret organisations in Italy and France and the rest of Europe emerged therefrom, of which Leonardo Da Vinci and Isaac Newton were members,

And the Muwasshah were also composed and sung in the Byzentine Syria and Turkey, secretly, many of their tunes and lyrics have also survived,

Most famous is lammaa badaa yatsannaa, and here is its correct reading in English:

When He showed, Effulgent,

Amen amen amen,

My Love, His Beauty enchanted us,

Amen amen amen.

And the times of 6/4, 7/4, 8/4, 11/4, to the austere sounds of the raq (a tambourine without the jingles), which are almost unique to the Muwasshah, induce giddiness in the head, and not bodily reflexes of hand-clapping or dancing.

But ignorant people in the Arabic speaking world have been singing those songs to their belly dancers and to the noise and the fumes of their hubble-bubble, in their gatherings of senseless entertainment, believing they are pious people, guided by their rituals of worship.

They stretch the tunes, they twist their tongues, distend their jaws, side-way and down, burst their throats… to uglify the sound of the music, this is how the music becomes trapped in vulgarity;

And the heavy use of percussion, with a lot of tick tack, and ch ch sounds, and nowadays out of the electronic synthesisers, have made things worse,

And such sounds have an appropriate role to play, but where there is no justice music is no more, rather noise.

And those scales which are unique to Arabic music: of Bayaaty, Rast, Sika, Jihar Kaar… were all descended in ancient Egypt, and today’s art of Tarab of Egypt originated back then.

So, in the Middle East and Europe, apart from folk music, there was no good music for a long time, until after the Renaissance, when the music of Europe took a direction that is paralleled only by the music of Eden of millions of years before: where music, philosophy, mathematics and science converge, to produce the sounds of the elements and the heavens: sounds, which, perhaps, only classical Indian music was capable of creating, although in a much subtler way,

And Arabic music still has a long way to go to gain a status and position next to classical Western and Indian music, and it can achieve that only if it is taken out of the business of entertainment and its confinement in the emotions of the ego,

And those who see that it encourages sedentarisation and slothfulness, and traps its listeners in a trap of helplessness and self-pity, are not wrong.

The extreme opposite to that is in the West, and now all around the world, where Rock Music has fuelled passions, sped up time, and infused activity,

And all of those are natural human tendencies, especially at young age, were they harboured naturally;

But it has been speed for speed’s sake, passion for passion’s sake, and activity for activity’s sake;

And even this is fine, to a degree;

But amidst a confusion of directionlessness, and the ideologies of Darwinism and consumerism, the energy that Rock Music has poured into people’s minds had only itself to consume, and individuals as well as groups, have become inadvertently an instrument of self-destructiveness.

Governments and religious and business institutes are not interested in examining the causes of the ills of their societies,

But those ills are out of their control already, and no country, rich or poor, first or third world, is free from them,

And solar flares are not the only triggers of the outbursts of human aggression and anger,

It is this soul that has been forced into a mould that is not hers, by whatever religion or political system, that suffers of her own faults.