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The Catholic Church, whatever its problems, nevertheless has a beautiful aesthetic culture. Nothing conveys Holiness better than a Gregorian Chant IMO.
(Cross-posted to Yes and No.)
You’ve got to admit: it’s catchy 
.
Minimalist music has had an important role to play in my aesthetic and spiritual development. My intense interest in music started when I heard Tristan and Isolde by Richard Wagner, and the discovery of that piece led to the discovery of other works of classical and minimalist music. I’m not sure how exactly this happened, as the two genres are not the same or much like each other, but I suspect it happened through the imperfection of the Limewire search function and an abounding curiosity left over from Tristan.
The first minimalist composition I discovered was Terry Riley’s Cadence on the Wind, which sounded like a morose and lifeless piece of garbage intended to suck the energy out of the listener. It lay unappreciated in my music library until I heard Tristan, when my ear started to change. I finally ‘got’ Cadence, and decided to find more minimalist music.
Philip Glass was an instant favourite. His music has a winter-ish quality to it; and the mood it conveyed was very familiar to me, being highly serious and ‘cold’ but not unfriendly or painful. When I played around on my keyboard, I often paused at chords that had a cool, understanding, serious sound. Philip Glass’ music was a lot like my personality, and gave materiality to a spirit or quality that my life had at that time. I suspect that the reason I became so much more spiritual after my ‘musical revolution’ was that focusing on the music helped me to introspect and ‘catch’ the intangible and unique quality of any conscious state.
Inevitably, I moved on from my habit of listening almost exclusively to Philip Glass. I’ll be honest: even as I loved his music I felt lingering discomfort. There is something inadequate about minimalist music, even the most melodious kind (Yann Tiersen being an exception). The lack of tune, and the repetition do take their toll, and like all human creations the genre is ultimately incomplete. Realizing this, and due to changes in the ‘mood’ of my life, I overcame my infatuation with minimalist music*. I now listen to some minimalist, mostly Yann Tiersen; some classical, mostly Vivaldi, and a whole lot of devotional music, mostly Gregorian chants.
From the documentary:
“The first feeling can be one of disorientation and disarray perhaps; and you say, well where is the tune? … And this gets into kind of a complicated subject in a way, about how we hear music, and how we hear music that doesn’t have recognizable melodic material. In fact, what I’ve discovered in the last 14 years that I’ve been playing with my ensemble, is that people learn very quickly to hear music in another way.
[...]
There are people who can hear it [music] in terms of the process… The music proceeds from moment to moment in a way, it’s a kind of present tense music. Someone described it as without past and future, but in a way it does have beginnings and middles and ends. Those usual kinds of dialectical structures – I’m sorry to use such garbagy words, but – or those sonata form structures, they’re not there… Repetitive structures are a procedure, an alternate procedure to narrative procedures.”
* I suspect that this is something like computer geeks overcoming their infatuation with Linux.
(Cross-posted to Yes and No.)
An interesting album was nominated in MOJO magazines honour list, under the catagory compilation of the year. The album being: The Sound of Wonder: The First Wave of Plugged-In Pop at the Pakistani Picture House (1973-1980). Will Hodgkinson writes in the Guardian:
From the late-60s to mid-70s, Pakistan had its own film and music industry that was as vibrant, open-minded and odd as anything in the west. Imbued with Sufi ideas of love, tolerance and dogma-free faith, Pakistani pop was an explosion of colour contrasting with the country’s image today as a hotbed of fundamentalist intolerance.
After a violent conflict with India in 1965 Indian movies were banned in Pakistan. This galvanized the country’s ailing film industry, creating stars (Waheed Murad – the Elvis Presley of Karachi) and giving birth to a native pop music. At the scene’s heart were a composer and his muse: M Ashraf and Nahid Akhtar. Incredibly prolific – Ashraf made over 400 soundtracks – and working on a shoestring, the duo threw anything in, from space-age bleeps to surf guitar to hip English slang.
The good times were not to last. The Pakistani liberation war of 1971 led to a drain of talent after the founding of Bangladesh. Then the rise of piracy decimated the film and music industries. And in 1977 general Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq staged a coup and advanced the Islamisation of Pakistan. The fun was over.
With the closure of EMI Pakistan’s vaults in the early-80s all of this music would have been buried had it not been for two vinyl obsessives: Andy Votel, a DJ whose Finders Keepers label specialises in reissuing psychedelic music, and Chris Menist, a UN envoy based in Pakistan. Votel discovered a Pakistani pop 45 in a charity shop and, intrigued by its raw sound and alternate verses in Urdu, Panjabi and English, delved deeper. Menist tracked down the original recordings, which were all owned by one man in Lahore; EMI had sold the entire legacy of Pakistani pop as a job lot.
The result is The Sound Of Wonder, a time capsule capturing Pakistan’s rich artistic legacy.
Read the rest of this article at the Guardian.
Here is Arieb Azhar, singing a beautiful poem by the Indian Sufi Khawaja Ghulam Farid entitled ‘Husn-e-Haqiqi’ or ‘True Beauty’. I had a translation of this song somewhere — I may upload it later on.
I’ve met Arieb personally in Islamabad. He’s a very humble, very cultured person. And his voice, needless to say, is stunningly beautiful
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