This week Salah Abdeslam, the only surviving terrorist of the Paris 2015 attacks when fifty people died, goes on trial in the Belgian courts. At the same time I read that UK schools are allowing Muslim families to withdraw their children from music lessons because learning an instrument is forbidden according to some Islamic beliefs. Hundreds of pupils are thought to have been removed from state school music classes despite the subject forming part of the statutory National Curriculum.
What’s the connection? Too many Muslim terrorist incidents have taken place at music festivals. In 2017 twenty two people were killed at Ariana Grande’s concert in the Manchester arena because of a suicide bomber and in 2016, Omar Mateen killed 49 people and wounded 53 others in an attack at Pulse, a venue in Orlando, Florida.
The group claiming responsibility for the Manchester bombing described the venue as a “shameless concert arena.”
The fact is that there are certain schools of Islamic thought that believe in forbidding musical expression and seeking justification in Holy Scriptures. They think that whoever listens to music will be punished since music is apparently an incitement to lasciviousness and adultery.
Actually, the same attitude regarding music has not been unknown in western culture. Plato in his ‘Republic’ writes that music directly imitates the passions or states of the soul so that when one listens to it that imitates a certain passion, imbues the listener with the same passion and shapes his whole character to an ignoble form.
It might be argued that this is indeed the case. Certainly, the conservative parental arguments against children going to pop concerts were that the music’s frenetic rhythms and the apparent abandonment of the whole show could lead offspring to both immoral (sex) and illegal (drugs) acts.
At least here there is a distinction between types of music: that encouraging noble and that encouraging ignoble passions. Of the classical Greek music modes the Phrygian incites dangerous fiery passions while the Lydian leads to gentleness and friendship. This is akin to Indian ragas and their emotional associations or rasas. For example, Hindola raga is associated with love and other ragas are linked to different emotions or even times of day. Moving to western classical music anyone who listens to that god of composers, Mozart, will associate his use of the scale of D minor with daemonic passion (e.g. Don Giovanni), C major with transcendent liberation (Symphony no 41), Eb major with cheerfulness and confidence, A minor (e.g. piano rondo K511) with devastating melancholy and G minor with noble suffering.
However, another passage in Plato’s Republic states that any musical innovation is full of danger to the whole state, and ought to be prohibited. For when music modes change, the fundamental laws of the state always change with them. This is exactly the picture created by the breakdown of tonality in western music at the start of the twentieth century which led to scathing comments from conservative composers (Saint Saens and his ilk) and even riots at first performances of works which espoused the new dissonant idiom (Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring).
The relationship between music, politics and society is a fascinatingly complex one. The English reformation saw the destruction of most religious music simply because it was associated with heretical papist liturgy. The Commonwealth puritan period saw the virtual disappearance of music for entertainment with the closing of the theatres and the banning of instrumental accompaniments in church music. In Roman Catholic countries there was a reaction against the overtly operatic character of church Masses, outlawing such works as Puccini’s Messa a Quattro, and replacing them with Perosi and the Caecilian musical reforms.
To return to music in a Muslim context; there is a distinction between what music is suitable and what isn’t. Some varieties of this art are permissible (halal) while others are forbidden (haram). It is, therefore, permissible to listen to the first while it is forbidden to listen to the latter. But who is to decide what is permissible and what isn’t? Evidently, music that is permissible is music that does not entail entertainment in gatherings held for that purpose i.e. concerts and forbidden music is music that is suitable for entertainment and amusement gatherings even if it does not arouse sexual temptations.
I am reminded of Stalin’s condemnation of what became known as ‘formalism’ when the dictator first heard Shostakovich’s fourth symphony and left before the end in utter disgust at the blatant sexuality of certain passages. (Actually if one wants to listen to perhaps the most sexually loaded music of all time one has only to hear Wagner’s Venusberg music from ‘Tannhauser’. Venusberg = the mount of Venus and the multiple sexual orgasms imitated in this amazing music must have set the tight-corseted Paris ladies in delirium when they first heard it 1869 – and still does today). During Stalin’s reign, formalism was associated with western decadence and the mere entertainment value of music, whereas what was expected for the new communist state was the foundation of a neo-realistic school.
The ambiguous and sometimes downright condemnatory view of music in contemporary Muslim culture spills out, as I have already suggested, in the UK’s school curriculum with increasing examples of Muslim pupils being withdrawn from music lessons. Although parents have a legal right to withdraw children from religious and sex education classes (a legal right challenged by the ex Education Secretary, Justine Greening) no automatic right exists to pull them out of music lessons since the subject is a compulsory part of the national curriculum.
It is incredibly sad, when music is increasingly seen as a catalyst for closer cultural ties, a promoter of peace, a healer of the scars of enmity and war, a hope in a better future for mankind, an art form where the world’s greatest composers have expressed mankind’s noblest thoughts, whether it be Mozart’s Magic Flute or Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis Benedictus or Indonesian gamelan or Sufi chants or Eastern Orthodox hymns or, indeed, any other wonderful example of world music, that children should be removed from classes by their parents and not allowed to develop their musical talents with the natural freedom they are entitled to. It’s quite tragic and quite unacceptable.
Going back to the start of what I’ve written, and considering, furthermore, the broadcasting of classical music in London’s underground stations effecting the sudden fall there in violent crime and vandalism, I wonder if those bloody terrorists might have had their actions tempered if they had received some musical education or, at least, appreciation of music, whether it be Reger or Rap, Schubert of Sufi chants, Mozart or myxolydian modes.
Who can guess? If children are removed from musical education we shall never know.
My readers at this stage might ask what has this all to do with Bagni di Lucca and our part of the world. Simply this: Italy has a huge social integrative task ahead of itself when dealing with the almost incontrollable influx of migrants to its shores and their placement within the context of a broader Italian social universe. Music is an invaluable aid to social integration.
However, in Italy music education has suffered particularly heavily. As composer Salvatore Sciarrino has stated: “inattention towards music, compared to other contemporary arts, is particularly acute. But this depends above all on how we view society and education. In other countries, teaching includes and encourages the making of music and performing arts, so the younger generations do not have this difficulty. How does the audience get used to things that they have never heard before if the experience of going to a concert becomes a purely occasional event? This is why we no longer have any significant public attendance”. That’s why too our own Borgo a Mozzano Music school (see its web site at http://www.scuolacivicasalotti.it/ ) is such a valuable part of the cultural landscape in these parts.
I feel so strongly about this that I would like to suggest a new crime of ‘wilfully forbidding children to enjoy, make and appreciate music’. After all, music is an international language, indeed the only language that all the world has the capacity to understand. A world where making or listening to music is, in some parts, considered a crime is not a world I would ever care to live in and is certainly a world which can never properly aim towards mutual understanding and social tolerance.
